Hacker News Reader

Comment by causality0 | Hacker News Reader

Covid has a death rate hundreds of times higher than a cold. Colds don't make healthy women in their twenties stay up all night coughing so hard their oxygen dips into the 80s. Colds don't cause lung, heart, and cognitive damage that is potentially cumulative.

If covid brain fog compounds over time there will be some serious damn consequences.

View on HN

Actually my wife had a bad cold this summer and she coughed so hard during the night that we had to take her to the ER and she was lacking oxygen (not sure by how much). She is otherwise healthy in her early 30s, though she was pregnant, which might have made it worse. It surprised me, I always thought that colds were harmless.

Yeah, they're really not. I was a paramedic about 10 years ago. Every winter I'd see colds or influenza kill people. (Or at least, initiate convalescence and subsequent rapid death from related issues within a few weeks.) Always though, those were people who were either very old or had COPD (a lung disease). It's a common way that people go out actually. A cold leads to weakness/stress leads to pneuomonia/UTI's/sepsis and then death.

Colds kill thousands of people every year and some may have lifelong effects, such as neurological impairment or heart damage.

> though she was pregnant, which might have made it worse.

Being pregnant does dampen the immune system.

But are most of those issues with naive subjects? Once everybody is vaccinated or has had it once, the extreme reactions should drop way off.

The death rate isn't the same for your 1st case of covid and your nth case.

Is there even a single confirmed death from Omicron yet? I've heard of a couple but they turned out to be fake.

This is a highly dynamic situation. Omicron is not alpha or even delta.

An unvaccinated man with underlying health conditions died in Texas mid December after testing positive for the COVID-19 omicron variant, officials in Houston said, marking what is believed to be the first death linked to the strain in the U.S.

https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/2021122...

Your article perfectly illustrates my point. It says Omicron is 3/4 of the cases and that this one person MIGHT have died from it, but it's unclear and may be due to his other health conditions.

Let's just assume it was Omicron that killed this guy. All signs point to Omicron being less deadly than the common cold.

I can’t find the article, but I believe that hospital modified their statement to specify that he died *with* Omicron, not *from* Omicron.

There are yes. On another note "28-day average case fatality rate in South Africa, the likely origin of the Omicron variant, tumbled in the past six weeks from 8% to 0.2%" from WSJ https://www.wsj.com/articles/omicron-variant-may-end-up-savi...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com