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Comment by dougmwne | Hacker News Reader

It’s terrible to feel terrible, but getting over the worst part of Covid in 3 days is an enormous improvement from how unvaccinated people fared in the initial waves. Even for people not hospitalized, they dealt with pneumonia and shortness of breath for weeks. I think we can celebrate the progress we are making in reducing the average severity of this disease and there are more tools coming soon with Pfizer’s new pill and newer multivalent vaccines.

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Your comment makes it out like everyone with Covid had pnuemonia and shortness of breath for weeks, when really it was a small minority.

According to the CDC, 30% to 40% of symptomatic people get shortness of breath, which is a significant share. That is a signal that the infection has reached the lower respiratory system.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/non-us-setting...

Had I reported to the CDC (I didn't), I would have reported that I woke up in the middle of the night unable to take a deep breath, went nearly immediately back to sleep, and was free of all symptoms the next day. This would have counted toward the total (had I reported), and such counting needs a wider perspective before such things as say, creating lockdown policies based on these figures.

According to https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-59895598, over 500,000 people in the UK are still suffering health issues a year after catching Covid, and nearly 900,000 are still suffering after 12 weeks. The UK population is around 70 million, so that's around 1% of the entire population. If you take into the fact that many people in the UK have managed to not catch it at all yet, or exclude children who suffer far less (if at all), then the percentage would be higher.

I don't think 1% is "a small minority".

The problem with a statistic like that is that it is pretty much devoid of almost all data that would make it truly meaningful and valuable. That stat tells us nothing of their health pre-Covid, and I’d bet a very large portion of that number were already dealing with health issues (which we already know significantly increases severe Covid). The meaningful number is how many formerly healthy people are battling Covid caused health issues a year later. My guess is that it is a pretty small number, likely small enough that it would be considered even by you to be a “small minority”.

Previous health condition status is part of the dataset, so you don't need to guess. If you want to take that into account, then use the data to make your point.

Thanks for the tip! I’ll let the dataset speak for itself:

“7. Health/disability status is self-reported by study participants rather than clinically diagnosed. From February 2021 study participants were asked to exclude any symptoms related to COVID-19 when reporting their health/disability status. However, in practice it may be difficult for some participants to separate long COVID symptoms from unrelated exacerbation of pre-existing conditions, so these results should be treated with caution. “

Yeah absolutely, I count ourselves reasonably lucky that we only caught the disease after vaccinations.

I have absolutely non-zero desire to go through this every year, unlike my parent commenter though.

Would I be of a similar opinion as parent if I had a similarly asymptomatic-to-mild case? I don't know for sure, but I would hope not, because I wouldn't want to draw conclusions or base policy from just my anecdotal experience.

Other replies to me appear needlessly partisan jibes: I neither said nor implied anything about continued lockdowns and any such inference is pure projection.

Your parent commenter wasn't saying that they have a desire to get this every year, just that if the worst case outcome is getting what they had every year, they would find that an acceptable trade-off for getting society back to normal.

By saying “I don’t want to experience this every year” without any caveats, there is an implication we should do something to prevent it. Especially given the broader context of the pandemic thus far. Surely you can see how many readers might feel that implication.

> I have absolutely non-zero desire to go through this every year, unlike my parent commenter though.

Many people get sick every year or every other year. Their illness is like you described: 2-3 days of being "knocked out" and about a week to fully recover.

It's not that I "desire" to go through that every year or two, it's just life. I expect that's why people responded incredulously to your post: for them, getting sick occasionally is normal.

to add on — before i had kids i rarely got sick. at one point i went maybe seven or eight years. now, every couple months. and at least one a year that puts me down a few days or more. And those aren’t even the flu, typically. There are many kinds of colds that can knock you out.

Each is likely an endemic version of something that was far more serious and deadly historically. Now it’s a minor or major annoyanace that is part of normal life. i bet eradicating covid would fall into the same bucket S eradicating any of the others. Something to aspire towards, but until then something to simply accept as normal and move on with our lives.

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