Vaccines and Omicron mean Covid now less deadly than flu in England
ft.com
ft.com
https://www.njspotlightnews.org/2022/03/living-with-covid-mo...
Hypochondriacs are a thing: they are out there. Some of them have gotten Covid-19, and that of course turns into their new obsession.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting, we'd appreciate it.
Lung scarring is certainly real and can take a long time (up to a year) to fully heal. This isn't imaginary: lung function and capacity can be quantified and measured.
I don't doubt that tissue damage from Covid isn't real; like people having loss of smell or heart trouble.
But there is considerable scaremongering around it which plays into the psychology of hypochondria.
A healthy dose of skepticism is needed here, and remembering where the burden of proof lies.
Simply, too many people have had Covid to be able to squarely blame prior Covid infection for everything weird that's happening to everyone health-wise.
Maybe those people would have developed those symptoms anyway. A pandemic broke out and so, like millions of others, they got it, and now their inevitable predicament (those weird symptoms) get blamed on that, which may be wrong.
All sorts of people had all sorts of weird health issues; and now all sorts of people with weird health issues also have a Covid-19 history, because it's common to have one.
If Covid were a rare disease, it would be different. Say that only 100 people in the United States got Covid-19 in a particular year, and then 79 of them had weird symptoms months and months later. That would strongly indicate there is something there.
Look, we all have to die. From now on, whenever someone dies (spontaneously, not accidentally), do we blame it on Covid-19, if they ever had it?
A: Did you hear? Bob died last week. Heart attack. Just turned 69.
B: Yikes, I just remembered something: didn't he have Covid-19 back in 2021 when he was, what, ... 43?
A and B, in unison: OMG, long Covid!
B: Caught up with him.
A: Got him in the end, wow.
ps Pretty sure the comment you responded to was sarcasm.
I think it was more mockery than sarcasm. It’s a pretty common insult to make fun of people that wear masks, quarantine, etc. as being afraid or weak. It’s not a constructive or interesting viewpoint.
covid isn't endemic
Should also try to push back against a culture of going to work and similar when blatantly symptomatic (I don't want a cold, I don't care if it is mild, I don't want it).
People lead their lives under all sorts of necessary restrictions (e.g. seatbelts, motorbike helmets). Unfortunately these extra restrictions highlighted that uncomfortable and inevitable fact. Some people have been able to deal with this better than others.
Normal people will win through sheer attrition.
It’s a shame how easily we overlook and disregard swathes of people.
Taxes, military, traffic laws, etc.
Risk mitigation is not my priority. If it were, I'd never ride my bike again, even with my helmet. I'd never go kayaking, or rock climbing. I wouldn't swim in lakes, and you'd never catch me in the ocean. If I were preparing for the worst, I'd go everywhere with a tourniquet in my back pocket, keep a few thousand dollars cash in my shoe, and get myself vaccinated for rabies right now. I have no intent to do any of these things, because such fretting every possibility is no way to live.
No because those flu viruses were not novel, or as deadly.
When there is a large degree of uncertainty (like a deadly novel virus), I personally tend towards caution and am fine being too cautious rather than not cautious enough. If you don’t, that’s fine and that’s your choice.
The lifestyle examples you give are too simplistic. I’m willing to bet you’re willing to ride your bike on some roads and not others, or swim at some beaches in some weather conditions and not others. To act like you never assess the situation or act in a way that mitigates your risk is absurd. I bet you wear a seatbelt on occasion and look both ways when crossing the road. Those are risk mitigation techniques.
That information always lags reality. When/if the next deadly flu strain emerges, it will have emerged before it is discovered to have emerged. If you're not planning for this scenario, are you really planning for the worst case? You could be Patient Zero for Spanish Flu Part Two, with your preemptive masking being the difference between global disaster and nothingburger.
No, I was being a little loose with my language there. I didn’t mean the literal worst case of being patient 0. I agree that I don’t plan for that. My personal risk tolerance is higher than that.
I meant the more colloquial worst case of hearing about a deadly virus spreading rapidly in the news and then deciding to react with an abundance of caution once it seems probable that my community will be affected. Then I’m fine playing it safe.
Just like I would with any other forecasted threat from Mother Nature like a fire, hurricane, blizzard, etc.
The more certainty it’s going to affect me + the greater uncertainty of the short & long terms effects = the greater the caution.
So in 2020 when I was highly confident COVID would infect my community + there was very little info about how deadly it was = I was overly cautious
As more info came out I became less cautious.
We started wearing masks because covid actually existed, not because we feared that it might one day exist. Fear of hypothetical future covid strains is an example of the later, not the former. I'll consider fearing them once they actually exist, just like those hypothetical future flu strains.
During flu season? Of course. As well as soon any cold symptoms were felt. My institution would also issue stay-at-home recommendations during flu outbreaks.
Only because we live in a “me” society and not a “we” society. If we were sensible, masking up would be normal when one has a cold/there’s a local flu outbreak. So much illness and lost productivity would be easily avoided with a minor change in expectations and behaviour.
In the US and much of Europe. In other countries they absolutely were the norm. I'm not advocating for permanent mask wearing, but I absolutely DO think we should have shown more concern for others prior to Covid. It drove me nuts how many people would show up to work with "just a mild flu" or "just a cold" with no concern for the likelihood they might pass it on to others.
Only ever for people who actually felt sick. Not for all people by default regardless of how they felt. If I'm wrong please correct me, I'd love to know of this land where wearing surgical masks was the default expectation of everybody all the time.
I'm from the US and have spent limited time in other countries, so I can only really judge based on what I've read, but it was my understanding that masks where common in a number of countries pre-pandemic, mostly the denser areas of Asia. Certainly I had seen plenty of pictures of crowded subways and walkways with far more people wearing masks than one would expect if only the sick were wearing them, and the above article, written in 2016 seems to confirm that impression.
It's worth noting that if your only wearing a mask because you feel sick and have decided to go out anyway.... Well your doing it wrong. Everyone understands that a surgical mask is not a highly effective barrier against the spread of a virus, be it cold, flu, or Covid. What it DOES do is help keep those little moisture molecules to yourself such that if your unknowingly packing one of these viruses you somewhat reduce the chances of spreading it. Even a small percentage reduction in spread when amplified across a large population can have a huge effect on the total number of cases.
When your symptomatic, and thus most likely to be contagious, just stay the heck home.
No one's asking for everyone to hide in their houses forever, we want increased testing, contact tracing, and mechanisms for community protection that kick in when cases start to rise, not after they've reached critical mass. Think of these like the swimming lessons you took and laps you did in the pool before you moved on to the lake.
Are there some risks I choose to mitigate? Of course. But there are maaany more risks that I choose to ignore. Everybody is entitled to their own opinions on which risks they want to tolerate and which are intolerable. Which leads to my next point..
>No one's asking for everyone to hide in their houses forever, we want [...]
Everybody has their own set of 'common sense' desires, but virtually none of those desires is universal. Using the 'royal we' to implicitly upgrade your personal desires to the desires of society in general is a tedious rhetorical trick. As for general population trends, covid mitigations were quite popular for the past two years, but with every day that passes more and more people stop caring. Go outside and see it for yourself, mask usage is dropping off a cliff even in the progressive west coast city I call home. There will come a day, soon, when wearing a mask will make you the odd one out.
I have come to realize I was wrong.
If we humans always prepare for the worse, then indeed we will always be terrified. There is no way for us (I know for me) to decouple the nightmarish scenarios I ingested and prepared for, from my emotions. I want to be Spock [0], but I am not. I cannot be on the edge 24/7. I did that for decades (for work & life), it kills me and everyone around me. There is no way to enjoy this great world we live in.
So, what do I do? I try to find a "good enough" preparedness for me personally, and my family. Where is that "good enough" for me? It is just a touch more than the average preparedness. I do not have a bomb shelter, but I do have a "breakdown box" in my vehicles; I do not have hidden caches of food, ammo, household needs, but I have a well stacked pantry; and, so on.
This might be worth reviewing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
These COVID threads are almost always garbage, but we can't make them better by throttling people for writing snarkily; if there's something of value to take from a comment on these threads, everyone will have to do the work of mining it out.
Regarding the flu - indeed this was expected to be the next pandemic, but the lowly coronavirus got there first! Should there be a deadly flu outbreak, or even another coronavirus, I hope our response will be less politicized and more effective.
I guess some people are more susceptible than others (or have more risk due to lifestyle factors), but only once or twice in a lifetime? I'd guess I've had a really bad flu at least once every 4-5 years or so on average in my lifetime, and moderate cases probably every 1-2 years.
I had Covid twice as well, within a year (both times in 2020, before vaccines were available).
A year pre-covid my whole family (kids first) got the flu. Viral test confirmed one kid got two strains in succession ("A" and "B").
Its sudden onset, sudden remission, total body exhaustion, lack of my traditional cold symptoms, etc. made it very obviously different from any cold I'd had. Previous to that, I thought "the flu" was some strong "the common cold". Or just a word for arbitrary viral infection (e.g. "stomach flu").
I understand "the flu" has an ambiguous meaning now in English, but I'll certainly recognize that kind of infection again.
There is absolutely no reason to expect that.
It’s at the upper end of what I might guess but it’s plausible for some portion of the population.
I'm much more sympathetic to the death rate concerns (admittedly: Omicron makes it easy to have that kind of sympathy) than to the long-COVID stuff. Appeals to long-COVID all seem like an appeal to an application of the Precautionary Principle that, taken to any sort of logical conclusion, would shut down society. You can do shutdowns (and I supported them!) to manage an acute crisis, but you can't generally do them as a precaution.
Measures such as customary mask wearing in public places, better ventilation, less tolerance of the 'walking sick' would certainly have an effect on the infection rate. If we are looking at a situation where health issues become more severe with each (re)infection, then this may be a reasonable approach to take.
that's a funny way of saying "it turned out to be mild". deaths and hospitalizations undershot all the dire predictions.
What a horrible acronym! Was it coined by the pharmaceutical industry? "To fight COVID, we have vaccines, antivirals, steroids, novel pharmaceutical approaches, and then we have a miscellaneous category of non-pharmaceutical interventions."
You could've used "PPE" here. (personal protective equipment.)
Was reported on Channel 5 News today.
> Was reported on Channel 5 News today.
That does not fill me with confidence.
You mean because Viacom?
I'm not accusing them of media-bias or intentional misreporting, but I just don't expect C5 to be entirely accurate on nuances of the issues reported or things like second-order consequences of news events. Medical news is far outside their organizational expertise: they don't have their own journalists: their Ofcom-mandated news programmes are made by ITN which just repackage AP/Reuters/BBC/ITN - it's better to get information closer to the source, where the details are, rather than getting lost in the game of telephone played between researchers, their journals, the journals' publishers (...and publicists), to newsgatherers, to newsagencies' editors, to newsrooms, and your screen. There's a lot of people in the way: https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174
So what I mean is that getting news on Covid from C5 is like getting world affairs updates from South Park.
Death rates tend to lag hospitalisations and infections.
I don't want the flu, I don't want a cold and I don't want to get covid.
I never wear a mask when I'm with my toddler, even in public. I'd rather suffer whatever bad effects that bring me than risk lifelong language issues.
This is but one source to support that people in Asia wear masks at a high rate. [1] [2]
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC3536629/ [2] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/culture-shocked/2020...
The wearing of the mask is just one piece in this puzzle. Hygiene and sanitary practices vary widely across Asia. It could be that wearing a mask degrades maintenance of the immune system, but other sanitary practices in Asia result in the opportunity for the immune system to maintain vigilance. That is, it could be the immune system maintains itself in spite of the masks, rather than the mask having no effect or positive effect on immune system.
And most people are unmasked: so they're still exposed to at least some pathogens. So I don't see why they'd have a compromised immune system.