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Comment by wellthatsawrap1 | Hacker News Reader

COVID has killed 6 million or so people in a few years, so "non lethal" seems like a stretch.

You are correct, if you are overweight or obese it can definitely be a lethal disease (78% of hospitalizations are overweight and obese). So if you fall into that category, I can for understand continued concern.

If you're young, healthy, in good shape, it's just a bad flu, though (had it in May).

The lesson here for America, who is a unique outlier in how badly this went here, should've been "lose weight, get in shape". It's not too late to do that!

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/08/covid-cdc-study-finds-roughl...

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/obesity-overweight.htm

According to this 73.6% of adults over 20 in the US are classified as overweight or obese, so 78% of Covid hospitalizations being overweight or obese is not at all surprising.

This means that overweight and obese people are roughly 5.8% more likely to be hospitalized with Covid than people who are not overweight or obese. Hardly the slam dunk you're implying it is. (Of course I'm potentially making a mistake by excluding under 20s without knowing if the covid hospitalization statistic you're mentioning also excludes them, but taking that into account is too much research/math for today - what percentage of the US pop is < 20 years old?).

(As a side note, that article is awful (and I assume the source of your mistake) - it seems to imply that "obese" and "overweight or obese" are the same thing, except the former is 41.9% of the population and the latter is 73.6%. Not sure if intentional misuse of statistics, or just incompetence).

>According to this 73.6% of adults over 20 in the US are classified as overweight or obese

My God.

I did not think it was that high.

I had thought “ehh 50%” based simply on who I see walking around at Costco, and you’re right shame on me for not looking up the relevant statistics to fact check CNBC. That’s a legit public health catastrophe. We’re slow walking into a health case disaster if this doesn’t change.

To be fair I think the threshold for 'overweight' is pretty low (and based on BMI which isn't a super great measure at least on an individual level), but yes it's definitely a problem.

Yeah BMI is a very crude metric. Half the guys I was in the Army with would be “overweight” if you only used BMI (these guys were not overweight, they were yoked).

The "5.8% more likely" statistic would be in comparison to the population rate, not the subgroup who aren't overweight or obese. That group would have a 1-(1-.78)/(1-.736) or 16% reduction in hospitalization rate in comparison to the population, resulting in a relative increase of ~27% if you compare these two groups.

Why would the right reference be the adult overweight/obese rate rather than the population-wide, all-ages rate?

"Lose weight, get in shape" is good advice that would lower all cause mortality if it reliably resulted in such a change. The advice that we ought be perfect to avoid mortality doesn't take into account reality.

I agree with your statement in the small (yes, get fit, try to motivate friends and family to do the same), but it's not useful to moralize about what-if on a population level in my opinion, and it is tantamount to blaming the victims of the pandemic for bad outcomes. Especially before the vaccines, many young and healthy people died or experienced very bad outcomes, and it still happens, though the vaccines have helped a ton in this regard.

Well, I obviously don’t mean to blame the victims here. Sorry if you or anyone took it that way. Obviously it’s tragic when anyone has a bad time or dies from this. To be more clear, my ire is directed at public health officials who would do a lot of good by simply encouraging more physical activity and for other political leaders who don’t use their power to advocate for infrastructure changes in the US that get people to be more physically mobile (more mass transit, and so on).

You're right that the vast majority of healthy people are recovering. But keeping infection levels down and continuing to mask in high transmission environments helps keep the disabled and immunocompromised safe. Also, long COVID is nothing to play with.

People can take protective measures when appropriate, but there's really no way to keep the disabled and immunocompromised safe. The latest variants are so contagious that everyone will be exposed eventually. The virus is here to stay and there will be no significant herd immunity effect.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646

https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...

Don’t the vaccines do this? And aren’t the immunocompromised already taking extra steps (like not hanging out in high transmission environments)?

I’m not really convinced “long Covid” is something to worry about for people that aren’t already at risk for having bad outcomes from the disease in the first place. I’m open to reading something to convince me that it’s different from being tired for a week or two after getting other respiratory viruses. This [1] is from May. I’m not entirely convinced it’s even real.

[1] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/search-long-covid

There’s a continent with tons of immunocompromised people with no masking and very limited public health resources that seems to be doing okay. I’d be thrilled with the outcomes they’re getting, actually.

Dude, that is just how illnesses work. Almost all of them. You make it sounds like a "gotcha", but obviously older people, unhealthy people and immune compromised people are always the ones to die most frequently from illnesses. Duh.

And do we reorder all of society for these other illnesses, for these vulnerable people, because of this truism about how being unhealthy is bad?

No?

Okay then.

I'm young, healthy, and in good shape, and it's much worse than a bad flu.

That depends on the person, and vaccination/previous natural infection status. My 89 year old grandpa has tested positive twice, no symptoms. My J&J vaccine was significantly worse than the two later infections (one 6 months after vaccine, before boosters were available, one a few weeks ago, no boosters). Both were like a mild, longer, cold, with some extra muscle aches and fatigue.

Yup, so since it kills some people and is a really terrible illness for others, those who like you who had it easy need to be a little more considerate in how you talk about it. Just because it was "like a cold" to you doesn't mean we shouldn't care about it.

I am double vaccinated (Astra-Zenaca) and have had a single booster (Moderna).

I was on the floor in the foetal position at my worst, while my spouse just had a cough and very bad headaches.

Stating a fact that it depends on the person, and giving my experience, just as you did, doesn’t mean I’m being inconsiderate or don’t care about it. I don’t understand how you could have come to that completely irrational, ridiculous, conclusion. I have family members who are unable to get vaccinated. I worry about them every day. Touch grass.

it is speculated that having many vaccinations actually increase your chance of a bad reaction to the virus (and other infections/diseases).

Speculation like that isn't useful.

My spouse and I had the same vaccination history, yet her experience with covid was much milder.

Long-covid can happen to anyone. Not just a flu.

Indeed, COVID has devastated the Alzheimer’s Community.

The COVID response however has devastated the young, robbing children of socialization. Not to mention how it’s impacted young adults with inflation and lack of in person networking. The collateral damage is immense and will take many years to shake out still.

The avg age of death from COVID is higher than your life expectancy. The biggest factor in having “long COVID” is a prior history of anxiety disorders.

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