Long-term cardiac pathology in individuals with mild initial Covid-19 illness | Hacker News Reader

Long-term cardiac pathology in individuals with mild initial Covid-19 illness

nature.com

118 pointsbelltaco152 comments

I'll add my anecdotal experience, got covid in 2020, got the vaccine a year later and felt butterflies in my chest immediately after. Went away after a few seconds but after a month discomfort started during intense exercise. Another month later and I went to the ER with mild pericarditis. Its been a long ~year of recovery where I had to keep my HR under 100 and take tons of anti-inflammatories. Got lucky that I had it mild and finally back to normal (minus getting out of fitness), lets hope it stays that way.

What I learned (perhaps too late lol): * Medical Science is largely empirical (requires statistical nous), unfortunately doctors do not understand statistics, take argmaxes and treat things deterministically in the guise of evidence based medicine. * Said doctors advise Insurance companies so any doctors that do understand statistics will be bounded within the confines of what the insurance company considers evidence based medicine. This creates wasted work and even frustration as the doctor has to jump through hoops to get things done. * getting a rare disease or disease with uncertainty requires becoming an expert on it to "correctly" navigate the health system (US here). I have a newfound appreciation for not only those who have to deal with insurance but simply navigating the uncertainty.

Getting a rare disease means you have to become the expert of your own disease in other places as well.

For the “average” rare disease, the vast majority of the people in the medical system have either (a) not heard of it at all (b) had one paragraph (at most, one lecture) about it while studying. (c) have likely not met a patient with said disease, or maybe a couple over a decade or two

The doctors you see have no time to study and be up to date about multiple rare diseases.

Whereas you have the time and the motivation (and hopefully the ability) to understand all the updates, consider anecdotes, etc.

I got the vaccine long before getting Covid (about a year before), and have had palpitations ("butterflies") since the vaccine.

Are the two related? No idea. But it illustrates the fallacy of relying on anecdote. For anything.

That said: we know that the vaccine causes myocarditis in younger men, and the rate is at least in 1 in 5000, and quite probably higher than that [1]. A recent study of Thai boys suggested a much higher rate, on the order of 1 in 100 [2]:

[1] https://anishkokamd.substack.com/p/vaccine-myocarditis-updat...

[2] https://twitter.com/anish_koka/status/1560617943762878464

covid causes myocarditis at a higher rate

just a reminded because some people don’t know, not advocating for an additional original strain booster or any cause aside from that it definitely needs to be factored into incidence reports

>covid causes myocarditis at a higher rate

Not for all age groups: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32623508

I think your link (or rather the reference in your link) refutes your statement. If I'm reading correctly, beyond age, you also have to subgroup by sex and by the particular vaccine type to find a subgroup where myocarditis risk of vaccine exceeds that of the disease.

Here’s the thing though, it shouldn’t be a choice of Covid19 or a vaccine that isn’t good for you right ?

Yes there are risks , but we’re just accepting that this vaccine might fuck with our cardiovascular systems now ?

Disclaimer: I took covid vaccines

> not advocating for an additional original strain booster or any cause

we should be able to point out the strength of arguments without being seen as a supporter of the counterargument

There are also a number of cases where someone got mild covid, and then months later got vaccinated and developed pericarditis and myocarditis.

Three young men I work with got myocarditis from the vaccine. In each case, the emergency room staff didn't believe that it was a vaccine injury. In each case, they called it "anxiety" and sent them home. Only later were they able to find doctors willing to call it vaccine injury, but who knows how much damage was done in the meantime with the condition left untreated.

The point is, this isn't rare, and you are not alone.

This entire study should never have made it through peer review for this alone:

> The effect of vaccination was not systematically assessed. In total, 144 participants received an mRNA vaccination between the baseline and the follow-up scan. We performed separate analyses for participants with vaccination as well as for participants without vaccination. The results were not different from the findings of the full cohort as presented. The cardiac effects of vaccination require further research.

144 out of 346 total participants is statistically significant, but this number only includes people who received a vaccine dose between the baseline and the follow-up. The study makes no mention of people who received a vaccine dose before the baseline measurement. Since the baseline group covered people who got COVID between April 2020 and October 2021, there is a high likelihood that even more people were vaccinated before they were selected to participate in the study. Therefore, it’s impossible to prove if the cardiac related issues have to do with COVID or the vaccine.

In addition, two of the three authors of this study received speaker fees and grants from Bayer AG who helped develop and manufacture COVID vaccines in Europe.

The vast majority (>80% for men, >90% for women) of professional cyclists have gotten vaccinated, who are among the most closely monitored endurance athletes in the world, whose livelihood depends on their cardiovascular system.

If the vaccine were actually dangerous to your heart (or rather, more risky for their heart than getting COVID while being unvaccinated), they'd had have more than enough data to show it.

But in your example wouldn’t that just tell you that it’s not dangerous for endurance athletes? Unless I’m misunderstanding and you’re not extrapolating from that population to wider society.

Several vaccines were pulled from market for causing heart problems.

Were these among them?

Cardio problems are officially listed as possible side effects for Moderna, Pfizer etc... I really do not understand why we even have this discussion!

Cardio problems are a side effect of covid, so there is no surprise that it also is from the vaccines for it. What's interesting is comparing heart related issues between vaccinated and unvaccinated incidents of covid.

You said multiple vaccines were pulled from the market due to heart-related side effects. Both Moderna and Pfizer were never pulled, both are still available in many countries. The benefits obviously outweigh the small risk of side effects in the eyes of many regulatory authorities.

The AZ vaccine was not pulled from the market, the recommendation was changed to not give it to younger people anymore. Or at least this was the case for any market I know where it was initially approved.

That hardly tells me anything because essentially everyone has a weaker heart than a professional cyclist. So they may be more capable of fighting off whatever hypothetical damage there is.

It's like saying, "we threw a brick at 80% of NFL players and none of them were seriously injured by it. Therefore it is safe to have a brick thrown at you."

All that tells me is that if you are a supremely fit individual, you will likely not see any cardiovascular damage from the vaccine OR covid (hard to tell which).

That doesn't describe me or the vast majority of the world's population.

I haven't seen any evidence yet that fitness affects Covid infection outcomes. Age, yes, fitness not so much. And if anything, high performance athletes (as opposed to regular people who try to keep reasonably fit) are heavily straining their immune system, so actually they are more at risk of infection.

Obesity leads to worse outcomes [0]. I know it's not the same as 'fitness' (which is a pretty loosely defined term), but we at least know that extremely unfit people have worse outcomes.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/obesity-and-covid-19.html

Cyclists often have to wear a heart monitor when they sleep because their hearts are so efficient that their heart rate can drop to the point where it just stops, and they need to be waken before that happens so they can exercise to get their heart rate back up. They're a terrible group to use as representative of the general population. This includes the cyclist who recently died in his sleep and both long-covid and anti-vaccine theorists claimed it was from their favorite pet cause. Professional cyclists are physiological freak shows and should only be representative of other pro cyclists.

That's not how the human cardiovascular system works. It's not necessary to wake a fit person up because of a low heart rate.

You are apparently just repeating an unproven rumor that was printed in the book “The Death of Marco Pantani" by Matt Rendell. Back in Pantani's day, some pro cyclists had circulatory problems because they used EPO and/or transfusions to drive their hemocrit numbers way above normal levels. Doping controls eliminated that particular issue long before the COVID-19 pandemic (although it's likely that many pro athletes continue to engage in other forms of doping which don't affect hemocrit levels and which are harder to detect).

Having data to show doesn't mean being ready to share it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/20/health/the-cdc-isnt-publi...

I'm not going to believe athlete based statistics, way too much incentive to lie about being vaccinated and absolutely they have the means to get a doctor to vouch.

> This entire study should never have made it through peer review for this alone

Why do you assume the peer review didn't consider that, and consider it not significant before approval?

> In addition, two of the three authors of this study received speaker fees and grants from Bayer AG who helped develop and manufacture COVID vaccines in Europe.

Name an industry where the experts aren't employed by the someone in the industry.

> Name an industry where the experts aren't employed by the someone in the industry.

This is a strawman. It is a valid signal, when reading a scientific paper, to understand where the funding came from and if there could be any bias as a result. This happens all the time.

I always wonder with these reports, how does Covid-19 compare with other illnesses of comparable severity such as influenza? Such as, does the flu have potential of long term cardiac pathology? Is it possible we will eventually determine that all manner of infectious disease generally has a deleterious, long term systematic effect on the body that has largely gone unnoticed, albeit not perhaps to the same extent as Covid?

Just look at the death counts, COVID-19 is killing 10x more people than the flu per year. You realize over a million Americans are dead in two years from COVID-19, right? The flu in a similar timespan kills ~100k. Right now COVID-19 is the #3 killer of Americans, period. Right behind heart disease and cancer. Doesn't seem comparable to the flu _at all_.

I don't think the mortality rate needs to correspond to the incidence of long term effects.

I could imagine a world where there's even an inverse correlation (survivorship bias?), tho unlikely.

> You realize over a million Americans are dead in two years from COVID-19, right?

That number is probably not accurate since there were numerous cases reported of people dying "with COVID" and not "from COVID". Also these numbers were heavily used by the media and authorities to push for widespread vaccination so expect bias.

No you can look at CDC excess death counts if you're so concerned about the with vs. of COVID minimization. According to excess deaths we're over 1.2 million dead vs. pre-pandemic. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

But to humor you, OK what exactly has caused over a million people to mysteriously die in the last couple years if it wasn't COVID?

You're making a cause and effect mistake.

We know there is excess mortality. We know there are deaths from covid. We know there are deaths with Covid from events, gunshots and car accidents. We know from actuarial tables there are 3 sigma increases in deaths among some working age populations. We know here in the US, for the majority of the epidemic, the treatment for COVID only started if you were bad off enough to be in the hospital; unofficial off-label treatments have been widely demonized. We know there are alleged weird adverse events from both Covid, and the vaccines. We know some medical treatments for COVID early in the epidemic are now considered contrary to Standard of Care for COVID. We know many people are claiming new disabilities from Covid, and also, the vaccines. We know many people have lost their jobs for refusing vaccination, particularly in healthcare. We know drinking and substance abuse have gone up. We know extreme isolation which many people have experienced has gone through the roof. We know that many industries have been devastated by Covid. We know many people are depressed, and suicide rates have gone up. We know supply chains have been damaged, and some essential supplies may be transferring in greatly reduced numbers. We know that many families have had to do virtual schooling, and have much higher stress levels. We know that many businesses in the US are still treading water and having problems making payroll, with 20% of small businesses missing rent payments in the last 3 months. We know many people are becoming homeless, and some people are likewise going hungry, or starving. We know some states, NY & NJ in particular, ordered at-risk populations of eldery to sequester their vulnerable infected, with the vulnerable un-infected, and to continue to accept covid infected referrals from hospitals. We know that hospitals and potentially others, have received renumerations based on covid cases, diagnoses, and cause of death that may disproportionately effected ICD coding used by hospital administrators.

Given all of above, it is dangerously cavalier to point out one singular cause of deaths only.

>Given all of above, it is dangerously cavalier to point out one singular cause of deaths only.

Occam's razor says your wall of text is just rationalizing bullshit.

Notice how they start off by saying something we’d agree with (“We know there is excess mortality.”) and take us on a windy road, ending in conspiracy.

Sorry, what "conspiracy" is it that you're claiming? Here are the last two sentences of the comment. Both are objectively true:

> We know some states, NY & NJ in particular, ordered at-risk populations of eldery to sequester their vulnerable infected, with the vulnerable un-infected, and to continue to accept covid infected referrals from hospitals.

This is 100% true [1].

> We know that hospitals and potentially others, have received renumerations based on covid cases, diagnoses, and cause of death that may disproportionately effected ICD coding used by hospital administrators.

This is also true. Every hospital in the US gets paid higher medicare rates for Covid patients. Even factcheck.org admits the truth of the statement, despite trying hard to "debunk" it [2].

[1] https://www.statnews.com/2021/02/26/cuomos-nursing-home-fias...

[2] https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/hospital-payments-and-the-...

>what "conspiracy" is it that you're claiming?

It's definitely a conspiracy to simultaneously claim that "hospitals" were deliberately misdiagnosing non-covid deaths as covid deaths while doing high mental gymnastics to rationalize while excess deaths exceed covid deaths and the excess comes exactly during the infection waves.

misdiagnosing sounds like your words not mine. Stay on topic. The topic is billing and coding.

Hospital administrators are going to pursue whatever is their best billing and coding option. That is logical.

Why would they submit for a finger injury that pays $500 when they can get a covid bump-up for $2000?

The topic is that you are alleging a conspiracy for something which is exactly backed by the excess death data. For an explanation of which you have to invent a second conspiracy.

>Why would they submit for a finger injury that pays $500 when they can get a covid bump-up for $2000?

Because if this was routinely done, there will be some sort of proof. Where is the proof? Is there a third conspiracy to suppress it?

I am on topic. The topic is the conspiracy nutting around covid which you epitomize.

You're making a grave mistake, and I am happy to point it out.

In the case of an unknown pathogen potential first treatments may prove to be wrong. Likewise, vaccines flawed. And for this there is a great history of flawed vaccines, such as the Polio Vaccine Live Virus debacle [1] the Simian contamination of Polio vaccines [2], or perhaps the Swine flu [3]. How much more so with a novel therapeutic technology that is not well understood, or which there appears to be troubling side effects? A vaccine mandate can make it even worse [4]

Much of the destructive influences Covid has had was not because of the virus exclusively, but because of the economic effects from mandated lockdowns [5], and potentially, contributions from mandated vaccines [6]

Whether you agree with Covid lockdown economic destruction or not, people are writing about it [7] from many different perspectives [8].

I provide much evidence. Let's hope you can respond with more than an ignoble response lacking any historical merit.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1383764/

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9450713/

[3] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/long-shadow-1976-s...

[4] https://www.acsh.org/news/2022/02/08/trouble-vaccine-mandate...

[5] https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/how-much-exactly-have-co...

[6] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/healthcare/hospita...

[7] https://fee.org/articles/study-lockdowns-had-largest-impact-...

[8] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/an-economist-explains...

Ah, here comes the conspiracy. Except that, if the culprit was "the economic effects from mandated lockdowns, and potentially, contributions from mandated vaccines", excess deaths wouldn't exactly (and it really is exactly) track case counts and instead would be evenly spread during the "lockdown" periods and the vaccine administration periods. Which is not the case.

Your "evidence" (to the extent it is evidence at all) is cherrypicked, for lack of a better world, sh*t.

If you could read the previous comment you would notice several factors are mentioned but you are too busy confirming you bias towards a single factor to explain everything. One dimension thinking.

It mentions 2 factors, both of which easily disprovable since excess deaths almost perfectly track case numbers and not vaccines administered and/or lockdown stringency. Better luck with your "it's complicated" bullsh*t next time.

You haven't disproved anything with your one sentence evidence lacking comments, and you have no evidence thus far. Gotta link some data which you haven't.

Bob and Alice each have 1000 balls. I add 1000 balls and add 1000 anti-balls. Alice now has 0 balls while Bob has 2000 balls. What happened? Were Alice's balls annihilated and Bob picked up the new balls? Did Bob steal from Alice while his balls were annihilated? We just do not know without seeing some extra detail within.

>Occam's razor says your wall of text is just rationalizing bullshit.

Each claim I wrote is well supported by evidence.

You just dismissed something out of hand. Sorry, no blanket wave-away is going to cut the mustard here. And, there is no need for profanity.

Strangely, the original submission is about "Long-term cardiac pathology in individuals with mild initial Covid-19 illness (nature.com)" which goes right along with the points I have made.

Occam's razor is not a dousing rod for the actual truth in complex situations. It's a tool for dismissing wild claims in the face of the very obvious.

Occams razor is overhyped. It is almost never useful when it comes to complex systems.

occams razor is another name for confirmation bias. you dont win an argument with this kind of bullshit.

Occam's razor is an entirely logical heuristic whereas confirmation bias is not. But it's good that you show so readily you have no grasp of even basic concepts.

CDC is not a reliable source. They are completely partisan and sold to Pfizer and Co. Look for other health authorities around the world for a better picture.

Just curious - what do you feel is a more accurate number and how are you coming to that conclusion?

I think the UK data is probably more reliable, and then no other country outside of the US suffered the same level of death toll so this should be a strong sign that the data needs to be taking with a huge bag of salt.

Sigh, this is my fault for not stating in bold print that I wasn't trying to make a backhanded argument that COVID is no worse than the flu. It wasn't that type of comment.*

I'm really only wondering about whether or not other infectious diseases cause also cause long term issues but it just hasn't been detected before at the level of Covid. To put it more simply I'm wondering if every time we get sick, it decreases our overall vitality just a little bit. Maybe even catching the common cold is chopping a month or two off our lifespan and we never noticed before.

* Having said that, of course covid is comparable to the flu. You just did compare it by stating one is 10x the other. Things don't have to be equivalent or even the same order of magnitude to be comparable. I know we're getting into the weeds of what people typically mean when they say "comparable," so again, 100% my fault for not being more clear.

Just because I feel the need to say it, I didn't get that vibe from your comment at all. Some people just want to have an argument.

But I do wonder the same thing, COVID has obviously been studied enormously around the world. It also seems to impact relatively healthy people in vastly different ways unlike a cold. However, I do wonder if you took a group of people who have been hit with the flu, if you would observe similar long term impacts, albeit perhaps not to the same degree.

The clinical symptoms of COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) appear to be very similar to HCoV-OC43. That is another betacoronavirus which is classified as one of the hundreds of endemic "common cold" viruses. It is now suspected to have caused a worldwide pandemic which killed many people starting in 1889.

https://doi.org/10.1111/1751-7915.13889

There hasn't been much research on long-term sequelae from HCoV-OC43. I'll bet that if we studied it as closely as COVID-19 we would find similar effects.

X and Y aren’t comparable is a rather common expression meaning X is much greater than Y (or vice versa) along some dimension.

I suppose the logic is that you wouldn’t actually weigh them against one another because the result is so obvious - compare here perhaps implicitly meaning to weigh both carefully.

One can quibble with the logic of the phrase, but GP used it correctly.

Yes, influenza, and other viruses, causes myocarditis. I had myocarditis from some sort of gastric flu (which is not influenza, i know!).

This is well-known to doctors. It's only the general public who think that COVID causing myocarditis is novel and strange.

(FWIW i understood your comment)

> I'm really only wondering about whether or not other infectious diseases cause also cause long term issues but it just hasn't been detected before at the level of Covid. To put it more simply I'm wondering if every time we get sick, it decreases our overall vitality just a little bit. Maybe even catching the common cold is chopping a month or two off our lifespan and we never noticed before.

They do, just look at the prognosis section of influenza on Wikipedia [0] (I know, Wikipedia isn't the best source). I had a colleague that had a bad flu one year and then never properly recovered. The doctors say he now has "chronic fatigue syndrome". This was before COVID was a thing.

I'm not claiming that flu is as bad as covid, just that this stuff does happen without covid to unlucky people.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza#Prognosis

“Not comparable” can be used casually in everyday speak to mean “Not on the same order of magnitude” which adds confusion.

Number of people isn't necessarily the best metric, better to look at expected years of life lost, and by that metric covid looks less significant because it kills the old and infirm at a much higher relative rate than e.g. the flu.

Then there is the problem of deaths being attributed to covid any time the person who died has a positive covid test in the month prior to their death. It's easy to find numerous examples of people who died in car crashes or from suicide being reported as covid deaths, even still.

And interestingly, the mortality rate could even be inversely related to long term effects-- after all, if covid kills you then you don't have any long term effects (except being dead).

> Then there is the problem of deaths being attributed to covid any time the person who died has a positive covid test in the month prior to their death. It's easy to find numerous examples of people who died in car crashes or from suicide being reported as covid deaths, even still.

I never understood the reasoning behind this. I understand that pinpointing the cause of death is hard, especially with overcrowded hospitals, but I'm guessing that any doctor could circle the "high or low probability of covid causing the death" on the forms after the death of the patient. Covid+pneumonia, intubation, heart failure... sure, it's 99% it really was covid and not an unrelated undiscovered heart issue. Car crash... pretty sure it wasnt directly covids fault. The suicides would be a bit more touchy though.

I think the us numbers are suspect due to the money incentive system set up where hospitalized patients with Covid got a bigger payment that ones without. So if someone came in with a gun shot we wound and was positive he would be marked as died with Covid thus releasing the extra payment and ending up in the statistics.

> Just look at the death counts, COVID-19 is killing 10x more people than the flu per year. You realize over a million Americans are dead in two years from COVID-19, right? The flu in a similar timespan kills ~100k.

That's fallacious reasoning. Even assuming that every one of those deaths is from Covid, comparing a disease that has been circulating for 3 years with one that has been circulating for many hundreds of years is misleading.

Of course the virus with little population immunity is going to have more of an immediate effect. That does not imply that the virus has greater long-term impact, greater overall severity, or anything else. It says that nobody had this virus before, and everyone got it, quickly.

On top of all of that, the ~100k people that flu kills, in an average year, is biased toward the young. Covid mortality, on the other hand, is almost exclusively amongst the elderly and infirm.

You have that final stat around the wrong way.

The average flu is very heavily weighted towards deaths in the elderly and infirm. We even have a name for a bad flu year - it ‘clears the dead wood’.

Covid has been much more significantly impacting younger age groups - those in their 40-60s - compared to the elderly and infirm (comparing the flu death curves).

No, I don't. I'm talking about mortality of the young, not middle-aged people (40-60). The flu kills a lot of elderly people, but it also kills a lot of kids. Covid doesn't do that.

It's absolutely unquestionable that children are at higher risk from influenza than Covid, but it's also probably an exaggeration to say that Covid kills more middle-aged adults; there's a lot of debate on the issue, and papers like this one suggest significantly lower odds from Covid until age 65:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8375609/

Only when you restrict your view to the period of 2020-present do you start to see discussions of Covid leading to higher deaths relative to flu during the pandemic. Here's the UK ONS, doing exactly this:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...

But you can't go from this to claims about Covid mortality, in general. The flu largely disappeared during the last couple of years, so it's not terribly surprising that it killed fewer people during that same time period. (To be fair to the UK ONS, they aren't making that claim here, but people regularly misinterpret the data.)

Influenza doesn't seem to spread as much beyond the respiratory system as COVID does. Most damage is to lungs. Influenza damage to other organs is known but rare. [1][2]

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-17497-6

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22948576/

It is my understanding that it has long been known that many viral infections have the potential to cause heart inflammation.

It seems covid is going to a gift that keeps giving and it’s long term impact seems hard to underestimate.

One that has long flown under the radar seems to be Epstein-Bare virus. It is being implicated in cancers and multiple sclerosis among other things. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-022-00770-5

Argh, Epstein-Barr.

Yes! It's a very unfortunate way to bring to the forefront viral damage into the public consciousness who may have had that awareness slip away since perhaps the polio era. I'd like to see more research put into this and other viruses. Coxsackieviruses are another common family that can leave someone with long term heart issues.

I honestly wonder how many studies have been done on peoples fitness in 2022.

Most people I know do next to nothing for their cardio vascular systems, or their health.

Maybe these things are unavoidable no matter how fit one is, but some in their thirties are less fit than 75 year olds I know.

yeah, this study is missing controls

Well, where can you get a large population who haven't been exposed to Covid-19, to be that control group?

China.

Ideally you’d use matched historical controls from before 2019. Depending on the study, that’s a common source for “controls”. But it depends on using measurements/diagnoses that are roughly standard.

For example, prior to 2019, 30-40 years old made up X% or people diagnosed with a cardiomyopathy. Post 2020, that number is Y%.

But many other diseases are way down since 2019, due to more social distancing and remote work.

or less testing!

there's something called longitudinal studies, you know.

> underwent a baseline scan after a minimum of 4 weeks from the diagnosis of initial COVID-19 between April 2020 and October 2021 and a follow-up examination after a minimum of 4 months from baseline

They had time.

Study only looked at 350 people.

Just because a problem is hard to solve doesn't make the problem not matter.

Western Australia maybe :-)

Also the effects of lockdowns on all that.

Walking to and from the car a few times a day was, for some people, pretty much all of their daily exercies. Working from home meant they didn't even do that.

Even the mainstream media is reporting about worsening state of kids health due to missing out on in-school exercise (PE) during lockdowns and schooling from home. Closing down playgrounds, basketball courts, footbal fields also did not help. Gyms closed too.

but some in their thirties are less fit than 75 year olds I know.

It has Always been like that. There are many, many folks in their 30s. Of course some of them are going to be sick - sicker than a 75 year old. A large group of them won't make it to their 70's: A subset won't make it to 40.

The 75 year old has been lucky enough not to die so far. I'm pretty sure that when they were in their 30's, they knew an amount of unhealthy folks, too - that were more unhealthy than the 75 year olds at the time.

In other words: A 75 year old being healthier than a subset of 30 year olds doesn't prove or mean anything.

Other than family, if you known the 75 year old they are probably out and about and mobile. And I get the vibe that older people know they need to take care of things to continue to enjoy life.

"The effect of vaccination was not systematically assessed."

> "The effect of vaccination was not systematically assessed."

I think you're either paraphrasing deceptively, or you are being intellectually lazy. Perhaps it is better to not assume malice...

The rest of the quote is:

"In total, 144 participants received an mRNA vaccination between the baseline and the follow-up scan. We performed separate analyses for participants with vaccination as well as for participants without vaccination. The results were not different from the findings of the full cohort as presented. The cardiac effects of vaccination require further research."

Malice with respect to the researchers or the CDC/Pfizer?

I was saying that I think it's better to assume you're not dishonest, just intellectually lazy.

I find it funny that 25% of comments are people complaining that they didn't assess the effects of the vaccine. And yet those people will be the first to believe that there's a vast conspiracy against studying the effects of the vaccine. You can't really have it both ways, you know?

If you want to see governmental negligence, look no further than the fact that studies like this keep coming out, and no one in government is taking them seriously. Guess we'll all just die from heart problems from mild covid? The governments of the world seem entirely okay with that.

Researchers investigate effects of covid on the body. HN commenters.... BUT THE VACCINE. This site is really full of psuedointellectuals.

Not only has covid knocked ~2 years off the life expectancy in the US, it is likely to permanently knock a lot more of the healthy life expectancy. The long tail of sequlae is a reality and no level of denying and "I just want to live my life not worrying about it" will change that.

At a certain point these articles have blended into the background “this thing is bad for you” noise. We’ve all had COVID at this point. Either we will or we won’t have complications down the line. I don’t care to worry about it anymore.

I haven't had COVID at this point, and information like this helps me understand how much I should be trying to continue this conservative lifestyle that's let me avoid it thus far.

It's helpful to know what the complications are, because not only can people better understand the potential source of issues, it helps direct research & attention to where it's needed for treatment.

Same situation as you and totally agreed.

Given that many people don't have any symptoms, how do you know that you haven't had it? The latest wave seemed to be very thorough at infecting every last person.

If one has been working remotely, gotten everything delivered, and not spent any time out and about since January it's reasonable to assume that they never caught it. Little to no contact with outsiders means little to no chance of contracting it.

Good lord are people still doing that? I understand if you’re immunocompromised. But get over it. We have the shots. It’s just a flu now for healthy people.

I think this article, and the other "background noise", are evidence that it is a severe disease with lifelong consequences. Maybe the flu is as well! But these measures work for both.

This article tells you nothing useful in terms of evaluating your own personal risk. They recruited people with symptoms, in order to see if they could explain the symptoms. It tells you nothing about the risk to any random person of experiencing the same symptoms.

For all you know, you could have faced the exact same risk from myriad other viruses every year of your life before 2020; we simply never looked.

Regardless, you're going to get Covid. It is inevitable. It isn't going away. You can get it when you're younger and healthier, or you can get it when you're older and sicker. The only truly tragic difference is how many years of your life you might give up trying to hide from it in the meantime.

>Regardless, you're going to get Covid. It is inevitable. It isn't going away. You can get it when you're younger and healthier, or you can get it when you're older and sicker.

You know you're full of sh*t when you still treat covid as a one-time infection when it's perfectly clear that it will reinfect you at best on a biyearly basis.

I said nothing about reinfection, but you're right: you're going to get it multiple times in your life, just like any other circulating coronavirus, the risk of which you've completely neglected in every prior year you have been alive.

You can't do anything about it. You have a choice: you can lock yourself indoors, keep your face hidden, and live in perpetual anxiety -- in a futile attempt to stave off the inevitable -- based on questionable research. Alternatively, you can accept that life comes with some level of risk.

What you can't do, no matter how much you hide and curse at others, is avoid a respiratory virus.

The fact that you are going to get reinfected has a significant bearing on your ridiculous implicit claim made here:

> You can get it when you're younger and healthier, or you can get it when you're older and sicker.

that you are better off getting infected sooner rather than later and that there is only negative value to be had in postponing infection.

>What you can't do, no matter how much you hide and curse at others, is avoid a respiratory virus.

You may want to keep that sentiment for when a 30+% IFR respiratory virus like MERS causes a pandemic which, given the law of large numbers, will absolutely happen. Then, the attitude "you can do nothing" leads to only one thing - total civilizational collapse. (BTW, measles and rubella are both respiratory viruses that I have avoided and will continue to avoid but thanks for again proving the point that you have no idea what you are talking about.)

But looking at your submission history, I don't intend to lose any more time with the definition of covidiotism.

Most of us are able to avoid measles and rubella because the vaccines are highly effective at preventing infection and transmission. By contrast, the COVID-19 vaccines are pretty good at preventing severe symptoms but do little to prevent infection and transmission. Attempting to avoid SARS-CoV-2 is utterly pointless; unless you live like a hermit, you're going to be occasionally exposed no matter what.

>attempting to avoid SARS-CoV-2 is utterly pointless

Maybe you should start by learning about cumulative probability and hence why n/2 infections carry less risk than n infections.

Biology can seldom be reduced to such simplistic calculations. Do you have any actual evidence for that claim? Please provide a quantitative estimate of the relative risk reduction for a serious adverse cardiac event under your proposed course of action, and show your work.

It is axiomatically true that a repeated event that carries non-zero probability for an adverse effect increases the cumulative probability of said adverse effect when it recurs.

I don't need to show any work since covid infection AND reinfection has already been proven beyond any doubt to have non-zero risk of adverse effects on those that don't die from the infection. So either provide proof that covid reinfection carries 0 risk of permanent sequelae or stop wasting my time with the ridiculous claim that reducing the number of times someone is getting reinfected has no health benefit.

trention,

you need to provide some evidence instead of endlessly misusing some heuristic, or principle like Occam's Razor.

There is no such axiomatic truth. You are making things up and posting medical misinformation. Please provide peer reviewed citations for your claims.

This:

>a repeated event that carries non-zero probability for an adverse effect increases the cumulative probability of said adverse effect when it recurs.

is true by logical necessity. It doesn't need peer-review citation because is it's a synthetic apriori proposition (and also straight out of Probability 101, which unsurprisingly you haven't attended/understood), it's not an empirical claim depending on data.

I would say "learn to read with comprehension" but I fear it's not possible.

>posting medical misinformation

Very rich coming from a person literally reposting conspiracy talking points off from antivax twitter.

Stop lying. I haven't posted anything from "antivax twitter".

You are making things up without scientific basis.

trention has no evidence.

He also misapplies principles like Occam's Razor, in Latin ""Numquam ponenda est pluritas sine necessitate" (Multiples should not be posited without necessity) and cumulative probabilities, despite not knowing the science on infection seropositivity, and having a situation that literally demands multiples.

In a complex situation where there are multiple causes, and multiple effects simultaneously due to multiple agents taking action, he refuses to provide evidence and then blames it all on covid deaths, even when the deaths are happening among working age individuals which by their very nature, are less likely to have multiple comorbidities or the advanced age which are more likely to be associated with Covid fatalities.

He does not accept that the governors that sequestered covid patients in nursing homes with highly vulnerable residents have any culpability for the wildfire infections that killed many of our most vulnerable. Nope, he brushes all that away too.

i’ve noticed the same about their comments. and i didn’t even have to look at their history, because their batshit opinions, downplaying covid and long covid, have been obvious in every thread about covid i’ve seen on this site.

Idk, I have a brother that was double jabbed and boosted and he still got it. Granted most of my family with similar vaccination records never got it at all. Meanwhile an aunt who never vaccinated never got it either while other family members (many with pre-existong conditions) pre-vaccine passed away from it early on. Not sure if its worth worrying about to the extent that it seems out of our hands but still worth keeping tabs on in case something changes. Seems a little random sometimes but mostly consistent with the idea that people with pre-existing conditions are the most at risk but there could be other reasons why some that dont vaccinate dont get sick. If its diet related for example that would be very useful to know.

> double jabbed and boosted and he still got it.

Thats not how vaccines work. They don't protect you from getting it, they protect you IF you get it!

Actually, that is how most vaccines work. Just not these vaccines.

A lot of us enjoy life better this way. I realized through COVID that I fuckin hate people.

Covid is as catchy as measles. That means it's probably not just airborn but exceptionally so. It's in the air outside. It's in air in ventilation systems. It's in the sewers. There are cases where outbreaks have happened within buildings when the virus came up through the toilets, spreading from flat to flat despite complete lockdown. It's very likely that you have caught it already despite the precautions.

I can’t be absolutely certain, but I’m high risk so it’s unlikely to be asymptomatic. I also haven’t dined indoor or anything of the like. Been extra careful. It would be very surprising if I had.

I've been avoiding people since this all began. I haven't gotten it yet. I'm in very good health, very fit and lean, but I keep seeing people I know are more fit than I am get sick, like Dr. Mike Israetel just recently got symptomatic covid again. Not many people are as fit as he is. I honestly think the only reason I haven't gotten sick yet is because I largely avoid people. Going to keep avoiding it until people stop getting sick from it.

Well it’s endemic so it will never go away just join the generic group of cold viruses

>I haven't had COVID at this point, and information like this helps me understand how much I should be trying to continue this conservative lifestyle that's let me avoid it thus far.

Is it your conservative lifestyle? I haven't been taking any precautions and i haven't had covid yet either.

I didn’t get it for a long time until it went gangbusters through this area and you’d pretty much need the agoraphobic lifestyle to avoid getting it.

I haven't had it, and I certainly don't want it, reading these articles.

The virus isn't going away so you're going to get it whether you want it or not. Unless you avoid all human contact, which is obviously worse and more unhealthy than any respiratory virus.

The metaverse gets facetracking next month.

The absolutes in this comment show heavy bias.

> Unless you avoid all human contact […]

Here comes the straw man.

Secondly, the original comment was likely talking about doing their best* to avoid infection. Doing one’s best but failing is an acceptable outcome. Even if one fails, being infected once is better than being infected twice. In general, for covid, being infected as few times as possible is a good thing and a worthwhile goal.

*For some people, doing their best might even include doing some relatively unsafe activities on a whim occasionally. Being so doesn’t make them hypocrites.

There's no point in trying when failure is inevitable.

Humbly speaking, failure isn’t inevitable in avoiding covid infection. For example, if you’re fortunate enough to work from home, you’re already nearly there. The rest is curbside pickups, home deliveries for groceries, and responsible N95/P100 mask wearing.

Also, did you read the comment you’re replying to? I repeat its point: Failing once is better than failing twice. Failing twice better than failing thrice. And so on.

So you're suggesting that people eliminate all direct human contact just to avoid a minor respiratory virus with a >99% survival rate? It's sad to see people fall into mental illnesses like germophobia.

https://www.verywellmind.com/diagnosing-a-specific-phobia-26...

> So you're suggesting that people eliminate all direct human contact [...]

> There's no point in trying when failure is inevitable.

I didn't ask that you eliminate all human contact. I called you out for telling other people that trying to avoid it is futile and for discouraging others from doing so.

In any case, one can still do their best to avoid covid, without necessarily avoiding human contact. Avoiding all human contact is just your straw man, it seems.

> a minor respiratory virus with a >99% survival rate

It's not the acute phase that matters. I (and most people) don't care about the acute phase. So your patronizing about phobias was not only unnecessary but also widely off the mark.

Covid isn't just a respiratory illness, like the common cold, that ends with a 'full' recovery after the acute phase. The post-acute phase* incidence and morbidity is on another level of magnitude. Covid presents as a respiratory illness in its acute phase. In its post-acute phase, covid is vascular and neurological. Some physicians consider it airborne thrombotic vasculitis, since it causes clotting and damage to multiple organ systems after initial infection.

For many, post-covid disorders are typically characterized by serious issues such as brain damage--or "brain fog," to be cutesy; postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS); post-exertional malaise (PEM); and myalgic encephalomyelitis-like chronic fatigue--or "fatigue," to be dismissive. So much so that 1/3 of 10 MM job unfilled job vacancies in the US are estimated to be due to long covid absences.

*Many other viral illnesses, e.g., dengue virus, HIV, EBV, present post-acute phase issues, so this isn't unique or surprising.

Bullshit. I haven't been eliminating all my direct human contact, and I've been fine. I've taken some reasonable safety precautions. I recognize that I've been somewhat lucky this far, but I think that I've had a reasonable take on the risks associated.

Edit: I also realize that I've been exceptionally lucky in where I live. Tokyoites have been taking the illness seriously until now. The signs of fatigue are there, so not sure if that'll continue, but at least I've managed to earn some time; the later to catch the disease, the better!

In the meanwhile, a vaccine targeting BA.4 and BA.5 is being approved at these moments where I live. If I manage to avoid an infection for some another months and get the jab, I guess I'll be fine for the time being.

You sound like you're suicidal or suffering severe depression if you have that little care for your own life or future.

That is quite the logical jump. OP might just prefer not to worry about it anymore, which honestly seems to be the case for most people these days. Two years is a long time to be ultra-careful about everything.

What they're espousing is pure nihilism, AKA "if I die, I die". It's not a good attitude with a novel virus that has killed over a million folks in America so far! It's not hard to take simple mitigations like mask wearing to prevent catching it or prevent getting reinfected over and over from it.

What a silly comment. Regular people obviously aren't going to spend the rest of their lives wearing masks (which aren't even completely effective anyway). You're likely to get infected (or reinfected) no matter what you do.

> What they're espousing is pure nihilism, AKA "if I die, I die". It's not a good attitude with a novel virus that has killed over a million folks in America so far!

It’s not nihilistic. It’s realistic. The virus is no longer “novel”. And its’ only danger was its novelty. We are vaccinated now. Life can resume. Unless you want to spend your life also worrying about polio, measels, HPV, and whatever else we’ve beaten and learned to live with.

We definitely don't "live with" polio and measles, not in the sense the usual *** in the comments use this phrase.

We are also well on our way to stop living with HPV - but of course antivaxxers there are also sabotaging.

I can’t believe that the sibling comment:

> Vaccinated people are not protected against catching and spreading the disease, and they're not protected from long COVID or even heart issues like this paper shows. […]

has been downvoted/flagged. This site has really gone downhill over the last decade. Wishful, uninformed thinking, that goes against the reality of covid & long covid described in the quoted portion.

There is nothing wrong with this comment other than "all" should instead be "most.

Can this explain why the quality of twitter has taken a dive (in my opinion of course)? I blocked all the crypto stuff by blocking 'bitcoin' and 'crypto', as well as 'trump', but something has been going on for the last 6-12 months.

I mean, all the crypto stuff at least objectively made sense: people trying to make money, but I don't know what's going on anymore.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com