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Comment by gadders | Hacker News Reader

You seem to have lived through a different pandemic than the rest of the world.

It's hard to say the GBD was wrong when Sweden didn't lock down and they weren't exactly seeing bodies pile up in the street.

Covid is now here to stay, ranking somewhere in severity between the common cold, flu or pneumonia.

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I think the severity of long Covid might be more debilitating as it is my understanding that the long-term consequences of pneumonia is not as long lasting. I've not known of people that have had to change their whole way of life, and possibly their career, because of pneumonia or flu but have met a few that have had to do so as a consequence of long Covid.

Apart from having taste or smell affected, I don't know anyone with "long COVID".

I know a few people who are impacted by it. But they all, if I recall correctly, have confounding factors. For example, I know two people with MS where Covid has completely wrecked havoc -- and a year or so later are still largely devastated.

There's also the fact that for a lot of people, COVID isolation meant a precipitous decline in physical and social activity that lasted for years.

We know this stuff can fuck you up pretty bad both mentally and physically. Depressive symptoms and a steep decline in physical fitness is very much the expected outcome from that.

My brother has it. Persistently elevated heart rate and breathing issues, to the point that walking up a flight of stairs would leave him winded when he was suffering the worst. I believe he's gotten a bit better since, but not fully recovered.

His resting heart rate is up 20bpm, and it can take 10-15 minutes after exerting himself for it to return to that new normal. He's almost certainly at risk for a stroke due to whatever caused the change, and it left him more susceptible to being sick- he's gotten COVID 3 times despite the vaccines, while the rest of his family has only had it once or twice, on top of the usual flu and colds going around that his kids bring home from school.

Edit: noting the sibling comment, he also had no confounding factors, aside from being slightly overweight. Even our elderly parents have gotten COVID with no lingering symptoms.

I'm not saying it doesn't exist, I'm saying it's a lot, lot rarer than the COVID alarmists seem to think.

People also get post viral fatigue from other virii.

To be clear, you’re saying it’s a lot, lot rarer than Covid alarmists think… because you don’t personally know anyone with it?

Yes. That's how anecdata works. If enough people observe they don't know anyone either with or post long covid, it starts to move significance. I've known two people with ME over 50 years and it doesn't alter my sense of their personal anguish or its economic and wider health consequences.

I have no doubt long covid exists and will need significant funding in research and targeted health care. It won't need as much as, or return as much as the spend on paediatrics or obstetrics, per capita.

I’ve never known anyone to justify an argument explicitly using anecdata unironically. Amazing, no notes.

You don't seem to care that the COVID alarmists are only using anecdata as well. I think if is clear where your sympathies lie.

It's not the scientific method but if something is very common, and I have several hundred friends, relatives and work colleagues of various backgrounds and states of health then I should have heard of someone experiencing it, no?

I've seen no evidence on this thread that proves it's super-common so apart from funding my own research project, what do you suggest?

Well, of the ten people I know who have gotten COVID, one has long COVID. That makes my anecdatum a 10% rate of people developing long COVID.

Given the number of people who have been infected, that's a very large number of people with potentially permanent side effects.

I'm not saying it doesn't exist but I have no doubt we're going to see fewer people seeking a fibromyalgia diagnosis over the next decade.

There are certainly post viral complications like ards but we already have names for those things.

Psychosomatic illnesses are in fact quite serious, but they require psychological treatment, not lockdowns of society.

The incidence of heart attack and stroke increases significantly after COVID infection, so please spare us your appeal to “psychosomatic illnesses”:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8321431/

(I should get bonus points for this being a Swedish study as well, since every COVID denier loves to wave around their flag.)

"Results: Patients with post-COVID syndrome scored lower for emotional stability, equanimity, positive mood, and self-control. Extraversion, emotional stability, and openness correlated negatively with anxiety and depression levels. Conscientiousness correlated negatively with anxiety."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8870488/#:~:tex....

I think it's very possible there ARE occasional life-long consequences of the flu and other such infections that are so normalized we don't even notice.

The statistics are that Covid is much worse than seasonal flu and that’s after vaccination. To say otherwise is to ignore reality.

people have been desperate to paint Covid as no worse than the flu from the beginning of the pandemic, and it seems like no amount of time or facts will stop them.

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-03-31/sweden-cov...

> Covid is now here to stay, ranking somewhere in severity between the common cold, flu or pneumonia.

I know it’s ideologically motivated, but it’s surprising people just bold-faced lie about the impact of COVID, when the stats are there for everyone to see. In the US, COVID is on track to kill ~200K people this year:

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker

The cold and flu will not kill anywhere near this number, pneumonia is a consequence of respiratory illness, not a disease in itself, and before COVID, this would be considered an absolutely insane amount of deaths.

Is that tracking deaths from COVID or deaths with COVID? I have doubts that the numbers are not overstated (by how much, I'm not sure).

Looking at CDC data for excess deaths from Jan through July 2023*, excess deaths have averaged around 1.7%. Deaths reported as being due to COVID are running at 2.7%.

Annualizing and turning the data back to excess deaths, that means of the ~200K people that "COVID is on track to kill", only about 53.4K total excess deaths are expected, projecting from Jan-Jul, or projecting mid-Jan-Jul, excess would be only 31.5K.

Perhaps COVID is saving 146K-169K lives and then killing 200K this year?

* This is to avoid the recent data incompleteness. If I include more recent data records, my argument becomes stronger, not weaker. Setting aside the first two weeks in January, the average drops to 1.0% excess deaths overall.

The death from/with covid distinction is only relevant here if there is a systematic difference in over/under reporting of covid deaths between red and blue states. If it's a constant bias regardless of state, it would not change the conclusion of the article. And it could only change the conclusion of the article directionally if covid deaths in red states are significantly overreported compared to blue states.

GP was claiming COVID was on track to kill ~200K in the US this year *

If that's the case, it seems reasonable to compare that claim to the total excess deaths in the country. Nothing to do with red or blue states.

* - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37729830

> COVID is on track to kill ~200K people this year

Where are you seeing this? I'm eyeballing cumulative deaths in the linked data tracker, it's about 50k through September 23.[1]

[1]: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_totaldeaths...

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