Similarly, not everyone on or near campus is a health 19 year old and not every college student can afford to live in their own apartment or with a few healthy roommates. Universities have large numbers of staff of all ages, and no college town functions without a similar all-ages mix of people living near those students. The entire reason why there's so much pressure to re-open is because the lack of federal support means that city and state governments (at least 30 of the states have recent laws preventing them from running a budget deficit during a crisis) are desperate for the revenue generated by those students, and that is another way of saying that lots of people are literally banking on having those students be in contact with a fair chunk of the local economy.
This seems to be an alarmist statement. Any disease with a fever component will leave a small percentage with long term damage, same for diseases affecting the lungs.
From https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...
>COVID-19: Lasting damage to the lungs, heart, kidneys, brain and other organs is possible after a severe case of COVID-19.
>Flu: Influenza complications can include inflammation of the heart (myocarditis), brain (encephalitis) or muscles (myositis, rhabdomyolysis) tissues, and multi-organ failure.
Scary headlines sell papers. I read recently on the BBC about brain damaged covid patients. There were less than 50 in a country of 50+ million. That is not a "much greater percentage".
It does everyone a disservice to spread exaggerated fear.
And so does poo-pooing risk when you have no actual numbers.
Every infectious disease expert I've heard from is puzzled by this disease. The variance of individual outcomes from expected norms is simply impossible to predict. Taking unnecessary risk is the act of a fool.
If you or your close ones invite even a small chance of a dire outcome, then you play it safe. And you hope your good neighbors will be likewise considerate.
> During the Sheffield, England influenza epi-demic from 1972 to 1973, the cases of 50 consecutive patients who were initially diagnosed as mild cases and were treated on an outpatient basis were followed. Transient electrocardiogram (ECG) changes were seen in 18 patients, and long-lasting changes were seen in 5 patients.
Granted I learned more than I wanted to know about the complications around influenza, and that the numbers are more significant thanI though, but my opinion is reinforced that covid is nothing out of the ordinary for these types of viruses.
>If you or your close ones invite even a small chance of a dire outcome, then you play it safe. And you hope your good neighbors will be likewise considerate.
You asked me about numbers, and now I would like to ask you the same question. What do you mean by even a small chance? Does that small chance include the risk every year from the flu, with all the related complications and possible long term effects? We don't shut the world down every year for that.
I'm not meaning to "poo-poo" risk. I want to quantify it. I'd like an intellectually rigorous response to the situation. I feel like the danger from covid relative to other similar diseases has been exaggerated, so many alarming headlines, for the clicks, not put into context, etc.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/brain-fog-heart-dama...
https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/long-term-symp...
https://www.statnews.com/2020/08/12/after-covid19-mental-neu...
There are studies looking at permanent changes to various bodily systems - see for example, this one finding cardiac differences in recovered patients:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/...
There are similar concerns for liver damage, reduced lung capacity, and neurological effects.
Obviously it’s too soon to have high precision numbers for this or level of impact on the rest of someone’s life but it definitely means that the deniers’ favorite framing of the outcomes as 99% ok, 1% fatal is leaving out a lot for the sake of political correctness.
There are people who take a long time to recover from rhinovirus. The question is, at what rate? You'll note that this is not covered in the articles you have linked.
We simply don't have the data -- what we have is a small number of anecdotes, and a bunch of news organizations who are willing to write speculative stories before we know anything. But you could write the same kinds of speculative stories about any illness, if you chose to look.
That JAMA article has serious methodological flaws, by the way: their "Covid" cohort has twice the number of smokers as their "risk-factor matched" group, almost twice as many men, more people with COPD, high cholesterol, diabetes and hypertension...and they report their results in terms of absolute numbers of defects observed. The reported differences between those groups is smaller in magnitude than the number of smokers. It's frankly embarrassing that JAMA chose to publish the study.
For example, I linked to this: https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/long-term-symp...
> "I think it's an argument for why we take this disease so seriously," says Dr. Poland. "People who are thinking, especially young people: '(It's a) mild disease, you know. I might not even have any symptoms, and I'm over it.' Whoa. The data is suggesting otherwise. There's evidence of myocardial damage, cardiomyopathy, arrhythmias, decreased ejection fractions, pulmonary scarring and strokes.
I'd tend to think that a doctor at the Mayo Clinic who has relevant education, experience, and is actively working in the response has better instincts for whether we should be taking this seriously.
I have the same standard that I apply everywhere: the burden of proof is on the person making the extraordinary claims. I don't care if that person is a hypochondriac telling me about secret herbal cures for cancer, or medical doctors who haven't done their statistics correctly. When I can look at the data myself and see that they haven't done their math right, I disregard their opinions.
Having spent my fair share of time "in the medical community", I'm here to tell you that there are plenty of doctors and nurses and professors out there who are more than willing to give a reporter a salacious quote just to get their name in the press or their paper in a better journal. Doctors are humans too: they rush to judgment, fall victim to bias, and get dazzled by the idea of seeing their name in print.
So far we have a few (mostly bad) papers describing a small number of the most serious cases, a few (really bad) papers that have gone on statistical fishing expeditions, and an absolutely credulous news media, willing to amplify any speculative claim for clicks. So no, I don't cede my critical thinking skills to an authority figure, just because that figure is in a lab coat.
Can you quantify this?
A 1% mortality rate in the US (if everyone gets it) is 4 million people. The US fought the longest war in their history over 3000 deaths.
That all is ignoring permanent, non-fatal damage. There's reasonable evidence at this point that Covid infections do long-term damage, even to healthy people. I'm reasonably healthy and young, and neither my lungs nor my sense of smell have recovered fully since I had it in March. Are you really arguing to sacrifice the quality of life of millions of people at the altar of economic progress?
It is already a known fact that diseases with fever and/or lung components leave a small percentage of people with long term damage. Covid is like the flu in this regard.
From https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...
>COVID-19: Lasting damage to the lungs, heart, kidneys, brain and other organs is possible after a severe case of COVID-19.
>Flu: Influenza complications can include inflammation of the heart (myocarditis), brain (encephalitis) or muscles (myositis, rhabdomyolysis) tissues, and multi-organ failure.
It seems that people are surprised that this happens, and/or think covid is different in degree. The numbers I have seen so far are quite small and unsuprising, for example less than 50 people with long-lasting fever damage in a country of 50+ million.
Do you have any sources claiming covid is different in this regard than any other fever/lung disease?
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/...
> During the Sheffield, England influenza epi-demic from 1972 to 1973, the cases of 50 consecutive patients who were initially diagnosed as mild cases and were treated on an outpatient basis were followed. Transient electrocardiogram (ECG) changes were seen in 18 patients, and long-lasting changes were seen in 5 patients.
Like I said, covid is no different than the flu in this regard. The above linked paper is full of other case studies showing similar data, from 1918 to the 2000s.
While reading up on your citation I found tons of literature out there talking about how common this is with other bacterial and viral infections.
EDIT: I grant that the numbers for myocardial inflammation are not insignificant. I'm learning as I go. But I'll stand by my opinion that covid is not (historically) anything out of the ordinary, just another coronavirus that made the jump to people, like so many before, and lockdowns are not going to eradicate it.
https://publichealth.wustl.edu/heatlhspan-is-more-important-...
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
You also overlook the many people on campus who are over age 30 -- all profs, and most academic and support staff. Infected students will mix with them and increase their risk to a dangerous degree that none of them would welcome.
Or are you thinking that you can run a college with only students and no staff? Dream on.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
Besides, by your argument, why should we even have bothered eradicating polio?
>why should we even have bothered eradicating polio?
Because it doesn't require locking down significant part of the population...
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/poliomyelit...
Comparing covid-19 to polio with regard to the danger to kids is absurd.
The level of fear is frankly ridiculous. People get sick and people die. One day, we will all die. That is the human condition. Life must go on. This is not the Black Death. A 1% fatality rate, mostly of people already on the cusp of death, is not a reason to bring society to a halt, to lock children inside for months.