For example, here's a paper going over heart inflamation and the flu, going over data gathered in the last 100 years [0].
> During the Sheffield, England influenza epidemic 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.
[0] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.685...
Correct, this has been my observation too. I see people attributing even a loss of smell to Covid, which is actually quite common to all respiratory illnesses.
Sure, flu and COVID-19 can both have long-term effects on the body. But that's true of many disparate diseases. What matters for long-term care are the details that are specific to each disease.
At this point bringing up the flu in discussions of COVID-19 is basically a form of "what-aboutism".
Taking into consideration of that which has gone before is the basis of progress and research.
> The way this novel coronavirus infects the body is different from influenza, and the symptoms of COVID-19 are different.
Everything is different from everything else.
> We really need to stop comparing it to the flu.
In other words, everybody needs to stop thinking in ways that don't support your viewpoint. People that try to solve this problem by looking at related problems should stop because 'reasons'.
Human society operates just fine with the risk of flu despite the high annual death toll. How much worse does another virus have to be in order to justify a qualitatively different approach? Is there a specific numeric threshold in terms of fatality rate or QALYs lost or severity of long-term effects?
Quite a lot of people do not understand the extent of the differences, in part because of repeated comparisons to the flu from earlier in the pandemic--comparisons which we now know were based on incomplete early impressions of the new disease.
Yes there is significant overlap in symptoms--hence the early comparisons. There are also significant differences.
Are these differences enough to produce complications worse than the flu? There's not enough evidence yet to know. I'm not saying "we're sure COVID-19 will have worse complications than the flu." I'm saying we don't know either way, so it's irresponsible to cite flu studies to imply we're sure there won't be worse complications than the flu.
Even with all the precautions, we've surpassed 175k deaths in the US. Imagine if we had been treating covid like the flu from the beginning?
A good example is my mother who is a teacher. School started this week, and they've been changing their local guidelines/procedures until, well, they continue to change every day still. It should be no surprise, because these are a bunch of county-level educational administrators trying to figure out how to respond to a once-in-a-century epidemiological/social/economic event with effectively zero guidance. It's improv but with people's lives at stake.
Why hasn't the federal government, with the immense resources and power that we entrust to it, stepped up and provided clear guidelines for opening schools and the funding necessary to implement those guidelines? If the answer is that it cannot be safe to open schools, then why have they not stepped up to provide clear guidelines for moving classes online and the funding necessary to implement those guidelines?
This is well beyond the point of being an enormous national security threat. Our government has both legal and moral authority to organize our society. This doesn't mean martial law or nationalization - simply publishing good, clear guidelines for every type of establishment and making available the funding necessary to implement those guidelines. Those guidelines ought to include clear risk assessments that these establishments and their patrons can evaluate for themselves to gauge their level of risk acceptance for re-opening, re-closing, patronizing, or choosing to stay away from.
Instead we have an entire executive branch hellbent on retaining its power, regardless of how sick, destitute, and morally broken its kingdom winds up becoming in the process. It's equal parts pathetic and despicable. Vote.
I'm not sure of Human societies operating 'just fine' with the risk of flu. We seem to operate just fine NOW because we make vaccines for the flu every year, and we have several years of experience in terms of Herd Immunity and Medical assistance.
We also do not have medical personnel dying in hundreds from flu every year as they catch it in line of service.
And the baseline of flu u refer to DID NOT HELP much with predicting or managing clots in almost every major organ when it comes to COVID. Sure, we have blood thinners etc. But when u hear from frontline workers in hospitals, the situation with clots is pretty dire. And this is a much bigger deal and the overlap with flu is very little, even in patients tht may seem to have recovered frm Covid. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/health/coronavirus-stroke...
Influenza also increases the risk of blood clots and ischemia. So SARS-CoV-2 is nothing new in that regard, although the effects appear to be more severe.
https://vascular.org/news-advocacy/jvs-report-swine-flu-and-...
And I provided some evidence for it.
I'm hoping people will not underestimate how serious Covid19 is by drawing parallels to THE NUMBER of yearly Flu fatalities, coz the number of flu fatalities are much less compared to what gets reported every year.
Thts what the SciAm link I provided talks about.
Societies operated WITH a lot of Caution and Precautions in place before the vaccines. They still operate with caution for flu DESPITE vaccines as they do not provide complete immunity.
Look at how people celebrate elimination of Wild polio in Africa! It came AFTER several decades of human suffering and wide ranging precautions.
And the level of caution changes depending on the local medical infrastructure, dynamics of the spread, demographics, and the specific knowledge we have about the disease in question.
I also claimed that WE HAVE SOME IDEA on how to deal with blood clotting wen it comes to Flu. Your link itself shows that out right "Emperic Anticoagulation decreases VTE"
But we are not there yet, when it comes to Covid19.
We have people dying from strokes AFTER they were thought to have recovered from Covid. And these aren't necessarily 'edge cases' that arise from the tail end of large numbers of patients during a pandemic.
These are most likely due to absence of knowledge,data and insights into managing a novel disease. Just read through the NYTimes article. It's very detailed and specific about how we are falling short NOW in dealing with strokes and clots.
Which most likely is also true when it comes to predicting and managing long-term effects due to Covid, as indicated by these experiences of Covid 'long haulers' https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/08/long-haul...
You missed the entire point of their post - you shouldn’t believe something without evidence and there is no evidence COVID is special wrt long term complications.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2015432
This is a study of the lungs of people who died. Obviously more study is needed, but it's not unreasonable to infer that people who survive COVID-19 would experience symptoms that most flu patients do not.
> there is no evidence COVID is special wrt long term complications.
Since this coronavirus is novel, and COVID-19 is a new disease, of course there are not long-term studies yet. The lack of long-term data does not provide any support for (or against) the idea that its long-term impact is similar to the flu. So we have to look at what we do know so far, which is that it is different from the flu in many ways.
Except when one makes a claim, one needs evidence. The assumption is the status quo unless proven otherwise which by your own admission is not possible to do right now so quit the fearmongering.
It is impossible to establish evidence for long term complications of a novel virus that has been with us for less than a year.
> you shouldn’t believe something without evidence
This is an OK heuristic but absence of evidence is not sufficient to conclude falsification of the hypothesis, especially when faced with novel phenomena.
Obviously we can't just sit around for years and wait for evidence to appear. We'll have to move forward based on incomplete information, knowing that some of it will later prove to have been wrong.
Sure, novel is a sliding scale. But it has been novel enough for our immune systems, and that is sufficient reason to be cautious. Also its epidemiologic profile was sufficiently different that our knowledge with sars or mers didn’t help us being in a pandemic right now, which can’t be entirely explained with bad policy decisions.
I'm no expert. But I am reticent to think that sars/mers and covid are going to have similar long term effects. Mostly due to the strange additional symptoms with covid that don't appear to happen with Sars/mers. Loss of taste and smell is one of them. Infected and inflamed extremeties is another. It seems as though covid is more adept at infecting other types of human tissue rather than just respiratory. Which on a micro level might be a rather small difference but could have very serious long term differences in outcomes.
Exactly - there is no reason to believe it causes long term problems so fearmongering about it pointless and anti-scientific.
This term (or the similar "scaremongering") gets thrown around an awful lot in discussions about the novel coronavirus and I don't think it's helpful.
For one thing, it's quite insulting to assume someone is deliberately exaggerating something for manipulation purposes. Please assume some good faith.
It's also a problem in that it doesn't advance the discussion in any way, because it can be applied to just about any topic where you don't like the argument.
Discussing dangers of possible long-term health effects of contracting COVID-19? Fearmongering. Raising concerns about climate change? Fearmongering. Studies that show a link between alcohol and heart disease? Fearmongering.
It's such a general-purpose accusation that it's meaningless in most contexts.
The problem is throwing out unscientific speculation with zero evidence - that is fearmongering. HN is held to a higher standard.
When faced with something novel, the right approach is to be cautious, for some optimal values of novel and cautious. If we were in a timeline where cigarettes or uranium toothpastes were as novel as sars-cov-2, we wouldn’t have established their long term effects yet either.
Not inherently but the problem is throwing out unscientific speculation without any evidence. This is often done with Covid because fear speculation attracts attention and get clicks/views.
People are hardwired to look for fear - so this sort of irresponsible speculation is dangerous because it spreads like wildfire.
This is a complete lack of understanding of scientific process and practices. People believe things without evidence all the time, gut feelings for example, and manage to be quite successful at them, I might add.
Stock markets. Startups. Scientific research into unknown categories. All these things require a sense of faith in what might be instead of blind trust in what has been "proven" (which is only to say a belief in a statistical model about a given thing).
Also, nobody said "woosh" so quoting it as if it was said is irrational.
I disagree, for two reasons:
1) Covid seems to be stronger and deadlier than any other influenza
2) Covid is spreading in the world IN ADDITION to any other influenza or cold or disease that we already had.
Therefore, there's a case to be made for many health care systems in hard-hit countries to be under heavy stress for several years to come.
"any other influenza" includes the 1918 pandemic. Which had a higher CFR, and that's before trying to account for QALYs: Covid is especially deadly to the old, in a nonlinear way, and Spanish Flu rather notoriously killed those in the prime of life.
Bird flu has an almost 50% CFR. We're lucky that, to date, strains aren't very infectious in humans.
"It's just a flu" is a really bad measure of how bad a disease is. Influenza is terrifying.
2) is almost tautologically true, but it's worth noting that the quarantine measures have been very effective at stopping the spread of other respiratory illnesses.
The excess mortality of Covid is visible, without trying to track deaths from it separately. The average victim is old enough that I wonder if it will remain visible if smoothed out over a five-year period.
We'll know eventually. "Heavy stress for years to come" from post-Covid syndrome is certainly possible; it's not the square upon which I'd lay my chips.
It wasn't too bad but it lasted three weeks and I still have periodic shortness of breath and fatigue and my doctor has no clue what to do. I hope it's not permanent.
Death is definitely not the only bad outcome.
I'm 44 now and one thing I've learned the hard way is that injuries DO NOT reverse themselves. You recover 90% but the remaining 10% is just lost forever.
human body: i can produce a fully functioning human being in 9 months, complete with a skeleton, brain, digestive track, the whole 9 yards!
person: great, when will my ankle start feeling better?
human body: a full year and it will never be the same
Unfortunately our bodies follow this same principle.
From nature stand point. Have kids in late teens, by mid 30s the cycle is already starting again. Repairing body beyond 30s is a luxury.
I’ve lived in areas where girls are all on 4th kid by 24. Men’s ages all over the place
Moved to “nicer” areas where 35-45 is first kid for woman. The man is at least 10 years older.
We have good friends in each side
Very different perspectives in each group.
Men aren't having kids until they're 45-55 then? That seems extreme -- how do they find the energy to deal with young kids at that age?
I was able to get a nasal swab test done in June when community wide testing finally opened up in my area, but it came out negative. The whole thing has been so frustrating to deal with because I don't know and may not ever know if this was for sure Covid related.
Also get a pulse oximeter and ask your doctor for one of those lung function devices aka an incentive spirometer (you breathe into them). Get a normal pulse ox when you feel ok and when you have shortness of breath, take your pulse ox again.
There is also evidence of chronic fatigue syndrome caused by covid.
Are these long term covid cases showing objective complaints? Are the lungs still damaged when imaged? Or are we relying on subjective complaints? I know there have been a few documented cases of myocarditis which is clearly objective in nature, but that’s all I have seen.
But I can feel a distinct difference and the shortness of breath always comes with the fatigue. It's too early to have any proper long term studies, but I think SARS gave lung damage to quite a few of the patients that lasted a long time [1].
One of my mutuals on Twitter is a highly active young woman, who does things like spend time in Thailand to train Muay Thai. She's been doing what she can to recover, but it's been slow going.
Covid long-haulers are a real thing, that much I'm convinced of. How prevalent it is, is an open question.
I went into the hospital for a week for severe asthma, has coughing spells for a year and my lungs haven’t been right since. It’s not as bad and I can do some level of resistance exercise, but I never fully recovered.
I’m paranoid about getting Covid. I know how terrifying it is not to be able to breathe and how irritating it is not to be able to do slight strenuous day to day activities without giving out of breathe for a couple of years afterward.
I was exposed twice to high mold spore environment; it was an enclosed space on a neglected boat. I still feel it two years later.
Could do it just for curiosity perhaps :)
In Seattle, at least, you can just go get a free test in a drive thru with almost 0 hassle and no cost. This is the way it should be -- as accessible as possible and free. Otherwise you'll have infected folks skipping testing.
Antibody is a blood test for (potentially) detecting past infection. Its public health benefits are lower and is usually not offered in a drive-through format. But it is available free with prescription, besides being included in blood donations.
The study this references turned out to be based on bogus data and bad statistics. The original authors since amended their data and don't back down from their conclusions, but they seem a bit unjustified (IMO, and the opinion of their critics).
Here's the tweetstorm (sorry) from the professor that initially called this out [1], the acknowledgement of the errors [2], and the tweetstorm (again, sorry) from that professor again pointing out that the corrected data shows "Covid survivors DO have thingies in their T1. But it is JUST AS COMMON in people with similar risk factors who have NOT had Covid. In other words, yes there are those funny thingies in the scan, but it is NOTHING TO DO WITH HAVING HAD COVID. It is because of the background risk factors" [3].
Here's a news article summing this all up nicely, if you prefer [4].
[1] https://twitter.com/ProfDFrancis/status/1288246926392070145?...
[2] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/...
[3] https://twitter.com/ProfDFrancis/status/1298524305945436161
[4] https://www.tctmd.com/news/message-unchanged-say-researchers...
> The researchers, who performed MRI scan of their hearts an average of 2 months after they first were diagnosed with Covid-19, uncovered some concerning findings: 78% of patients had ongoing heart abnormalities and 60 percent had myocarditis, inflammation of the heart muscle. Even more concerning was that the extent of myocarditis was not related to the severity of the initial illness or overall course of the illness.
This is so important. I'm so sick of people on either "side" faking data to prove their presuppositions on this.
I don’t think this research is carried out with ulterior motives. Scientists make mistakes, and are prone to biases whenever they have a hypothesis. The progression of repeated studies is the final arbiter of truth. Saying that long-term heart abnormalities would be faked to push an agenda is suggesting the existence of a conspiracy. Beyond the usual “publish or perish” drive, nobody stands to benefit from reporting results either way.
Plus, what am I to make of a researcher that doesn’t correct for the most basic confounding factors in their data. Are you seriously suggesting they never thought of that?
One of the quirks of this disease is that it does damage to the lungs and reduces oxygenation without any obvious external signs (see the reports from doctors of people texting when their blood oxygen levels were otherwise extraordinarily low) and there are now reports of people having lung damage when they otherwise did not present as sick.
So yes, it appears that it is possible to have long term damage even if it didn't seem that you were sick at first.
-- most cases are asymptomatic.
-- some asymptomatic cases have e.g. detectable heart and lung problems.
-- some people have long term consequences.
...these points are not mutually exclusive.
25-50% of people in certain areas have gotten covid. A comparison to baseline is required. Having covid one day and developing seizures the next does not determine causation, as your prior is baseline.
I'm not sure what omissions you're talking about, or where you're looking for this stuff and not finding it. I recommend listening to the podcast This Week In Virology which is run by infectious disease experts (including some dual PhD MDs) and covers the bleeding edge of the research. A lot of people are out there doing their best to gather and synthesize the limited data we have right now.
If there were serious effects of Covid we’d have heard about it with multiple articles from the science community. All there is now is conjecture, opinion and anecdotes.
I'm equally worried about the long term mental health issues people will suffer due to loss of jobs, and the domino effects that come from it (divorce, default on their debts, etc). Suicide rates will go through the roof. I think the secondary effects will in size be a lot larger than the reported number of people who have died + those who suffer from long term health-damage. Then there are those who missed cancer treatments, or who don't want to risk going in for chemo because they're equally worried about infecting themselves by leaving the house.
Specifically because the data doesn’t exist yet so they have a coping mechanism shunning all discussion of possibilities
The media coverage and social media narrative is very doom laden and fearful, so there are no shortage of places to discuss that.
Whilst the people highlighting the 99.9% survival rate unless you are very old or sick and questioning whether nuking your economy is worth it have a very socially unacceptable view.
It’s been a strange and isolating experience for me to hold a minority socially unacceptable view throughout this whole thing. I feel for minority groups much more nowadays having experienced it.
are you referring to these as the same thing? like "minority group opinions" as literary synonyms
or
are you empathizing with power/race minority because you once held a less popular view?
its not really clear here.
That's how data is collected to have a data-driven conclusion.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/08/long-haul...
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/06/covid-19-...
> Although fatality estimates are important for understanding the risk of viral spread to people in different age groups, they don’t tell the full story of the toll COVID-19 takes, says Kilpatrick. “There is a fascination with death, but COVID-19 appears to cause a substantial amount of long-term illness,” he adds.
I've been very surprised by how little attention the media gives to the damage that covid does to people, but here's a few articles:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/jul/13/heart-scans-...
https://www.smh.com.au/national/seizures-and-battered-heart-...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertglatter/2020/08/17/covid-...
It makes me wonder what's going to happen in a few years from now in the countries that haven't controlled covid well. Will there be a huge demand for new types of medical treatments to help covid survivors?