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.
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.