> This is a virus with bad long-term effects on the body.

In what percentage of people who get COVID-19 are there bad long-term effects? What other conditions did the people get bad long term effects have? How does these numbers compare with other diseases?

Would appreciate citations.

Damage to the heart, the brain, even for mild or asymptotic cases. My references are previous posts on HN or on phys.org as you can easily search it.

As you said there are scarce data yet, but the risks are scary. In these conditions, it's obvious one should avoid relying on a herd immunity induced by the virus.

> My references are previous posts on HN or on phys.org as you can easily search it.

And you could cite a claim you are making. Without numbers it is hard to say if this is a good basis for decisions.

The statistics are in the making, and researchers discover more illness mechanisms each day.

As I said, we are in the presence of a huge risk and there is no "reassuring numbers" anywhere to counterbalance that.

As one reference on the risks I'm speaking of, here is an article about the action of the virus on the nerve cells:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-we-know-so-f...

By the way, between "relying on virus-induced herd immunity" and just keeping safe with mask and waiting for the vaccine to come, why the rush to get the virus??

There is a risk, there is the possibility to wait it over. So why just not do that and wait the safe solution?

Suicide, abuse/trauma, avoided medical treatments, drug and alcohol addictions, and depression have all been seen to increase since we first had lockdowns.

There is no safe solution, it's a decision between protecting the 0.5% old, obese, and sick or the 99.5%

The fact that catching the COVID should be avoided instead of looked for is really obvious.

How to avoid it is the real discussion.

I could avoid it easily until now because everybody wears a mask here.

In some cases or in some countries, this is not possible, or too much people are infected already, and lockdown becomes the best solution.

Nobody is saying that lockdown is the only solution in every case, and absolutely nobody is even thinking that lockdown is making people happy.

> Suicide, abuse/trauma, [...], drug and alcohol addictions, and depression have all been seen to increase since we first had lockdowns.

Correlation versus causation.

We're in the middle of a major health emergency. Why are you attributing those to the effects of lockdowns, rather than the effects of the pandemic? You don't think that the risk to personal health of a potentially lethal virus, seeing older friends and relatives dying, and worrying about the risk of health systems collapsing are causing any of the above?

In March, someone I know in Italy passed on the virus to his grandfather, who died at home. All the ambulances in the area were tied up for hours. You can imagine the effect on his mental health. I doubt the impact was comparable to the effects of intermittent lockdowns.

Please provide evidence for this.

(To avoid misunderstandings, evidence does not mean your unverified opinions).

I'm particularly interested in your methodology for arriving at 0.5%, so a detailed data dump on that from you would be very useful.

The IFR is ~0.6%, the threshold for herd immunity is below 80% according to even the most pessimistic estimates. 80% * 0.6% = 0.5%.

Exactly. There is scarce data. If after almost a year there is still no evidence of long-term damage, it's reasonable to assume there is none.

We don’t know yet. It’s a gamble.

A uk study suggests 12% have symptoms longer than 30 days. Beyond that, hard to say. We also don’t havea good measure of invisible damage: do survivors have reduced lung function from pneumonia? Damage to endothelium predisposing to pneumonia? Too soon to tell.

About 20% of people are hospitalized.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-54296223

We don't know. Which is why it's preferred to play it safe, in that regard.

Nobody knows its long term effect on the body. Especially if you were asymptomatic.

Your response is phrased in a way that all the meaning lies in the exact definition of what you mean by "knows". There is certainly evidence that there are long-term effects. Example: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.20.20215863v...

This huge uncertainty is in favor of avoiding taking the risks, rather than the other way.

Put another way: Nobody knows of any long term effect on the body.