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A comment on NIH study offers new evidence of early SARS-CoV-2 infections in U.S.. Parent comment

Re:NIH study offers new evidence of early SARS-CoV-2 infecti... by p_j_w on Tuesday June 15, 2021 @01:36PM (#27518723)
There are plentiful anecdotes (including this very comment section) of people with similar stories just assuming they had caught covid early. Yours is the only one I've seen where the people involved took a rational/science minded approach and bothered to get tested for antibodies. Your story should be viewed as a teaching moment about making assumptions for others.

>So maybe we just all caught a bad flu bug?

I think we in the general public have a tendency to underestimate just how bad the flu is. Tens of thousands of people die from it every year in the US alone. This in spite of easy access to vaccines. It's nothing to mess around with.

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Re:NIH study offers new evidence of early SARS-CoV-2 infecti... by thaumaturgy on Tuesday June 15, 2021 @07:15PM (#27522854)
> I think we in the general public have a tendency to underestimate just how bad the flu is. Tens of thousands of people die from it every year in the US alone.

This is a misunderstanding a lot of people have about influenza statistics, btw. That "tens of thousands" number is an estimate; confirmed annual influenza deaths are much lower, from 3,448 to 15,620 (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/comparing-...).

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Re:NIH study offers new evidence of early SARS-CoV-2 infecti... by Fomite on Tuesday June 15, 2021 @06:15PM (#27522245)
This. A perennial annoyance among infectious disease epidemiologists is how not seriously people take influenza. As noted, it kills tens of thousands of people a year, and both times I've gotten it, I've felt like I got hit by a bus.
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Re:NIH study offers new evidence of early SARS-CoV-2 infecti... by bsder on Tuesday June 15, 2021 @05:27PM (#27521738)
> I think we in the general public have a tendency to underestimate just how bad the flu is.

Holy hell this.

I wanted to punch people who were saying "Covid is just like a bad flu."

I've had bad flus. "I would kill myself but I can't get out of bed to do it" is something that goes through your mind.

Anyone who dismisses something as "just a bad flu" should get infected with flu for the next 10 flu seasons. That would teach them.

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Re:NIH study offers new evidence of early SARS-CoV-2 infecti... by nradov on Tuesday June 15, 2021 @10:23PM (#27524185)
From a symptoms and virology standpoint, COVID-19 is closer to being like a really really bad cold. Several of the people I know who had it literally used those words to describe their experience. Several other endemic human coronaviruses also cause colds.
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Re:NIH study offers new evidence of early SARS-CoV-2 infecti... by mattzito on Tuesday June 15, 2021 @11:02PM (#27524420)
But surely, the hundreds of thousands of dead in the US alone, millions worldwide, would suggest that while for many people it is a really really bad cold, for others it is far worse than the flu?
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Re:NIH study offers new evidence of early SARS-CoV-2 infecti... by nradov on Tuesday June 15, 2021 @11:56PM (#27524734)
You're missing the point. The SARS-CoV-2 virus is almost completely different from the influenza virus. It's structurally much closer to at least some cold viruses. In particular it's very similar to HCoV-OC43 which causes colds and frequently kills patients who are in poor health to start with.
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