16 ms·

We thought it was just a respiratory virus

camillomiller 6y ago
We don't hear anything like this in Europe from the vast majority of patients that beat Covid. Either the data is recorded differently, or this virus has shown something quite obvious to outside watchers: the U.S. is a sick country, relying on amounts of drugs unheard of in other parts of the western world, and disgraced by the largest obesity epidemic of the globe. I know this quite a brisk statement, but it's daunting to see how the American public opinion considers absolutely normal and justified a vast range of lifestyle-induced physical disabilities.
- udue73uru 6y ago
  Can you expand on your point about American pharmaceudical consumption? It reeks of the naturalist fallacy but I realize you were mainly mentioning it as part of a broader statement so I'd like to hear more.
  - danielheath 6y ago
    I don’t have any special insight, but in my part of the world that’s definitely a common perception of the USA, usually attributed to lax regulation around what kind of pharmaceutical advertising os permitted.
    - udue73uru 6y ago
      It's an interesting topic because I've heard a South African joke that every American has a pharmacy in their house (talking about over the counter meds in that case) so I guess it's a common perception around the world. It's funny because most Americans have the opposite view (except regarding mental health medicine for some reason), if I had to summarize the attitude it's essentially "I hate being sick and I've got shit to do".
      - dguaraglia 6y ago
        It's not so much about 'hate being sick and got shit to do' and more about 'I hate feeling sick but going to the doctor will cost me a small fortune, so I'll stick to over the counter medicine until I feel so bad I can't avoid it'.
    - oblio 6y ago
      According to these sources: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/drug-use-therapeutic.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/drug-use-therapeutic.htm https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Medicine_use_statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... they don't seem ahead. The data sources are not 100% comparable so make of that what you will.
  - normalnorm 6y ago
    Normalizing obesity because you can take some drugs to stay alive (artificially lowering your cholesterol, blood pressure, etc) might not be the smartest idea ever. But yeah, maybe it's the naturalist fallacy. To each their own.
    - udue73uru 6y ago
      Would those obese people be better off with bad cholesterol, blood pressure, etc.? It seems like you're trying to avoid outright saying we should just let fat people die as an example to everyone else.
      - normalnorm 6y ago
        What? How on earth would you conclude this from that I wrote? I was replying to the idea that it is the "naturalist fallacy" to say that it is better to be develop good habits (in this case, eat better), than to just take some drugs and maintain the bad habits. Obese people should take the drugs, I don't wish for anyone to die. Even better for them would be to lose the weight. The US has a huge (pun intended) obesity problem, and it seems related to worse health outcomes across several dimensions. This is just a fact.
        fortran77 6y ago
        > The US has a huge (pun intended) obesity problem, and it seems related to worse health outcomes across several dimensions. This is just a fact. Yes. Nobody wants to talk about the elephant in the room. In a just society, we'd make the obese pay for their cost to the non-obese population.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    - the municipal water supplies are full of pharma drugs, as is our meat supply - UCSF, the paper author, consider HFCS to be a poison and likely explains why there was no obesity in 60's photos, yet over half of Americans today. As a result, a huge number are on blood pressure and other drugs, which also end up in the water supply.
    - pengaru 6y ago
      > UCSF, the paper author, consider HFCS to be a poison and likely explains why there was no obesity in 60's photos I presume you're referring to Dr. Lustig of UCSF's research on sugar, or more specifically his position that fructose is a toxin akin to ethanol due to how similarly they're processed by the liver. If so, Dr. Lustig is careful to point out that this is not an HFCS-specific issue. Sugar and HFCS both contain fructose, and are essentially identical in this regard. This kind of misinformed demonizing of HFCS results in people thinking sweets are perfectly safe as long as they contain sugar and not HFCS, UCSF does not back such a position AFAIK.
      - dillonmckay 6y ago
        I have definitely binged out on sugar candy, and felt like I was recovering from a hangover afterwards.
        pengaru 6y ago
        If you haven't seen/heard any of Lustig's talks on the subject, he makes a very compelling argument re: fructose being a toxin. They're readily available on youtube. Excess fructose consumption is implicated in causing non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which affects about 20-25% of people in Europe, and 30-40% of adults in the US. [0] This statistic alone gives me cause for grave concern WRT covid-19 outcomes for those 30-40% of American adults should they get infected. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-alcoholic_fatty_liver_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-alcoholic_fatty_liver_dise...
      - redis_mlc 6y ago
        You're missing the point by focusong on the chemical reaction in isolation. HFCS has replaced fat as the basis of many processed foods because corn is subsidized in the US. As a result, the majority of Americans are obese from eating pounds of HFCS weekly.
  - corin_ 6y ago
    Stuff like "well I'm getting on a flight, time to pop a couple of xanax" seems much more common in films/TV that America exports than, say, real life in the UK. I know plenty of people who use illegal drugs but still have that perception of America thanks to Hollywood/etc. Personally, I don't know the data between countries, and while I've been to the US a bunch of times I've never tried to obtain medicine there legally or illegally. But I have found a big difference between UK ("You want valium? Are you sure? OK, here are 4x 2mg pills") vs France/Belgium ("Do you mean 10mg, I don't think valium comes that weak..." before realising they could prescribe 2mg indeed, and multiple times I've asked for a controlled drug in FR/BE and had the doctor reply "how many boxes" without even asking why I wanted it. Purely anecdotal, though.)
    - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
      This sort of behavior is only common among the people who write screenplays.
      - corin_ 6y ago
        Even for non-pillpopping writers, I imagine it's often more interesting to make a character take drugs/medicine than not. Ultimately, a lot of the world's views of America are shaped by the versions we see in fiction - I've been to the US from Europe more than most people I know, and I have plenty of American friends/colleagues. But still, I spend more time watching fictional versions of America on my TV than I do experiencing America myself.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >It reeks of the naturalist fallacy The naturalist fallacy is often actual empirical reality (sometimes natural states are better). It's just the fact that it's not always the case, which makes it a fallacy. But in the case, overloading on drugs for every BS annoyance, and having them needlessly pushed by doctors on payola and gifts from pharmaceuticals, is worse than not doing it.
    - api 6y ago
      Very seldom is anything "always the case," and almost anything in the realm of drugs or similar interventions becomes bad if done in excess.
      - coldtea 6y ago
        And that's the point the grandparent made: in the US, pharmaceutical drug use, is done in excess (considering e.g. Europe as the baseline).
- Kiro 6y ago
  I hear about it every day in Sweden. It's one of the hot topics here.
- graeme 6y ago
  You perhaps haven’t been reading any of the papers coming out of Europe? In my submission history you can see just yesterday an MRI study out of Europe. 78% of patients had cardiovascular involvement, 60% of patients still had heart inflammation. These were 100 Germans, tested 2-3 months after diagnosis. And 2/3rd of the cases in the study were mild at home cases, no hospitalization. There was no large difference in heart involvement between groups. A fairly large amount of the literature on these effects is actually from Europe as you got hit a month before the US, so there’s been more time to write studies. I would not say you have any evidence in support of your position. I certainly have not heard of any studies finding covid to be a multi fanged beast in america and a mere respiratory virus in the rest of the world. Edit: the paper: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/2768916 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/...
  - lbeltrame 6y ago
    I doubt the virus is still around 2-3 months later in their bodies. These effects are likely due to the hyperinflammation triggered later on during the course of the disease, if I am to follow the mechanism described in the well-detailed paper in Cell from a few weeks ago. The virus is still a coronavirus (neural invasion, also noted for SARS-CoV-2, is also a feature of regular coronaviruses). These effects, although possibly severe and worthy of concern, are second-order effects.
    - bsaul 6y ago
      "the virus is still a coronavirus" That's always something i wonder every time i read about covid-19 : are we sure that those effects aren't also observed with other coronaviruses, maybe on a different intensity, but we just never had so much scrutiny for thoses virus as we have on this one in particular ? Diarrheas etc are common symptoms of many viral infections, and people die from side effects of the flu or the cold every year ( old people most of the time). Is the difference qualitative or quantitative ?
      - huffmsa 6y ago
        It's somewhat similar to the mutant behavior of FCoV, which can cause feline infectious peritonitis. Regular FCoV causes some gastrointestinal and respiratory issues, but upon mutation starts breaking down cells and causing issues in the circulatory system, ultimately causing death. https://www.sheltermedicine.com/library/resources/?r=feline-infectious-peritonitis-feline-coronavirus-fip-fcov https://www.sheltermedicine.com/library/resources/?r=feline-...
- neuronic 6y ago
  ? Media isnt mentioning it a lot and still does faulty reporting all the time ("respiratory virus"). But there have been numerous studies and articles spread in Europe about exactly these effects. Example: https://www.tagesschau.de/investigativ/kontraste/coronavirus-langzeitfolgen-101.html https://www.tagesschau.de/investigativ/kontraste/coronavirus...
  - 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
    Calling it a respiratory virus is not faulty, because that's its primary means of transmission. It's just that the symptoms go well beyond that.
- ztjio 6y ago
  This is a completely unsupported position composed of biased, speculative nonsense. Much of the science about impacts beyond basic respiratory problems is coming from Europe, "recorded" on europeans. Example, just today, this rather concerning study on (German) people having cardiovascular issues still months after testing positive... https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/2768916 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/...
- growlist 6y ago
  As regards obesity the US might be out in front but many other countries are catching up fast. When I was a kid here in the UK large people were unusual, but now they're everywhere, albeit fewer in rich areas as it's certainly class-related. I don't see that there's any particular point to be made about the US and obesity other than that certain factors behind it are perhaps more exaggerated - in the US and everywhere else it's a function of class, cheapness, quality and availability of food, education, and to a degree also culture.
- pjc50 6y ago
  > We don't hear anything like this in Europe from the vast majority of patients that beat Covid. That is because the news flows in only one direction, not because it's not happening. It's not being very well reported even here, but it's definitely happening; I have heard several friends-of-friends who now have long term post-covid conditions, including some previously very fit.
- Wandfarbe 6y ago
  USA is huge, its over 260 Million People. The country itself spannes different regions and zones. It is quite closed minded to reduce this to 'the U.S. is a sick country'
  - chrshawkes 6y ago
    USA has around 330 million.
    - Wandfarbe 6y ago
      hui sry! I have to update the number in my head :D
DiabloD3 6y ago
tl;dr: Its an everything virus, and we're fucked. If you contracted it, you're fucked. You may not be fucked now, it maybe a decade or two later before you discover the fuckening. It can fuck anything, head to toes (literally). Best part: just because you've had it, doesn't mean you've developed working antibodies against it, thus if you aren't fucked now, just get back in queue and wait your turn.
- phoe-krk 6y ago
  You've somehow summed up a long and elaborate article containing a multitude of stories and detailing multiple seemingly detached symptoms into a "tl;dr we're fucked". Seriously, how did you manage to do that?
  - brazzy 6y ago
    It's called "pessimism".
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - eternalban 6y ago
      It could easily read as sarcasm depending on the reader's point of view.
- devin 6y ago
  I read a lot on this topic, and while I don’t disagree some people are dealing with serious long term effects, your assessment is wildly overblown and offered without qualification. I’m aware of cases that are dealing with serious short to medium term effects. There’s no doubt this is real, but the likelihood of their occurrence is a topic of research. Furthermore, the 1+ year outcomes have not been measured in any meaningful way. Conjecture is not evidence.
  - DiabloD3 6y ago
    I read scientific papers that are published in journals as a hobby. If you think my assessment is wildly overblown, then you might not actually be listening to the CDC, the thousands of researchers out there across hundreds of labs and universities, and everyone else trying to keep everyone safe. If you think I'm wrong, you should be able to quote legitimate sources on why COVID is not incredibly dangerous and should not be taken as a serious threat to life and liberty. I know you didn't intend on sounding like this, but you're veering into COVID denier territory, the kind of nay-saying that Trump et al are fueling on Twitter and Facebook. COVID is an extreme threat, according to the science, short, medium, and long term.
FriendlyNormie 6y ago
How can someone write all this shit about ACE2 receptors and not once mention Shi Zhengli which is the first name anyone sincerely researching the true origin of COVID-19’s ability to target human ACE2 receptors would come across? Author is suspicious.
nooneknowswhy 6y ago
Black, brown, and white? Where is yellow
yread 6y ago
Dear reader, it's ok, you can skip the comments here. Just read the article and move on
- self_awareness 6y ago
  This applies to most of the stories on HN nowadays
- swebs 6y ago
  It's only been an hour, and insightful comments take more time to type out than ignorant speculation. Have some faith that this community isn't just another Reddit.
DoreenMichele 6y ago
But the virus hadn’t wrecked Dowd’s lungs. In fact, she had only mild pneumonia. Instead, SARS-CoV-2 had ruptured her heart. A lot of the early part of the article rehashes basics, like how viruses replicate. If you have basic knowledge of that sort, you can kind of skim until the mid point, where we find the above factoid. I have been reading less about the virus of late, but this fits with everything I know. It causes blood clots. Ventilators aren't really fixing it. The lack of oxygen is probably more about what it does to the blood (than what it does to the lungs). Later in the article, it talks about impacts on the feet suspected to be a side effect. Feet issues are commonly associated with blood/circulation issues. This is why diabetes can lead to feet being amputated. The blood issues are well established and this has been known for some time. I'm somewhat aghast to see this article talking like we don't already know that detail.
- simonh 6y ago
  This is the feature article in a special series of articles on combating the virus. As such it's presenting a summary of what we know about it so far, and references a lot of sources, some going back several months. Given that context I think that's exactly what I'd expect it to do. Not everyone has done as much research as you, and the public perception and debate is still awash with "just a bad flu" disinformation, so its really important a clearer and more accurate picture is put out as widely as possible.
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    Thank you. The stuff about blood clots began coming out about the time I concluded I probably had it and had been mostly asymptomatic and about that same time I ran into a researcher on HN who said something about the blood that I didn't follow and I asked questions and that went weird places and then they said something else about zinc. And that led to an epiphany for me and I turned to my son and kind or recounted the exchange with the researcher and then I said "We've been eating a lot of zinc-rich foods. I am going to go get a cheese pizza because cheese has zinc." So I got a pizza and then he felt vastly better. So the whole blood angle is cemented in my mind like "Clearly, this is a hard fact and everyone knows it." But it's probably just me in my little bubble and that's it. I'm still aghast. But what you say makes sense.
twic 6y ago
Influenza does this stuff too, and we happily refer to influenza as a respiratory virus.
- CraigJPerry 6y ago
  [citation needed]
  - twic 6y ago
    Maybe i can dig out the MRI scans of my heart, so you can see the scar tissue that an influenza infection left.
    - corin_ 6y ago
      Friendly reminder that even if flu was the direct cause of you having scar tissue on the heart, it's a single data point rather than a great citation. edit: good citation provided by twic below
      - twic 6y ago
        First paper that came to hand: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3533457/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3533457/
        corin_ 6y ago
        Excellent source, thanks! I wasn't the one who asked for citation, and didn't mean to imply that you were wrong at all in my comment just that one patient's example isn't a good way of proving something about a disease. I've edited out the quick CDC quote of my last comment since your citation is much better.
- makomk 6y ago
  Yup. For example, there's a well-established effect where influenza causes heart attacks and strokes, big enough that the severity of the influenza season has a noticable effect on heart attack deaths. This is, naturally, taken into account when calculating the number of influenza deaths. The differencce is that instead of this being spun as proof that influenza is more deadly than people think, since Covid the press has been spinning it as proof it's leas deadly and that the official flu stats are overstating the number of deaths. For instance, this article - which was quite popular on HN - outright claimed that widespread flu deaths didn't exist because doctors didn't see people dying because of the flu and the CDC was misleading the public by claiming otherwise: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/comparing-covid-19-deaths-to-flu-deaths-is-like-comparing-apples-to-oranges/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/comparing-...
hellofunk 6y ago
> If we did a mass testing campaign on 300 million Americans right now, I think the rate of asymptomatic infection would be somewhere between 50% and 80% of cases Wow that’s incredible. 200 million Americans could have the virus.
- sebiche 6y ago
  They mean 50-80% of cases, not 50-80% of Americans.
- cataflam 6y ago
  That's not what it says. It says if you tested everyone, out of those who tested positive, 50-80% would be asymptomatic, not 50-80% of the whole population.
  - hellofunk 6y ago
    Ah, thanks for the clarification. That was indeed not obvious to me the way they worded it.
- IAmGraydon 6y ago
  No. 50-80% of cases are asymptomatic, not 50-80% of the nation is infected asymptomatically.
tomohawk 6y ago
Interesting explanation for why children rarely get sick or transmit this disease: > Fattahi’s team has found evidence suggesting that male sex hormones such as testosterone may increase the number of ACE2 receptors that cells produce, which could help explain why SARS-CoV-2 seems to wreak greater havoc on men than on women and why kids rarely get sick.
- zspade 6y ago
  This is only true for Children under 10. Children over 10 transmit contract and transmit at similar rates. Considering 11 is when puberty kicks in for many kids, this appears to support Fattahi's findings. (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/18/health/coronavirus-children-schools.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/18/health/coronavirus-childr...)
  - tomohawk 6y ago
    That article puts people in 10 year bins, so it is not useful to determine what the cutoff age should be with more granularity than 10 years of age. However, Sweden did not close school for children through 14 years of age. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/how-sweden-wasted-rare-opportunity-study-coronavirus-schools https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/how-sweden-wasted-ra... And their excess mortality rates for that age group are indistinguishable from other European countries: https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps When you go to that link, near the bottom select graphs by age and see that Sweden ages 0-14 looks like all the other countries shown there. I think that is a pretty good indication. We have a country that kept their schools open and a number of countries that did not, and the results look the same. EDIT: in fact, the excess mortality for that age group looks indistinguishable from other years.
stanski 6y ago
If a lot of the damage is often caused by an overreacting immune system, why isn't this disease harder on younger people who presumably have stronger immune systems? Kind of like the Spanish flu? This doesn't add up for me and this article doesn't dwell on that either.
- 0xB31B1B 6y ago
  The issue with young people and the Spanish flu wasn’t “they have stronger immune systems so they cytokine storm harder and die in greater rates”, it was that there was an earlier endemic flu like 40 years before and basically everyone over like ~40 had been exposed to it and they had immunity, and anyone under that age had not been exposed so they lacked immunity.
- roaur 6y ago
  The article suggests a lack of ACE2 cell receptors in young people could contribute why the disease isn't as hard on them.
  - stanski 6y ago
    That's for the very young, ie children, at least from what I gathered.
- thdrdt 6y ago
  There is still no proof for this but some scientists suggest people over 80 years old came in contact with a similar virus when they were young and now their immune system is overreacting (like when the second sting of a wasp can be much worst that the first). In the Netherlands they found out by coincidence that some people who have a broken TLR7 gene don't fight the virus so the virus hits them very hard. So there may be multiple reasons.
- gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
  I've seen the idea of cross-reactivity and T-cell immunity being passed around. I think the idea is that younger, healthier people with better immune systems are able to prevent the virus from replicating as much, whereas sluggish immune systems and bodies that are highly inflamed like overweight ppl, diabetics, etc. (high leptin, also related to il-6) get overwhelmed. T-cell immunity/cross-reactivity meaning that most people have the ability to fight the virus from exposure to other coronaviruses. I think a major component of the death toll from the pandemic is basically a consequence of obesity. I'm suspicious that govt interventions, planning, etc make that much difference when the US is an order of magnitude more obese than Japan, for example.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
g3houdini 6y ago
The article based on studies by UCSF is a good read for many who are not understanding the basics of what is happening. I would suggest giving this out to friends and family who have concocted their own version of science and are refusing to wear a mask.
gbasin 6y ago
This is potentially concerning, but it's worth playing devil's advocate. What are the confounders? Most people have been more sedentary than usual this year. What impact does that have on circulation?
LinuxBender 6y ago
I will get beat up for bringing this up, but I think that these facilities are operating in bubbles / silos. The reason I believe this, is that for months everything discussed in the article has also been discussed by an ER doctor in Riverside, CA that makes Youtube videos in his down time. [1] He is just reading the research available on nih.gov and a few other sites. What would it take to get all of the medical research groups to start collaborating on a common platform? Is the issue that they do not have a platform to share findings, theories, tests, or is everyone depending on the scientific review process and waiting for peer reviewed papers? Should we set up a forum for all the medical groups to share findings, theories, debate theories, etc? [1] - https://www.youtube.com/user/MEDCRAMvideos/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/MEDCRAMvideos/videos
- rpearl 6y ago
  The article is a summary of research findings over the course of the pandemic. What makes you think the research is happening in a silo? it's not. Medical researchers, just like, uh, that guy you saw on YouTube, are quite capable of reading the research on nih.gov and capable of discussing and sharing findings with each other. The article even says "By June, clinicians were swapping journal papers, news stories, and tweets describing more than three dozen ways that COVID-19, the disease the coronavirus causes, appears to manifest itself."
  - LinuxBender 6y ago
    I see each group reaching the same or similar conclusions, but months apart. This suggest to me they are not collaborating with one another. It feels to me like there is a gap. Think of it this way. If there were a giant asteroid heading towards earth and we have a limited time to solve this problem, would I want 500 teams all operating by themselves and using the incredibly slow process of sharing data via NIH / NIST and other research paper repositories, or would I want them all in a war room (virtual or physical) and someone coordinating the effort to risk rank all the solutions and quickly form action plans? My vote is the latter. It feels like the scientific community may have artificially painted themselves into a corner because of something like the banana ladder conundrum. [1] meaning, doing it that way because that is the way it has always been done. [1] - https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/33470/what-technical-reasons-are-there-to-have-low-maximum-password-lengths/33471#33471 https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/33470/what-tech...
oxymoron 6y ago
This article claims that they are able to isolate live virus from stool, which seems to contradict the observations here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2196-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2196-x
notJim 6y ago
I'm surprised to read the stuff about asymptomatic cases. I thought the current thinking was that asymptomatic people are really pre-symptomatic, because of the incubation period. In other words, truly asymptomatic cases are rare. Am I wrong about that?
- DanBC 6y ago
  Some people just have very mild symptoms that they don't recognise. A lot of people don't notice their temperature is raised for a day or so. Some lists of symptoms don't include anosmia or diarrhoea, so people have symptoms but don't think these are covid-19 symptoms.
- graeme 6y ago
  Hard to know without widespread testing, and it depends how people define asymptomatic. But cruise ship cases seem to indicate people with no true visible symptoms. There was a cruise ship with universal masking and a 80+% asymptomatic rate after 28 days. Now, these patients may well have symptoms such as ground glass opacities in the lungs. But you can’t exactly feel that, so that’s some of the ambiguity.
- bart_spoon 6y ago
  Yes you are wrong, though I suppose what you consider "rare" could be arbitrary. It seems that asymptomatic cases are anywhere from 20-40% of cases, although even that could be low, given that you are more likely to be missed if you have no symptoms prompting you to get tested.
rhacker 6y ago
Zinc
gentleman11 6y ago
Every other source online says that you can’t get Covid from eating, but this one says your stomach cells are particularly susceptible. > Gut specialists are finding that 20% to 40% of people with the disease experience diarrhea, nausea, or vomiting before other symptoms, says gastroenterologist Michael Kattah, MD, PhD, a UCSF assistant professor. If you swallow virus particles, he says, there’s a good chance they will infect cells lining your stomach, small intestine, or colon. As in the lungs and heart, these cells are studded with vulnerable ACE2 portals. In that case, is the info about not getting it from eating as thoughtless and parroting as saying masks don’t work, or is this article fake news? It makes a huge life changing difference to know for high risk people
- graeme 6y ago
  So there are a few unknowns: 1. Does the virus remain infectious in food? In particular, does hot or reheated food affect it? 2. The digestive process produces more acid. Will that kill the virus? 3. Will the virus even touch the wall of the stomach? It may be in food after chewing, rather than directly on the stomach wall There are some reasons to think that swallowing virus replicating in your throat is different than having some inside a chewed up piece of food surrounded by saliva. We don’t know of course, and someone super high risk should perhaps avoid takeout salads. But as of yet we haven’t had any case cluster reports where a superspreader cook spread the virus to their colleagues + customers via food. No country has reported a single instance of a traced infection via takeout. This doesn’t mean it’s impossible, as contact tracing is not perfect. But the lack of any evidence so far is suggestive.
digibri 6y ago
Does this mean that it's possible blood thinners could help some patients with covid-19?
sharken 6y ago
Always interesting to learn more about the virus and that there is a lot of knowledge about handling ventilators. But even so, the numbers from New York say that 80% of people over 80 years do not make it once they are on the ventilator. Source: https://www.google.dk/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/health/elderly-covid-19-patients-on-ventilators-usually-do-not-survive-new-york-hospitals-report/2020/05/19/ba20e822-99f8-11ea-89fd-28fb313d1886_story.html%3foutputType=amp https://www.google.dk/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/health/el... I do hope that more attention will be focused on telling that this virus is both causing respiratory issues and heart issues. The leading comorbidities data from New York says it very clearly. Source: https://www.the-hospitalist.org/hospitalist/article/220457/coronavirus-updates/comorbidities-rule-new-yorks-covid-19-deaths https://www.the-hospitalist.org/hospitalist/article/220457/c...

We don't hear anything like this in Europe from the vast majority of patients that beat Covid. Either the data is recorded differently, or this virus has shown something quite obvious to outside watchers: the U.S. is a sick country, relying on amounts of drugs unheard of in other parts of the western world, and disgraced by the largest obesity epidemic of the globe. I know this quite a brisk statement, but it's daunting to see how the American public opinion considers absolutely normal and justified a vast range of lifestyle-induced physical disabilities.

udue73uru 6y ago
Can you expand on your point about American pharmaceudical consumption? It reeks of the naturalist fallacy but I realize you were mainly mentioning it as part of a broader statement so I'd like to hear more.
- danielheath 6y ago
  I don’t have any special insight, but in my part of the world that’s definitely a common perception of the USA, usually attributed to lax regulation around what kind of pharmaceutical advertising os permitted.
  - udue73uru 6y ago
    It's an interesting topic because I've heard a South African joke that every American has a pharmacy in their house (talking about over the counter meds in that case) so I guess it's a common perception around the world. It's funny because most Americans have the opposite view (except regarding mental health medicine for some reason), if I had to summarize the attitude it's essentially "I hate being sick and I've got shit to do".
    - dguaraglia 6y ago
      It's not so much about 'hate being sick and got shit to do' and more about 'I hate feeling sick but going to the doctor will cost me a small fortune, so I'll stick to over the counter medicine until I feel so bad I can't avoid it'.
  - oblio 6y ago
    According to these sources: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/drug-use-therapeutic.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/drug-use-therapeutic.htm https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Medicine_use_statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... they don't seem ahead. The data sources are not 100% comparable so make of that what you will.
- normalnorm 6y ago
  Normalizing obesity because you can take some drugs to stay alive (artificially lowering your cholesterol, blood pressure, etc) might not be the smartest idea ever. But yeah, maybe it's the naturalist fallacy. To each their own.
  - udue73uru 6y ago
    Would those obese people be better off with bad cholesterol, blood pressure, etc.? It seems like you're trying to avoid outright saying we should just let fat people die as an example to everyone else.
    - normalnorm 6y ago
      What? How on earth would you conclude this from that I wrote? I was replying to the idea that it is the "naturalist fallacy" to say that it is better to be develop good habits (in this case, eat better), than to just take some drugs and maintain the bad habits. Obese people should take the drugs, I don't wish for anyone to die. Even better for them would be to lose the weight. The US has a huge (pun intended) obesity problem, and it seems related to worse health outcomes across several dimensions. This is just a fact.
      - fortran77 6y ago
        > The US has a huge (pun intended) obesity problem, and it seems related to worse health outcomes across several dimensions. This is just a fact. Yes. Nobody wants to talk about the elephant in the room. In a just society, we'd make the obese pay for their cost to the non-obese population.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  - the municipal water supplies are full of pharma drugs, as is our meat supply - UCSF, the paper author, consider HFCS to be a poison and likely explains why there was no obesity in 60's photos, yet over half of Americans today. As a result, a huge number are on blood pressure and other drugs, which also end up in the water supply.
  - pengaru 6y ago
    > UCSF, the paper author, consider HFCS to be a poison and likely explains why there was no obesity in 60's photos I presume you're referring to Dr. Lustig of UCSF's research on sugar, or more specifically his position that fructose is a toxin akin to ethanol due to how similarly they're processed by the liver. If so, Dr. Lustig is careful to point out that this is not an HFCS-specific issue. Sugar and HFCS both contain fructose, and are essentially identical in this regard. This kind of misinformed demonizing of HFCS results in people thinking sweets are perfectly safe as long as they contain sugar and not HFCS, UCSF does not back such a position AFAIK.
    - dillonmckay 6y ago
      I have definitely binged out on sugar candy, and felt like I was recovering from a hangover afterwards.
      - pengaru 6y ago
        If you haven't seen/heard any of Lustig's talks on the subject, he makes a very compelling argument re: fructose being a toxin. They're readily available on youtube. Excess fructose consumption is implicated in causing non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which affects about 20-25% of people in Europe, and 30-40% of adults in the US. [0] This statistic alone gives me cause for grave concern WRT covid-19 outcomes for those 30-40% of American adults should they get infected. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-alcoholic_fatty_liver_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-alcoholic_fatty_liver_dise...
    - redis_mlc 6y ago
      You're missing the point by focusong on the chemical reaction in isolation. HFCS has replaced fat as the basis of many processed foods because corn is subsidized in the US. As a result, the majority of Americans are obese from eating pounds of HFCS weekly.
- corin_ 6y ago
  Stuff like "well I'm getting on a flight, time to pop a couple of xanax" seems much more common in films/TV that America exports than, say, real life in the UK. I know plenty of people who use illegal drugs but still have that perception of America thanks to Hollywood/etc. Personally, I don't know the data between countries, and while I've been to the US a bunch of times I've never tried to obtain medicine there legally or illegally. But I have found a big difference between UK ("You want valium? Are you sure? OK, here are 4x 2mg pills") vs France/Belgium ("Do you mean 10mg, I don't think valium comes that weak..." before realising they could prescribe 2mg indeed, and multiple times I've asked for a controlled drug in FR/BE and had the doctor reply "how many boxes" without even asking why I wanted it. Purely anecdotal, though.)
  - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
    This sort of behavior is only common among the people who write screenplays.
    - corin_ 6y ago
      Even for non-pillpopping writers, I imagine it's often more interesting to make a character take drugs/medicine than not. Ultimately, a lot of the world's views of America are shaped by the versions we see in fiction - I've been to the US from Europe more than most people I know, and I have plenty of American friends/colleagues. But still, I spend more time watching fictional versions of America on my TV than I do experiencing America myself.
- coldtea 6y ago
  >It reeks of the naturalist fallacy The naturalist fallacy is often actual empirical reality (sometimes natural states are better). It's just the fact that it's not always the case, which makes it a fallacy. But in the case, overloading on drugs for every BS annoyance, and having them needlessly pushed by doctors on payola and gifts from pharmaceuticals, is worse than not doing it.
  - api 6y ago
    Very seldom is anything "always the case," and almost anything in the realm of drugs or similar interventions becomes bad if done in excess.
    - coldtea 6y ago
      And that's the point the grandparent made: in the US, pharmaceutical drug use, is done in excess (considering e.g. Europe as the baseline).
Kiro 6y ago
I hear about it every day in Sweden. It's one of the hot topics here.
graeme 6y ago
You perhaps haven’t been reading any of the papers coming out of Europe? In my submission history you can see just yesterday an MRI study out of Europe. 78% of patients had cardiovascular involvement, 60% of patients still had heart inflammation. These were 100 Germans, tested 2-3 months after diagnosis. And 2/3rd of the cases in the study were mild at home cases, no hospitalization. There was no large difference in heart involvement between groups. A fairly large amount of the literature on these effects is actually from Europe as you got hit a month before the US, so there’s been more time to write studies. I would not say you have any evidence in support of your position. I certainly have not heard of any studies finding covid to be a multi fanged beast in america and a mere respiratory virus in the rest of the world. Edit: the paper: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/2768916 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/...
- lbeltrame 6y ago
  I doubt the virus is still around 2-3 months later in their bodies. These effects are likely due to the hyperinflammation triggered later on during the course of the disease, if I am to follow the mechanism described in the well-detailed paper in Cell from a few weeks ago. The virus is still a coronavirus (neural invasion, also noted for SARS-CoV-2, is also a feature of regular coronaviruses). These effects, although possibly severe and worthy of concern, are second-order effects.
  - bsaul 6y ago
    "the virus is still a coronavirus" That's always something i wonder every time i read about covid-19 : are we sure that those effects aren't also observed with other coronaviruses, maybe on a different intensity, but we just never had so much scrutiny for thoses virus as we have on this one in particular ? Diarrheas etc are common symptoms of many viral infections, and people die from side effects of the flu or the cold every year ( old people most of the time). Is the difference qualitative or quantitative ?
    - huffmsa 6y ago
      It's somewhat similar to the mutant behavior of FCoV, which can cause feline infectious peritonitis. Regular FCoV causes some gastrointestinal and respiratory issues, but upon mutation starts breaking down cells and causing issues in the circulatory system, ultimately causing death. https://www.sheltermedicine.com/library/resources/?r=feline-infectious-peritonitis-feline-coronavirus-fip-fcov https://www.sheltermedicine.com/library/resources/?r=feline-...
neuronic 6y ago
? Media isnt mentioning it a lot and still does faulty reporting all the time ("respiratory virus"). But there have been numerous studies and articles spread in Europe about exactly these effects. Example: https://www.tagesschau.de/investigativ/kontraste/coronavirus-langzeitfolgen-101.html https://www.tagesschau.de/investigativ/kontraste/coronavirus...
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
  Calling it a respiratory virus is not faulty, because that's its primary means of transmission. It's just that the symptoms go well beyond that.
ztjio 6y ago
This is a completely unsupported position composed of biased, speculative nonsense. Much of the science about impacts beyond basic respiratory problems is coming from Europe, "recorded" on europeans. Example, just today, this rather concerning study on (German) people having cardiovascular issues still months after testing positive... https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/2768916 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/...
growlist 6y ago
As regards obesity the US might be out in front but many other countries are catching up fast. When I was a kid here in the UK large people were unusual, but now they're everywhere, albeit fewer in rich areas as it's certainly class-related. I don't see that there's any particular point to be made about the US and obesity other than that certain factors behind it are perhaps more exaggerated - in the US and everywhere else it's a function of class, cheapness, quality and availability of food, education, and to a degree also culture.
pjc50 6y ago
> We don't hear anything like this in Europe from the vast majority of patients that beat Covid. That is because the news flows in only one direction, not because it's not happening. It's not being very well reported even here, but it's definitely happening; I have heard several friends-of-friends who now have long term post-covid conditions, including some previously very fit.
Wandfarbe 6y ago
USA is huge, its over 260 Million People. The country itself spannes different regions and zones. It is quite closed minded to reduce this to 'the U.S. is a sick country'
- chrshawkes 6y ago
  USA has around 330 million.
  - Wandfarbe 6y ago
    hui sry! I have to update the number in my head :D

DiabloD3 6y ago

tl;dr: Its an everything virus, and we're fucked. If you contracted it, you're fucked. You may not be fucked now, it maybe a decade or two later before you discover the fuckening. It can fuck anything, head to toes (literally). Best part: just because you've had it, doesn't mean you've developed working antibodies against it, thus if you aren't fucked now, just get back in queue and wait your turn.

phoe-krk 6y ago
You've somehow summed up a long and elaborate article containing a multitude of stories and detailing multiple seemingly detached symptoms into a "tl;dr we're fucked". Seriously, how did you manage to do that?
- brazzy 6y ago
  It's called "pessimism".
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - eternalban 6y ago
    It could easily read as sarcasm depending on the reader's point of view.
devin 6y ago
I read a lot on this topic, and while I don’t disagree some people are dealing with serious long term effects, your assessment is wildly overblown and offered without qualification. I’m aware of cases that are dealing with serious short to medium term effects. There’s no doubt this is real, but the likelihood of their occurrence is a topic of research. Furthermore, the 1+ year outcomes have not been measured in any meaningful way. Conjecture is not evidence.
- DiabloD3 6y ago
  I read scientific papers that are published in journals as a hobby. If you think my assessment is wildly overblown, then you might not actually be listening to the CDC, the thousands of researchers out there across hundreds of labs and universities, and everyone else trying to keep everyone safe. If you think I'm wrong, you should be able to quote legitimate sources on why COVID is not incredibly dangerous and should not be taken as a serious threat to life and liberty. I know you didn't intend on sounding like this, but you're veering into COVID denier territory, the kind of nay-saying that Trump et al are fueling on Twitter and Facebook. COVID is an extreme threat, according to the science, short, medium, and long term.

FriendlyNormie 6y ago

How can someone write all this shit about ACE2 receptors and not once mention Shi Zhengli which is the first name anyone sincerely researching the true origin of COVID-19’s ability to target human ACE2 receptors would come across? Author is suspicious.

nooneknowswhy 6y ago

Black, brown, and white? Where is yellow

yread 6y ago

Dear reader, it's ok, you can skip the comments here. Just read the article and move on

self_awareness 6y ago
This applies to most of the stories on HN nowadays
swebs 6y ago
It's only been an hour, and insightful comments take more time to type out than ignorant speculation. Have some faith that this community isn't just another Reddit.

DoreenMichele 6y ago

But the virus hadn’t wrecked Dowd’s lungs. In fact, she had only mild pneumonia. Instead, SARS-CoV-2 had ruptured her heart. A lot of the early part of the article rehashes basics, like how viruses replicate. If you have basic knowledge of that sort, you can kind of skim until the mid point, where we find the above factoid. I have been reading less about the virus of late, but this fits with everything I know. It causes blood clots. Ventilators aren't really fixing it. The lack of oxygen is probably more about what it does to the blood (than what it does to the lungs). Later in the article, it talks about impacts on the feet suspected to be a side effect. Feet issues are commonly associated with blood/circulation issues. This is why diabetes can lead to feet being amputated. The blood issues are well established and this has been known for some time. I'm somewhat aghast to see this article talking like we don't already know that detail.

simonh 6y ago
This is the feature article in a special series of articles on combating the virus. As such it's presenting a summary of what we know about it so far, and references a lot of sources, some going back several months. Given that context I think that's exactly what I'd expect it to do. Not everyone has done as much research as you, and the public perception and debate is still awash with "just a bad flu" disinformation, so its really important a clearer and more accurate picture is put out as widely as possible.
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  Thank you. The stuff about blood clots began coming out about the time I concluded I probably had it and had been mostly asymptomatic and about that same time I ran into a researcher on HN who said something about the blood that I didn't follow and I asked questions and that went weird places and then they said something else about zinc. And that led to an epiphany for me and I turned to my son and kind or recounted the exchange with the researcher and then I said "We've been eating a lot of zinc-rich foods. I am going to go get a cheese pizza because cheese has zinc." So I got a pizza and then he felt vastly better. So the whole blood angle is cemented in my mind like "Clearly, this is a hard fact and everyone knows it." But it's probably just me in my little bubble and that's it. I'm still aghast. But what you say makes sense.

twic 6y ago

Influenza does this stuff too, and we happily refer to influenza as a respiratory virus.

CraigJPerry 6y ago
[citation needed]
- twic 6y ago
  Maybe i can dig out the MRI scans of my heart, so you can see the scar tissue that an influenza infection left.
  - corin_ 6y ago
    Friendly reminder that even if flu was the direct cause of you having scar tissue on the heart, it's a single data point rather than a great citation. edit: good citation provided by twic below
    - twic 6y ago
      First paper that came to hand: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3533457/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3533457/
      - corin_ 6y ago
        Excellent source, thanks! I wasn't the one who asked for citation, and didn't mean to imply that you were wrong at all in my comment just that one patient's example isn't a good way of proving something about a disease. I've edited out the quick CDC quote of my last comment since your citation is much better.
makomk 6y ago
Yup. For example, there's a well-established effect where influenza causes heart attacks and strokes, big enough that the severity of the influenza season has a noticable effect on heart attack deaths. This is, naturally, taken into account when calculating the number of influenza deaths. The differencce is that instead of this being spun as proof that influenza is more deadly than people think, since Covid the press has been spinning it as proof it's leas deadly and that the official flu stats are overstating the number of deaths. For instance, this article - which was quite popular on HN - outright claimed that widespread flu deaths didn't exist because doctors didn't see people dying because of the flu and the CDC was misleading the public by claiming otherwise: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/comparing-covid-19-deaths-to-flu-deaths-is-like-comparing-apples-to-oranges/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/comparing-...

hellofunk 6y ago

> If we did a mass testing campaign on 300 million Americans right now, I think the rate of asymptomatic infection would be somewhere between 50% and 80% of cases Wow that’s incredible. 200 million Americans could have the virus.

sebiche 6y ago
They mean 50-80% of cases, not 50-80% of Americans.
cataflam 6y ago
That's not what it says. It says if you tested everyone, out of those who tested positive, 50-80% would be asymptomatic, not 50-80% of the whole population.
- hellofunk 6y ago
  Ah, thanks for the clarification. That was indeed not obvious to me the way they worded it.
IAmGraydon 6y ago
No. 50-80% of cases are asymptomatic, not 50-80% of the nation is infected asymptomatically.

tomohawk 6y ago

Interesting explanation for why children rarely get sick or transmit this disease: > Fattahi’s team has found evidence suggesting that male sex hormones such as testosterone may increase the number of ACE2 receptors that cells produce, which could help explain why SARS-CoV-2 seems to wreak greater havoc on men than on women and why kids rarely get sick.

zspade 6y ago
This is only true for Children under 10. Children over 10 transmit contract and transmit at similar rates. Considering 11 is when puberty kicks in for many kids, this appears to support Fattahi's findings. (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/18/health/coronavirus-children-schools.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/18/health/coronavirus-childr...)
- tomohawk 6y ago
  That article puts people in 10 year bins, so it is not useful to determine what the cutoff age should be with more granularity than 10 years of age. However, Sweden did not close school for children through 14 years of age. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/how-sweden-wasted-rare-opportunity-study-coronavirus-schools https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/how-sweden-wasted-ra... And their excess mortality rates for that age group are indistinguishable from other European countries: https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps When you go to that link, near the bottom select graphs by age and see that Sweden ages 0-14 looks like all the other countries shown there. I think that is a pretty good indication. We have a country that kept their schools open and a number of countries that did not, and the results look the same. EDIT: in fact, the excess mortality for that age group looks indistinguishable from other years.

stanski 6y ago

If a lot of the damage is often caused by an overreacting immune system, why isn't this disease harder on younger people who presumably have stronger immune systems? Kind of like the Spanish flu? This doesn't add up for me and this article doesn't dwell on that either.

0xB31B1B 6y ago
The issue with young people and the Spanish flu wasn’t “they have stronger immune systems so they cytokine storm harder and die in greater rates”, it was that there was an earlier endemic flu like 40 years before and basically everyone over like ~40 had been exposed to it and they had immunity, and anyone under that age had not been exposed so they lacked immunity.
roaur 6y ago
The article suggests a lack of ACE2 cell receptors in young people could contribute why the disease isn't as hard on them.
- stanski 6y ago
  That's for the very young, ie children, at least from what I gathered.
thdrdt 6y ago
There is still no proof for this but some scientists suggest people over 80 years old came in contact with a similar virus when they were young and now their immune system is overreacting (like when the second sting of a wasp can be much worst that the first). In the Netherlands they found out by coincidence that some people who have a broken TLR7 gene don't fight the virus so the virus hits them very hard. So there may be multiple reasons.
gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
I've seen the idea of cross-reactivity and T-cell immunity being passed around. I think the idea is that younger, healthier people with better immune systems are able to prevent the virus from replicating as much, whereas sluggish immune systems and bodies that are highly inflamed like overweight ppl, diabetics, etc. (high leptin, also related to il-6) get overwhelmed. T-cell immunity/cross-reactivity meaning that most people have the ability to fight the virus from exposure to other coronaviruses. I think a major component of the death toll from the pandemic is basically a consequence of obesity. I'm suspicious that govt interventions, planning, etc make that much difference when the US is an order of magnitude more obese than Japan, for example.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

g3houdini 6y ago

The article based on studies by UCSF is a good read for many who are not understanding the basics of what is happening. I would suggest giving this out to friends and family who have concocted their own version of science and are refusing to wear a mask.

gbasin 6y ago

This is potentially concerning, but it's worth playing devil's advocate. What are the confounders? Most people have been more sedentary than usual this year. What impact does that have on circulation?

LinuxBender 6y ago

I will get beat up for bringing this up, but I think that these facilities are operating in bubbles / silos. The reason I believe this, is that for months everything discussed in the article has also been discussed by an ER doctor in Riverside, CA that makes Youtube videos in his down time. [1] He is just reading the research available on nih.gov and a few other sites. What would it take to get all of the medical research groups to start collaborating on a common platform? Is the issue that they do not have a platform to share findings, theories, tests, or is everyone depending on the scientific review process and waiting for peer reviewed papers? Should we set up a forum for all the medical groups to share findings, theories, debate theories, etc? [1] - https://www.youtube.com/user/MEDCRAMvideos/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/MEDCRAMvideos/videos

rpearl 6y ago
The article is a summary of research findings over the course of the pandemic. What makes you think the research is happening in a silo? it's not. Medical researchers, just like, uh, that guy you saw on YouTube, are quite capable of reading the research on nih.gov and capable of discussing and sharing findings with each other. The article even says "By June, clinicians were swapping journal papers, news stories, and tweets describing more than three dozen ways that COVID-19, the disease the coronavirus causes, appears to manifest itself."
- LinuxBender 6y ago
  I see each group reaching the same or similar conclusions, but months apart. This suggest to me they are not collaborating with one another. It feels to me like there is a gap. Think of it this way. If there were a giant asteroid heading towards earth and we have a limited time to solve this problem, would I want 500 teams all operating by themselves and using the incredibly slow process of sharing data via NIH / NIST and other research paper repositories, or would I want them all in a war room (virtual or physical) and someone coordinating the effort to risk rank all the solutions and quickly form action plans? My vote is the latter. It feels like the scientific community may have artificially painted themselves into a corner because of something like the banana ladder conundrum. [1] meaning, doing it that way because that is the way it has always been done. [1] - https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/33470/what-technical-reasons-are-there-to-have-low-maximum-password-lengths/33471#33471 https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/33470/what-tech...

oxymoron 6y ago

This article claims that they are able to isolate live virus from stool, which seems to contradict the observations here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2196-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2196-x

notJim 6y ago

I'm surprised to read the stuff about asymptomatic cases. I thought the current thinking was that asymptomatic people are really pre-symptomatic, because of the incubation period. In other words, truly asymptomatic cases are rare. Am I wrong about that?

DanBC 6y ago
Some people just have very mild symptoms that they don't recognise. A lot of people don't notice their temperature is raised for a day or so. Some lists of symptoms don't include anosmia or diarrhoea, so people have symptoms but don't think these are covid-19 symptoms.
graeme 6y ago
Hard to know without widespread testing, and it depends how people define asymptomatic. But cruise ship cases seem to indicate people with no true visible symptoms. There was a cruise ship with universal masking and a 80+% asymptomatic rate after 28 days. Now, these patients may well have symptoms such as ground glass opacities in the lungs. But you can’t exactly feel that, so that’s some of the ambiguity.
bart_spoon 6y ago
Yes you are wrong, though I suppose what you consider "rare" could be arbitrary. It seems that asymptomatic cases are anywhere from 20-40% of cases, although even that could be low, given that you are more likely to be missed if you have no symptoms prompting you to get tested.

rhacker 6y ago

Zinc

gentleman11 6y ago

Every other source online says that you can’t get Covid from eating, but this one says your stomach cells are particularly susceptible. > Gut specialists are finding that 20% to 40% of people with the disease experience diarrhea, nausea, or vomiting before other symptoms, says gastroenterologist Michael Kattah, MD, PhD, a UCSF assistant professor. If you swallow virus particles, he says, there’s a good chance they will infect cells lining your stomach, small intestine, or colon. As in the lungs and heart, these cells are studded with vulnerable ACE2 portals. In that case, is the info about not getting it from eating as thoughtless and parroting as saying masks don’t work, or is this article fake news? It makes a huge life changing difference to know for high risk people

graeme 6y ago
So there are a few unknowns: 1. Does the virus remain infectious in food? In particular, does hot or reheated food affect it? 2. The digestive process produces more acid. Will that kill the virus? 3. Will the virus even touch the wall of the stomach? It may be in food after chewing, rather than directly on the stomach wall There are some reasons to think that swallowing virus replicating in your throat is different than having some inside a chewed up piece of food surrounded by saliva. We don’t know of course, and someone super high risk should perhaps avoid takeout salads. But as of yet we haven’t had any case cluster reports where a superspreader cook spread the virus to their colleagues + customers via food. No country has reported a single instance of a traced infection via takeout. This doesn’t mean it’s impossible, as contact tracing is not perfect. But the lack of any evidence so far is suggestive.

digibri 6y ago

Does this mean that it's possible blood thinners could help some patients with covid-19?

sharken 6y ago

Always interesting to learn more about the virus and that there is a lot of knowledge about handling ventilators. But even so, the numbers from New York say that 80% of people over 80 years do not make it once they are on the ventilator. Source: https://www.google.dk/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/health/elderly-covid-19-patients-on-ventilators-usually-do-not-survive-new-york-hospitals-report/2020/05/19/ba20e822-99f8-11ea-89fd-28fb313d1886_story.html%3foutputType=amp https://www.google.dk/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/health/el... I do hope that more attention will be focused on telling that this virus is both causing respiratory issues and heart issues. The leading comorbidities data from New York says it very clearly. Source: https://www.the-hospitalist.org/hospitalist/article/220457/coronavirus-updates/comorbidities-rule-new-yorks-covid-19-deaths https://www.the-hospitalist.org/hospitalist/article/220457/c...