7 ms·

Covid doesn't seem to be different that the flu in this regard. Any disease that has a fever component will leave some with long lasting problems. Any disease t

Covid doesn't seem to be different that the flu in this regard. Any disease that has a fever component will leave some with long lasting problems. Any disease that infects the lungs will do the same. There has been nothing indicating that covid is unique in this regard. 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=10.1.1.685.8394&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.685...

snowwrestler 6y ago
We really need to stop comparing it to the flu. The way this novel coronavirus infects the body is different from influenza, and the symptoms of COVID-19 are different. We don't fully understand COVID-19 but those conclusions are very well supported by what we do know. 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".
- jjcon 6y ago
  > Woosh 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.
  - snowwrestler 6y ago
    > The lungs from patients with Covid-19 also showed distinctive vascular features, consisting of severe endothelial injury associated with the presence of intracellular virus and disrupted cell membranes. Histologic analysis of pulmonary vessels in patients with Covid-19 showed widespread thrombosis with microangiopathy. Alveolar capillary microthrombi were 9 times as prevalent in patients with Covid-19 as in patients with influenza (P<0.001). In lungs from patients with Covid-19, the amount of new vessel growth — predominantly through a mechanism of intussusceptive angiogenesis — was 2.7 times as high as that in the lungs from patients with influenza (P<0.001). https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2015432 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.
    - jjcon 6y ago
      > 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. 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.
      - snowwrestler 6y ago
        The flu is not the "status quo" for COVID-19 since they are different diseases.
        chrisjs96 6y ago
        An airplane is different than a helicopter. Doesn't mean we can't learn things by observing the other.
  - acituan 6y ago
    > there is no evidence COVID is special wrt long term complications. 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.
    - jjcon 6y ago
      > It is impossible to establish evidence for long term complications of a novel virus that has been with us for less than a year. Exactly - there is no reason to believe it causes long term problems so fearmongering about it pointless and anti-scientific.
      - acituan 6y ago
        I don’t follow. Just because something causes fear doesn’t mean that it tells us anything about its truthiness. 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.
        jjcon 6y ago
        > Just because something causes fear doesn’t mean that it tells us anything about its truthiness. 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.
      - chimprich 6y ago
        > fearmongering 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.
  - kordlessagain 6y ago
    > you shouldn’t believe something without evidence 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.
    - jjcon 6y ago
      > woosh https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=woosh https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=woosh
  - throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
    Well, define special. There may/may not but it's definitional, so please...?
- nradov 6y ago
  Please stop gatekeeping and politicizing the discussion. We all understand that influenza and SARS-CoV-2 are different viruses. However there is significant overlap in symptoms (for example both can cause viral myocarditis) so flu provides a useful baseline for analysis. 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?
  - jjeaff 6y ago
    I don't know, but it is somewhere between covid and 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?
    - chrisjs96 6y ago
      Yea just keep imagining. We'll never know. We could have had the same amount of deaths just by the older folks and at risk people quarantine themselves and everyone else keeps working. Then we could have had the jobs and money to help our neighbors pay for grocery delivery. People helping other people. Quarantining everyone is like punishing the whole class when one kid acts up. Now no one has jobs and we can't help each other. From what I know the older members of my family were already taking precautions. Why does everyone? If they are in contact with no one then we can't spread it to them.
      - ethanbond 6y ago
        Man, if only there were some sort of organization that we could create and give immense power, capital, and reach to organize such efforts...
        chrisjs96 6y ago
        You're a developer I'm assuming. You think the CDC is capable of developing a model that could predict this? As a developer I don't have much confidence for something like that. Netflix still can't recommend me a movie correctly with millions upon million data points and spending millions of dollars on it.
- grammarnazzzi 6y ago
  > 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'.
  - duckMuppet 6y ago
    180 days to flatten the curve.. Remember, we're all in this together...
- nscalf 6y ago
  Actually, even though the infection (and biological signs of the infection like blood oxygen) are different from the flu, the actual grouping of symptoms is very similar to the flu. In the most extreme cases, it has more differences, but on the average, COVID-19 is very comparable to the flu. It should be taken seriously, especially for certain demographics, but so should the flu. Not sure why people are offended by this comparison, but it's a good comparison.
  - jjeaff 6y ago
    Those symptoms are also common in Ebola patients. Probably a huge percentage of infectious disease have the symptoms of fever, headache, lethargy, body aches, etc.
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
> There has been nothing indicating that covid is unique in this regard. 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.
- samatman 6y ago
  Your bullet 1) is factually incorrect by any measure we have access to today. "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.
dennis_jeeves 6y ago
>There has been nothing indicating that Covid is unique in this regard. 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.

snowwrestler 6y ago

We really need to stop comparing it to the flu. The way this novel coronavirus infects the body is different from influenza, and the symptoms of COVID-19 are different. We don't fully understand COVID-19 but those conclusions are very well supported by what we do know. 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".

jjcon 6y ago
> Woosh 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.
- snowwrestler 6y ago
  > The lungs from patients with Covid-19 also showed distinctive vascular features, consisting of severe endothelial injury associated with the presence of intracellular virus and disrupted cell membranes. Histologic analysis of pulmonary vessels in patients with Covid-19 showed widespread thrombosis with microangiopathy. Alveolar capillary microthrombi were 9 times as prevalent in patients with Covid-19 as in patients with influenza (P<0.001). In lungs from patients with Covid-19, the amount of new vessel growth — predominantly through a mechanism of intussusceptive angiogenesis — was 2.7 times as high as that in the lungs from patients with influenza (P<0.001). https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2015432 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.
  - jjcon 6y ago
    > 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. 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.
    - snowwrestler 6y ago
      The flu is not the "status quo" for COVID-19 since they are different diseases.
      - chrisjs96 6y ago
        An airplane is different than a helicopter. Doesn't mean we can't learn things by observing the other.
- acituan 6y ago
  > there is no evidence COVID is special wrt long term complications. 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.
  - jjcon 6y ago
    > It is impossible to establish evidence for long term complications of a novel virus that has been with us for less than a year. Exactly - there is no reason to believe it causes long term problems so fearmongering about it pointless and anti-scientific.
    - acituan 6y ago
      I don’t follow. Just because something causes fear doesn’t mean that it tells us anything about its truthiness. 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.
      - jjcon 6y ago
        > Just because something causes fear doesn’t mean that it tells us anything about its truthiness. 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.
    - chimprich 6y ago
      > fearmongering 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.
- kordlessagain 6y ago
  > you shouldn’t believe something without evidence 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.
  - jjcon 6y ago
    > woosh https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=woosh https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=woosh
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  Well, define special. There may/may not but it's definitional, so please...?
nradov 6y ago
Please stop gatekeeping and politicizing the discussion. We all understand that influenza and SARS-CoV-2 are different viruses. However there is significant overlap in symptoms (for example both can cause viral myocarditis) so flu provides a useful baseline for analysis. 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?
- jjeaff 6y ago
  I don't know, but it is somewhere between covid and 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?
  - chrisjs96 6y ago
    Yea just keep imagining. We'll never know. We could have had the same amount of deaths just by the older folks and at risk people quarantine themselves and everyone else keeps working. Then we could have had the jobs and money to help our neighbors pay for grocery delivery. People helping other people. Quarantining everyone is like punishing the whole class when one kid acts up. Now no one has jobs and we can't help each other. From what I know the older members of my family were already taking precautions. Why does everyone? If they are in contact with no one then we can't spread it to them.
    - ethanbond 6y ago
      Man, if only there were some sort of organization that we could create and give immense power, capital, and reach to organize such efforts...
      - chrisjs96 6y ago
        You're a developer I'm assuming. You think the CDC is capable of developing a model that could predict this? As a developer I don't have much confidence for something like that. Netflix still can't recommend me a movie correctly with millions upon million data points and spending millions of dollars on it.
grammarnazzzi 6y ago
> 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'.
- duckMuppet 6y ago
  180 days to flatten the curve.. Remember, we're all in this together...
nscalf 6y ago
Actually, even though the infection (and biological signs of the infection like blood oxygen) are different from the flu, the actual grouping of symptoms is very similar to the flu. In the most extreme cases, it has more differences, but on the average, COVID-19 is very comparable to the flu. It should be taken seriously, especially for certain demographics, but so should the flu. Not sure why people are offended by this comparison, but it's a good comparison.
- jjeaff 6y ago
  Those symptoms are also common in Ebola patients. Probably a huge percentage of infectious disease have the symptoms of fever, headache, lethargy, body aches, etc.

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

> There has been nothing indicating that covid is unique in this regard. 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.

samatman 6y ago
Your bullet 1) is factually incorrect by any measure we have access to today. "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.

dennis_jeeves 6y ago

>There has been nothing indicating that Covid is unique in this regard. 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.