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> 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 h

> 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.
  - jjcon 6y ago
    > Discussing dangers of possible long-term health effects of contracting COVID-19? Fearmongering. The problem is throwing out unscientific speculation with zero evidence - that is fearmongering. HN is held to a higher standard.
nradov 6y ago
SARS-CoV-2 isn't very novel. The long-term clinical effects appear to be fairly similar to SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV. There are thousands of survivors from those earlier epidemics whom we can study. Obviously we can't just sit around for years and wait for evidence to appear. We'll have to move forward based on incomplete information, knowing that some of it will later prove to have been wrong.
- acituan 6y ago
  > SARS-CoV-2 isn't very novel. The long-term clinical effects appear to be fairly similar to SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV Sure, novel is a sliding scale. But it has been novel enough for our immune systems, and that is sufficient reason to be cautious. Also its epidemiologic profile was sufficiently different that our knowledge with sars or mers didn’t help us being in a pandemic right now, which can’t be entirely explained with bad policy decisions.
- jjeaff 6y ago
  How can we say the long term effects of sars/mers appear to be similar to covid when we have zero data on long term effects of covid? I'm no expert. But I am reticent to think that sars/mers and covid are going to have similar long term effects. Mostly due to the strange additional symptoms with covid that don't appear to happen with Sars/mers. Loss of taste and smell is one of them. Infected and inflamed extremeties is another. It seems as though covid is more adept at infecting other types of human tissue rather than just respiratory. Which on a micro level might be a rather small difference but could have very serious long term differences in outcomes.

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.
- jjcon 6y ago
  > Discussing dangers of possible long-term health effects of contracting COVID-19? Fearmongering. The problem is throwing out unscientific speculation with zero evidence - that is fearmongering. HN is held to a higher standard.

nradov 6y ago

SARS-CoV-2 isn't very novel. The long-term clinical effects appear to be fairly similar to SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV. There are thousands of survivors from those earlier epidemics whom we can study. Obviously we can't just sit around for years and wait for evidence to appear. We'll have to move forward based on incomplete information, knowing that some of it will later prove to have been wrong.

acituan 6y ago
> SARS-CoV-2 isn't very novel. The long-term clinical effects appear to be fairly similar to SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV Sure, novel is a sliding scale. But it has been novel enough for our immune systems, and that is sufficient reason to be cautious. Also its epidemiologic profile was sufficiently different that our knowledge with sars or mers didn’t help us being in a pandemic right now, which can’t be entirely explained with bad policy decisions.
jjeaff 6y ago
How can we say the long term effects of sars/mers appear to be similar to covid when we have zero data on long term effects of covid? I'm no expert. But I am reticent to think that sars/mers and covid are going to have similar long term effects. Mostly due to the strange additional symptoms with covid that don't appear to happen with Sars/mers. Loss of taste and smell is one of them. Infected and inflamed extremeties is another. It seems as though covid is more adept at infecting other types of human tissue rather than just respiratory. Which on a micro level might be a rather small difference but could have very serious long term differences in outcomes.