6 ms·

There's a difference between being exposed to dirt and being exposed to viral diseases, though. Playing outside in the leaves will likely trigger healthy immune

There's a difference between being exposed to dirt and being exposed to viral diseases, though. Playing outside in the leaves will likely trigger healthy immune responses. Contracting COVID-19 may lead to long term health issues.

btilly 6y ago
One of the known things is that babies who get seriously sick somewhere in their first year have a better immune system for life. So yes, failing to be exposed to viral diseases can be bad for you.
- giantg2 6y ago
  It's really a balance though. Some of those viral diseases could have permanent consequences that outweigh the benefit of a stronger immune system. For example, Polio could leave you crippled, or Mumps could leave a boy with sterility. Do you have a link to the data for the claim about it being a serious illness that causes a better immune system? My understanding has been that exposure to a variety of pathogens and minor illnesses would be sufficient.
- croes 6y ago
  Are you sure you aren't falling for survivor bias?
  - btilly 6y ago
    Very sure. The fatality rate is negligible and the boost is significant. See https://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/12/06/daycare.kids/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/12/06/daycare.kids/index.htm... for a random news article reporting on a similar result only with kids getting sick in daycare. Being exposed to diseases early builds immunity later.
- AbrahamParangi 6y ago
  Morbid but this sounds like burn-in (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burn-in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burn-in) All complex systems, us included, have bathtub curves (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve)
  - postalrat 6y ago
    The simplest answer isn't always the correct one. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/384057 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
- notabee 6y ago
  That's not universally true. The immune system is far more complex than that. Two examples: 1. 28 year olds, who were exposed to a prior influenza pandemic during an early age window, disproportionately died during the 1918 pandemic. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-actuarial-journal/article/agedependence-of-the-1918-pandemic/3BCBF4BDFBD8C5F0F4FBFDF34DF42209 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-actuarial-jo... 2. Measles destroys prior immune memory. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03324-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03324-7
jeffreyrogers 6y ago
I think the hypothesis is that they aren't exposed to as many pathogens in general (due to increased sanitation/attention to cleanliness), not that the negative effects will be due to no exposure to covid (which doesn't appear very serious for infants in any case).
- faitswulff 6y ago
  Right, to which I say people should spend time outdoors, digging gardens, hiking, and absolutely continue to mask up near other people.
- TomSwirly 6y ago
  America's obsession with cleanliness dates from the 1950s, so I'm a little baffled as to why it would take 50 years to emerge.
clairity 6y ago
how do you supposed herd immunity develops without low level exposure to viruses and organisms (which is what's in the dirt)? it's quite likely we've prolonged the pandemic by excessively curtailing exposure, which in turn dampens in vivo immune response necessary for natural herd immunity in the population. the 1918 flu, which killed 10-20% of the infected, was worthy of that kind of avoidance response, not this virus that kills much less than 1% (and maims far fewer, contrary to your claim). the tiresome messaging (fear strangers and non-conformists; trust our "science", not theirs) of politicians and sympathetic media played this pandemic for maximum political & economic gain, not minimizing impact. it's disgusting.
- faitswulff 6y ago
  Have you heard of any coronavirus variants coming out of South Korea, China, or New Zealand? No. That’s because they don’t have uncontrolled spread there, which leads to mutations due to the virus’s exposure to heterogenous immunity in the population. So uncontrolled spread doesn’t necessarily shorten the duration of the pandemic. All of which is actually incidental to the point I was making, that the hygiene hypothesis is about exposure to dirt and pathogens that prime your immune system for healthy responses. You can have healthy exposure to dirt without exposure to whole classes of viral diseases. No one’s going to say you have to catch Ebola to solve the hygiene hypothesis, for example.
  - mbg721 6y ago
    I think the idea is that not every virus is Covid or Ebola. If you oversanitize your way out of every common cold, then the more serious diseases hit harder.
  - clairity 6y ago
    mutations happen not as a response to effective defenses as implied by 'heterogenous immunity', but because the replication process is chaotic, introducing a range of defects and accidental benefits. it's a random process as likely to prolong as it is to shorten the duration, so has no persuasive power in your direction. as for your second point, we're exposed to coronaviruses of all sorts already (viruses that have spike proteins)--the relevant class of viral disease here--and that's what's likely to have conferred mild/asymptomatic cases in the majority of the infected.
collyw 6y ago
You talk nonsense.
- dang 6y ago
  Can you please not break the site guidelines like this? We ban accounts that do that. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site to heart, we'd be grateful.
  - collyw 6y ago
    The OP made an unsubstantiated claim with no evidence, why can't I call that out? There are plenty of things you could catch from playing in dirt that could lead to long term health problems.
    - dang 6y ago
      We're trying to avoid the online callout/shaming culture here because it damages the container and destroys the sense of community. Internet forums all too easily turn into a war of all against all, or at least tribe against tribe. That's not compatible with curious conversation, which is the purpose of this site. Fortunately you can make your substantive points without breaking the site guidelines. For example, if you had simply posted your last sentence here, that wouldn't have broken the site guidelines. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=online%20shaming%20by%3Adang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a...
bequanna 6y ago
> Contracting COVID-19 may lead to long term health issues. Uh-huh. And what percentage of people who contract have "long term health issues"? This is just more scaremongering based on self-reporting and anecdotes.
- 9985479945_ 6y ago
  This comment is dangerous and problematic. Your ISP is hopefully monitoring this disinformation
  - curtis3389 6y ago
    Perhaps this comment is dangerous and problematic. The idea that your ISP should be monitoring the semantic content of their customers is disturbing, and you imply that they should do something about content that, what?, they don't like? That they think is illegal? That the government tells them to report on? This is constantly recurring debate on HN. What is the appropriate level of censorship? Who should be censoring? By what criteria is something censorable? I emphatically disagree with the notion that ISPs should do the censoring. They should be neutral carriers of data.
    - spookthesunset 6y ago
      In some peoples mind even questioning or being skeptical of many of the more extreme covid claims and actions is extremely dangerous. According to some “experts” we shouldn’t be allowed to research covid, look at public covid data sets, or even think very hard about it. We should, instead, have almost complete blind faith in a handful of “experts” and just roll over and do whatever they recommend. A ton of our actions in the last 11 months have been accepted based on nothing but appeals to authority. More disturbing is how many real life people I talk with whose arguments for all our restrictions boil down to raw appeals to authority.
      - junipertea 6y ago
        To be fair, some random persons datapoint wrangling can (and usually does) have large number of eyeballs than a life long trained professional with a PhD. While the data should be public and object to scrutiny (ideally by other experts in scientific community), how much insight would untrained people actually get? Apart from alternative facts and "just a flu". Many popular blog posts and opinions were proven to be flat out wrong. If we don't trust the people dedicated to handle that kind of situations, who can we trust? I totally agree there has not been enough transparency (what panic would it cause if the scientists say "We don't know at this point. We think X Y Z, it might change completely in a month) about what we know, but I still would rather trust WHO/CDC (who have been proven incorrect multiple times) than some random forum with no credentials. What politicians do based on these observations is a very different thing.
nradov 6y ago
It's not just dirt. Traditionally people lived in close proximity to a variety of domestic animals. Most viruses originated in animals and then crossed to humans. So our immune systems evolved to cope with that exposure.
- faitswulff 6y ago
  I personally doubt we need zoonotic diseases to calibrate a healthy immune response. I also believe the close association of people and animals was more salient to European populations than elsewhere, and furthermore we didn’t evolve in an environment where you could expose or be exposed to thousands of people on a regular basis. So I’m not sure I’m convinced by an anthropological argument here. And IIRC, the hygiene hypothesis mostly has to do with autoimmune diseases and our immune systems not learning how to differentiate between serious threats and harmless exposure.
  - halfnormalform 6y ago
    The word vaccine literally means “of the cow”
    - faitswulff 6y ago
      That’s because the first vaccine was developed from cow ulcers, not because we need to be near cows.
- krrrh 6y ago
  Mass domestication of animals is also pretty recent on the scale of human existence, on the order of 10-11,000 years ago.
spookthesunset 6y ago
Any respiratory virus can cause long term health issues in some people. Covid is absolutely not unique in that regard.
- faitswulff 6y ago
  Then we should continue to wear masks!
  - spookthesunset 6y ago
    Forever, I assume.
    - faitswulff 6y ago
      Yeah, if you’re sick or near sick people, it’s probably a good idea. It’s standard practice in Asia. Here’s a Taiwanese children’s show from three years ago encouraging mask wearing: https://youtu.be/qXaD871hXnc?t=18s https://youtu.be/qXaD871hXnc?t=18s
      - grillvogel 6y ago
        its standard practice in asia to wear masks if you are sick or worried about getting sick. its not standard practice to wear masks 100% of the time forever.
  - matz1 6y ago
    Sure, as long as its not being forced. Mask sucks, I rather took the chance.
- Uberphallus 6y ago
  I'd love a citation, because I think it's certainly not "any". COVID isn't unique in that regard, nor very common.
mrfusion 6y ago
On the other hand I’ve heard conjecture that exposure to other milder corona family viruses has given people some protection from COVID.
- faitswulff 6y ago
  Right, I mentioned cross-reactivity in another comment. A term to google for if you’re interested.
mrfusion 6y ago
> Contracting COVID-19 may lead to long term health issues. It’s certainly possible but to put that in perspective, here’s a study showing 98% of people (self-reporting) were symptom free after 12 weeks. Is that any worse than other respiratory viruses? https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.19.20214494v1.full#F6 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.19.20214494v...
matz1 6y ago
>Contracting COVID-19 may lead to long term health issues It may but more likely to make you immune from covid-19 and similar virus.

btilly 6y ago

One of the known things is that babies who get seriously sick somewhere in their first year have a better immune system for life. So yes, failing to be exposed to viral diseases can be bad for you.

giantg2 6y ago
It's really a balance though. Some of those viral diseases could have permanent consequences that outweigh the benefit of a stronger immune system. For example, Polio could leave you crippled, or Mumps could leave a boy with sterility. Do you have a link to the data for the claim about it being a serious illness that causes a better immune system? My understanding has been that exposure to a variety of pathogens and minor illnesses would be sufficient.
croes 6y ago
Are you sure you aren't falling for survivor bias?
- btilly 6y ago
  Very sure. The fatality rate is negligible and the boost is significant. See https://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/12/06/daycare.kids/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/12/06/daycare.kids/index.htm... for a random news article reporting on a similar result only with kids getting sick in daycare. Being exposed to diseases early builds immunity later.
AbrahamParangi 6y ago
Morbid but this sounds like burn-in (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burn-in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burn-in) All complex systems, us included, have bathtub curves (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve)
- postalrat 6y ago
  The simplest answer isn't always the correct one. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/384057 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
notabee 6y ago
That's not universally true. The immune system is far more complex than that. Two examples: 1. 28 year olds, who were exposed to a prior influenza pandemic during an early age window, disproportionately died during the 1918 pandemic. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-actuarial-journal/article/agedependence-of-the-1918-pandemic/3BCBF4BDFBD8C5F0F4FBFDF34DF42209 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-actuarial-jo... 2. Measles destroys prior immune memory. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03324-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03324-7

jeffreyrogers 6y ago

I think the hypothesis is that they aren't exposed to as many pathogens in general (due to increased sanitation/attention to cleanliness), not that the negative effects will be due to no exposure to covid (which doesn't appear very serious for infants in any case).

faitswulff 6y ago
Right, to which I say people should spend time outdoors, digging gardens, hiking, and absolutely continue to mask up near other people.
TomSwirly 6y ago
America's obsession with cleanliness dates from the 1950s, so I'm a little baffled as to why it would take 50 years to emerge.

clairity 6y ago

how do you supposed herd immunity develops without low level exposure to viruses and organisms (which is what's in the dirt)? it's quite likely we've prolonged the pandemic by excessively curtailing exposure, which in turn dampens in vivo immune response necessary for natural herd immunity in the population. the 1918 flu, which killed 10-20% of the infected, was worthy of that kind of avoidance response, not this virus that kills much less than 1% (and maims far fewer, contrary to your claim). the tiresome messaging (fear strangers and non-conformists; trust our "science", not theirs) of politicians and sympathetic media played this pandemic for maximum political & economic gain, not minimizing impact. it's disgusting.

faitswulff 6y ago
Have you heard of any coronavirus variants coming out of South Korea, China, or New Zealand? No. That’s because they don’t have uncontrolled spread there, which leads to mutations due to the virus’s exposure to heterogenous immunity in the population. So uncontrolled spread doesn’t necessarily shorten the duration of the pandemic. All of which is actually incidental to the point I was making, that the hygiene hypothesis is about exposure to dirt and pathogens that prime your immune system for healthy responses. You can have healthy exposure to dirt without exposure to whole classes of viral diseases. No one’s going to say you have to catch Ebola to solve the hygiene hypothesis, for example.
- mbg721 6y ago
  I think the idea is that not every virus is Covid or Ebola. If you oversanitize your way out of every common cold, then the more serious diseases hit harder.
- clairity 6y ago
  mutations happen not as a response to effective defenses as implied by 'heterogenous immunity', but because the replication process is chaotic, introducing a range of defects and accidental benefits. it's a random process as likely to prolong as it is to shorten the duration, so has no persuasive power in your direction. as for your second point, we're exposed to coronaviruses of all sorts already (viruses that have spike proteins)--the relevant class of viral disease here--and that's what's likely to have conferred mild/asymptomatic cases in the majority of the infected.

collyw 6y ago

You talk nonsense.

dang 6y ago
Can you please not break the site guidelines like this? We ban accounts that do that. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site to heart, we'd be grateful.
- collyw 6y ago
  The OP made an unsubstantiated claim with no evidence, why can't I call that out? There are plenty of things you could catch from playing in dirt that could lead to long term health problems.
  - dang 6y ago
    We're trying to avoid the online callout/shaming culture here because it damages the container and destroys the sense of community. Internet forums all too easily turn into a war of all against all, or at least tribe against tribe. That's not compatible with curious conversation, which is the purpose of this site. Fortunately you can make your substantive points without breaking the site guidelines. For example, if you had simply posted your last sentence here, that wouldn't have broken the site guidelines. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=online%20shaming%20by%3Adang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a...

bequanna 6y ago

> Contracting COVID-19 may lead to long term health issues. Uh-huh. And what percentage of people who contract have "long term health issues"? This is just more scaremongering based on self-reporting and anecdotes.

9985479945_ 6y ago
This comment is dangerous and problematic. Your ISP is hopefully monitoring this disinformation
- curtis3389 6y ago
  Perhaps this comment is dangerous and problematic. The idea that your ISP should be monitoring the semantic content of their customers is disturbing, and you imply that they should do something about content that, what?, they don't like? That they think is illegal? That the government tells them to report on? This is constantly recurring debate on HN. What is the appropriate level of censorship? Who should be censoring? By what criteria is something censorable? I emphatically disagree with the notion that ISPs should do the censoring. They should be neutral carriers of data.
  - spookthesunset 6y ago
    In some peoples mind even questioning or being skeptical of many of the more extreme covid claims and actions is extremely dangerous. According to some “experts” we shouldn’t be allowed to research covid, look at public covid data sets, or even think very hard about it. We should, instead, have almost complete blind faith in a handful of “experts” and just roll over and do whatever they recommend. A ton of our actions in the last 11 months have been accepted based on nothing but appeals to authority. More disturbing is how many real life people I talk with whose arguments for all our restrictions boil down to raw appeals to authority.
    - junipertea 6y ago
      To be fair, some random persons datapoint wrangling can (and usually does) have large number of eyeballs than a life long trained professional with a PhD. While the data should be public and object to scrutiny (ideally by other experts in scientific community), how much insight would untrained people actually get? Apart from alternative facts and "just a flu". Many popular blog posts and opinions were proven to be flat out wrong. If we don't trust the people dedicated to handle that kind of situations, who can we trust? I totally agree there has not been enough transparency (what panic would it cause if the scientists say "We don't know at this point. We think X Y Z, it might change completely in a month) about what we know, but I still would rather trust WHO/CDC (who have been proven incorrect multiple times) than some random forum with no credentials. What politicians do based on these observations is a very different thing.

nradov 6y ago

It's not just dirt. Traditionally people lived in close proximity to a variety of domestic animals. Most viruses originated in animals and then crossed to humans. So our immune systems evolved to cope with that exposure.

faitswulff 6y ago
I personally doubt we need zoonotic diseases to calibrate a healthy immune response. I also believe the close association of people and animals was more salient to European populations than elsewhere, and furthermore we didn’t evolve in an environment where you could expose or be exposed to thousands of people on a regular basis. So I’m not sure I’m convinced by an anthropological argument here. And IIRC, the hygiene hypothesis mostly has to do with autoimmune diseases and our immune systems not learning how to differentiate between serious threats and harmless exposure.
- halfnormalform 6y ago
  The word vaccine literally means “of the cow”
  - faitswulff 6y ago
    That’s because the first vaccine was developed from cow ulcers, not because we need to be near cows.
krrrh 6y ago
Mass domestication of animals is also pretty recent on the scale of human existence, on the order of 10-11,000 years ago.

spookthesunset 6y ago

Any respiratory virus can cause long term health issues in some people. Covid is absolutely not unique in that regard.

faitswulff 6y ago
Then we should continue to wear masks!
- spookthesunset 6y ago
  Forever, I assume.
  - faitswulff 6y ago
    Yeah, if you’re sick or near sick people, it’s probably a good idea. It’s standard practice in Asia. Here’s a Taiwanese children’s show from three years ago encouraging mask wearing: https://youtu.be/qXaD871hXnc?t=18s https://youtu.be/qXaD871hXnc?t=18s
    - grillvogel 6y ago
      its standard practice in asia to wear masks if you are sick or worried about getting sick. its not standard practice to wear masks 100% of the time forever.
- matz1 6y ago
  Sure, as long as its not being forced. Mask sucks, I rather took the chance.
Uberphallus 6y ago
I'd love a citation, because I think it's certainly not "any". COVID isn't unique in that regard, nor very common.

mrfusion 6y ago

On the other hand I’ve heard conjecture that exposure to other milder corona family viruses has given people some protection from COVID.

faitswulff 6y ago
Right, I mentioned cross-reactivity in another comment. A term to google for if you’re interested.

mrfusion 6y ago

> Contracting COVID-19 may lead to long term health issues. It’s certainly possible but to put that in perspective, here’s a study showing 98% of people (self-reporting) were symptom free after 12 weeks. Is that any worse than other respiratory viruses? https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.19.20214494v1.full#F6 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.19.20214494v...

matz1 6y ago

>Contracting COVID-19 may lead to long term health issues It may but more likely to make you immune from covid-19 and similar virus.