4 ms·

The risk of death from COVID is pretty negligible for some age groups. The biggest confusion of this whole situation is we've fixated on CFR numbers as a meas

by blagie 6y ago

The risk *of death* from COVID is pretty negligible for some age groups. The biggest confusion of this whole situation is we've fixated on CFR numbers as a measure of risk. Risks of long-term consequences don't seem to be all that low.

tazjin 6y ago
I haven't seen anything that indicates that the risk of long-term consequences is significantly elevated above other viral diseases. There is a condition (which we know too little about, and which - as one of the few good outcomes of the COVID situation - is now actually getting some attention) that can lead to fatigue and other symptoms after fighting off a viral infection, but it's not unique to COVID. A year ago there was a lot of noise about things like heart issues induced by COVID, which turned out to be mostly statistical errors in the papers that made the claims. A lot of people (often people who never actually had a positive test) also claim to suffer from various mental impairments after their COVID infections, and some newspaper ran an article saying that some of these symptoms were alleviated after the people were given anxiety medication. Go figure ...
- DanielleMolloy 6y ago
  Mh, do you really want to play down the possibility of unknown long-term consequences? Check out this: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.23.432474v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.23.432474v1 The Spanish Flu has led to a „sleeping sickness“ epidemic years after it ceased.
  - anoncake 6y ago
    There is nothing to play down. More than a year into the pandemic are there is still no evidence of long-term damage except in rare cases. Evidence of inflammation in monkeys does not qualify, before you ask.
    - ptaipale 6y ago
      CDC reports many kind of long-lasting adverse effects. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/long-term-effects.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/long-term-effects....
      - anoncake 6y ago
        That page is useless, it doesn't mention how frequent the effects are.
  - mapme 6y ago
    There is no evidence of the link between sleeping sickness, EL, and Spanish flu. > Since encephalitis lethargica’s (EL) prevalence in the 1920s, epidemiological and clinical debate has persisted over whether EL was caused by, potentiated by, or merely coincident with the Spanish influenza pandemic. Epidemiologic analyses generally suggest that the disorders were coincidental. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalitis_lethargica https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalitis_lethargica https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2778472/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2778472/
- gdubs 6y ago
  Someone very close to me is a “long hauler” and the quality of life effects have been horrible. A young and healthy person, now dealing with fatigue, blood clotting, and a host of other uncomfortable and troubling issues. Throughout, medical professionals have been struggling to give people like this answers as to what exactly is happening to them — and the common refrain is “we don’t knew enough about it yet, but we’re seeing a lot of this.” I’ll let the eventual studies give the percentages. But my (personal, non professional) take on this is that long-hauler experiences are a LOT more common then people realize, have been fairly ignored while people have fixated on the death count, and have big possible implications for quality of life for younger, otherwise healthy people.
estaseuropano 6y ago
Agree fully, although even the mortality numbers far outweigh the thrombosis incidence! Long covid: > Estimates of the number of people with long COVID vary widely. In July, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that one in five patients 18–34 years of age without chronic medical conditions and with a positive outpatient test had not fully recovered by 2–3 weeks after testing, and a research center in Rome found that 87% of 143 patients reported persistence of at least one symptom 60 days after onset of the disease. According to a preprint published in October that has not yet undergone peer review, 24% of 233 patients still had symptoms at 90 days after infection. Data from a smartphone app, as reported by the COVID Symptom Study, showed that one in ten patients with COVID-19 have symptoms after 3 weeks. Given the scale of the pandemic, if even only a small percentage of the tens of millions of infected people worldwide develop long COVID, a staggeringly large number of people would need long-term follow-up and treatment. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-01177-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-01177-6

The risk *of death* from COVID is pretty negligible for some age groups. The biggest confusion of this whole situation is we've fixated on CFR numbers as a meas

by blagie 6y ago

tazjin 6y ago

I haven't seen anything that indicates that the risk of long-term consequences is significantly elevated above other viral diseases. There is a condition (which we know too little about, and which - as one of the few good outcomes of the COVID situation - is now actually getting some attention) that can lead to fatigue and other symptoms after fighting off a viral infection, but it's not unique to COVID. A year ago there was a lot of noise about things like heart issues induced by COVID, which turned out to be mostly statistical errors in the papers that made the claims. A lot of people (often people who never actually had a positive test) also claim to suffer from various mental impairments after their COVID infections, and some newspaper ran an article saying that some of these symptoms were alleviated after the people were given anxiety medication. Go figure ...

DanielleMolloy 6y ago
Mh, do you really want to play down the possibility of unknown long-term consequences? Check out this: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.23.432474v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.23.432474v1 The Spanish Flu has led to a „sleeping sickness“ epidemic years after it ceased.
- anoncake 6y ago
  There is nothing to play down. More than a year into the pandemic are there is still no evidence of long-term damage except in rare cases. Evidence of inflammation in monkeys does not qualify, before you ask.
  - ptaipale 6y ago
    CDC reports many kind of long-lasting adverse effects. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/long-term-effects.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/long-term-effects....
    - anoncake 6y ago
      That page is useless, it doesn't mention how frequent the effects are.
- mapme 6y ago
  There is no evidence of the link between sleeping sickness, EL, and Spanish flu. > Since encephalitis lethargica’s (EL) prevalence in the 1920s, epidemiological and clinical debate has persisted over whether EL was caused by, potentiated by, or merely coincident with the Spanish influenza pandemic. Epidemiologic analyses generally suggest that the disorders were coincidental. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalitis_lethargica https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalitis_lethargica https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2778472/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2778472/
gdubs 6y ago
Someone very close to me is a “long hauler” and the quality of life effects have been horrible. A young and healthy person, now dealing with fatigue, blood clotting, and a host of other uncomfortable and troubling issues. Throughout, medical professionals have been struggling to give people like this answers as to what exactly is happening to them — and the common refrain is “we don’t knew enough about it yet, but we’re seeing a lot of this.” I’ll let the eventual studies give the percentages. But my (personal, non professional) take on this is that long-hauler experiences are a LOT more common then people realize, have been fairly ignored while people have fixated on the death count, and have big possible implications for quality of life for younger, otherwise healthy people.

estaseuropano 6y ago

Agree fully, although even the mortality numbers far outweigh the thrombosis incidence! Long covid: > Estimates of the number of people with long COVID vary widely. In July, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that one in five patients 18–34 years of age without chronic medical conditions and with a positive outpatient test had not fully recovered by 2–3 weeks after testing, and a research center in Rome found that 87% of 143 patients reported persistence of at least one symptom 60 days after onset of the disease. According to a preprint published in October that has not yet undergone peer review, 24% of 233 patients still had symptoms at 90 days after infection. Data from a smartphone app, as reported by the COVID Symptom Study, showed that one in ten patients with COVID-19 have symptoms after 3 weeks. Given the scale of the pandemic, if even only a small percentage of the tens of millions of infected people worldwide develop long COVID, a staggeringly large number of people would need long-term follow-up and treatment. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-01177-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-01177-6