3 ms·
Nearly all diseases are worse if you're in bad health to begin with. That doesn't make them "not just diseases".
by ciphol 5y ago
Nearly all diseases are worse if you're in bad health to begin with. That doesn't make them "not just diseases".
- swayvil 5y agoWell if they have no symptoms then they aren't really diseases, right? And there are a thousand species of varmint that inhabit our body without helping or hurting anyway. So yes, massive unhealth can definitely spell the difference there.
- SketchySeaBeast 5y agoI'm not following. For some people a cold can have basically no symptoms and can even spread asymptomatically, and for most people it's just an irritation, but for the especially vulnerable it can kill. Would you argue that the common cold is also not a disease?
- swayvil 5y agoThe key word here is "for some". If nobody gets a symptom then it isn't a disease. If only a very few get a symptom then maybe we call it a disease and maybe we call it something else. A disease requires some minimum proportion of the infected to feel it. Otherwise it's just commensalism or something. Therefore, as the general health shifts, so does what we call our relationship with that varmint.
- SketchySeaBeast 5y agoI'm still confused, because I don't know how that connects to your question "Could covid not actually be just a disease?", because it clearly is as it's affecting people. If we assume that the cold is a disease so is COVID, by the same criteria. Is the cold not just a disease? If so, what is just a disease?
- swayvil 5y agoIt's a pretty simple idea. I'm having doubts about this "confusion".
- SketchySeaBeast 5y agoFair enough. I think you're throwing a weird "disease" distinction and then moralizing angle into COVID which doesn't make any sense. We didn't just hit some sort of health critical mass for illness. COVID is its own beast and it's hurting a ton of people and implying it's people's fault for eating junk is bizarre.
- swayvil 5y agoThe moral trip is all yours.