I think that's a better metric because it puts it in perspective. If you're 30, a 50% increased risk of death is still very very low. But if you're 80+ that risk is pretty substantial.
Note: this is basically extrapolating the New York and New Jersey numbers, which is assumed had the highest COVID19 penetration in the U.S.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. We don’t have enough data to support that claim, probably won’t for years.
Very few peer reviewed treatments have been socialized. Most evidence is that things “show promise” then end up being less effective after actual analysis.
Peer reviewed treatments, sure. But case studies have been widely shared between medical teams. Things like tummy time, steroids for people on ventilators, anti clotting agents, ventilator strategies and remdesivir are all things we've learned since the outbreak started. These aren't ground breaking cure all treatments, but they definitely moved the needle.
One of the most notable things about Covid is that the IFR seems to be closely proportional to baseline all-cause mortality for most groups.
It's obviously not exact, so it's hard to tell whether this is just a case of coincidence and squinting to find a pattern in the noise. But still, I think there's potentially something deep going on that may tell us more about what mediates Covid lethality.
> I think that's a better metric because it puts it in perspective.
It’s interesting that you see it this way. Personally if someone said to me I have a 50% increased chance of death, I’d really struggle to make a proper risk assessment. Maybe it’s just hard to talk probabilities about ones own mortality
Based on New York isn't that off by 5 or so? Around 1% die each year, in New York State around .17% of coronavirus (confirmed/probable), and more likely ~.2% from coronavirus (excess deaths). To double normal deaths, reaching 2% dead for the year, it would need to be 5X higher excess deaths. There is still a quarter of the year left, but it doesn't seem enough.
I think it would be closer to doubling everyone's mortality risk only in the zero mitigation scenario.
Based on these data, can we now calculate the expected impact on life-years instead of just "deaths?" An 80 year old dying isn't a tragedy in the way a 30 year old is.
If you want to go down that path, you must also include long-term impairment of life function
E.g., a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox is out for the season due to a heart condition brought on by COVID-19, prognosis unknown. [1]
You don't get any healthier than a professional athlete for a top major sport, and although this guy likely will not die, he is off the field in in danger of losing his career.
And yes, I know several 80, and even 100-year olds that are a lot more sharp and physically active than many 40 year olds. Age is not the mere number you think it is. Genetics and decades of healthy/unhealthy choices create massive variations in healthspan and lifespan - you simply do not know that your "typical" 80-year-old has a near expiration date - (s)he could have decades of healthy, happy life ahead.
You were on a roll in the first half, but you didn't stick the landing.
Sure, plenty of hale and healthy 80 year olds. Also, a majority of 80 year old Covid patients survive. Are they likely to be the same cohort? That's what I would bet on.
QALY stands for Quality-Adjusted Life Years. That includes long-term impairment of life function, in the definition.
And you're spot-on, we don't even have preliminary data on that, yet. If it were a really big and obvious effect, like 20% of all patients suffer a 20% downward adjustment that will never get better, I wager we'd have a preprint to that effect.
It's a terrible thing for those affected, of course it is. But how many? How badly? We just don't know yet.
Indeed, we have no strong data on that, because it literally can not yet exist, and will not for many years
But the initial reports of both serious effects to blood, circulatory, lung, organ, and peripheral & central nervous system are real cause for concern, as are teh sufficient numbers of extended illnesses, enough that it already has a name - "Covid long haulers", and support forums.
Yes, but at the risk of repeating myself, if this crossed a certain murky threshold, we would have more than reports and support fora, we would have preprints and preliminary numbers.
From my own small sample of people I personally know, I can tell you about twenty reports of complete recovery, and one long hauler.
Is that typical? We agree that it will be years before we know with any certainty. I'm pointing out the dog that isn't barking.
Also worth pointing out: a family friend in her 80s never recovered from a bout of pneumonia, suffering a reduced quality of life until her death about a year later. Severe illnesses do this sometimes, that's known. Is Covid more likely to? Not known.
I understand. Have you been actively searching for preprints of long-term conditions (I haven't, only noticing what I come across in definitely non-exhaustive just-trying-to-keep-up-with-it-all reading)? If so, do you have any good recommendations for where to look?
That's fascinating. Because poverty lowers life span by ~ 10 years [1]. And covid economics are expected to push over 100 million children into poverty [2]. So that's a billion life years lost from economic costs versus the 10 million life years lost if 1 million die from covid.
I'd say we'd need at least two years until that. The first to make a life table [0] and determine increased risk for each age in years. Then we could assume each person's added risk at successive ages is similar to people of that age this year.
The second (and further) years would support or disprove that assumption. My guess is disprove.
We still don't have enough data to get a good estimate of that, because we don't have good data on the number of people infected by the virus. Even the best surveillance testing regimes are known to miss a bunch of cases.
If we're supporting millions of COVID survivors, it might be a further argument to limit air pollution - banning coal and oil burning in power and transport, for example.
I had Asthma as a kid but COVID has triggered it back on again. I'm now a lot more sensitive to pollution.
There are so many correlation-and-causation problems with that study that it's very difficult to take it seriously. And from common knowledge about the world, if this effect does exist, it's not a very large one for indirect relations. [1] COVID, on the other hand, is contagious as all hell.
The other thing about COVID, though, is that I don't even need to know the person who I can catch it from.
[1] If your obese parents raised you, it's quite likely you'll be obese. If you and your extended family fell into poverty, and your cousins became obese, it's quite likely you will become obese, too. But subtract direct role models, direct sources of your habits, changes to your economic status, and the fact that as time goes on, you get older (And older people tend to be more obese), geographic effects (The rust belt started becoming depressed and poor over the years, which lead to obesity)... And what sort of effect is left?
I used to work out regularly, eat a low-carb diet, and made an effort to walk to work whenever I had time. Now I'm still doing all that stuff, but I also have to do it while skipping the walks to work (which is shut), work out without a bunch of gym equipment (gym is closed for indoor classes, equipment is sold out in most stores), and all of the added stress and boredom of lockdown made me gain a bunch of weight, which I'm now trying to drop. And in addition to the potential health effects of being overweight, I also have the possibility of getting COVID to add to it all.
I don't think the "obesity is really worse than COVID" thought process takes into account how much worse the pair are than either one individually.
For me, this whole thing has really highlighted how huge a role stress plays in my weight management problems. I made the mistake of sheltering with someone who turned out to be an emotional terrorist at the same time my gym was closed down for several months and I still had to go to work because apparently my company interpreted itself to be "essential" and so was my presence. I put on a lot of weight in those months. How much, I can't say, since I have wisely avoided the scale since early on so I wouldn't end up offing myself over it.
Since then I have kicked out the emotional terrorist, taken up several disciplines of biking, and my gym opened back up. I am still fighting my weight, but I can see how directly my overeating is tied to stressful events at work, how it gets worse when I can't get out riding often, etc.
It has inspired me to accelerate my plans to quit IT as a career since that's my current major source of stress.
Keep on the good fight of fighting your weight, star wars kid. May the Force be with you!
Careers are interesting... who wouldn't be stressed with a car in your rear!
Stress is addictive, it's a choice to be stressed, it's a choice to take things seriously, it's a choice to deny, deflect, and downright lie to yourself and make up stories and make excuses, it's a choice to grab that piece of food, it's a choice to not put it down, and it's a choice to swallow it after "properly" (uh oh here comes the stories) masticating every bite into a fine mash by chewing 30 times or more, 30 choices to spit out that food.
Take it easy on yourself, it takes time and focus to sustain enough attention to mold the body into a vision you have for yourself... If you constantly spike that vision with mind poisons known as "problems" or "management", how much awareness do you actually have left to put that doughnut down, let alone be in a state of mind to chose something your much rather be doing than dreaming about tossing Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen and other gross elements in the form of a doughnut into your divine cosmic cauldron?
Your overeating is tied to your choice, simple as that, you are addicted to stress, and you choose the medicine of overeating to mitiGATE and relieve that stress... there's other methods, but with all of them you will still lean into the addictive nature that is systemic to the OG stress addiction. Fighting this, fighting anything is almost always a fire vs fire fight, you want something to remain, resolve?
Give it space... that means allowing it to be, allowing yourself to just be, that is just being yourself, not being the stories you make up about yourself that serve to distract and put you in a mood of self-sabotage and self-annihilatory behavior to persist in the upkeep and to be quite frank, the hard work of doing all of that heavy psychological work and mind games to maintain--part of the way you can motivate persistence is to dualistically and ritualistically swap victimization/villinilization, or in other words you keep moving the goal posts away from you because you really enjoy all of it--You realize that all of it the good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly... it's all love, and it is precisely this resistance to this love that perpetuates it, the stress, the manifestation of everything you want and do not want.
Dream the dream you want to be in, not the dream you don't, or better yet leave it and give it space as you go explore the unknown.
This comment got unwieldy, but I wanted to relate a diet experience to OP after facing a similar health/weight-gain situation. Most people can just ignore me
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This is totally tangential, but I've been forced onto a low-/no-fat diet (fewer than 30g a day) due to a health problem of indeterminate cause (thankfully, COVID was ruled out completely)—of which acute necrotizing pancreatitis was one of the outcomes— which puts me in the place where I'm eating a lot more carbs to make up my caloric requirements than I was when I was in the gym every day.
I'm losing stubborn fat I couldn't drop previously like crazy. That said, I loved cooking and food is not exciting now. But I didn't realize how many calories I may have been missing in my counts due to added olive oil here and there, etc etc.
I know keto/low-carb diets are all the craze right now, and the faddy low-fat diets of the 80s/90s had glaring problems, but it might be worth reassessment given the current circumstances.
My current situation, to sum it up is:
• working from home, at a desk 4-5 days a week
• go for a walk most days, but not every day (I should be doing more, but bouts of pain have interrupted forming better habits)
• no weights — I'd like to reintroduce this to prevent further muscle loss after years of so much hard work, but again—been warned against this for now
• under 30g of fat in my diet a day — doesn't matter if it's "good" or "bad" fat. Just total volume. This means I have to select food options I used to think were awful. If I want cheese I have to pick the cheaper, non-fat options like store-brand plastic-like slices. A lot of chicken and turkey cold cuts. Low-fat bread and bagels (I used to avoid bagels like the plague)—nothing with seeds or nuts. Hardly any oils. No butter, no margarine, no nut butters or spreads. I can have small amounts of low-fat cream cheese.
I previously lost a great deal of weight suddenly due to the inability to eat properly for two weeks, and being taken off solid foods for several days entirely.
In June 2020 I was up to 225 from 198lbs. From mid-June to early July I went from 225 to around 205 (I suspect mostly muscle loss since I was still flabby). Since returning to solid food and the new, unwanted diet I have gone from that 205 down to 186 today. Some of that loss may be due to other health factors as the rate is probably a bit high for healthy, but a large part is due to a much more calorie-restricted diet. It's actually a lot harder to read my caloric requirements without those fats and things I actually want to eat...
This is a prime case of YMMV, and my diet is a bit extreme, but I was in exactly the same case as you prior to the emergence of my health problem and am on a diet I would never have considered otherwise. Also—my heart has been in great shape so I don't know how this would hurt someone with heart issues—I probably get a lot of salt, but my needs for electrolytes recently probably also buffer that a bit.
The previous century was very hard on ,mostly(??), mens respiratory systems. Asbestos, silica etc. were inhaled by many. I don't find it surprising that 60+ men are more susceptible.
Both of these categories have been known since early on. There have been plenty of stories and initiatives focused on age (and BAME and comorbidities like obesity).
Maleness as a risk factor was being reported in Chinese statistics before Covid was prevalent in the rest of the world.
As was the weird underrepresentation of smokers among the infected. Which persisted through at least New York, there were several papers about it, but I haven't seen anything on the subject since.
The article proves itself a little bit pointless by closing with this without any elaboration:
> Although fatality estimates are important for understanding the risk of viral spread to people in different age groups, they don’t tell the full story of the toll COVID-19 takes, says Kilpatrick. “There is a fascination with death, but COVID-19 appears to cause a substantial amount of long-term illness,” he adds.
I've been very surprised by how little attention the media gives to the damage that covid does to people, but here's a few articles:
It makes me wonder what's going to happen in a few years from now in the countries that haven't controlled covid well. Will there be a huge demand for new types of medical treatments to help covid survivors?
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.
>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.
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".
> 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'.
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?
It is not politicizing to point out that these are different viruses that cause different diseases.
Quite a lot of people do not understand the extent of the differences, in part because of repeated comparisons to the flu from earlier in the pandemic--comparisons which we now know were based on incomplete early impressions of the new disease.
Yes there is significant overlap in symptoms--hence the early comparisons. There are also significant differences.
Are these differences enough to produce complications worse than the flu? There's not enough evidence yet to know. I'm not saying "we're sure COVID-19 will have worse complications than the flu." I'm saying we don't know either way, so it's irresponsible to cite flu studies to imply we're sure there won't be worse complications than the flu.
Plus, when you bring up any kind of comparison with the flu, no matter how nuanced you try to be, the general public just ignores all the nuance. Using the word "flu" anywhere near a COVID-19 discussion reinforces the "See, it's just the flu, bro" mentality that convinced vast swaths of people to downplay the disease.
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.
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.
No, I'm not a developer, and no, the CDC is not the organization that I'm alluding to, nor am I poking at the need for any sort of model. The need is for our nation's resources - at every level - to be organized and deployed effectively against this problem using the information available at any given moment. We have failed at this at nearly every level, at nearly every moment.
A good example is my mother who is a teacher. School started this week, and they've been changing their local guidelines/procedures until, well, they continue to change every day still. It should be no surprise, because these are a bunch of county-level educational administrators trying to figure out how to respond to a once-in-a-century epidemiological/social/economic event with effectively zero guidance. It's improv but with people's lives at stake.
Why hasn't the federal government, with the immense resources and power that we entrust to it, stepped up and provided clear guidelines for opening schools and the funding necessary to implement those guidelines? If the answer is that it cannot be safe to open schools, then why have they not stepped up to provide clear guidelines for moving classes online and the funding necessary to implement those guidelines?
This is well beyond the point of being an enormous national security threat. Our government has both legal and moral authority to organize our society. This doesn't mean martial law or nationalization - simply publishing good, clear guidelines for every type of establishment and making available the funding necessary to implement those guidelines. Those guidelines ought to include clear risk assessments that these establishments and their patrons can evaluate for themselves to gauge their level of risk acceptance for re-opening, re-closing, patronizing, or choosing to stay away from.
Instead we have an entire executive branch hellbent on retaining its power, regardless of how sick, destitute, and morally broken its kingdom winds up becoming in the process. It's equal parts pathetic and despicable. Vote.
I'm not sure of Human societies operating 'just fine' with the risk of flu. We seem to operate just fine NOW because we make vaccines for the flu every year, and we have several years of experience in terms of Herd Immunity and Medical assistance.
We also do not have medical personnel dying in hundreds from flu every year as they catch it in line of service.
And the baseline of flu u refer to DID NOT HELP much with predicting or managing clots in almost every major organ when it comes to COVID.
Sure, we have blood thinners etc. But when u hear from frontline workers in hospitals, the situation with clots is pretty dire.
And this is a much bigger deal and the overlap with flu is very little, even in patients tht may seem to have recovered frm Covid.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/health/coronavirus-stroke...
Influenza vaccines only started to become available in the 1940s. Are you claiming that human society didn't operate before that?
Influenza also increases the risk of blood clots and ischemia. So SARS-CoV-2 is nothing new in that regard, although the effects appear to be more severe.
I'm claiming the high death toll u seem to think of when talking of Flu fatalities ain't that high.
And I provided some evidence for it.
I'm hoping people will not underestimate how serious Covid19 is by drawing parallels to THE NUMBER of yearly Flu fatalities, coz the number of flu fatalities are much less compared to what gets reported every year.
Thts what the SciAm link I provided talks about.
Societies operated WITH a lot of Caution and Precautions in place before the vaccines.
They still operate with caution for flu DESPITE vaccines as they do not provide complete immunity.
Look at how people celebrate elimination of Wild polio in Africa! It came AFTER several decades of human suffering and wide ranging precautions.
And the level of caution changes depending on the local medical infrastructure, dynamics of the spread, demographics, and the specific knowledge we have about the disease in question.
I also claimed that WE HAVE SOME IDEA on how to deal with blood clotting wen it comes to Flu. Your link itself shows that out right "Emperic Anticoagulation decreases VTE"
But we are not there yet, when it comes to Covid19.
We have people dying from strokes AFTER they were thought to have recovered from Covid. And these aren't necessarily 'edge cases' that arise from the tail end of large numbers of patients during a pandemic.
These are most likely due to absence of knowledge,data and insights into managing a novel disease. Just read through the NYTimes article. It's very detailed and specific about how we are falling short NOW in dealing with strokes and clots.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
I had something with symptoms similar to corona in March but there was not enough tests to get me prioritised (40 year old healthy male, 22.5 BMI).
It wasn't too bad but it lasted three weeks and I still have periodic shortness of breath and fatigue and my doctor has no clue what to do. I hope it's not permanent.
This is one of the reasons I've been so careful and paranoid. It's a new disease and yes, some people recover with no issues but we just don't know what's going to happen.
I'm 44 now and one thing I've learned the hard way is that injuries DO NOT reverse themselves. You recover 90% but the remaining 10% is just lost forever.
Similar situation. I'm in my early 30s. I had symptoms for 3-4 weeks (coughing, mild fever, covid toes) starting in early April, but I didn't qualify for testing because I hadn't had any contact with anyone that was known to be infected. Since then I've had many random bouts of fatigue and I've had random severe digestive issues as well that have yet to be explained. I have had several tests done and have monitored my eating and resting habits, but nothing has been able to explain either of them.
I was able to get a nasal swab test done in June when community wide testing finally opened up in my area, but it came out negative. The whole thing has been so frustrating to deal with because I don't know and may not ever know if this was for sure Covid related.
You probably had covid so see if you can get a antibody test but don't rule it out if you test negative. You can weigh the likelihood of this based on prevalence in your local community and if you know anyone who had covid and how your social distancing was in March.
Also get a pulse oximeter and ask your doctor for one of those lung function devices aka an incentive spirometer
(you breathe into them). Get a normal pulse ox when you feel ok and when you have shortness of breath, take your pulse ox again.
There is also evidence of chronic fatigue syndrome caused by covid.
Not saying this is true in your case, but hypochondria is much more prevalent than we give due. Myself included. Anxiety plays tricks on the brain causing people to actually experience all kinds of symptoms that would otherwise not exist. And we are drowning in anxiety these days.
Are these long term covid cases showing objective complaints? Are the lungs still damaged when imaged? Or are we relying on subjective complaints? I know there have been a few documented cases of myocarditis which is clearly objective in nature, but that’s all I have seen.
But I can feel a distinct difference and the shortness of breath always comes with the fatigue. It's too early to have any proper long term studies, but I think SARS gave lung damage to quite a few of the patients that lasted a long time [1].
One of my mutuals on Twitter is a highly active young woman, who does things like spend time in Thailand to train Muay Thai. She's been doing what she can to recover, but it's been slow going.
Covid long-haulers are a real thing, that much I'm convinced of. How prevalent it is, is an open question.
Not Covid related, but something happened to me around 2012. Pre-2012,I was a part time fitness instructor and runner with slight exercised induced asthma but it was controllable.
I went into the hospital for a week for severe asthma, has coughing spells for a year and my lungs haven’t been right since. It’s not as bad and I can do some level of resistance exercise, but I never fully recovered.
I’m paranoid about getting Covid. I know how terrifying it is not to be able to breathe and how irritating it is not to be able to do slight strenuous day to day activities without giving out of breathe for a couple of years afterward.
I can relate to this story. Went through something similar, though with different symptoms. Just never recovered completely after an illness, even after years. No definite or discernable cause. There seem to be lots of triggers for latent autoimmune issues and other inflammatory problems. I think that there are also lots of things like novel species-hopping viruses that randomly get a few people but never become contagious enough to turn into pandemics. It's not like doctors have or use tests to identify most viruses, unless it's the flu or a pandemic. The one silver lining to Covid is that perhaps more research will go into these "long haul" illnesses that result from viral infections or other traumas.
If you're in the USA, Red Cross is giving free coronavirus antibody tests when you go donate blood so they can get more convalescent plasma donors. I was very mildly ill a couple weeks back (wasn't worth getting tested at the time with 6-10 days turnaround) so I've scheduled my appointment to donate blood this Tuesday. Supposedly blood antibody levels drop to undetectable levels a couple of months after infection though (note: we still have T cells for long term immunity) so this might not be useful for you.
At least it'll give you some info about whether you're likely to make it when a really bad pandemic comes along. I thought I was being fairly careful - extremely diligent with masks, surgical-prep-style handwashing, disinfecting my phone, working entirely from home, leaving my apartment about once every two days for groceries or to go to a climbing gym (limited pre-registration required, masks mandatory, socially distanced, hand sanitizer everywhere, obviously this one was still a bit of a risk). So I guess we'll see whether or not my precautions were sufficient.
Well, Red Cross sells the blood to hospitals to recoup costs (not for profit) and from there it enters the regular for-profit American healthcare system. So I guess they do, yes.
This is the most grim thing I've read in a while. Get your free test, the price is only a pound of blood and an hour of your time.
In Seattle, at least, you can just go get a free test in a drive thru with almost 0 hassle and no cost. This is the way it should be -- as accessible as possible and free. Otherwise you'll have infected folks skipping testing.
That's a PCR test, for active infection. That's not the same thing as the parent comment is talking about.
Antibody is a blood test for (potentially) detecting past infection. Its public health benefits are lower and is usually not offered in a drive-through format. But it is available free with prescription, besides being included in blood donations.
The study this references turned out to be based on bogus data and bad statistics. The original authors since amended their data and don't back down from their conclusions, but they seem a bit unjustified (IMO, and the opinion of their critics).
Here's the tweetstorm (sorry) from the professor that initially called this out [1], the acknowledgement of the errors [2], and the tweetstorm (again, sorry) from that professor again pointing out that the corrected data shows "Covid survivors DO have thingies in their T1. But it is JUST AS COMMON in people with similar risk factors who have NOT had Covid. In other words, yes there are those funny thingies in the scan, but it is NOTHING TO DO WITH HAVING HAD COVID. It is because of the background risk factors" [3].
Here's a news article summing this all up nicely, if you prefer [4].
In other words, the following paragraph from Forbes is fake news:
> The researchers, who performed MRI scan of their hearts an average of 2 months after they first were diagnosed with Covid-19, uncovered some concerning findings: 78% of patients had ongoing heart abnormalities and 60 percent had myocarditis, inflammation of the heart muscle. Even more concerning was that the extent of myocarditis was not related to the severity of the initial illness or overall course of the illness.
This is so important. I'm so sick of people on either "side" faking data to prove their presuppositions on this.
>I’m so sick of people on either “side” faking data to prove their presuppositions on this.
I don’t think this research is carried out with ulterior motives. Scientists make mistakes, and are prone to biases whenever they have a hypothesis. The progression of repeated studies is the final arbiter of truth. Saying that long-term heart abnormalities would be faked to push an agenda is suggesting the existence of a conspiracy. Beyond the usual “publish or perish” drive, nobody stands to benefit from reporting results either way.
Saying that Forbes has no motive to sensationalize things is a different matter entirely, though.
Plus, what am I to make of a researcher that doesn’t correct for the most basic confounding factors in their data. Are you seriously suggesting they never thought of that?
I'm a bit confused, I'm hearing lots about long term consequences, but then I hear that most cases are asymptomatic. Can someone who is asymptomatic have really have long term consequences? If so, wouldn't they have symptoms?
"asymptomatic" in the Covid context means "no external symptoms".
One of the quirks of this disease is that it does damage to the lungs and reduces oxygenation without any obvious external signs (see the reports from doctors of people texting when their blood oxygen levels were otherwise extraordinarily low) and there are now reports of people having lung damage when they otherwise did not present as sick.
So yes, it appears that it is possible to have long term damage even if it didn't seem that you were sick at first.
IIRC, this is because the aveoli in the lungs can still expel the CO2, but have a tough time with oxygen intake. It is CO2 build up that makes you feel distressed, not necessarily the lack of oxygen.
Yes, but it is similat to the long term side effects from sars-cov-1, is in alignment with the pathology of moderate and severe cases, is in alignmnent with the type multi-organ damage observed... It might be hard to specifically tell for one person, but it seems very likely to me, speaking as a layman (and I believe there are academic papers that support it).
Any serious infection causes long-lasting damage. Even with bog-standard viral pneumonia, many people take 3-6 months to fully recover, and some people never feel as healthy as they did before. It's good to acknowledge that the harm of the disease goes beyond just people who die to it, but the media doesn't pay a huge amount of attention because it's not covid-specific.
All the articles I’ve read on this use anecdotal evidence. I haven’t seen much in any peer reviewed sense. From a scientific sense, what we’re looking for is something like “Covid causes a 50% increase in the occurrence of asthma.” It can be a rough estimate. In fact, given the omission across the scientific world and given the vast amounts of data, my estimate is there are no or mild after effects of covid.
25-50% of people in certain areas have gotten covid. A comparison to baseline is required. Having covid one day and developing seizures the next does not determine causation, as your prior is baseline.
There are no gold-standard longitudinal studies on the impact of COVID because it's only been around for a year or so. There is a substantial amount of preliminary research on so-called "long haulers" and on indicators left behind in asymptomatic patients such as heart and lung damage.
I'm not sure what omissions you're talking about, or where you're looking for this stuff and not finding it. I recommend listening to the podcast This Week In Virology which is run by infectious disease experts (including some dual PhD MDs) and covers the bleeding edge of the research. A lot of people are out there doing their best to gather and synthesize the limited data we have right now.
So, the IFR was estimated back with the princess cruise to something like 0.5-0.8%. That’s pretty damn accurate for an article out in April?
If there were serious effects of Covid we’d have heard about it with multiple articles from the science community. All there is now is conjecture, opinion and anecdotes.
Fatality is a binary measure for which early numbers are easy to get. You catch the illness and you either survive or don't, with some fatalities at a delay. (Diamond Princess did have some people that took months to perish afterwards) Other effects require long periods of observation, and more granular measures of degree of impact. That research is ongoing now, and you seem to be deliberately wanting to misunderstand the nature of the problem.
as someone who fits the risk-group and wasn't able to attend funerals of a close childhood friend, ... I have a job-interview next week and been pondering how will I answer the question "where do you see yourself in 5 years" ... and should they really be _this_ insensitive to ask then I'll answer "on a respirator, probably" ...
I'm equally worried about the long term mental health issues people will suffer due to loss of jobs, and the domino effects that come from it (divorce, default on their debts, etc). Suicide rates will go through the roof. I think the secondary effects will in size be a lot larger than the reported number of people who have died + those who suffer from long term health-damage. Then there are those who missed cancer treatments, or who don't want to risk going in for chemo because they're equally worried about infecting themselves by leaving the house.
People talk about it, they just get effectively censored on consensus based websites like this because even the data-driven crowd is full of people that will cry “fearmongering!!”
Specifically because the data doesn’t exist yet so they have a coping mechanism shunning all discussion of possibilities
Not sure if it’s the circles I move in, but it seems that the people questioning whether “the cure is worse than the disease” are the ones who are being silenced.
The media coverage and social media narrative is very doom laden and fearful, so there are no shortage of places to discuss that.
Whilst the people highlighting the 99.9% survival rate unless you are very old or sick and questioning whether nuking your economy is worth it have a very socially unacceptable view.
It’s been a strange and isolating experience for me to hold a minority socially unacceptable view throughout this whole thing. I feel for minority groups much more nowadays having experienced it.
As someone who predominantly self-identifies as progressive, on the rare occasion that I've found myself in a minority position I have been amazed at how vicious the condemnation and ridicule is. It has helped temper my own reaction when talking with other people who don't share my ideals.
This was news in Feb or so, because not every disease has this profile. The 1919 flu, for instance, was much more deadly in the young (whose stronger immune systems could over-react more dramatically).
Thankfully, "more likely" does not mean "guaranteed". In the article if you're male and over 80 you still only had a 12% shot of passing due to it. Which means you actually probably won't die of it, but I wouldn't play a game with those odds, not to mention all the secondary effects - at least Russian Roulette has a fairly binary outcome.
https://austingwalters.com/u-s-covid19-less-tests-more-death...
I think that's a better metric because it puts it in perspective. If you're 30, a 50% increased risk of death is still very very low. But if you're 80+ that risk is pretty substantial.
Note: this is basically extrapolating the New York and New Jersey numbers, which is assumed had the highest COVID19 penetration in the U.S.