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Comment by mfer | Hacker News Reader

Strokes, kidney disease, and other problems are happening to people who get this. Looking at death rate alone doesn’t tell of all the consequences

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I read that there was visible lung tissue damage forming the characteristic broken glass pattern on CT scans of 58% of the infected but asymptomatic carriers on the Diamond Princess cruise. That to me adds a sobering footnote to the process of developing herd immunity. Most of us won't die, but do we walk away with long-term impairment of our lungs and possibly other organs?

This was also confirmed by a physician from Innsbruck, Austria that looked after healthy young adults that were divers and got the virus - all of them had only mild symptoms but most lost the fitness to dive anymore and lack lung function.

https://www.sportschau.de/weitere/allgemein/corona-lungen-sc... (I did not found an english link)

they could also need longer to recover,

It's been discussed in the linked article (a translator should work reasonably well). For the physician the look of the lungs in the scans indicate it's non-reversible but only time will tell.

Lung scarring is not reversible yet. If it grow too much, it might turn into pulmonary fibrosis and kill you in ~5 year.

https://www.lung.org/lung-health-diseases/lung-disease-looku...

Other fibrosis can be chirgurgically removed (happened to a semi-pro i know of), but this is not possible for the lungs.

Yep. Lung damage rarely heals, which has life-long consequences. IIRC, a BBC report mentioned a 30% average decrease in lung function in survivors. Heart, liver, kidneys and possibly other organs are also affected.

I'm not equating Covid-19 to the flu, but ground glass opacities are common among people with influenza. They're also not uncommon in older folks with no history of smoking etc. Right now the evidence of long term or permanent damage to lungs is very muddled and often anecdotal.

And how many strokes, kidney disease, and other problems were caused by other respiratory system viruses before COVID-19? We don't know because we've never really looked.

for SARS-Cov (the first one from 2003) there is some data and it's not pretty :/

There is data showing that flu vaccination reduces the chance of heart attack. The effect is about as strong as giving up smoking.

Holy cow. I admit I've been lazy about flu shots but COVID has opened my eyes. That's one more fact that's going to send me to the clinic yearly.

My thoracic diaphragm sits too high on one side due to a issue with the phrenic nerve probably caused by some virus I had some time ago.

So yeah a virus can do more harm than you can see from the outside. It is not just a cough. You don't know what else is going on.

Yep. Heart and lung damage, obviously, also. COVID isn't a mild or trivial infection.

True, but is this information actionable?

The point of flattening the curve is to keep the healthcare system from being overwhelmed, in order to avoid a catastrophic death rate.

With a vaccine still 18-24 months away, we're all going to get infected sooner or later no matter what we do.

Source? It depends on the intervention, but my understanding is that that is not required to be true on the 18mo timeline. I.e. I think the original Imperial College study was calling for for suppression, rather than just avoiding overwhelmed hospitals

I don't think this is a foregone conclusion by any means. Many countries have gotten growth rates low enough that even after 2 years, their whole population won't have gotten it. Some countries might opt to infect everyone (as the US seems to be doing, due largely to chaos and incompetence), but I don't think it's the only option.

A vaccine isn't the be-all-end-all. We can still potentially hold out until there's an effective treatment. Famotidine? Remdesivir? Anything that would reduce the severity of the infection would lead to a better outcome than you're facing currently.

Universal mask wearing could keep us out of lockdown for a long time before a vaccine.

There are a lot of useful interventions that we're figuring out that will help even before we get a vaccine. Lots of antivirals are being studied and those that work will probably be best given in the first few days after symptoms show up, which requires more testing. Figuring out when to give steroids or IL-6 inhibitors after the first week when the virus starts to fade but the danger of cytokine storms gets worse. Figuring out when to flip people onto their stomachs (proning) and how low blood oxygen levels can get before intubation is actually necessary.

If we can keep this thing suppressed for another month summer might provide us with a bit of breathing room to figure out what works and stockpile supplies. But even if not I'd rather get this thing with the medical state of the art a month from now.

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