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Comment by zby | Hacker News Reader

OK - but what are the stats here? Worldometer shows that there are more than 8 million Covid survivors, how many of them have the prolonged symptoms? 8 million is really many people - so I would not be surprised if there are a few strange stories (https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood as always).

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The post has a figure with rather scary stats. Although I suppose it comes from a followup of severe cases, not from a random sample of cases? Otherwise it's really, really scary.

Ah - yeah - I though the graph was about patients who report persistent symptoms not the whole population. If indeed 60% of all Covid patients have fatigue and 40% breathlessness after more than 60 days - than it is scary indeed. But we don't know how the 143 patients where found - are they random people with Covid or are they only hospitalized Covid patients? With 8 millions we should really have better stats.

Quote from another story (by Der Spiegel):

>Long-term* symptoms reported by COVID-19 patients

>47% general fatigue

>24% prolonged respiratory problems

>*longer than 30 days; analysis of a study of COVID-19 symptoms from King's College London;

>8,065 people who tested positive, of whom 857 had long-term symptoms

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/covid-19-many-peo...

OK - that would be compatible with the theory that the original article were about those who had long-term symptoms. Journalism is a mess. But the 10% is still scary.

The good news is that we have no idea at this point how long-term long-term will end up being; maybe they go away in six months or a year. Of course, that's also the bad news -- maybe they don't.

From the article:

We know from studies of patients who had Sars - one of the family of coronaviruses - back in the 2003 epidemic, that almost half of survivors went on to have chronic fatigue or other long-lasting symptoms. So it should not be a surprise that this cunning descendant, Sars-CoV2, should have a similar inheritance.

That doesn't sound good.

Thats why I think people have been over focused on the death metric, for evey person that dies there are going to be multiples of people with lifelong or multi year complications. The us is going to have millions in the long term compliation catergory.

The article’s first graphic is from a randomized 60-day follow-up. It shows fatigue and breathlessness for 50% and chest pain at around 20%.

This is among diagnosed patients, not those self-selecting to seek to seek treatment for their ongoing problems. It’s possible that some bias is introduced by people who are now completely fine being less likely to cooperate. But I doubt that any durch effect would make more than marginal differences.

It also ignores everyone who did not get tested, either because they did not have symptoms, because they just assumed they had it, or who couldn’t get tested (Italy in March was...busy).

That is strange - because the numbers would be compatible with the Der Spiegel stats (from comment above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23888175) if it was only about those who report the persistent symptoms.

Also 10% sounds more plausible - if it was 50% of all diagnosed Covid survivors than for sure this would be reported earlier.

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