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Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

Aside from Deaths, Covid can cause permanent organ damage.

People have talked about the uncertainty involved in this virus as reason to not shutdown economies. But this kind of argument misses the danger involved in exposing many people to a fairly intense disease where it's not just the death rate that will harm the people and indirectly harm society.

Headline: "Three-quarters of adults with COVID-19 have heart damage after recovery". See: https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2020/07/27/Three-quarters-of...

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> Aside from Deaths, Covid can cause permanent organ damage.

So can other diseases we live with, we're just not that exposed to them through the press. Certain diseases can cause heart failure; bacterial pneumonia, even if treated, can have effects that last for months if not a year or more; some viral infections can cause all sorts of bad side effects, including cytokine storms.

This including the recent interview with someone who had a lot of their fingers amputated due to cardiovascular complications from infections: this also happens to quite a few who have type 2 diabetes (due to neuropathy).

A lot of treatable diseases can have long lasting, sometimes even crippling effects in life. Many people just don't know because it's not told around.

This virus is no different from them.

Right.

This one, though, seems to be much more adept at spreading through communities than your run-of-the-mill bacterial pneumonia or type two diabetes.

That must factor into your equivalence test, no?

Yes, but the easiness it spreads does not equate to the same frequency of long-lasting damage.

In fact, given so many cases are missed (bloodstream antibody tests don't catch those with T-cell responses, and mucosal antibodies aren't detected by those tests, either) I would not be surprised if those with complications are a minority (of extreme clinical importance, mind you) of the total cases.

My point is not much as to downplay the seriousness of these side effects, but rather that we have become more aware of them due to "information overload", because many other diseases can have these complications. IOW, this is not a magic disease (sometimes the press almost paints SARS-CoV-2 as something out of this world...).

Hopefully those with complications will turn out to be a minority but we are talking a disease whose parameters haven't been fully discovered.

The "magic" of COVID is that combines the seriousness of many serious diseases, like more conventional viral pneumonia, that do long lasting damage with an infectiousness greater than the flu - so even minority with organ damage can be many, many people. It's not the worst disease in the world but the point one should be concerned with the number of cases rather than just fatalities.

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