Lots of people that don't get hospitalized are reporting significant lingering symptoms. An effective vaccine appears to be ~months away. Do either of those things matter at all?
Lots of people that don't get hospitalized are reporting significant lingering symptoms. An effective vaccine appears to be ~months away. Do either of those things matter at all?
With SARS-1, there can be lingering fatigue and minor cognitive deficits for a few months post infection, but radiological abnormalities of the lungs, etc clear away within months and are certainly gone at the 1 year mark.
The evidence in SARS-2 is incredibly weak and especially for those who are asymptomatic or paucisymptomatic the chance of lasting harm is essentially zero. Remember that the real damage occurs from the immune response, so if you have no symptoms you cannot have damage. The notion being promulgated of having totally asymptomatic COVID-19 and then randomly showing organ damage (heart, lungs etc) is absurd.
Finally for mathematical purposes we need to consider long-term damage - which again just doesn’t really happen - as not as bad as a death. So we can still work it into the math just fine, whether you want to call it a tenth of a death or half or whatever.
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Oh finally, quick point that vaccines are not without risk either. Go read the data on the Moderna trials. Or the history of rushed-out vaccines that caused paralysis (it was either for swine flu or avian flu, I forget which)
We don't have that information about a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine yet, but you are just hand-waving here, it's likely enough that one of the many vaccine candidates will be less harmful than a course of infection (In general, vaccines are safe enough that we use lots of them…).
You also aren't working long term damage "into the math", you are doing just what I was getting at, dismissing it.
Your position also implicitly relies on the notion that SARS-2 isn't spreading right now, but it is, so by the time we get a vaccine we will have a lot of exposure. Data from NY and Sweden implies somewhere around 20% seroprevalence is when we hit herd immunity.
Since you haven't given me much to work on, and I don't feel like digging into the vaccine side, let me give you some research on long-term damage:
["Follow-up Chest CT findings from discharged patients with severe COVID-19: an 83-day observational study"](https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-27359/v1) - First Submitted May 4, Published online May 12
> Radiological abnormalities in patients of severe COVID-19 could be completely absorbed with no residual lung injury in more than two months’ follow-up.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1440-1843... (SARS-1 pathology)
> Preliminary evidence suggests that these lung function abnormalities will improve over time
and here's just one effect of lockdown: loneliness.
https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/110/15/5797.full.pdf
> mortality was higher among more socially isolated and more lonely participants. However, after adjusting statistically for demographic factors and baseline health, social isolation remained significantly associated with mortality (hazard ratio 1.26, 95% confidence interval, 1.08–1.48 for the top quintile of isolation), but loneliness did not (haz-ard ratio 0.92, 95% confidence interval, 0.78–1.09). The association of social isolation with mortality was unchanged when loneliness was included in the model.
For the first link, only 40% of the patients had (in the sense of the Chest CT study) recovered after 2 months. But that's a single measure, it would be good to have additional assessments of the health of those folks, rather than just the single factor.