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Comment by Itaxpica | Hacker News Reader

I know one Covid long-hauler personally. She's in excellent physical shape, and has worked for several years as a paramedic (which is, in fact, where she caught Covid). She's got medical training, professional expertise, and is generally an all-around no-bullshit kind of person. It's been six months since her original diagnosis, and she still has lingering symptoms - on bad days she can't climb up a flight of steps without getting winded, despite literally running 10Ks earlier this year. This is just a single anecdote, and COVID long-haulers may not be as widespread or as significant as the article suggests, but having witnessed her experience firsthand I'm absolutely not willing to write it off.

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I think part of it a cultural idea, perhaps driven by our employment system and antibiotics, that it takes about 1-5 days to get over a most illnesses.

If you read older literature, you see people taking months to get over things like the flu, a whole process of recuperation completely unheard of even among those who may have the affluence today to do it.

There are the outliers who may never recover from COVID, people who assign their general discontentments to it, but I suspect there is another group that maybe just needed more than a week or two to recover and are suffering the consequences of not taking it or not being allowed to take it.

I’ve had flu about 6 times in my life (I mean real flu, not sniffles/cold) and even when I was younger, a 5-day recovery would have been a miracle. For me it’s 2 weeks to feel normal, at a minimum!

I've had flu, or something with symptoms like it, twice as an adult, and both times it took a whole month to get through the "really feeling awful and stuck in bed" stage.

Recovery was quick afterwards. But just being ill was much more than a 1-5 day event.

I also know what really sounds like a COVID long-hauler personally. She's in her 30s, in shape, ran long races as recently as last year, worked as a dev at a healthcare startup and is in the final stages of applying to med school as a returning student.

She's been down for 5-6 months now with recurring symptoms like fatigue and shortness of breath. She's had a very extensive health workup to exclude a number of possibilities (thyroid disorder? CMV?), but is now basically resigned to living with what amounts to moderate asthma and exercise intolerance.

We're not saying it doesn't exist.

We are saying exceptional stories like hers are repeated and spread by the media. These stories scare the general population because they think it could happen to them. Statistics tell us otherwise but most people don't know that but instead they react emotionally and get scared.

On one hand these people's stories need to be shared. On the other hand sharing them spreads fear and, indirect, mis-information about the potency of the virus.

I don't have a good answer but stories like this bring eyeballs and viewers to the media. That's their goal and by attaining that goal they're scaring the public.

> On the other hand sharing them spreads fear and, indirect, mis-information about the potency of the virus.

And what if it’s information and not misinformation? And what if the public should be scared?

They should not be.

Infection Fatality Ratios for COVID-19 Among Noninstitutionalized Persons 12 and Older: Results of a Random-Sample Prevalence Study

Sept 2020, Annals of Internal Medicine, study in Indiana, USA

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-5352

People aged 40 or below have a .01% chance of dying.

People over the age of 70 have a 1.17% chance of dying.

Overall the chance of dying from the virus is 0.26%.

I encourage you to share this information.

You're responding to a discussion about serious long-term effects with death statistics. Why?

Your quoted figures were surprising to me so I went and read the source. Are you aware that the statistics you're citing explicitly don't include over half of the deaths in the sample? It's the fifth paragraph,

> Although nursing home residents were not tested, they represented 54.9% of Indiana's deaths. Thus, we excluded nursing home residents from all calculations (that is, deaths and infections).

The point the original post is making is that it's not just about dying. You don't know what the other effects may be on your body. Are you willing to roll the dice on it?

Furthermore, the more people that have it, the more out of control it will be. Obviously. And while on average your chances of death or debilitation are low, it will have outsized effects on minorities, frontline workers, and other groups. You're not just rolling the dice on your own health, you're doing so with the health of everyone you interact with as well.

Studies and statistics also tell us that as a young person below the age of 50 you have a 0.01% chance of succumbing to COVID. Yet, you will read the stories of the unfortunate few as if it's NORMAL that this happens to people. It's not. Those are outliers but media report on these real cases but inflate them as if the bubonic plaque has hit the planet.

Coronavirus is very dangerous and worse than the flu. But we need to stop acting as if this is a population killer virus. We have a pandemic and we need to stop it but the amount of panic-inducing articles and videos is insane. We need a level-headed approach.

Make no mistake - I believe in and support the measures we take. Fully. I wear mask whenever required and even more often than that. I want to keep others safe from this virus and keeping distance/wearing a mask costs nothing. We need to stop this virus especially since it's rather novel.

BUT. And this is a big but. You have to explain to the same people who shut down their shops a few months ago and might have to do so again that we are tanking the economy on purpose (Germany in my case).

This will also cost lives. It's just harder to make that connection but people will die as a result of lockdown measures. Why is death by Corona less okay then death by shitty economy and its effects? What is this weird disregard for other deaths when compared to Corona? Because it's more tangible?

All kinds of metrics are telling us that poor economic performance and economic depressions are directly correlated with increased deaths, e.g. suicides or simply shittier healthcare.

It's just impossible to openly talk about this without causing a demon rampage.

That's not too far fetched. It is well known that heart and, obviously, lungs are affected by COVID19. Add to that a potentially week long sickness and I am not surprised your friend is in a bad shape. Compare this to coma patients, for instance.

The question is: Is her condition chronic? That is, given a good treatment, diet, and specific exercise, could she return to normal? What did she do after recovery?

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