Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

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Because I'm not a complete idiot.

- pandemic in progress: check

- risky lifestyle: check (as in very frequent air travel for work)

- symptoms: O2 level drop, fluid in lungs, persistent cough, extreme tiredness, dizzyness, loss of smell/taste check all of these, and the rest, fortunately not. Later on: crazy beating heart for no particular reason, losing weight steadily but more slowly now.

Decision not to test was made by qualified medic, who said that they needed the tests for those cases where there was some degree of doubt, which in my case there really wasn't, besides that there was an extreme shortage of tests at that time. And to call an ambulance straight away, and not my house doctor in case things got worse than they were at that moment.

Keep in mind that there are vast numbers of people that have gotten COVID that did not get tested and that therefore do not show up in the various statistics. Especially in the beginning the health care system was totally overwhelmed and care went to those who needed it most, and either wasn't administered to those who might have benefited from it and many who simply didn't make it.

In previous Corona discussions on HN I saw multiple comments from people who were convinced they had COVID, tested after the fact, but the tests ( some tested multiple times ) came back negative.

You could check for T-cells at some point -- if you had Covid, they are measurable even after many months. In contrast, IgG titers show up in only ~80% and decline steadily. Excellent recent paper:

> Here, we investigated SARS-CoV-2 antibody and T cell responses in matched samples of COVID-19 convalescent individuals up to 6 months after infection. Longitudinal analysis revealed decreasing and stable spike- and nucleocapsid-specific antibody responses, respectively. In contrast, functional T cell responses remained robust, and even increased, in both frequency and intensity.

https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/13/590/eabf7517

Thank you, if there is any benefit to having that level of certainty (and not to satisfy internet naysayers) then I may still do this, but I have received my shot (Jansen) because there are still some immunological benefits from that and it helps in a regulatory sense as well (lots of doors are closed to people that have not been vaccinated).

What matters to me is that I got through it, still live pretty carefully even now because I don't want a re-run if I can avoid it and I would advise anybody that hasn't had it yet and/or has not been vaccinated to go and get that done as soon as you can. This is no walk in the park, I used to be pretty fit for my age, and the last year has been a complete wipe-out. Avoid if you can.

You might consider it if insurance puts up a fight but there's no utility in getting a T-cell test just to try to win arguments on the Internet.

Insurance? For what? I did not end up in hospital and where I live medical problems do not end up (normally) as financial problems as well.

Yeah, I assumed you might wind up getting treatment for long COVID and that you lived in the US.

> “Because I'm not a complete idiot.”

yah, it’s the partial idiots who are hard to discern. complete idiots are the easiest to dismiss out of hand.

many infections have long lasting effects. you’d need to systematically rule them out/in via testing to be as certain as you claim to be.

Right, well let's just say that coincidentally I had a viral infection that has the exact same symptoms as COVID, has the same long term effects as are reported in many cases of COVID and which coincidentally happened to be timed to match the first wave of that particular pandemic, but according to you it wasn't COVID when it wasn't confirmed as such with a test.

Consider the alternative: you would have to come up with some kind of viral agent that did the same thing but wasn't COVID.

Which to me seems to be a far more outrageous claim than the one that I was simply one of many. The test does not make the disease, it is merely positive confirmation, but I've yet to hear of some surprise viral disease that ran in parallel to this, isn't COVID but matches the symptoms so well.

I mean, I'm not even sure I would bother with a T-cell test in your case. The only meaningful difference in your future life would be to have the results to give people on the internet, which doesn't seem worth getting two tubes of blood drawn.

Precisely. If there is a benefit to me I'll get tested. Even the medic I talked to was pretty clear: don't bother, save the test for someone who really needs it. Which at that time could have saved a life for someone that needed to have an operation and required a COVID test prior to admission.

that’s being overly invested in the idea that it’s covid rather than realizing that infections of all kinds have long-lasting effects. individually and societally, that leads to a distortion of attention and resources to the wrong things. i.e., partial idiocy, the worst kind, and unfortunately rampant.

there is a real opportunity now for medical science to look comparatively at infectious diseases and attack them systematically and cohesively rather than myopically. hopefully we don’t squander that.

Hopefully we don't squander basic respect for our fellow human beings either. Not everything is a science experiment or a thesis. Given that the number of people that died from COVID based on excess mortality where I live is approximately 50% higher than the official figures the chances of a bunch of people having unconfirmed COVID are rather high.

So unless you are going to go out on a limb to suggest a better alternative I suggest you leave well alone.

> let's just say that coincidentally I had a viral infection that has the exact same symptoms as COVID, has the same long term effects as are reported in many cases of COVID and which coincidentally happened to be timed to match the first wave of that particular pandemic

That happened to a lot of people. The first wave in March wasn't very big compared to later months.

You mentioned the flu season didn't happen in a different post, but that was much later, as was most masking.

> Which to me seems to be a far more outrageous claim than the one that I was simply one of many.

That's a terrible way to analyze this. You were "one of many" either way.

> but I've yet to hear of some surprise viral disease that ran in parallel to this, isn't COVID but matches the symptoms so well.

The symptoms aren't all that unique for a severe illness that messes up your lungs. There's no 'surprise' involved in other possible causes.

Extreme fatigue for months after is not neatly explainable. Myalgic Encehalomyelitis/CFS is similar, but when other symptoms are included (weird skin rash, heart palpations, smell issues, GI trouble), the simpler explanation is Covid. A deeper reading on long Covid symptoms may prove informational as the cluster of symptoms is fairly unique and unexplainable.

I don't think GP was suggesting you were dumb, just trying to point out there's a lot of widespread respiratory illnesses with exactly the same symptoms that are endemic - not to say Covid isn't more severe at a population level, but that you can't really say with any kind of certainty based only on those symptoms that someone has Covid. A few years ago I had exactly these symptoms, plus a high fever, but in my case, it was probably the flu. it was awful - I didn't really get over it for several months.

Yes, but the flu season in 2020 pretty much didn't happen and COVID did. So in your case the even money would be on it not being COVID 'a few years ago' but if it had happened in March up to today of 2020/2021 then probably it would be.

GP is playing silly games and I'm a bit tired of those given my rather personal engagement with this particular virus, and frankly, if it is some other kind of virus then it hardly matters now, does it?

> Yes, but the flu season in 2020 pretty much didn't happen

Not arguing the rest of your claims, but that's objectively not true. Based upon current estimates it was actually worse than average[1] and its season was cut short in April due to the COVID efforts[2].

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932020_United_State...

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