Comment by thingification | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thingification | Hacker News Reader

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Long COVID exists. Personally, it's always worried me more than the risk of death from COVID.

I think people who haven't had a chronic condition (including doctors) tend to underestimate the impact they can have on your life. Long COVID symptoms may not be "severe" or "serious" in a medical coding dictionary, but those terms in a medical dictionary are quite distinct from their everyday meanings.

The best evidence we have seems to be that somewhere very roughly around 20% of people who get infected (vaccinated or not) get it -- more if you're older, less if you're younger. Experts don't seem to be willing to say much about what fraction of those people will have symptoms forever, or to what extent (very happy to hear otherwise if somebody knows better!).

While case numbers are high again (in the UK) and with the more infectious and virulent Delta variant having replaced others, it's not totally clear to me that the risks from long COVID are even all that much changed since before the vaccines.

Yes, but, the reality is that everyone is going to get exposed to this virus eventually. Probably not that long from now, if you haven't yet. Pretending that evading it forever is possible, is not helping people to make wise decisions; I think many of the unvaccinated currently believe they can evade both the virus and the vaccine (they are incorrect). Eventually, long covid or not, we are all getting exposed. We should act accordingly.

One point is that the consequences of getting COVID are likely to become less serious over time as prevalence is controlled (via better vaccines, we hope, masks etc., if we're not fatalistic), better drugs are found.

Another important point is that currently, the risks of long COVID seem not at all well understood. "Unknown risk" is quite a different thing than "low risk" or "high risk". The lengths to which it makes sense for people to go to avoid it right now depend on those risks, so lying low seems quite sane to me.

A worse problem still is, I think, that "we're all going to get it" is a self-fulfilling prophecy: viruses have been unconquerable in the recent past, but this is 2021, we have incredible understanding of the mechanisms (no, not most of the details: they're not all worth knowing) that should give us incredible power over them at some point in the relatively near future (as in the next few decades). If the next few decades, why not the next few years? If we believe it's "inevitable", we'll make it so. (not to mention abandoning effective measures like masks)

I find it completely hard to believe with the way that I live my life that I am eventually in quotes going to get covid. I would have to go out of my way and inconvenience myself in some unfathomable change of daily routine and life for me to get covid eventually. So have fun making generalizations

Speak for yourself or get on respirator crew.

As someone in a cognitive-dominant industry on an industry board, I'm baffled why more people aren't discussing long COVID-caused brain fog here. The chances of getting long COVID once infected are better than 1 in 3,000, the odds of a US residential structure fire, an insurable event. If you live in the US, then unless you have established gold-plated short- and long-term disability insurance, then long COVID-caused brain fog for an average HN participant is likely a career-altering diagnosis.

This is all I've been trying to reply to people about in this. I'm already disabled I already collect SSI I'm already basically agoraphobic and if I somehow magically get covid even though I don't put myself at risk I'm just going to be even more disabled just the odds are not in my favor for this at all and it's not my doing or my fault. But everyone here seems to just be ignoring this and I don't understand it I don't think all of the nerds on this website are actually as smart as they say they are and I think they're just good at rote memorization and repetition

People just aren't generally interested in small but severe risks like that. I've seen about as much long Covid discussion as I see carpal tunnel discussion.

Bunch of nerd programmers don't want to face reality is what that is. They want to be concerned about their kids that they can't take care of during the day because the place that they work for isn't doing remote anymore so they have to go into work or they need the kids to go to school because they can't pay attention because they are remoting. So you have that weirdness going on. So obviously the kids can't wear masks because that's just more hassle for them because they need to sit at home and they need to work and that's not their fault that they need to work it's just because we don't have basic income because no one wants basic income because everyone wants to justify themselves as needing to be productive and needing to be paid and needing to be worth something. I'm just going to go off a hacker news I'm sorry that I'm I've just been reading this whole entire thread all morning since like 7:00 a.m. EST

Curious why the downvote?

Perhaps because "always worried me more than the risk of death"? If so: this is because the evidence always seems to have said that the risk of long COVID has been at least an order of magnitude higher than the risk of death. Also, if you have no dependents, death involves less suffering: in the unlikely event it happens, you're out of the picture already after a short period of misery. On the other hand, chronic illness can come with a lifetime of suffering.

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