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Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

If she was vaccinated, then COVID sounds like it could still be a big problem.

If not, then the current general impression of COVID largely being behind us (us being the vaccinated world) is still tenable.

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Respiratory distress is a symptom of preeclampsia. Doesn't have to be related to COVID.

As I understand it, she wasn't diagnosed with preeclampsia (despite being a pregnant woman in a maternity hospital for shortness of breath--for ~36h) until after she was placed on ECMO. Her levels (I think maybe liver enzyme is what matters?) fell back into normal range within a few days of coming off ECMO, but they do not reverse the diagnosis once given.

Causality is never clear in individual cases. With millions of cases worldwide there will always be occasional outliers due to genetics or environmental factors or random luck. Severe COVID-19 symptoms have always been rare in that age group, and multiple large scale clinical trials have shown pretty conclusively that vaccination cuts the risk still further. But vaccines are never 100% effective, and individual anecdotes don't tell us anything useful about vaccine efficacy.

SARS-CoV-2 can never be eradicated and it will continue killing people just like other endemic respiratory viruses such as influenza, RSV, HCoV-OC43, etc. At this point the majority of Americans have already been infected so it's time to accept the risk and move on, regardless of how well the vaccines work.

https://www.npr.org/2022/04/26/1094817774/covid-19-infection...

“Vaccinated” is not really a Boolean. It is a list of N vaccine types and administration dates. After all, the protection fades over time, subject to many variables.

Relevance? The question still has a boolean answer (modulo booster), regardless of the menu of vaccine options.

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