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Comment by jlmorton | Hacker News Reader

Importantly, Covid very rarely results in severe symptoms for middle aged adults. In the vast majority of adults, the symptoms are mild and nonspecific.

So the idea that all of these researchers would have contracted Covid and present with symptoms specific/indicative of Covid is absurd. The chances of that must be infinitesimally small.

If they had the typical, flu- and cold-like symptoms that most people experience, why would anyone ever even notice? It's extremely common to have illnesses with these symptoms in an office environment, to the point it would be strange if they didn't.

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> "Importantly, Covid very rarely results in severe symptoms for middle aged adults. In the vast majority of adults, the symptoms are mild and nonspecific."

I've had Covid three times (March '20, December '20, August '22) and as a healthy middle-aged adult, I'm not sure I'd agree.

The first two times were pretty wretched: I was sick enough that I could barely eat or get out of bed for a week or so, and it was many weeks before I felt completely recovered. The third time (after getting vaccinated) was definitely milder and I recovered much more quickly, but was still pretty ill for a couple of days.

But notably, the symptoms for me were quite different from a typical 'flu. One thing that was very distinctive/specific for me was the wild changes in taste perception: I couldn't even eat some foods that I normally like due to them tasting so bad. I struggled to brush my teeth because I couldn't taste the mint flavour in toothpaste, only bitter chemicals!

Of course, it's fair to say that it doesn't affect everyone equally: some of my friends and family had similar experiences to me while others only had fairly mild symptoms.

> Covid very rarely results in severe symptoms for middle aged adults

Correct, but I don't recall this being the narrative the media were following in 2020, despite stuff like this:

"After nearly 45,000 Covid deaths in England and Wales, we can see that people of different ages have been exposed to dramatically differing risks. Fatalities among school-children have been remarkably low. Taking women aged 30–34 as an example, around 1 in 70,000 died from Covid over the 9 peak weeks of the epidemic. Since over 80% of these had pre-existing medical conditions, we estimate that a healthy women in this age-group had less than a 1 in 350,000 risk of dying from Covid, around 1/4 of the normal risk of an accidental death over this period.

Healthy children and young adults have been exposed to an extremely small risk during the peak of the epidemic, which would normally be deemed an acceptable part of life. Risks can be far higher for the elderly and those with pre-existing medical conditions."

https://medium.com/wintoncentre/what-have-been-the-fatal-ris...

"Data on deaths from covid-19 show an association with age that closely matches the “normal” age-related risk of death from all other causes that we all face each year, says statistician David Spiegelhalter in The BMJ today.

His findings are based on analysis of death certificate data for England and Wales over a 16 week (112 day) period between 7 March and 26 June 2020."

https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/covid-deaths-closely-ma...

It's even worse than that. Those numbers are for deaths "with" COVID, not "of COVID". At one point, the UK was recording any death where the person had a positive COVID test at any time prior. Cancer victims and car accidents where recorded as COVID deaths. So, the odds of dying after catching COVID where highly exaggerated.

> "At one point, the UK was recording any death where the person had a positive COVID test at any time prior."

Not entirely true. The UK definition was death _within 28 days_ of the first lab confirmed, positive Covid test. Not "any time prior".

I said "at one point". E.g. from August 2020:

  In England, a new weekly set of figures will also be published, showing the number of deaths that occur within 60 days of a positive test. Deaths that occur after 60 days will also be added to this figure if COVID-19 appears on the death certificate. This will provide an additional measure of the impact of the disease over time.

  This follows concerns raised by academics from the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine about the original measure, which counted anyone who had ever tested positive as a COVID-associated death. They called for the introduction of a 21-day measure in order to accurately assess the impact of the virus on mortality rates

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-uk-wide-methodology-a...

Aggregate death numbers spiked and not just the old. Death risk from Covid might mirror age related risk but, but, but it is on top of it.

> Aggregate death numbers spiked

If you're claiming that, for instance, those aged under 40 without any comorbidities were at significantly higher risk of dying due to the impact of Covid-19 I think it would be good to post a reference for that.

The CDC publishes data showing causes of death by age cohort[0], it's worth looking at for the year 2020. Apparently they're still working on the 2021 figures.

The short version: Covid-19 just isn't a random killer - and certainly not of otherwise healthy under 40s - that everyone thinks it is/thought it was.

[0] https://wisqars.cdc.gov/fatal-leading

I can't be certain, but I think they were implying that aggregate deaths spiked more than you would expect.

Look at data here:

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

These numbers show that the number of deaths observed is beyond the sum of reported covid deaths + expected deaths from all other sources. Which indicates either that many covid deaths were misclassified as something else, or that the strain on the health system caused by covid resulted in significantly more deaths. If deaths were misclassified, it is certainly possible that some percentage of people in their 40s or 50s died of Covid, with cause of death listed as something else.

It's also possible that lockdowns were causing deaths.

The earliest strains of Covid were by far the most severe ones. It's not that surprising to me that the very first patients contracted a strain more likely to put them in the hospital.

The severity also depends a lot on viral load.

That's part of it. The other part is that once the weakest individuals in the population have died the remainder will be stronger on average and so they may be able to deal with infection that much better.

> The earliest strains of Covid were by far the most severe ones. It's not that surprising to me that the very first patients contracted a strain more likely to put them in the hospital.

No, the only SARS-Cov-2 strain with (likely) decreased mortality is Omicron, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variants_of_SARS-CoV-2 The fact that Covid (as an illness) has become milder is due to the hosts adapting, not the virus being milder.

> The severity also depends a lot on viral load.

Yes, that is a factor.

Not only the hosts, but also the hospitals. Treatments became available, and we learned what worked well and what didn't. The care a person who is infected today gets is very different from what people in the first months of the pandemic got and that's improved outcomes.

Not sure why you are being downvoted, that is something that struck me as well. In particular Vanilla strains were milder than beta/delta.

Don't get me wrong, Covid is a deadly disease with a lethality of 1-2 %, but the typical symptoms for a 30 year old are mild.

> "In particular Vanilla strains were milder than beta/delta."

Not my experience! OG Covid (March 2020) was just as severe as alpha/beta (December 2020). My most recent infection (August 2022) was much milder, but that could also be explained by being vaccinated.

See my sibling comment with a link to the estimated properties of SARS-Cov-2 variants: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36337757

I don't disagree with your linked comment. But my personal experience, not to mention the high level of hospitalisation and mortality at the time which resulted in the first UK lockdown, disagrees with your "Vanilla strains were milder than beta/delta." statement, if "Vanilla" was the variant circulating in the UK in March 2020.

Yes that makes sense. I wrote:

> The fact that Covid (as an illness) has become milder is due to the hosts adapting, not the virus being milder.

My understanding is that newer strains aren't much different in terms of severity, but the hospitalization and mortality rates will change by some percentage because our treatment protocols improved. When covid first hit, people had no idea what to do with the infected. Doctors around the world were sharing information and research was underway but they all had to learn as they went along. Eventually things were bound to improve, even if the virus hadn't evolved at all.

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