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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

This article is framed in such an odd way. As if the virus that literally uses the ACE2 receptor for cell entry wouldn't have cardiovascular effects or if they were not known and assumed immediately. That's wild. The article itself doesn't even have the letter sequence "ACE2" in it... Of course binding to ACE2 is going to throw the cardiovascular Renin/Angiotensin system all out of wack. Even if the sars-cov-2 virus weren't specifically entering and killing off ACE2 expressing cardiovascular cells.

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I think it’s an article targeted at laypeople, many of whom consider COVID to be a respiratory disease like the flu. It’s simply spreading awareness of the fact that it’s more complicated than that.

> COVID‑19 is caused by infection with a strain of coronavirus known as 'Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus 2' (SARS-CoV-2)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19#Cause

> Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‑CoV‑2)[2] is a strain of coronavirus that causes COVID-19, the respiratory illness responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS-CoV-2

I’m not suggesting that COVID isn’t a respiratory disease but that its effects seem to go beyond solely the respiratory system.

It passes the bloodbrain barrier.

Like influenza.

not "just" a respiratory disease

The article does not appear to be claiming that SARS-CoV-2 damages the heart directly. From the article:

"Research has since shown that myocytes for the most part escape infection. Instead, SARS-CoV-2 damages the heart indirectly by unleashing inflammatory reactions that affect cardiovascular functioning."

The same is true of pneumonia, I believe.

A lot of obvious things like that were met with

source!?!?

stop fearmongering!!!

thats a preprint!!

despite such things clearly needing 3 years to begin existing while there was a need to react in the present.

so having a source is nice.

thats the odd paradigm of studies, either nobody agrees with it or everyone says “well, duh”

On the flip-side, we know we're easily fooled and that the scientific method is a barely sufficient set of tools to be fooled a lot less.

There was a sea of preprints pointing in different directions, and it was difficult to navigate and know whom to believe.

Someone believing something strongly 3 years ago based on a few preprints is hardly vindicated for having great process when published research comes out validating that view now.

IMO the only approach is to roll with the punches and to go "ehhhhh, mayyyybe." (And of course use the best weight of information we have now).

> There was a sea of preprints pointing in different directions, and it was difficult to navigate and know whom to believe.

right, this was only obvious with particular education instead of relying on the educated, who were saying all sorts of random things in every direction.

> this was only obvious with particular education instead of relying on the educated,

Hindsight bias. We tend to remember our intuitions when we were right, instead of fairly measuring them. Thus, we become convinced we are reliable and experts are not.

Damage to other tissues, especially from mild illness, was a possibility that was neither well-supported nor well-refuted in 2020. It was clear there was morbidity risk, but the mechanism was not understood (and is still not well-understood) and the magnitude was also uncertain and confounded.

I try to be aware of blind spots by subjecting myself to the same tests I put others through

In this case, I started keeping logs of what people said what across social media. I noticed that they never revisit their theories and just go on to the next one. In one example, the people calling the existence of the virus fictional were same people that were having 5g hysteria for the next year, some of the same people that moved to theories that required the existence of that virus but to stick with issues about the vaccine. Everyone that took the vaccine is supposed to have dropped dead by now according to many individuals theories. But these are not being revisited, there is no “I was wrong about that” “what happened to 5g” “how come only a couple people have myocarditis problems in 2023 instead of 75% of the population, or more since the actual virus does the same thing” its just on to the next one

so I try to revisit which theories I made to at least address them

It's written this way to hopefully get some information across to people trippin on fox acid.

Never seen the hashtag #SuddenlyAndUnexpected used to blame every sudden (heart related) death to the Corona vaccines because the virus as such is harmless and just a flu or cold?

It is bizarre tbh. I've had people say "why are they only talking about covid heard damage now, after the vaccines?"

But we were all talking about this way back in 2020. People just have strange memories and attention windows.

Friend of a friend dropped dead of a blood clot after a "cold" in something like May 2020 when testing was extraordinarily difficult to get. We immediately suspected COVID due to already knowing about the clotting/cardiovascular symptoms of COVID.

> People just have strange memories and attention windows.

Indeed, but IMHO the strangeness is in you (and many others): How do you are you still calling this behavior "strange" - as if it's inexplicable - after seeing it right in front of your nose for years (in many areas, not just covid)?

Think of it this way: I can predict when this behavior will occur (though not its precise presentation). So can you. What predicts - what strongly correlates with - this behavior of theirs?

\ \ \ \ \ \

(Answer, obscured to prevent accidental reading: xreactionaryxpoliticsx.xthexreactionaryxmovementxfabricatesxwhateverxsuitsxtheirxideologicalxgoalsx;xtruthxandxconsequencesx,xincludingxhumanxlifex,xarexdisregarded.xwhenxthexmovementxturnedxagainstxcoronavirusx(toxbexantiliberal)xixhadxnoxdoubtxwhatxwasxcoming).

You are right about one thing, it isn't strange in the sense that it is unusual. It is in fact nearly universal.

Being too dead set in opinions not well supported is always error but only sometimes a problem. IMO, that latter part is a big part of why it can be so difficult to correct.

It's probably not surprising that it happens to some extent (like, you get flat earthers and FotLs/SovCits and various other loonies), but more how _common_ it is. It has to be one of this century's most widespread conspiracy theories.

I'm not talking about random 'loonies', but a large movement that follows the same playbook every time - probably the most influential social force of the day, electing US presidents and other world leaders, oppressing people worldwide, causing mass social change, etc. They follow the same playbook, with the same rhetorical tactics, every time! Look at the reactionary (sometimes called populist) political messaging in country after country - it's like it's written by the same person.

> It has to be one of this century's most widespread conspiracy theories.

The same group of people believe all sorts of conspiracy theories.

The flu is not a harmless disease, get that into your head. We have been vaccinating against the flu for decades, and yet there are about 400,000 deaths per year during an average influenza season.

You do realize I'm paraphrasing the vaccine blamers?

Because for them Corona is harmless and the flu is harmless, even worse, to them Corona and flu are the same.

Only the vaccines are dangerous.

Fun fact, for some of these guys the flu shot isn't a vaccination because it's called a shot.

The flu shot is called a shot because it isn't one vaccine, it's multiple at once.

The low efficacy is, at least in part, because every spring they make an educated guess as to which ones would be best to put into the shot distributed in the fall. Not all of them can be put into the shot for cost and compatibility reasons.

The flu shot is called a shot because... it's a shot. (See also: "jab".)

One might get allergy shots (no vaccine at all). One might get a shot of morphine in an ambulance. Liquid injections have been known as shots since before we had vaccines.

The popular narrative, including that being pushed by most western governments, is that COVID either never was or is no longer is dangerous, beyond the level of other common respiratory illnesses. This article begins from that (false) framing.

Is that false? I thought that that was the understanding from the get go, that for most people or was fine but that it was dangerous for certain people with pre-existibg respiratory issues, of whom there were enough that their sudden and widespread hospital admittance put a strain on the health service as a whole, meaning that all sorts of other issues that were normally easily treated became considerably more dangerous due to a lack of staff/facilities.

What is the true narrative?

> thought that that was the understanding from the get go

There were many get go’s, and one for each variant. I know a healthy person who got the original and then delta variant, the latter which attacked his pancreas and left him with type 1 diabetes.

> for most people or was fine but that it was dangerous for certain people with pre-existibg respiratory issues

For most people, it’s asymptomatic in the short term. We’ve known it would have novel systemic effects from the “get go,” because it hits a nasty receptor. With the flu, a cytokine storm and non-respiratory cellular damage is a fluke. With Covid, every infection—even the asymptomatic ones—damage the gut, testes, gallbladder and heart (ACE2).

We don’t know how that damage manifests in the long run, there hasn’t been a long run. But we know there is damage being accumulated. We just don’t know if it’s benign. (You can’t generally look at a body and tell how many times it’s had the flu. You can with Covid.)

> You can’t generally look at a body and tell how many times it’s had the flu. You can with Covid

Citations?

Unsurprised that this got no response. I linger around groups that take this hardline view, and the overwhelming consensus there is that Covid is a permanently debilitating disease and that the aggregate damage the gp is talking about is a certainty.

This is posted on a lot of the social media that prays on people with medical anxiety. Nothing credible is ever provided.

There are two sides to every polarizing issue like this. In this case, the Covid doesn’t exist crowd are loud and the Covid irreparably damages you crowd are hunkered down in their homes and sticking to their in group.

> There are two sides to every polarizing issue like this.

Well, there are more sides. It's the primitive human brain that breaks it down to a dichotomy.

I wonder if it's the same with other Primates.

Thanks for the info, there's definitely a few things in there I'll be looking up. By "get go" I meant circa March 2020 when it began to affect legislation fwiw.

The "long Covid" or long term health effects are missing from that narrative. And these can be unrelated to respiratory issues, like the heart issues. And the set who suffer from "long Covid" does not seem to be correlated with those with respiratory pre-existing conditions.

The risk of death for otherwise healthy people has always been low, yes. The long-term consequences were originally unknown and are still now unclear, and a lot of people and institutions have chosen to interpret that as "fine." I'd give it a decade before making confident assertions about how fine it is though.

I don't think that was the belief at first, I guess it is now, though. If I recall correctly, prior to the vaccine, the mortality and hospitalization rates among even healthy adults were still quite high. I also recall plenty of reported long-term side effects, like originally active people getting winded by a staircase for weeks after.

Weren't the mortality rates something like 1% for adults? I remember being shocked by the numerical consequences of the "just infect everyone and get it over with" plans floated by some governments.

Right, but it’s well known that mortality predictions for novel diseases are inflated, often by virtue of missing people who don’t have symptoms they care about enough to let anyone know.

I forget who the statistician was that accurately predicted the mortality rate of the initial variants by just scaling the predictions down.

Mortality of subsequent variants trends down on average because of selection pressures.

The "understanding" from politicians at the beginning was that everyone was highly susceptible, which was why the lockdowns were universal instead of going for targeted protection. They were just plain wrong.

We seem to remember it differently. As far as I understood it, the health workers were pushing for general lockdown in order to stop the spread overwhelming the services for everyone. Everyone was at risk in the sense that what would have normally been minor issues would have become serious with no one or no facility to treat them.

Perhaps I misunderstand: What western government says Covid-19 was never dangerous?

Can you link to even a single example of that?

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