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Comment by bugglebeetle | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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