Covid doesn't seem to be different that the flu in this regard. Any disease that has a fever component will leave some with long lasting problems. Any disease that infects the lungs will do the same. There has been nothing indicating that covid is unique in this regard.
For example, here's a paper going over heart inflamation and the flu, going over data gathered in the last 100 years [0].
> During the Sheffield, England influenza epidemic from 1972 to 1973, the cases of 50 consecutive patients who were initially diagnosed as mild cases and were treated on an outpatient basis were followed. Transient electrocardiogram (ECG) changes were seen in 18 patients, and long-lasting changes were seen in 5 patients.
>There has been nothing indicating that Covid is unique in this regard.
Correct, this has been my observation too. I see people attributing even a loss of smell to Covid, which is actually quite common to all respiratory illnesses.
We really need to stop comparing it to the flu. The way this novel coronavirus infects the body is different from influenza, and the symptoms of COVID-19 are different. We don't fully understand COVID-19 but those conclusions are very well supported by what we do know.
Sure, flu and COVID-19 can both have long-term effects on the body. But that's true of many disparate diseases. What matters for long-term care are the details that are specific to each disease.
At this point bringing up the flu in discussions of COVID-19 is basically a form of "what-aboutism".
> At this point bringing up the flu in discussions of COVID-19 is basically a form of "what-aboutism".
Taking into consideration of that which has gone before is the basis of progress and research.
> The way this novel coronavirus infects the body is different from influenza, and the symptoms of COVID-19 are different.
Everything is different from everything else.
> We really need to stop comparing it to the flu.
In other words, everybody needs to stop thinking in ways that don't support your viewpoint. People that try to solve this problem by looking at related problems should stop because 'reasons'.
Please stop gatekeeping and politicizing the discussion. We all understand that influenza and SARS-CoV-2 are different viruses. However there is significant overlap in symptoms (for example both can cause viral myocarditis) so flu provides a useful baseline for analysis.
Human society operates just fine with the risk of flu despite the high annual death toll. How much worse does another virus have to be in order to justify a qualitatively different approach? Is there a specific numeric threshold in terms of fatality rate or QALYs lost or severity of long-term effects?
It is not politicizing to point out that these are different viruses that cause different diseases.
Quite a lot of people do not understand the extent of the differences, in part because of repeated comparisons to the flu from earlier in the pandemic--comparisons which we now know were based on incomplete early impressions of the new disease.
Yes there is significant overlap in symptoms--hence the early comparisons. There are also significant differences.
Are these differences enough to produce complications worse than the flu? There's not enough evidence yet to know. I'm not saying "we're sure COVID-19 will have worse complications than the flu." I'm saying we don't know either way, so it's irresponsible to cite flu studies to imply we're sure there won't be worse complications than the flu.
Plus, when you bring up any kind of comparison with the flu, no matter how nuanced you try to be, the general public just ignores all the nuance. Using the word "flu" anywhere near a COVID-19 discussion reinforces the "See, it's just the flu, bro" mentality that convinced vast swaths of people to downplay the disease.
Yea just keep imagining. We'll never know. We could have had the same amount of deaths just by the older folks and at risk people quarantine themselves and everyone else keeps working. Then we could have had the jobs and money to help our neighbors pay for grocery delivery. People helping other people. Quarantining everyone is like punishing the whole class when one kid acts up. Now no one has jobs and we can't help each other. From what I know the older members of my family were already taking precautions. Why does everyone? If they are in contact with no one then we can't spread it to them.
You're a developer I'm assuming. You think the CDC is capable of developing a model that could predict this? As a developer I don't have much confidence for something like that. Netflix still can't recommend me a movie correctly with millions upon million data points and spending millions of dollars on it.
No, I'm not a developer, and no, the CDC is not the organization that I'm alluding to, nor am I poking at the need for any sort of model. The need is for our nation's resources - at every level - to be organized and deployed effectively against this problem using the information available at any given moment. We have failed at this at nearly every level, at nearly every moment.
A good example is my mother who is a teacher. School started this week, and they've been changing their local guidelines/procedures until, well, they continue to change every day still. It should be no surprise, because these are a bunch of county-level educational administrators trying to figure out how to respond to a once-in-a-century epidemiological/social/economic event with effectively zero guidance. It's improv but with people's lives at stake.
Why hasn't the federal government, with the immense resources and power that we entrust to it, stepped up and provided clear guidelines for opening schools and the funding necessary to implement those guidelines? If the answer is that it cannot be safe to open schools, then why have they not stepped up to provide clear guidelines for moving classes online and the funding necessary to implement those guidelines?
This is well beyond the point of being an enormous national security threat. Our government has both legal and moral authority to organize our society. This doesn't mean martial law or nationalization - simply publishing good, clear guidelines for every type of establishment and making available the funding necessary to implement those guidelines. Those guidelines ought to include clear risk assessments that these establishments and their patrons can evaluate for themselves to gauge their level of risk acceptance for re-opening, re-closing, patronizing, or choosing to stay away from.
Instead we have an entire executive branch hellbent on retaining its power, regardless of how sick, destitute, and morally broken its kingdom winds up becoming in the process. It's equal parts pathetic and despicable. Vote.
I'm not sure of Human societies operating 'just fine' with the risk of flu. We seem to operate just fine NOW because we make vaccines for the flu every year, and we have several years of experience in terms of Herd Immunity and Medical assistance.
We also do not have medical personnel dying in hundreds from flu every year as they catch it in line of service.
And the baseline of flu u refer to DID NOT HELP much with predicting or managing clots in almost every major organ when it comes to COVID.
Sure, we have blood thinners etc. But when u hear from frontline workers in hospitals, the situation with clots is pretty dire.
And this is a much bigger deal and the overlap with flu is very little, even in patients tht may seem to have recovered frm Covid.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/health/coronavirus-stroke...
Influenza vaccines only started to become available in the 1940s. Are you claiming that human society didn't operate before that?
Influenza also increases the risk of blood clots and ischemia. So SARS-CoV-2 is nothing new in that regard, although the effects appear to be more severe.
I'm claiming the high death toll u seem to think of when talking of Flu fatalities ain't that high.
And I provided some evidence for it.
I'm hoping people will not underestimate how serious Covid19 is by drawing parallels to THE NUMBER of yearly Flu fatalities, coz the number of flu fatalities are much less compared to what gets reported every year.
Thts what the SciAm link I provided talks about.
Societies operated WITH a lot of Caution and Precautions in place before the vaccines.
They still operate with caution for flu DESPITE vaccines as they do not provide complete immunity.
Look at how people celebrate elimination of Wild polio in Africa! It came AFTER several decades of human suffering and wide ranging precautions.
And the level of caution changes depending on the local medical infrastructure, dynamics of the spread, demographics, and the specific knowledge we have about the disease in question.
I also claimed that WE HAVE SOME IDEA on how to deal with blood clotting wen it comes to Flu. Your link itself shows that out right "Emperic Anticoagulation decreases VTE"
But we are not there yet, when it comes to Covid19.
We have people dying from strokes AFTER they were thought to have recovered from Covid. And these aren't necessarily 'edge cases' that arise from the tail end of large numbers of patients during a pandemic.
These are most likely due to absence of knowledge,data and insights into managing a novel disease. Just read through the NYTimes article. It's very detailed and specific about how we are falling short NOW in dealing with strokes and clots.
Actually, even though the infection (and biological signs of the infection like blood oxygen) are different from the flu, the actual grouping of symptoms is very similar to the flu. In the most extreme cases, it has more differences, but on the average, COVID-19 is very comparable to the flu. It should be taken seriously, especially for certain demographics, but so should the flu. Not sure why people are offended by this comparison, but it's a good comparison.
Those symptoms are also common in Ebola patients. Probably a huge percentage of infectious disease have the symptoms of fever, headache, lethargy, body aches, etc.
You missed the entire point of their post - you shouldn’t believe something without evidence and there is no evidence COVID is special wrt long term complications.
> The lungs from patients with Covid-19 also showed distinctive vascular features, consisting of severe endothelial injury associated with the presence of intracellular virus and disrupted cell membranes. Histologic analysis of pulmonary vessels in patients with Covid-19 showed widespread thrombosis with microangiopathy. Alveolar capillary microthrombi were 9 times as prevalent in patients with Covid-19 as in patients with influenza (P<0.001). In lungs from patients with Covid-19, the amount of new vessel growth — predominantly through a mechanism of intussusceptive angiogenesis — was 2.7 times as high as that in the lungs from patients with influenza (P<0.001).
This is a study of the lungs of people who died. Obviously more study is needed, but it's not unreasonable to infer that people who survive COVID-19 would experience symptoms that most flu patients do not.
> there is no evidence COVID is special wrt long term complications.
Since this coronavirus is novel, and COVID-19 is a new disease, of course there are not long-term studies yet. The lack of long-term data does not provide any support for (or against) the idea that its long-term impact is similar to the flu. So we have to look at what we do know so far, which is that it is different from the flu in many ways.
> The lack of long-term data does not provide any support for (or against) the idea that its long-term impact is similar to the flu.
Except when one makes a claim, one needs evidence. The assumption is the status quo unless proven otherwise which by your own admission is not possible to do right now so quit the fearmongering.
> there is no evidence COVID is special wrt long term complications.
It is impossible to establish evidence for long term complications of a novel virus that has been with us for less than a year.
> you shouldn’t believe something without evidence
This is an OK heuristic but absence of evidence is not sufficient to conclude falsification of the hypothesis, especially when faced with novel phenomena.
SARS-CoV-2 isn't very novel. The long-term clinical effects appear to be fairly similar to SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV. There are thousands of survivors from those earlier epidemics whom we can study.
Obviously we can't just sit around for years and wait for evidence to appear. We'll have to move forward based on incomplete information, knowing that some of it will later prove to have been wrong.
> SARS-CoV-2 isn't very novel. The long-term clinical effects appear to be fairly similar to SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV
Sure, novel is a sliding scale.
But it has been novel enough for our immune systems, and that is sufficient reason to be cautious. Also its epidemiologic profile was sufficiently different that our knowledge with sars or mers didn’t help us being in a pandemic right now, which can’t be entirely explained with bad policy decisions.
How can we say the long term effects of sars/mers appear to be similar to covid when we have zero data on long term effects of covid?
I'm no expert. But I am reticent to think that sars/mers and covid are going to have similar long term effects. Mostly due to the strange additional symptoms with covid that don't appear to happen with Sars/mers. Loss of taste and smell is one of them. Infected and inflamed extremeties is another. It seems as though covid is more adept at infecting other types of human tissue rather than just respiratory. Which on a micro level might be a rather small difference but could have very serious long term differences in outcomes.
This term (or the similar "scaremongering") gets thrown around an awful lot in discussions about the novel coronavirus and I don't think it's helpful.
For one thing, it's quite insulting to assume someone is deliberately exaggerating something for manipulation purposes. Please assume some good faith.
It's also a problem in that it doesn't advance the discussion in any way, because it can be applied to just about any topic where you don't like the argument.
Discussing dangers of possible long-term health effects of contracting COVID-19? Fearmongering.
Raising concerns about climate change? Fearmongering.
Studies that show a link between alcohol and heart disease? Fearmongering.
It's such a general-purpose accusation that it's meaningless in most contexts.
I don’t follow. Just because something causes fear doesn’t mean that it tells us anything about its truthiness.
When faced with something novel, the right approach is to be cautious, for some optimal values of novel and cautious. If we were in a timeline where cigarettes or uranium toothpastes were as novel as sars-cov-2, we wouldn’t have established their long term effects yet either.
> Just because something causes fear doesn’t mean that it tells us anything about its truthiness.
Not inherently but the problem is throwing out unscientific speculation without any evidence. This is often done with Covid because fear speculation attracts attention and get clicks/views.
People are hardwired to look for fear - so this sort of irresponsible speculation is dangerous because it spreads like wildfire.
> you shouldn’t believe something without evidence
This is a complete lack of understanding of scientific process and practices. People believe things without evidence all the time, gut feelings for example, and manage to be quite successful at them, I might add.
Stock markets. Startups. Scientific research into unknown categories. All these things require a sense of faith in what might be instead of blind trust in what has been "proven" (which is only to say a belief in a statistical model about a given thing).
Also, nobody said "woosh" so quoting it as if it was said is irrational.
Your bullet 1) is factually incorrect by any measure we have access to today.
"any other influenza" includes the 1918 pandemic. Which had a higher CFR, and that's before trying to account for QALYs: Covid is especially deadly to the old, in a nonlinear way, and Spanish Flu rather notoriously killed those in the prime of life.
Bird flu has an almost 50% CFR. We're lucky that, to date, strains aren't very infectious in humans.
"It's just a flu" is a really bad measure of how bad a disease is. Influenza is terrifying.
2) is almost tautologically true, but it's worth noting that the quarantine measures have been very effective at stopping the spread of other respiratory illnesses.
The excess mortality of Covid is visible, without trying to track deaths from it separately. The average victim is old enough that I wonder if it will remain visible if smoothed out over a five-year period.
We'll know eventually. "Heavy stress for years to come" from post-Covid syndrome is certainly possible; it's not the square upon which I'd lay my chips.
For example, here's a paper going over heart inflamation and the flu, going over data gathered in the last 100 years [0].
> During the Sheffield, England influenza epidemic from 1972 to 1973, the cases of 50 consecutive patients who were initially diagnosed as mild cases and were treated on an outpatient basis were followed. Transient electrocardiogram (ECG) changes were seen in 18 patients, and long-lasting changes were seen in 5 patients.
[0] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.685...