Vast majority of people recover just fine and what ever neurological structural changes are caused by the virus appear to have very little affect.
The article claims that both non-severe and severe patients get the same damage, meaning that globally we have at minimum 10 million people with this damage, probably many time more since most cases aren't tested.
But the article does very little to study if these changes actually effect people and for how long.
Evidence, as well as basic observation points to people recovering very well from the disease (we have over 4 million cases in the US but the number of people with crippling long-term effects is minimal, otherwise we'd be able to observe a massive group of impaired individuals).
The article does very little to illustrate that impact on people.
For example, people who lose their sense of smell, which is listed as symptom in this Chinese study get it back and they get it back faster than when they lose the sense of smell with other viruses:
>For now. We have no idea what kind of long term damage this is going to cause yet.
Has there ever been an influenza/coronavirus-like infection with less than 0.1% fatality rate in working-age people (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/singapore/) that caused lasting disability in a significant proportion of the population? Given how the immune system works it doesn't make sense that someone's body is good enough at fighting the virus that it only displays mild cold-like symptoms yet weak enough that it somehow lets the virus cause serious long-term damage.
I have a cyst on my spine. It doesn't keep me from walking.
But, many days, it keeps me awake and makes it very difficult for me to do physical tasks that I was once able to accomplish with ease.
I used to be able to squat 545lbs. I can hardly lift 100 lbs without assistance. If I do a moderate day of yard work, I am unable to take a shower upright.
All because of a pea-sized cyst.
Just because something isn't fatal, or debilitating to the point of it putting you in a wheel chair, doesn't mean it can't have a massive impact on not only your quality of life and your relationships, it can keep you from being able to adequately care for yourself or be a productive member of society.
> Has there ever been an influenza/coronavirus-like infection with less than 0.1% fatality rate in working-age people (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/singapore/) that caused lasting disability in a significant proportion of the population?
I've read that the low fatality rate of Singapore is due to mostly foreign, younger, healthy workers being the "cases" who were infected. Assuming that, the statistics of Singapore is not in any way inconsistent with what is observed in other locations. We already know that the older people have an order of magnitude higher probabilities to die while infected, or even two orders of magnitude when old enough.
Note that the "fatality rate" in this context then says absolutely nothing about the permanent damages of the people's organs. The fatality rate is just "who promptly died after being detected positive." We don't know how many of Singapore cases remained with worse health after being infected, or even if some died or will die later, after being declared virus-free, and it's not probable that we'll know, them being the foreign workers.
Therefore, it seems that citing Singapore in this way is irrelevant while talking about the known and reported cases of people with damaged health in, for example, the U.S.
Depends on what you consider significant. Even influenza itself is traumatic enough that the risk of long-term effects is part of public health planning; flu vaccines aren't considered so critical because of the "lie in bed eating chicken soup all week" cases. (Although I don't fully endorse everything upthread, and I'd agree there's not much risk of hidden damage where patients we think are recovered will actually end up being disabled.)
Weak symptoms from COVID-19 are likely due to the ~ 30% match with the Mumps vaccine. People who've had their MMR shots do better, on average against SARS-COV-2 than those (like older people) who haven't had it.
When I was fifteen, I had mononucleosis. For about three months, I spent large portions of my time in bed. I didn't go outside, except to go to the doctor for checkups, and to the library on the way back from the doctor's office.
The next five years were awful. I still had bouts of extreme fatigue, muscle soreness, joint pain, inability to concentrate... This lasted for 5 years. (I graduated a semester late from high school. The kids used to joke about my absences that I was working on my time machine and hadn't quite perfected it yet.) At the time, the name "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome" was new coinage. There are other names for it now.
Every so often, I'll get an enlarged spleen, fevers (100+ degrees in the evenings), pain, fatigue. It usually happens when I've been under significant stress (new child, moving, new job, the pandemic). Blood work shows very little, and the symptoms go away after a few weeks.
There's so much we still don't know about how viruses affect us as individuals over the long term. Let alone how we as a species adapt to them. Take Multiple Sclerosis, for example. It turns out that we carry MS in our genes, likely as a adaptation to a virus we once had trouble with. Every so often, something happens to some of us, and the adopted sequence of what was likely an external virus gets activated. That is, MS is an endogenous retrovirus.
Over the longer term, what will SARS-COV-2 do to us? It's really hard to say. I'm going to do my best to avoid it. I have enough trouble dealing with whatever it is I already have.
For those people blathering about "rights", those freedoms you enjoy require corresponding measures of personal responsibility. You have a right not to where a mask, but you have the corresponding responsibility to not be so selfish in enclosed public spaces. If I ask you to wear a mask, I'm not trying to be your nanny attempting to force you into doing what's good for you. It isn't for your protection, it's for mine.
>> But the article does very little to study if these changes actually effect people and for how long.
The higher bilateral gray matter volumes (GMV) in olfactory cortices, hippocampi, insulas, left Rolandic operculum would have long-term consequences which are indeed what it means: "long-term" i.e. too short to see physical manifestations of the impact in this study. But these changes in the brain are in itself horrifying given that the symptoms only manifest as respiratory and so on.
> the number of people with crippling long-term effects is minimal
The thousands of of reported "long haulers" is troubling. While not crippling, feeling tired and feverish every day for months does not sound pleasant. It also raises awareness that viruses in general (not just Covid) could potentially help explain long term lingering health issues.
How bad was your acute phase? Was it like a bad common cold or did you require hospitalization? Also, what symptoms do persist and how bad would you say they are? In what ways is your quality of life affected?
Can you show us any evidence of this happening to "thousands" of people besides the article in the Atlantic? The article that only speculates that there are thousands?
AFIAK the Atlantic article said there were thousands in a Facebook group but the Atlantic did not dig into how many in the group had symptoms or were just there for support.
Besides 1 off "dog bites man" stories the Atlantic article I see little reason to continue to suppress regular day to day life for something like this.
You and others can howl all you want but the reality is the numbers are not on your side. The EMOTIONAL argument is on your side ("think about the children!") but you have almost no imperial evidence and continuing this lifestyle due to what possibly might happen or what happen to less than one one hundredth of a percent of the population is pure madness.
Suppress the many to save the the .00001% from long term complications. Pure, weapons grade insanity.
I am not arguing for suppression. I do want more answers to our health related questions and better testing and diagnoses. Anecdotally my daughter and I were sick a few months ago, (Covid negative), and she and I continually had mild fevers. She is still suffering. We still are continuing with our lives, but it would be nice to understand why.
CFS has long been suspected to be caused by an immune deficiency, causing hard to detect chronic EBV/strep/... infections that result in the manyfold problems affected people have.
Lancet is one of the foremost medical journals. Peer review does not filter out 100% of bad papers.
For very understandable reasons, there's a huge pressure right now to get information about CoVID-19 out to the public (and to the medical community) quickly. That means that more bad papers are going to slip through right now.
But what's the alternative? Would you rather that critical results about CoVID-19 be withheld for longer, in order to more thoroughly vet results? That's reasonable, but it involves a trade-off, and the Lancet would no doubt face criticism in the opposite direction if they withheld papers for longer.
Except when the hypothesis is that COVID and millimeter wave radiation might be linked, that information is ruthlessly censoring by the publishing powers.
If you think this is a conspiracy theory then I doubt you understand much of quantum theory and how photons interact with matter. This experiment were running with millimeter waves is dangerous, and I've yet to see the research that suggests otherwise. I just dont understand how others are not seeing this, were moving far to quickly with our usage of photon manipulation technologies and I dont see the justification for it.
I am reading these negative neural impacts ranging from bad to worse, and I cannot help but think, how come there is not something in nature, a virus or bacteria, on the whole planet that can do something good?
I do not know help boosting confidence, making people happier, increasing cognitive abilities, maybe improving your sense of smell or direction, gain muscle... at least something, instead it is always a very long list of destruction.
Sorry guys, I am trying to offset, reading this paper made me depressive.
EDIT:
After reading all the answers, I remember a quote, probably answer to my question. It is not possible because we are very complex organism, and regardless how some virus or tiny bug can find flaws in our complexity, in the same way as randomly injected piece of code cannot improve application, the same way, is an equal chance that a virus will introduce positive change in our genome which will improve parameters we desire.
Quote was Hoyle's Fallacy used for something completely different: "the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747"
So it seems we need to wait for few million years or to really on marvel of genetically engineering.
The intent behind most of this is to drive a constant sense of fear and worry without any rational cooldown, so expect to be depressed among other things.
Until HN wakes up from fearmongering and "doomscrolling", the beatings will continue.
There are tons of bacteria that are either neutral, good for you, or that you even *need". You just only hear about the ones that are bad for us, because they are comparitively rare.
I know about good bacteria in fact 10 times as many microbial cells in the human body than human cells. We are more symbiotic organism than anything else.
Someone said that "No one noticing when you are healthy because you are healthy",
I was referring more to enhancing nominal abilities, something that will positively change our body, maybe make it stronger, more resistivity, maybe act with our T cells to clean bad bacteria in gut that may cause depression ...
Instead process is always painfully slow, evolution over millions of years, just to get one positive trait.
Toxoplasmosis does a whole host of negative things, but a few that could be considered positive, e.g. "Toxoplasma-infected male students are about 3 cm taller than Toxoplasma-free subjects and their faces are rated by women as more masculine and dominant." (https://jeb.biologists.org/content/216/1/127)
There are a few examples of adaptive addons that we've integrated to the point that we almost don't think of them as separate anymore. Going back really far, mitochondria are eukaryotic organisms that are now just part of our cells. Gut bacteria are likewise pretty vital, especially in ruminant species.
It's just comparatively rare because it's easier to benefit off of an environment non-sustainably (at least in the short term).
In addition to my comment to @magicnubs this is nice but again it is like form of probiotics, it makes your body function in nominal state.
Is there anything that will enhance abilities permanently?
For instance *(I know it is bad example) Caffeine will temporary enhance your state of alertness... etc...
The basic answer is that humans are an evolved system, and any simple unambiguously helpful change in the context of the environment of early humans spread fairly quickly throughout the entire population. If there was an infectious disease that improved sense of smell through any simple mechanism, it's almost certain that either some human somewhere had a mutation that did the same thing, or that "infectious disease" will become a symbiote (see gut bacteria for example).
So the basic answer is "you don't see them because you'd only notice them in the time between first being seen and being present in everyone in the population, which is a very short time compared to the time before they first occurred and the time after they reach 100% of the population".
>> that can do something good? I do not know help boosting confidence, making people happier..
Plants are doing good for the planet and for the living beings all the time (mostly). They provide you oxygen, cooler temperature and food which definitely makes me a happy person. And yet we value consumer products, building commercial centers, roads (for cars), infrastructure for industries over preserving forests.
All true, I have not tried to diminish that in any way. Being healthy is one of the most important things for happy life. I was wandering is there something that make you more than you are, positive DNA change, constructive instead of destructive.
Some naturally "engineered" CAS-9/CRISPER that will make our nominal values better, more adaptive to environment...
There are. Gut flora, whatever proto-germ gave us mitochondria, etc.
Most won't be and new ones are unlikely to be very transmissible (because transmissibility would imply features that would immediately make it negative) not would it be very noticeable (hey doc, my joints feel better than they did yesterday).
Every time there is a discussion on Covid on HN, an army of trolls come out to pooh pooh everything. We are supposed to be better than Reddit here. It's about discussion not dissing. You don't have to agree with everything, but you also should not be ruining the thoughtful discussion.
50 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] threadThe article claims that both non-severe and severe patients get the same damage, meaning that globally we have at minimum 10 million people with this damage, probably many time more since most cases aren't tested.
But the article does very little to study if these changes actually effect people and for how long.
Evidence, as well as basic observation points to people recovering very well from the disease (we have over 4 million cases in the US but the number of people with crippling long-term effects is minimal, otherwise we'd be able to observe a massive group of impaired individuals).
The article does very little to illustrate that impact on people.
For example, people who lose their sense of smell, which is listed as symptom in this Chinese study get it back and they get it back faster than when they lose the sense of smell with other viruses:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/08/thousands...
For now. We have no idea what kind of long term damage this is going to cause yet.
Has there ever been an influenza/coronavirus-like infection with less than 0.1% fatality rate in working-age people (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/singapore/) that caused lasting disability in a significant proportion of the population? Given how the immune system works it doesn't make sense that someone's body is good enough at fighting the virus that it only displays mild cold-like symptoms yet weak enough that it somehow lets the virus cause serious long-term damage.
But, many days, it keeps me awake and makes it very difficult for me to do physical tasks that I was once able to accomplish with ease.
I used to be able to squat 545lbs. I can hardly lift 100 lbs without assistance. If I do a moderate day of yard work, I am unable to take a shower upright.
All because of a pea-sized cyst.
Just because something isn't fatal, or debilitating to the point of it putting you in a wheel chair, doesn't mean it can't have a massive impact on not only your quality of life and your relationships, it can keep you from being able to adequately care for yourself or be a productive member of society.
We lock down until what condition is met?
I've read that the low fatality rate of Singapore is due to mostly foreign, younger, healthy workers being the "cases" who were infected. Assuming that, the statistics of Singapore is not in any way inconsistent with what is observed in other locations. We already know that the older people have an order of magnitude higher probabilities to die while infected, or even two orders of magnitude when old enough.
Note that the "fatality rate" in this context then says absolutely nothing about the permanent damages of the people's organs. The fatality rate is just "who promptly died after being detected positive." We don't know how many of Singapore cases remained with worse health after being infected, or even if some died or will die later, after being declared virus-free, and it's not probable that we'll know, them being the foreign workers.
Therefore, it seems that citing Singapore in this way is irrelevant while talking about the known and reported cases of people with damaged health in, for example, the U.S.
We need other statistics.
The first study I could find from a quick search: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-17497-6
When I was fifteen, I had mononucleosis. For about three months, I spent large portions of my time in bed. I didn't go outside, except to go to the doctor for checkups, and to the library on the way back from the doctor's office.
The next five years were awful. I still had bouts of extreme fatigue, muscle soreness, joint pain, inability to concentrate... This lasted for 5 years. (I graduated a semester late from high school. The kids used to joke about my absences that I was working on my time machine and hadn't quite perfected it yet.) At the time, the name "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome" was new coinage. There are other names for it now.
Every so often, I'll get an enlarged spleen, fevers (100+ degrees in the evenings), pain, fatigue. It usually happens when I've been under significant stress (new child, moving, new job, the pandemic). Blood work shows very little, and the symptoms go away after a few weeks.
There's so much we still don't know about how viruses affect us as individuals over the long term. Let alone how we as a species adapt to them. Take Multiple Sclerosis, for example. It turns out that we carry MS in our genes, likely as a adaptation to a virus we once had trouble with. Every so often, something happens to some of us, and the adopted sequence of what was likely an external virus gets activated. That is, MS is an endogenous retrovirus.
Over the longer term, what will SARS-COV-2 do to us? It's really hard to say. I'm going to do my best to avoid it. I have enough trouble dealing with whatever it is I already have.
For those people blathering about "rights", those freedoms you enjoy require corresponding measures of personal responsibility. You have a right not to where a mask, but you have the corresponding responsibility to not be so selfish in enclosed public spaces. If I ask you to wear a mask, I'm not trying to be your nanny attempting to force you into doing what's good for you. It isn't for your protection, it's for mine.
The higher bilateral gray matter volumes (GMV) in olfactory cortices, hippocampi, insulas, left Rolandic operculum would have long-term consequences which are indeed what it means: "long-term" i.e. too short to see physical manifestations of the impact in this study. But these changes in the brain are in itself horrifying given that the symptoms only manifest as respiratory and so on.
The thousands of of reported "long haulers" is troubling. While not crippling, feeling tired and feverish every day for months does not sound pleasant. It also raises awareness that viruses in general (not just Covid) could potentially help explain long term lingering health issues.
Note I am NOT asking what you think your condition is. I am asking what your doctor is saying.
Can you show us any evidence of this happening to "thousands" of people besides the article in the Atlantic? The article that only speculates that there are thousands?
AFIAK the Atlantic article said there were thousands in a Facebook group but the Atlantic did not dig into how many in the group had symptoms or were just there for support.
Besides 1 off "dog bites man" stories the Atlantic article I see little reason to continue to suppress regular day to day life for something like this.
You and others can howl all you want but the reality is the numbers are not on your side. The EMOTIONAL argument is on your side ("think about the children!") but you have almost no imperial evidence and continuing this lifestyle due to what possibly might happen or what happen to less than one one hundredth of a percent of the population is pure madness.
Suppress the many to save the the .00001% from long term complications. Pure, weapons grade insanity.
Maybe you meant to post this to another online community, but people don't generally talk that way here. Franciscofascii was not "howling".
https://bgr.com/2020/07/27/coronavirus-symptoms-return-after...
https://www.statnews.com/2020/06/04/lancet-retracts-major-co...
For very understandable reasons, there's a huge pressure right now to get information about CoVID-19 out to the public (and to the medical community) quickly. That means that more bad papers are going to slip through right now.
But what's the alternative? Would you rather that critical results about CoVID-19 be withheld for longer, in order to more thoroughly vet results? That's reasonable, but it involves a trade-off, and the Lancet would no doubt face criticism in the opposite direction if they withheld papers for longer.
If people want that "information" its free for the taking on reddit, 4chan and facebook memes.
EDIT: After reading all the answers, I remember a quote, probably answer to my question. It is not possible because we are very complex organism, and regardless how some virus or tiny bug can find flaws in our complexity, in the same way as randomly injected piece of code cannot improve application, the same way, is an equal chance that a virus will introduce positive change in our genome which will improve parameters we desire.
Quote was Hoyle's Fallacy used for something completely different: "the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747"
So it seems we need to wait for few million years or to really on marvel of genetically engineering.
p.s. Thank you guys!
Until HN wakes up from fearmongering and "doomscrolling", the beatings will continue.
I was referring more to enhancing nominal abilities, something that will positively change our body, maybe make it stronger, more resistivity, maybe act with our T cells to clean bad bacteria in gut that may cause depression ...
Instead process is always painfully slow, evolution over millions of years, just to get one positive trait.
It's just comparatively rare because it's easier to benefit off of an environment non-sustainably (at least in the short term).
Is there anything that will enhance abilities permanently? For instance *(I know it is bad example) Caffeine will temporary enhance your state of alertness... etc...
There is some tick, or insect whose bite/sting makes you allergic to eating meat. Forcefully vegetarian, so to speak.
edit: [1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/alpha-gal-syn...
So the basic answer is "you don't see them because you'd only notice them in the time between first being seen and being present in everyone in the population, which is a very short time compared to the time before they first occurred and the time after they reach 100% of the population".
Plants are doing good for the planet and for the living beings all the time (mostly). They provide you oxygen, cooler temperature and food which definitely makes me a happy person. And yet we value consumer products, building commercial centers, roads (for cars), infrastructure for industries over preserving forests.
Some naturally "engineered" CAS-9/CRISPER that will make our nominal values better, more adaptive to environment...
Most won't be and new ones are unlikely to be very transmissible (because transmissibility would imply features that would immediately make it negative) not would it be very noticeable (hey doc, my joints feel better than they did yesterday).