This sort of thing is one of the more disturbing things to me about COVID-19, and why I wish there was a less exclusive focus on death in talking about the pandemic. Clearly that's important but there's these hugely significant problems not captured by focusing solely on death.
Is there some reason to expect that covid-19 is different in long term effects than a flu? This study is saying it causes substantial brain damage, right? What possible mechanism is there for this?
Unlike the flu, SARS-CoV-2 causes micro-clots, which damage tissues that are capillary-heavy.
This doesn't matter so much for, say, your liver, which (given time, and luck, and otherwise decent health) can recover, but matters greatly for your slow-growing brain, or your lungs (dat popcorn scan)
Lots of diseases result in nerve damage. Polio was famous for this, after all. Different viruses infect different tissues. This is why we don't like getting sick, and push vaccines where we can.
Infectious diseases that don't have long term effects are actually comparatively few in numbers -- those are the ones we tend to "get sick" with, for the simple reason that they aren't worth the effort of trying to control.
This "flu" thing just won't die. No one expert EVER likened covid to "the flu", beyond pointing out that, like Influenza, it presents as an upper respiratory infection. Everyone knew from that first cluster in Wuhan that this was much, much more dangerous. Everyone told you that. Everyone trustworthy, anyway.
So why do you continue to insist, after nineteen months, that this is just "the flu"?
I agree with you that there are people who cavalierly dismiss the dangers of covid. But there are also people who oversell and exaggerate the dangers as well. Both are doing a disservice to people and society in general in my opinion.
Perhaps you meant covid is much more dangerous to some portions of the population while the flu was more dangerous to other portions of the population? Though I guess things could change in the future with more data and information.
> I agree with you that there are people who cavalierly dismiss the dangers of covid.
Don't call it the flu. It's not the flu. It's killed 20x more people than the flu even in the fact of pervasive society-changing mitigation strategies (all while the flu itself has all but gone extinct, remember! All that masking and distance learning actually worked!). It's not the flu.
Beyond that, nitpick with my phrasing all you like. This is HN, after all.
Not disagreeing that Covid19 is a much more lethal disease, can you point to some reference that compares covid death to flu related death (prior to covid).
Worst season in recent memory was 61k deaths among influenza patients. Last year saw 600k americans die of covid.
Meanwhile flu fatalities cratered due to the pandemic response. Full data isn't available yet, but this site has some details (e.g. pediatric flu deaths dropped between 37x and 199x -- there was ONE child who died of the flu last year):
> Worst season in recent memory was 61k deaths among influenza patients. Last year saw 600k americans die of covid.
Those aren't directly comparable because the various flus have been circulating for years/decades and people have died all across that time. While people do have cross-immunity with sars-cov-2 and other coronaviruses, sars-cov-2 is new so it's hitting those decades of people all at once.
The currently estimated IFR across all age groups is around 0.15%, putting it on-par with the flu (something like 0.07% IIRC; this one is hard to pin down because there's a lot of different flus). And in the past few months, cases have spiked without a spike in deaths all over the place, so that 0.15% is probably going to drop more, especially with indications that the Delta variant is more infections but less serious. (That said the effect the past few months could be the effect of the vaccines; it's not clear to me if that's supposed to affect the estimated IFR or that estimation is for a vulnerable population (but I'm not sure how you could estimate a vulnerable population for one that's been around for a while, so I think it does still count))
> Acknowledging residual uncertainties, the available evidence suggests average global IFR of ~0.15% and ~1.5-2.0 billion infections by February 2021 with substantial differences in IFR and in infection spread across continents, countries and locations.
Good grief. I don't even have to click on that to know you've misinterpreted or the paper is garbage. We've measured 600k US deaths (with a real count somewhat higher, excess death metrics usually overshoot that by 20-30%)? You'd need 400M+ Americans to even make that work. What's the contention here, magic unmeasured multiple infections? People dying more than once?
Yes, that's exactly right. It can only be true if there were 400M US covid infections. There are only 330M americans. I'll put my basic math skills up against any "high quality source" with a claim this ridiculous. The IFR is just plain not 0.15%. Period. That value is simply wrong. Or the paper might be from very early in the pandemic (and... wrong). Or most likely the comment above has simply misinterpreted it, deliberately or not.
An IFR of 0.15% for covid is laughably ridiculous.
As such, the "IFR" for a country is going to vary dramatically with the age of the population. It isn't particularly meaningful to talk about IFR as a single number, but it's decidedly true that for anyone under 60, the risk of death is measured in fractions of a percent.
For those under 25, the risk is measured in thousandths of a percent.
Meanwhile flu fatalities cratered due to the pandemic response.
That's not at all clear. Different areas have had vastly different levels of response to Covid, but the flu disappeared everywhere. So either minimal levels of non-pharmaceutical interventions are sufficient to virtually eradicate the flu, or something else is going on. Viral interference seems likely: https://www.statnews.com/2021/01/31/a-viral-mystery-can-one-...
No, it's 100% true. Flu deaths are just data. You can't argue with data. You're engaging in excuse-making to try to rule out the most obvious hypothesis for the enormous drop in deaths. You can't deny that it happened.
And while such excuses do exist, they don't represent consensus opinions anywhere. Those who believe them are essentially 1:1 with those who want to believe that covid "is only as bad as the flu", which is provably false.
The original commenter didn't call it the flu as far as I can tell. He wrote: "Is there some reason to expect that covid-19 is different in long term effects than a flu? This study is saying it causes substantial brain damage, right? What possible mechanism is there for this?".
Nowhere did he call it the flu.
> It's killed 20x more people than the flu even in the fact of pervasive society-changing mitigation strategies (all while the flu itself has all but gone extinct, remember! All that masking and distance learning actually worked!).
No. It killed 20x more people than the flu in 2020 to now. But the flu has killed far more people overall. The flu epidemic of 1918 killed 50 million people, far more than covid.
> Beyond that, nitpick with my phrasing all you like. This is HN, after all.
It's not the phrasing, you know that. You outright contradicted the CDC which makes your comment misinformation.
> It's not the flu.
In your zeal, you falsely attributed a statement/argument to a person and argued against it. In one of my philosophy classes, I learned that it was called building a straw man. It's a logical fallacy.
Your heart may be in the right place, but you aren't helping. Though I'm starting to believe the fanatics on both sides deep down want covid to ravage the world and that neither side has their heart in the right place.
Why not? They have many things in common. For example make they both make you sick, often with similar symptoms.
If you're arguing that you shouldn't dismiss the danger of covid because of its flu like nature, then be my guest but asking not to make comparisons between things doesn't strike me as a very smart thing to do.
Covid can be dangerous and similar to the flu at the same time.
I'm curious what you're citing here. I've actually seen lots and lots of charts that show the opposite. Are you maybe thinking of some of the non-scientific arguments that included the initial (extremely large) March 2020 outbreak in NYC in the "mask wearing" bucket, despite the fact that almost all those infections occurred before the lockdown?
I don't have anything offhand anymore, it's more from a variety of sources over the whole past year. But from what I've seen most people cite, and the way you mentioned NYC, I'm guessing the charts you've seen are single location over time, rather than results across comparable locations (which is what I'm remembering - one example, months ago there was a test someone made for fun that showed you case/death outcome curves for various comparable locations and you had to pick out which one(s) did or did not have measures taken. I didn't save the link and have been looking for it on and off since then, but haven't been able to find it).
The problem with those one-location-over-time ones is that quite often people don't take into account the incubation period and testing delay - for example, in Illinois cases started dropping the day stricter lockdowns went into effect Nov last year, which means it wasn't the stricter lockdown that did it because the effects of the lockdowns would've taken 2-3 weeks to show up in the numbers.
This seems like an overly pedantic approach. How many children younger than 5 are around posting on HN?
Granted, people here may have children of that age. But we're also talking about the expected value of vaccines as well. While I haven't kept on current information, last I heard vaccines also weren't approved for such young kids either.
Could they have been more exactingly accurate with their language? Sure. But the issue was small and basically entirely irrelevant given both the venue and topic at hand. Yet you basically tried to present this as an all-round smashing of their entire point.
> because the CDC says on their website that the flu is more dangerous than covid for young people.
Depends what you're defining as young people. Under 5 as in those quotes, maybe virtually no risk. But I know otherwise healthy people in their 20s who got sick over a year ago. Their sense of smell and taste is still completely fried with no sign of recovery.
Maybe that can happen with a bad flu sometimes, but it seems way more common with covid. It seems like there's some nerve damage resulting from the virus that we don't yet fully understand.
The vaccine seemed like a safer gamble than potentially forever losing my ability to taste, or worse.
> Their sense of smell and taste is still completely fried with no sign of recovery.
This is exceptionally rare. The vast majority of people who develop anosmia regain their smell and taste. And yes, it does happen with other viruses.
> Maybe that can happen with a bad flu sometimes, but it seems way more common with covid.
The danger here is the distance between what it "seems" like, and what it actually is. If you're basing your judgment on media reports, you have to understand that you're not getting a balanced picture. The news media dwells on the most exceptional examples, and neglects the (many more) examples of people who have no serious side effects at all.
> It seems like there's some nerve damage resulting from the virus that we don't yet fully understand.
The current best evidence is that the loss of smell is not nerve damage, but infection of the epithelial cells surrounding the nerves in the nose.
> I'm basing my experience on people I know who got infected. So are many other people who got vaccinated.
At this point, I know -- quite literally -- well over a dozen people who have had it. Varying ages. None had anything more than a mild illness. Nobody had lingering symptoms of any consequence (maybe a cough).
Either your sample is statistically skewed, my sample is statistically skewed, or....there is some creative remembering happening here.
> People who are screaming about the vaccine being a bigger risk than the virus are the ones being fed info by outrageous media reporting.
I am not going to defend every person saying this, but there are certain age groups in which this is absolutely true. The EU is not recommending vaccination of children for exactly this reason.
Free-floating spike protein is capable of crossing the blood/brain barrier. It's one of the reasons some people are wary of the long-term side-effects of the vaccines.
I guess it’s a good thing that the vaccine makes spike protein within your deltoid muscle cells, so it can’t float over to your brain. And it all gets quickly degraded anyway.
He/she/it was informed about the banning, but didn't understand it (or missed the comment) and has kept posting for three years. (Mostly a string of the same, characteristic one-liner quips.)
> We identified significant effects of COVID-19 in the brain with a loss of grey matter in the left parahippocampal gyrus, the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex and the left insula. When looking over the entire cortical surface, these results extended to the anterior cingulate cortex, supramarginal gyrus and temporal pole. We further compared COVID-19 patients who had been hospitalised (n=15) with those who had not (n=379), and while results were not significant, we found comparatively similar findings to the COVID-19 vs control group comparison [...]
The part that needs more research is the level of difference between hospitalized and non-hospitalized COVID patients. They only had 15 who were hospitalized.
> Unlike in post hoc disease studies, the availability of pre-infection imaging data helps avoid ...
That depends on why the earlier brain scans were done.
edit - I didn't find discussion on the UK one, but an Australian study found those with some health concerns were more likely to accept the invitation. Not surprising.
This is concerning, would be interesting to add post vaccination scans (to see if there are any similar effects triggered) and post vaccination post COVID exposure (to see if vaccination is protective)
Quote from https://apnews.com/article/health-coronavirus-pandemic-79959...
"Citing new information about the variant’s ability to spread among vaccinated people, the CDC also recommended indoor masks for all teachers, staff, students and visitors at schools nationwide, regardless of vaccination status."
If someone is vaccinated AND still spreading the virus, is it any different from having an asymthomatic case of COVID?
According to the article, even an asymptomatic case carries a risk of brain damage.
As a corollary, the vaccine may save you from the disease, but not from the brain damage. Is this a correct assessment?
> If someone is vaccinated AND still spreading the virus, is it any different from having an asymthomatic case of COVID?
It carries about an order of magnitude lower risk of hospitalization or death, so... yes. Yes, it is very different. We don't know about long term effects, those are, y'know, long term and hard to study in this kind of timeframe. Which is why the linked article is notable.
Also note that risk of transmission is about 10x lower (vs. delta, better vs. the older variants) for the vaccinated. So even if they're just as likely to see long term CNS issues from infection they're vastly less likely to be infected in the first place.
I don't think this article changes the vaccine calculus at all. Get your shot. It's your best protection against everything to do with covid.
It's hard for some of us, myself included. I'm a hospital physician in a suburban American hospital. I don't know a single physician who was even hospitalized with COVID-19. I know two physicians who died from the vaccine, one who bled to death with DIC in my care. I know of another in our area who is permanently disabled with transverse myelitis after the vaccine. I'm not alone, despite what you've heard generally about physicians, when I say I have some very controversial and unpopular opinions about vaccination of low-risk individuals, regardless of how that impacts the at-risk population. Selfish, yes, but in my opinion the reaction to this virus has been far more damaging than the virus itself. Throwaway for obvious reasons, as I would be fired for even sharing my opinions.
I'm sorry, but that seems to be an impossible claim. In fact there are zero cases (edit: two people have come by to cite statistics on all-cause death numbers, which aren't responsive here. PLEASE be careful with your numbers, people, those values include folks who died of car accidents and heroin overdoses, etc...) where the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines are generally believed to have caused death, and 3 (three) deaths in the US from clotting associated with the J&J vaccine. It strains credulity that two of those three were associates of yours, sorry.
In fact IIRC the overall death rate (i.e. just counting how many people died of all causes following vaccine administration) has, in fact (this is hardly surprising given the general pandemic environment) been shown to be significantly lower for the vaccinated.
I don't know what you're citing, but it doesn't track with existing science, sorry.
> I would be fired for even sharing my opinions.
My guess is it would be your factual assertions and not your "opinions" that would get you in trouble.
"Reports of death after COVID-19 vaccination are rare. More than 342 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines were administered in the United States from December 14, 2020, through July 26, 2021. During this time, VAERS received 6,340 reports of death (0.0019%) among people who received a COVID-19 vaccine."
Exactly, that is an overall death rate, which IIRC is lower than the death rate among the unvaccinated population! It shows the opposite of what you think it does.
Other vaccine trials were shut down immediately with less than 100 deaths. Suddenly we are accepting of THOUSANDS of deaths due to a vaccine, possibly more unreported? Utter Scientific Religion level beliefs going on here.
The vaccine isn't expected to prevent all-cause mortality, though.
People will die no matter whether they're vaccinated or not, the question is a) will they die because of covid and b) will they die because of the vaccine. Your statistics do not even approach this question.
This is governments own website, not "my statistics". Its a tracking system to report suspected adverse effects. As in a physician reported an adverse effect they noticed in the patient, soon after the admission of the vaccine. It does not include any potential long term effects. As we don't know them yet.
Sorry, you don't get to cite data incorrectly, get corrected, and then perform your own amateur epidemiology live on the internet to nitpick your way back to the argument. If you genuinely believe the vaccine is killing people, you need to find an expert saying that.
You do understand it also does not mean they are related to the vaccine, right?
I mean, putting aside the grasping as straws aspect of this claim, let's look at your original claim: in a country where there are already 20 million person's who already were administered the vaccine, and given that by your own account you can only put together two dozen cases among those 20 million that are not ruled out vaccine side-effects, don't you agree that the tradeoff is clear?
Well you don't know the long term effects. So you can't say the trade off is worth it. It's just blind optimism on your part, not even shared by the vaccine manufacturers, that put in their government contracts clauses that they will not guarantee that it works or take liability for any side effects. Despite making billions on these drugs.
"However, the leaky vaccine changes this evolutionary pressure and permits the evolution of highly virulent strains.[13] The vaccine's inability to prevent infection and transmission allows the spread of highly virulent strains among vaccinated chickens."
Note that this number includes e.g. people who were hit by a bus after leaving the vaccination centre. It’s not at all a useful statistic for determining vaccine safety.
1) You are assuming that the current set of vaccines will stop the spread of this disease. This is already in doubt due to break away strains. In fact, it's possible that the currently vaccinated will be more susceptible to spread the new strains. This week's mask mandate was all about the vaccinated spreading the delta strain and having more viral load in their nose .
Naturally gained immunity is know to offer more protection from being reinfected with the virus. People that carry antibodies because they had the disease are more resilient because their immune system recognizes the virus by more than just the spike protein.
2. You are assuming 22,000,000 would otherwise get infected with Covid. This is not necessarily true. Young people don't get sick. Herd immunity, therapeutics and better future treatments make this unlikely.
3. We don't know the long term effects of the vaccine yet, thus can't make an ultimate call on the actual comparative rates of deaths. Hypothetically, what if the vaccine reduces life expectancy by 10 years, of millions of people.
Would it still be better than natural herd immunity.
1) Studies show that vaccinated don't stop the spread of the variants but still slow it down compared to the not vaccinated.
>In fact, it's possible that the currently vaccinated will be more susceptible to spread the new strains.
On what is that assumption based? The vaccination effect is based on normal antibodies of the immune system, so there is no big difference between vaccinated and recovered.
2) You are confusing infection with infection disease. You can be sure you will get infected by the corona virus but that doesn't mean you'll get COVID. If 22,000,000 people get the corona virus if with low IFR like 0.003 you get 660 deaths and that's only for people under 30.
Additionally you are ignoring the effect of the variants you are referencing in 1)
Young people are more likely to get sick by the variants and herd immunity is based on antibodies and therefore have the same problem as he vaccine based antibodies. A new variant could make them equally useless.
3) We don't know the long term effects by corona either.
In contrast to the vaccines, we have already found evidence of organ damage in the heart , lungs and kidneys with Corona, which may not disappear even in the long term.
The bottom line is that the risk without vaccination is much higher than with vaccination.
I sincerely question this. Please provide references, as I’m seeing single digit numbers of documented cases for both DIC and Transverse Myelitis caused by the vaccine.
I in no way think those numbers are complete, but given the number of doses given and the astonishing rarity of those very specific issues, I have to question your comment.
I’m in an extraordinarily healthy population (military) and I know of no one that has had any reactions at all, as a counterpoint. Given the political leanings of my peer group, I’m positive I would have heard about it.
> I know two physicians who died from the vaccine, one who bled to death with DIC in my care. I know of another in our area who is permanently disabled with transverse myelitis after the vaccine.
Do you have a VAERS ID number? Do you have a link to a news report you can share? Not to be dark, but do you have a link to an obituary?
Because it's a little hard to take your claims as anything more than unsourced anecdotes that can be summed up by the CDCs adverse events statistics.
> We don't know about long term effects, those are, y'know, long term and hard to study in this kind of timeframe. Which is why the linked article is notable.
This is priceless, as, for the same reasons, we do not know the long term effects of any of the vaccines either.
Vaccinated people get in contact with the virus as much as the non vaccinated.
The virus invades the bodies and start multiplying in both populations.
The difference is that the vaccinated body is prepared to immediately attack the virus, something that takes weeks for the unvaccinated body to figure out.
So during the short interval when the vaccinated body hasn't yet wiped out the virus, the person is technically infected, will test positive, and can probably transmit some of the few viruses it has.
But that both vaccinated and unvaccinated can transmit the virus does NOT mean the danger levels are anywhere near similar!
This is probably why so many athletes get positive tests. If you get tested every day, you can get a positive test while a minor infection is defeated, even though you don't feel any symptoms.
> Vaccinated people get in contact with the virus as much as the non vaccinated.
Is this known to be true, or is it an assumption you're making in your analysis?
Just curious, because I would have expected people who refuse to be vaccinated to also be more likely to socialize in ways that expose them to the virus.
> The difference is that the vaccinated body is prepared to immediately attack the virus, something that takes weeks for the unvaccinated body to figure out.
Then vaccine side effects literally ruin your life if you get them. You will be sick, weak, perhaps unable to walk anymore, perhaps constantly shaking.
So many young people have gotten their lives completely ruined by trusting these vaccines. Anyone can go to CovidVaccinated on reddit and see the horrors people experience.
Most vaccinated people are fine (although we have no idea if they will continue to be fine or not, could be birth defects, infertility, or anything else that shows in months or years).
To me it's very stupid to risk your life for this vaccine. Its dangerous.
That's a great question.
Another interesting one is whether these vaccines are preventing cases of Long Covid.
I feel World leaders are conveniently being quiet about these questions, and focusing too much on the drop of death counts only. It's an attempt to rush and re-open the economy at any cost.
If you lose smell, then the brain will shift smell-related resources to other functions.
Any large-scale body damage should cause "brain damage," though it's possibly a little misleading to call it that (of course I'm not enough of a neuroscientist to know if that's all that's at play here).
102 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27569772
Related discussion on another study in the same area (covid effects on cognition) using alternative methods:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27939481
This doesn't matter so much for, say, your liver, which (given time, and luck, and otherwise decent health) can recover, but matters greatly for your slow-growing brain, or your lungs (dat popcorn scan)
Infectious diseases that don't have long term effects are actually comparatively few in numbers -- those are the ones we tend to "get sick" with, for the simple reason that they aren't worth the effort of trying to control.
This "flu" thing just won't die. No one expert EVER likened covid to "the flu", beyond pointing out that, like Influenza, it presents as an upper respiratory infection. Everyone knew from that first cluster in Wuhan that this was much, much more dangerous. Everyone told you that. Everyone trustworthy, anyway.
So why do you continue to insist, after nineteen months, that this is just "the flu"?
A lot of viruses do really shitty things to you. HIV, HPV, etc etc
And we've seen covid pass the BBB in mice. So expect more info like this.
I hope you find the CDC to be trustworthy because the CDC says on their website that the flu is more dangerous than covid for young people.
"For young children, especially children younger than 5 years old, the risk of serious complications is higher for flu compared with COVID-19."
"However, for adolescents, the risk of serious COVID-19 illness is less than in children younger than 5."
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/symptoms/flu-vs-covid19.htm
I agree with you that there are people who cavalierly dismiss the dangers of covid. But there are also people who oversell and exaggerate the dangers as well. Both are doing a disservice to people and society in general in my opinion.
Perhaps you meant covid is much more dangerous to some portions of the population while the flu was more dangerous to other portions of the population? Though I guess things could change in the future with more data and information.
Don't call it the flu. It's not the flu. It's killed 20x more people than the flu even in the fact of pervasive society-changing mitigation strategies (all while the flu itself has all but gone extinct, remember! All that masking and distance learning actually worked!). It's not the flu.
Beyond that, nitpick with my phrasing all you like. This is HN, after all.
It's not the flu.
Worst season in recent memory was 61k deaths among influenza patients. Last year saw 600k americans die of covid.
Meanwhile flu fatalities cratered due to the pandemic response. Full data isn't available yet, but this site has some details (e.g. pediatric flu deaths dropped between 37x and 199x -- there was ONE child who died of the flu last year):
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/season/faq-flu-season-2020-2021.htm
Those aren't directly comparable because the various flus have been circulating for years/decades and people have died all across that time. While people do have cross-immunity with sars-cov-2 and other coronaviruses, sars-cov-2 is new so it's hitting those decades of people all at once.
The currently estimated IFR across all age groups is around 0.15%, putting it on-par with the flu (something like 0.07% IIRC; this one is hard to pin down because there's a lot of different flus). And in the past few months, cases have spiked without a spike in deaths all over the place, so that 0.15% is probably going to drop more, especially with indications that the Delta variant is more infections but less serious. (That said the effect the past few months could be the effect of the vaccines; it's not clear to me if that's supposed to affect the estimated IFR or that estimation is for a vulnerable population (but I'm not sure how you could estimate a vulnerable population for one that's been around for a while, so I think it does still count))
Yeah, that's gonna need one hell of a cite. This is false.
> Acknowledging residual uncertainties, the available evidence suggests average global IFR of ~0.15% and ~1.5-2.0 billion infections by February 2021 with substantial differences in IFR and in infection spread across continents, countries and locations.
An IFR of 0.15% for covid is laughably ridiculous.
The difficulty with "global average IFR" is that it neglects the massive variation in IFR by age. This Nature paper:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2918-0
made an attempt to break down the IFR by demographic, and found an almost 100,000-fold difference between the youngest and the oldest groups:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2918-0/figures/2
As such, the "IFR" for a country is going to vary dramatically with the age of the population. It isn't particularly meaningful to talk about IFR as a single number, but it's decidedly true that for anyone under 60, the risk of death is measured in fractions of a percent.
For those under 25, the risk is measured in thousandths of a percent.
That's not at all clear. Different areas have had vastly different levels of response to Covid, but the flu disappeared everywhere. So either minimal levels of non-pharmaceutical interventions are sufficient to virtually eradicate the flu, or something else is going on. Viral interference seems likely: https://www.statnews.com/2021/01/31/a-viral-mystery-can-one-...
And while such excuses do exist, they don't represent consensus opinions anywhere. Those who believe them are essentially 1:1 with those who want to believe that covid "is only as bad as the flu", which is provably false.
The original commenter didn't call it the flu as far as I can tell. He wrote: "Is there some reason to expect that covid-19 is different in long term effects than a flu? This study is saying it causes substantial brain damage, right? What possible mechanism is there for this?".
Nowhere did he call it the flu.
> It's killed 20x more people than the flu even in the fact of pervasive society-changing mitigation strategies (all while the flu itself has all but gone extinct, remember! All that masking and distance learning actually worked!).
No. It killed 20x more people than the flu in 2020 to now. But the flu has killed far more people overall. The flu epidemic of 1918 killed 50 million people, far more than covid.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/reconstruction-19...
> Beyond that, nitpick with my phrasing all you like. This is HN, after all.
It's not the phrasing, you know that. You outright contradicted the CDC which makes your comment misinformation.
> It's not the flu.
In your zeal, you falsely attributed a statement/argument to a person and argued against it. In one of my philosophy classes, I learned that it was called building a straw man. It's a logical fallacy.
Your heart may be in the right place, but you aren't helping. Though I'm starting to believe the fanatics on both sides deep down want covid to ravage the world and that neither side has their heart in the right place.
Do. Not. Liken. Covid. To. The. Flu.
If you didn't, good! Don't.
If you're arguing that you shouldn't dismiss the danger of covid because of its flu like nature, then be my guest but asking not to make comparisons between things doesn't strike me as a very smart thing to do.
Covid can be dangerous and similar to the flu at the same time.
Across US states, there is no correlation, let alone causation, between stringency of masks/social distancing/lockdown and outcome.
The problem with those one-location-over-time ones is that quite often people don't take into account the incubation period and testing delay - for example, in Illinois cases started dropping the day stricter lockdowns went into effect Nov last year, which means it wasn't the stricter lockdown that did it because the effects of the lockdowns would've taken 2-3 weeks to show up in the numbers.
https://www.covidchartsquiz.com/
Granted, people here may have children of that age. But we're also talking about the expected value of vaccines as well. While I haven't kept on current information, last I heard vaccines also weren't approved for such young kids either.
Could they have been more exactingly accurate with their language? Sure. But the issue was small and basically entirely irrelevant given both the venue and topic at hand. Yet you basically tried to present this as an all-round smashing of their entire point.
Depends what you're defining as young people. Under 5 as in those quotes, maybe virtually no risk. But I know otherwise healthy people in their 20s who got sick over a year ago. Their sense of smell and taste is still completely fried with no sign of recovery.
Maybe that can happen with a bad flu sometimes, but it seems way more common with covid. It seems like there's some nerve damage resulting from the virus that we don't yet fully understand.
The vaccine seemed like a safer gamble than potentially forever losing my ability to taste, or worse.
This is exceptionally rare. The vast majority of people who develop anosmia regain their smell and taste. And yes, it does happen with other viruses.
> Maybe that can happen with a bad flu sometimes, but it seems way more common with covid.
The danger here is the distance between what it "seems" like, and what it actually is. If you're basing your judgment on media reports, you have to understand that you're not getting a balanced picture. The news media dwells on the most exceptional examples, and neglects the (many more) examples of people who have no serious side effects at all.
> It seems like there's some nerve damage resulting from the virus that we don't yet fully understand.
The current best evidence is that the loss of smell is not nerve damage, but infection of the epithelial cells surrounding the nerves in the nose.
People who are screaming about the vaccine being a bigger risk than the virus are the ones being fed info by outrageous media reporting.
At this point, I know -- quite literally -- well over a dozen people who have had it. Varying ages. None had anything more than a mild illness. Nobody had lingering symptoms of any consequence (maybe a cough).
Either your sample is statistically skewed, my sample is statistically skewed, or....there is some creative remembering happening here.
> People who are screaming about the vaccine being a bigger risk than the virus are the ones being fed info by outrageous media reporting.
I am not going to defend every person saying this, but there are certain age groups in which this is absolutely true. The EU is not recommending vaccination of children for exactly this reason.
Free-floating spike protein is capable of crossing the blood/brain barrier. It's one of the reasons some people are wary of the long-term side-effects of the vaccines.
There's way more molecular mimicry between this virus and our tissues than any flu virus. This is a recipe for long term autoimmune diseases.
So what does this mean, need more research?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17549790
Almost exactly three years ago, on July 17, 2018.
He/she/it was informed about the banning, but didn't understand it (or missed the comment) and has kept posting for three years. (Mostly a string of the same, characteristic one-liner quips.)
From the abstract:
> We identified significant effects of COVID-19 in the brain with a loss of grey matter in the left parahippocampal gyrus, the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex and the left insula. When looking over the entire cortical surface, these results extended to the anterior cingulate cortex, supramarginal gyrus and temporal pole. We further compared COVID-19 patients who had been hospitalised (n=15) with those who had not (n=379), and while results were not significant, we found comparatively similar findings to the COVID-19 vs control group comparison [...]
> Unlike in post hoc disease studies, the availability of pre-infection imaging data helps avoid ...
That depends on why the earlier brain scans were done.
edit - I didn't find discussion on the UK one, but an Australian study found those with some health concerns were more likely to accept the invitation. Not surprising.
If someone is vaccinated AND still spreading the virus, is it any different from having an asymthomatic case of COVID?
According to the article, even an asymptomatic case carries a risk of brain damage.
As a corollary, the vaccine may save you from the disease, but not from the brain damage. Is this a correct assessment?
It carries about an order of magnitude lower risk of hospitalization or death, so... yes. Yes, it is very different. We don't know about long term effects, those are, y'know, long term and hard to study in this kind of timeframe. Which is why the linked article is notable.
Also note that risk of transmission is about 10x lower (vs. delta, better vs. the older variants) for the vaccinated. So even if they're just as likely to see long term CNS issues from infection they're vastly less likely to be infected in the first place.
I don't think this article changes the vaccine calculus at all. Get your shot. It's your best protection against everything to do with covid.
In fact IIRC the overall death rate (i.e. just counting how many people died of all causes following vaccine administration) has, in fact (this is hardly surprising given the general pandemic environment) been shown to be significantly lower for the vaccinated.
I don't know what you're citing, but it doesn't track with existing science, sorry.
> I would be fired for even sharing my opinions.
My guess is it would be your factual assertions and not your "opinions" that would get you in trouble.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/ad...
This is also not a vaccine trial, there are far more people who have been vaccinated than would be in any trial, by orders of magnitude.
"Up to and including July 16, 2021, a total of 152 deaths were reported after the administration of a vaccine."
https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/vaccine-safety/#a...
People will die no matter whether they're vaccinated or not, the question is a) will they die because of covid and b) will they die because of the vaccine. Your statistics do not even approach this question.
- 33 are under investigation
- 61 unrelated to the vaccine
- 52 had insufficient information to determine if the vaccine was linked to the death
and finally the piece of information we're interested in:
- 6 due to TTS (a known side-effect), all from people who received the COVISHIELD/AstraZeneca vaccine
Is not the same as 61 unrelated to the vaccine.
You do understand it also does not mean they are related to the vaccine, right?
I mean, putting aside the grasping as straws aspect of this claim, let's look at your original claim: in a country where there are already 20 million person's who already were administered the vaccine, and given that by your own account you can only put together two dozen cases among those 20 million that are not ruled out vaccine side-effects, don't you agree that the tradeoff is clear?
To put it accurately, there is absolutely no indication that any vaccine has any long-term effect whatsoever.
Doesn't this mean you are trying to analyze tradeoffs of a problem that does not exist in the plane of reality?
"However, the leaky vaccine changes this evolutionary pressure and permits the evolution of highly virulent strains.[13] The vaccine's inability to prevent infection and transmission allows the spread of highly virulent strains among vaccinated chickens."
44,694,799 total doses administered, if all of these were two shots than that would be over 22,000,000 people.
What is the death rate of 22,000,000 infected people without vaccination?
1) You are assuming that the current set of vaccines will stop the spread of this disease. This is already in doubt due to break away strains. In fact, it's possible that the currently vaccinated will be more susceptible to spread the new strains. This week's mask mandate was all about the vaccinated spreading the delta strain and having more viral load in their nose . Naturally gained immunity is know to offer more protection from being reinfected with the virus. People that carry antibodies because they had the disease are more resilient because their immune system recognizes the virus by more than just the spike protein.
2. You are assuming 22,000,000 would otherwise get infected with Covid. This is not necessarily true. Young people don't get sick. Herd immunity, therapeutics and better future treatments make this unlikely.
3. We don't know the long term effects of the vaccine yet, thus can't make an ultimate call on the actual comparative rates of deaths. Hypothetically, what if the vaccine reduces life expectancy by 10 years, of millions of people. Would it still be better than natural herd immunity.
2) You are confusing infection with infection disease. You can be sure you will get infected by the corona virus but that doesn't mean you'll get COVID. If 22,000,000 people get the corona virus if with low IFR like 0.003 you get 660 deaths and that's only for people under 30. Additionally you are ignoring the effect of the variants you are referencing in 1) Young people are more likely to get sick by the variants and herd immunity is based on antibodies and therefore have the same problem as he vaccine based antibodies. A new variant could make them equally useless.
3) We don't know the long term effects by corona either. In contrast to the vaccines, we have already found evidence of organ damage in the heart , lungs and kidneys with Corona, which may not disappear even in the long term.
The bottom line is that the risk without vaccination is much higher than with vaccination.
I in no way think those numbers are complete, but given the number of doses given and the astonishing rarity of those very specific issues, I have to question your comment.
I’m in an extraordinarily healthy population (military) and I know of no one that has had any reactions at all, as a counterpoint. Given the political leanings of my peer group, I’m positive I would have heard about it.
Do you have a VAERS ID number? Do you have a link to a news report you can share? Not to be dark, but do you have a link to an obituary?
Because it's a little hard to take your claims as anything more than unsourced anecdotes that can be summed up by the CDCs adverse events statistics.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/ad...
I could go looking for trouble in the VAERS database but I think aggregate statistics are better for getting a feel for how safe the vaccine is.
This is priceless, as, for the same reasons, we do not know the long term effects of any of the vaccines either.
The virus invades the bodies and start multiplying in both populations.
The difference is that the vaccinated body is prepared to immediately attack the virus, something that takes weeks for the unvaccinated body to figure out.
So during the short interval when the vaccinated body hasn't yet wiped out the virus, the person is technically infected, will test positive, and can probably transmit some of the few viruses it has.
But that both vaccinated and unvaccinated can transmit the virus does NOT mean the danger levels are anywhere near similar!
This is probably why so many athletes get positive tests. If you get tested every day, you can get a positive test while a minor infection is defeated, even though you don't feel any symptoms.
Is this known to be true, or is it an assumption you're making in your analysis?
Just curious, because I would have expected people who refuse to be vaccinated to also be more likely to socialize in ways that expose them to the virus.
Personally, I expose myself to a lot more virus risks than before I got vaccinated, if you want an opposing argument.
Then vaccine side effects literally ruin your life if you get them. You will be sick, weak, perhaps unable to walk anymore, perhaps constantly shaking.
So many young people have gotten their lives completely ruined by trusting these vaccines. Anyone can go to CovidVaccinated on reddit and see the horrors people experience.
Most vaccinated people are fine (although we have no idea if they will continue to be fine or not, could be birth defects, infertility, or anything else that shows in months or years).
To me it's very stupid to risk your life for this vaccine. Its dangerous.
On the main page, the comment has a header, e.g. "peakaboo 1 hour ago [–]"
Click on the "1 hour ago" (will be later for you, obviously)
Now you see just the 1 comment, and a reply form.
But now the header has more options, "peakaboo 1 hour ago | parent | flag | favorite"
I have clicked "flag", to help take out the trash on this one too.
Dude, please stop watching the news and read more books.
Any large-scale body damage should cause "brain damage," though it's possibly a little misleading to call it that (of course I'm not enough of a neuroscientist to know if that's all that's at play here).
related: https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/a-new-theory-of-dreami...
https://dailycaller.com/2021/07/28/national-institutes-healt...
Arrest Fauci now!
How the vaccine cause a similar lighter effect ?