[puranjay]

I really wonder what the long term economic impact of a chronically fatigued population will be. It's clear by now that a) the virus isn't going away, and b) a lot of, if not most, people will get it.

If a substantial portion of the infected also develop a host of long term health issues, what's going to be the economic cost?

We seem to have been focusing on deaths as a key metric which has made a lot of younger people complacent. Apart from anecdotal accounts, I have seen very little reporting on the long term health effects among survivors

[SpicyLemonZest]

There's just no way to really measure long term health effects at this point, because the vast majority of infectees aren't past the normal timeline for full recovery from a serious disease. (Fatigue reports in particular probably shouldn't be concerning, since post-pneumonia fatigue is known to continue for 3-6 months.)

[Loughla]

That's what has been so confusing for me to sort out. COVID seems, according to what I can see, to have an extra-long recovery period for many people.

I had walking pneumonia and bronchitis two years ago, and even with treatment it took a good 5 months to get out from under that in anything near 90% capacity.

Is COVID that? Or is it worse? This gives me more anxiety than the deaths, to be honest.

[thaumaturgy]

There is as yet insufficient information on exactly what covid19 does to our biology, and consequently there is a lot of guesswork and misinformation flying around. Researchers are in hair-on-fire triage mode, there's an enormous amount of pressure to just "figure it out", people keep forgetting that the first word for this infection's official name is "novel", and they keep likening it to things that they do understand even though it's not really any of those things.

So we don't know. Nobody does right now. It takes time. It is really unfortunate that it keeps getting compared to other diseases. It's a lot like encountering malaria for the first time and saying "it's basically yellow fever". We should be behaving as though there's a mysterious new illness sweeping through populations across the world, with unknown short-term and long-term effects, because that's exactly what's happening.

The earliest severe cases all presented as pneumonia, so this disease got treated that way. But, it was quickly discovered that the pneumonia didn't behave quite like normal cases of pneumonia, and then shortly after that, there turned out to be a strong correlation with cardiac and stroke events. So, although people still think of this as a respiratory disease, there is something else going on, we just don't know what yet.

[puranjay]

I'm not in a vulnerable age group, but it's the constant stream of stories of patients experiencing everything from seizures and strokes to chronic fatigue and even diabetes that has me on edge. I don't want to get it and end up wrecking the next 12 months (or maybe more) of my life.