[VikingCoder]

And we have no idea what the long-term impacts of Covid-19 might be.

Just as a for-instance, I had the Chickenpox, like most people my age. No biggie. Then I later developed Shingles, because the Chickenpox virus can be dormant in your body for decades. Shingles can be debilitating.

I highly doubt that Covid-19 will have long-term health impacts like that for children. But we absolutely don't know for sure, yet.

[at_a_remove]

Chickenpox is a retrovirus, which is why it can linger in your body for decades, as it transcribes itself into selected portions of your genome to hide and then later re-emerge. SARS-CoV-2 is not a retrovirus.

[obloid]

Varicella-zoster virus (chickenpox/shingles), while it does create latent infections, is not a retrovirus. Retroviruses like HIV actually insert a copy of the viral genome into the host cell's DNA. VZV and other herpesviruses have a different latency mechanism[1] than retroviruses. SARS-CoV-2 probably does not cause latent infections, but could potentially cause a chronic infection similar to other RNA viruses like Hepatitis C. I would suspect it probably doesn't, but it is certainly possible.

1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3118253/

[at_a_remove]

How odd, this is not what I was taught decades back. I suppose I will have to refresh. This is like finding out that Mercury is not tidally locked to the Sun, despite that being in textbooks forever.

[mrguyorama]

Are you sure you aren't just misremembering?

[at_a_remove]

Of all of the things you can be sure of, misremembering isn't one of them.

[namibj]

Right, but it likes to hide out in rather remote areas of your body.

[SV_BubbleTime]

> Right, but it likes to hide out in rather remote areas of your body

Covid “hangs out” in your body? I have not heard this, is there any source you can link?

[namibj]

I must have been confused, or the presumed information source I remembered is much harder to find than expected.

The issue isn't the virus lingering, it's apparently blood clots throughout various organs, which can cause problems years after they come to be. A friend of my family died from unexpected bleeding/brain crushing after a small blood vessel in his brain popped. This was many months after the issue was first noticed, and a few months after one of to-be-two operations was done to prevent that clogged blood vessel from bursting due to over-pressure.

[__blockcipher__]

This is such an empty argument. Name me a coronavirus that has ever exhibited these mysterious long term impacts everyone is blindly conjecturing.

Even SARS-1, which is way more serious than SARS-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19), doesn’t cause long term damage (lungs, etc) in actual adults.

What we should be concerned about is the long term impacts of poor socialization, weakened immune systems due to suppression of natural pathogen exchange, an environment of fear and hysteria, widened educational attainment gaps due to non-scientifically-grounded refusal to allow in-person instruction etc. Virtually all the uncertainty is on the “pro lockdown” side IMO.

BTW I recognize you weren’t saying that long term damage does happen but rather that we just don’t know. But I reject that entire argument. We have no evidence it happens and plenty of evidence it doesn’t happen with more serious viruses.

[raphlinus]

There is a growing body of evidence of longer term effects in adults. Obviously the picture is still developing because this is a novel coronavirus, but I think there is plenty of reason to be very concerned.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/06/covid-19-...

[__blockcipher__]

It's technically true that it's a novel coronavirus, but functionally it is incredibly similar to SARS-1 (what we used to just call SARS).

SARS-1 is much more deadly and much more symptomatic. But structurally they resemble each other; they share the characteristic spike protein and a bunch of other features.

Immunity to SARS-1 confers immunity to SARS-2.

Now, SARS-1 being a more severe version of SARS-2, serves as a great model of what severe COVID-19 might look like.

And we know that in SARS-1, there are not these supposed long-term effects. You can get lung damage that lasts for a few months, but is undetectable at the 1 year mark. That's not long-term damage.

I also want to mention that the "long-hauler" narrative does not have real evidence behind it, except for those who are immunocompromised and therefore would be a "long-hauler" for literally any virus they got infected with.

Unfortunately, and I am worried that saying this will trigger reflexive downvotes, almost all US mainstream media has an incredible leftist bias (see: recent events in the NYT, WaPo etc). Therefore anything coming from the atlantic, vox, CNN, is very transparently trying to perpetuate the "doom" narrative. That's why they don't report on any of the incredibly positive/surprising facts, such as the widespread T-cell cross-reactivity in those who have never been exposed to either SARS-1 or SARS-2, or the fact that children surprisingly don't seem to spread it to adults in any real numbers, or the logical conclusion of the fact that SARS-2 kills the very old but not the very young, which is that recurring deaths (deaths in subsequent years) from COVID-19 will be virtually nonexistent.

---

Back to the long-term effects. The article you linked is not scientific at all and just rattles off a serious of anecdotes. So I don't really know what there is for me to argue against.

There was a great study of SARS-1 lung imaging that I love to cite, and yet I can't find where my notes on it are. So take this random one I just came across:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1440-1843...

> Lung function studies carried out on 258 patients from Xiaotangshan Hospital in Beijing 2 months after discharge showed that 21% patients (54 of 258 patients) had evidence of impaired diffusion (DLCO < 80%pred) while 6% (16 of 258 patients) had restrictive ventilatory defect (VC < 80%pred).18 Fifty‐one of 54 patients had lung function tests repeated one month later. DLCO was found to improve in 80.4% patients (41 of 51 patients), and FVC in 81.3% patients (13 of 16 patients) (Table 3). These findings suggest that lung function abnormality caused by SARS might improve spontaneously over time.

(BTW, long-term damage and the "long-hauler" meme are technically referring to two different things)

As a counter-point to myself, the following study identified abnormalities (although keep in mind abnormality doesn't mean it's necessarily a massive problem) at the 6 month mark:

https://thorax.bmj.com/content/59/10/889.abstract

The study I'm looking for but can't find showed abnormalities at the 3 month mark but no abnormalities at the 1 year mark, so that study I just linked doesn't actually contradict my own expectations.

Finally remember that we're using SARS-1 here as a model of what really bad SARS-2 looks like. For anyone who doesn't have invasive-ventilation-level COVID-19, the expectation that they might experience long term damage is completely unfounded.

[VikingCoder]

Thank you for the detailed responses.

But please consider:

At the one extreme, someone says "31 confirmed death by Covid19 on children under 14 years." As though death is the only possible negative consequence, and since 31 is a very small number, that should put to rest any concerns.

At the other extreme end, we're worried about the teachers, the staff, and the families of the students. We're worried about children who get sick, don't die, and develop chronic conditions.

The real danger level is probably in-between those two extremes, is it not?

[__blockcipher__]

There is abundant evidence that children do not play a serious role in transmission, so concerns about the teachers are unfounded:

[COVID-19 Transmission and Children: The Child Is Not to Blame](https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2020/07...) - July 2020

--

As far as negative consequences, there is no theoretical basis for long-term consequences of COVID-19. There is basis for medium-term lung abnormalities which happens in general with pneumonia, but that doesn't apply to children except the incredibly small fraction that actually have bad outcomes, which is so rare that we should literally treat it as a rounding error.

Even pediatric multi-inflammatory syndrome is incredibly rare.

No, most people are dramatically overestimating COVID-19 risk and dramatically underestimating risk of lockdown, universal masking, etc

[VikingCoder]

You're an interesting person. In the same comment you say "most people are dramatically overestimating COVID-19 risk," and then cite an article which says,

"Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) presents arguably the greatest public health crisis in living memory."

In other comments, you've claimed there's no long-term risk to children, while the article you cite says,

"emerging reports of a novel Kawasaki disease–like multisystem inflammatory syndrome necessitate continued surveillance in pediatric patients"

Then you just plain went to far, when you said "there is no theoretical basis for long-term consequences of COVID-19." Sorry, but "there is no theoretical basis" is an over-statement. If you had said, "The evidence indicates there are no long-term consequences," you would have maintained your aura of authority. But "there is no theoretical basis" is too far, especially since you cited an article that specifically mentions novel Kawasaki disease–like multisystem inflammatory syndrome. That's not just a theoretical basis, that's an example of a concrete basis. "There is no theoretical basis" doesn't mean, "the theory is incorrect," it means, "it's impossible for the theory to be correct," and that's a statement the evidence YOU CITED shows is not true.

I think you're more informed on the subject than average, but I am no longer convinced you have a good grasp of even the evidence you cite, let alone the body of available research. You Google well, but you don't really understand.

[__blockcipher__]

(1) Kawasaki-disease is not long-term risk. It's a disorder that goes away.

(2) Given your only argument against my statement of there being no theoretical basis is what I addressed in (1), there's not much for me to address here. So I'll throw it back at you: What long-term pathology has been observed in SARS-1?

It may be that we are using "long-term" in different senses. I don't consider 3 months to be "long-term". AFAIK most people raising alarm about (unfounded) long-term damage are implying either lifelong or at least years+, right?

(3)

> In the same comment you say "most people are dramatically overestimating COVID-19 risk," and then cite an article which says,

>> "Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) presents arguably the greatest public health crisis in living memory."

I don't see how these statements are mutually incompatible. It's possible for COVID-19 to be the most serious pandemic in over a century - which it is - and for people to still be overestimating the risk.

There is a study that surveyed people for their estimated COVID-19 risk which supports my claim; people in the 20-29 age group estimated their risk of death if infected at 2%. Think about that. That's at minimum a 50x overestimate.

Humorously, the older someone was the less they estimated their risk in absolute terms; young people reported higher chance of death than older people.

[VikingCoder]

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/monumental-acknow...

[tripletao]

What risk do you see in universal mask use? Lots of people have worn masks routinely for many years (medical staff, cleanroom operators, East Asians, etc.), without obvious bad consequences. Lockdowns are indeed expensive, but mask use seems pretty cheap to me.

[VikingCoder]

> There is abundant evidence that children do not play a serious role in transmission

Seems like there's evidence to the contrary:

Older children, 10-19, spread the Coronavirus just as much as adults, large study finds.

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/10/20-1315_article

[creaghpatr]

Anything could happen!