[ruairispain]

Here's a doctor's tweet from today about a young male that got reinfected after 7 months. EcMO machine, full bipass and 3 heart restarts.

NSFW link to twitter:

Not much scares me in this life. But just saw my first COVID reinfection this full moon Halloween & I am fucking shook.

20-something yo w/ massive PE, coded, TPA, ECMO in ED, hemorrhage, 3 code carts, methylene blue, PRBCs.

Praying for them and their family And for all of us. https://t.co/T0YqmVxLx8

[nradov]

With millions of cases worldwide there will always be some statistical outliers. Those are individually tragic, but not very relevant to most of us. The best estimate for infection fatality rate in the 20 - 49 age group is only 0.02%.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

[neuronic]

It's hard to talk about this because

a) these cases are real and scary

but

b) these cases are proven outliers amplified by crazy fearmongering media and the likes of redditors who don't stop to understand statistics.

What we need is a more reasonable approach to all of this, especially regarding the fact that COVID will be endemic. We need to deal with this fact.

But we also need better reporting since death is not the only bad consequence of COVID-19. It isn't even just limited to health.

[LeCow]

Those cases aren't scary, they're expected.

Some people die from diseases and some people have long term effects. It's not anything more than a novel virus.

[neuronic]

They are still scary due to the way they are portrayed to people. You could probably inject a million people with medical grade saline and still see some crazy reactions.

Many of the long term issues described for COVID already messed up my life as a result of Epstein-Barr 14 years ago (brain fog, fatigue). Post-viral syndrome is real and now it's getting some public attention for the first time.

[jaywalk]

Yeah, looking at more of his tweets, that guy seems like a Covid fear monger.

[craftinator]

Unless you're the person who has a second infection or the doctor who has to deal with this life and death situation, then yeah, fear mongering...

But the other side to this is that if the reinfection is due to the virus mutating into a more virulent state, then it's MORE likely to propagate as that virulent state, meaning more and more COVID19 infected people's will be open to reinfection over time.

[ethbr0]

https://nextstrain.org/sars-cov-2

[refurb]

I've noticed with Covid is that there is a lot of attention to edge cases with folks implying that the scenario is common. That's a very alarmist approach.

Hundreds (thousands?) of healthy people gets the flu in the US every year and die from it. Not because they have a comorbidity, they just have a really bad reaction to the flu.

But we don't assume that those edge cases are the most typical course of disease. Yes, you may be one of those really unlucky ones that die from a normally non-fatal disease, but the risk of that is pretty low.

[gnusty_gnurc]

This is how social media works; keep people engaged and cause them to experience large swings in emotion.

So as with almost everything nowadays (e.g. look up police brutality statistics and compare to common perception re: pervasiveness), the formula is simple: paint an exciting/horrifying view of reality by sensationalizing rare events.

[xienze]

> Hundreds (thousands?) of healthy people gets the flu in the US every year and die from it.

Way off! Tens of millions catch and tens of thousands die from the flu every single year in the US. And that's with a vaccine! You probably didn't know that though because news stations don't have rolling infection and death counters going 24/7 during flu season.

[refurb]

That's true. In 2018, ~80,000 Americans died from the flu. However, most of those had some comorbidity that exacerbated the course of the flu.

When I mentioned hundreds or thousands, I'm talking about healthy, young people dying of the flu. It's rare, but it does happen.

My point is that we don't look at those cases and assume that how the flu affects everyone.

[TaupeRanger]

Scary anecdote but not particularly helpful in trying to get a picture of the overall situation.

[phamilton4]

Why doesn't anyone question the ECMO machines? I'm definitely no doctor, but as a software engineer if my system failed 30-40% of the time I'd stop using it.

Last I read they have 30-40% instance of internal bleeding with many other TERRIBLE things as a side effect of all the blood thinners and other pharmaceuticals needed to use the machine.

I really find it hard to believe that COVID caused the PE, hemorrhage, etc. that ultimately put an end to that young man's life.

Read about it here: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/1...

[timr]

"Why doesn't anyone question the ECMO machines? I'm definitely no doctor, but as a software engineer if my system failed 30-40% of the time I'd stop using it."

ECMO is a hail-mary treatment for people who would almost certainly die otherwise. A 40% chance of death is better than a 99% chance of death.

What you're saying here actually happened with ventilators (though ventilators are nowhere nearly as invasive or complex as ECMO).

[thehappypm]

Tens of millions of cases, there are going to be a few outliers. Unless it starts happening at a statistically meaningful rate, these are just unfortunate one-offs.

[mlindner]

Looks like FUD. I wouldn't trust this type of information coming from Twitter.