There's also some very concerning long-term effects for those who have recovered. There's a trend of seeing lung-scarring or other things that I'm sure will come up again int 10 or 15 years. Imagine that happening to a large portion of society.
True, but that's not as if death was the only bad outcome. Not that we can even pretend to know the long-term effects yet, but anecdotally it seems that some people are already experiencing them, which include lung scarring and neurological symptoms.
Yep. Lung damage rarely heals, which has life-long consequences. IIRC, a BBC report mentioned a 30% average decrease in lung function in survivors. Heart, liver, kidneys and possibly other organs are also affected.
This reminds me of damage to lungs from smoking. We don't yet have enough research to claim that lungs will or will not recover from coronavirus. However, I would speculate that recovery is possible and in 5 or 10 years, just like with smoking, partial or near full recovery is possible.
Indeed, the long-term effects I've seen researchers express more concern over are simpler. The disease causes quite a lot of damage to the lungs and circulatory system, and messes with brain oxygen levels. Not all of that damage is easily repaired by the body.
Are you aware if there is any data yet on what proportion of recoveries will experience lasting lung/other damage? For example, is the permanent lung damage seen so far (which I've only anecdotally read about, I must admit) mostly related to ARDS?
From what I got, lung damage was actually caused by unnecessary ventilators. We now know that the vast majority of people are out of oxygen because of their blood and not lungs.
This is an extremely mild disease, I would assume that in a few months we'll know enough to make it a minor inconvenience for most people (more than it already is, since most people don't even experience symptoms today).
What long-term damage you know of (not saying there isn't, just curious)?
The major reason for suspecting long-term consequences were initially extrapolations from SARS and other related diseases. This was speculation. This was confirmed with chest x-rays in China: long-term lung scarring. People wrote this off, since it came from China. This was recently re-confirmed in Europe. Young people come off of COVID19 with reduced lung capacity.
What we should be doing is mitigating damage to those hundreds of millions of people. That's a lot easier to do than just about anything else in this equation.
You're right to point out that I should have thrown in some further qualification (it's too early to make definitive statements about long-term consequences).
Apparently, there was some significant recovery of lung damage in the aftermath of the 2002 SARS-CoV-1 outbreak (Pulmonary interstitial damage and functional decline caused by SARS mostly recovered, with a greater extent of recovery within 2 years after rehabilitation. [1])
This doesn't change the fact that this has to be accounted for if you want to play the numbers game.
Great news! What about long-term impacts, like damage to the lungs or heart?
We'll likely have a cohort of patients, like "Americans alive during 2020-2021", that'll be greatly impacted by health issues as they get older if we don't figure out how to mitigate long-term impacts.
I don't think it is possible to derive any reliable facts from the data right now. Even if the patients who recovered from COVID-19 still find that there is something wrong with them, that could still go away in a week or a month or a year.
However, here is a tiny bit of information on the long-term effects of the 2003 SARS outbreak:
> A small percentage of patients had long-term effects from their illness, including depression or anxiety, cough, shortness of breath, chronic lung disease or kidney disease. However, most patients fully recovered.
Not to mention complications. Little is known yet, but there are indications that some surviving patients get permanent lung damage. Especially when intensive care is not available. Imagine having 30 million 40-year-olds who will be short of breath for the rest of their lives.
...also important to remember that those who recover from severe symptoms (~10%) have permanently damaged lung function due to lesions that formed during infection.
A very valid point. There have been quite a few conflicting reports, especially on long term lung damage. It may be too early to make definitive statements. Certainly it seems likely enough that some long term consequences exist, enough that it worries me.
It's not only about people who die. We don't fully understand the implications of the virus on people who do not die. It's possible a large portion of recovered people will have other problems down the line because of the damage to their lungs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22943406
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