The decisive question surrounding this recent spike in cases around the industrialized world is if deaths will spike accordingly (with the usual delay of 2-4 weeks), or if the case fatality rate will remain lower than back in March/April. This would be well possible if the current infections are disproportionately happening among the younger, less at risk groups.

It should be far lower as actual cases in March/Apr were far greater than confirmed cases, which is still the case now but to a far lesser extent.

Even with a high capacity testing system in place, between 80 and 90% of cases are still missed. For example, using UK ONS data, there were an estimated 100,000 new infections daily at the peak in March and only 4,000 - 5,000 confirmed cases. So between 1 in 25 and 1 in 20 cases were picked up.

Currently we have a 7 day rolling average of 770 new infections daily, but with a far greater testing capacity they estimate this equates to 4200 actual cases.

Most countries will have followed a similar trajectory in getting their testing capacity up and running. Germany started off with one hence the lower reported death rate.

Theres evidence that there are a lot of serious after affects to covid infection since its clearly acting on multiple systems.

The death count isn't nearly the only concern, which is another reason why "it only kills old people" is a stupid line of reasoning.

thank you. this can't be emphasised loudly and often enough. people, at least those that haven't had the virus themselves, or close relatives that went ill, have the tendency to dismiss everything short of death. it's insane...

Take any (at least somewhat dangerous) disease with hundreds of thousands of cases, and you will find some patients with serious after effects. Fatigue syndrome, for example, is not that uncommon among those who had the influenza.

We have a press hungry for any story they can sensationalize, and severe lingering effects among outlier cases are nothing untypical in most diseases. So unless someone presents me with actual data showing that these types of lasting effects are common (enough to worry) in covid patients, I'll consider these types of stories blown out of proportion/fearmongering.



Both me and my closest family member most definitely had it already. (We both (independently from one another) had all the symptoms for 1-2 weeks at the end of March, when infections peaked here in Germany, and self-isolated accordingly. Unfortunately, testing was virtually unavailable at that time for common plebs who werent hospitalized or had contact with a confirmed case.)

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Aug 2 2020 11:52am

I work with an M.D. Ph.D student who has to catalog Covid papers for the medical school as part of her training, and this comes from her. I'll see if she can show me some good papers.

She's also the smartest person I've ever interacted with, the second person in my life that I know is smarter than me, and is just a genuinely perfect human. So I take whatever she says about medicine as fact.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Aug 2 2020 11:54am

You have no serious evidence for this, you know it's not an easy "cold" for everyone, in many case it's a really rude one, with fever.
But what do you want to say with that ? That most people are immune already ?

You are mixing fatigue with irreversible lungs damage, very dangerous to say that, take care.

That would be really interesting, I've long wanted to get my hands on some hard data about the frequency of covid after effects. As you may know, I tend to be stubborn, but this is an issue where I would happily let myself be convinced by strong scientific evidence. (I just refuse to join in on the panic when newspaper xy runs a shitty story along the lines of "coronavirus can leave you crippled!!! this healthy young woman is still feeling like shit six weeks after being healed!!!!11")

I'm afraid, however, that it's simply too early for solid data on these questions to exist.




I was talking about the actual influenza, not the common cold, when I mentioned that stuff like fatigue syndrome is not that unusual in a lot of other diseases which society takes less serious than covid.

Regarding the lung fibrosis: this type of damage has to be expected in patients which were ventilated by machines for several weeks. To the best of my knowledge, there have only been very few reported cases of lung fibrosis in patients who did not need to be hospitalized for a prolonged period of time.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Aug 2 2020 12:14pm

What is disappointing me a bit is this "it's like a cold" narrative, because it's not, there's damage observed in lungs, blood vessels...

Once a certain threshold is reached, there are irreversible sequels. That's the point: human body is limited, a cold can be recovered, even if it can take 6 months in some cases (?!) , but seems it's not the same deal with Covid.

"
Last week, a German study published in the journal Jama Cardiology warned about the risks of complications in the heart. Doctors at Frankfurt University Hospital performed an MRI scan on a cohort of 100 recently recovered Covid-19 patients two to three months after the diagnosis was confirmed by a PCR test. Result, 78% presented abnormal results. Researchers report inflammation of the heart muscle (myocardium) in 60 patients and / or of the pericardium, the envelope surrounding the heart, in 22 others. Depending on the case, this may be inflammation that is still active or scarring. More surprisingly, these results are not correlated with the severity of the disease. Only two patients in the cohort were admitted to intensive care following their contamination with Covid-19, and 31 were hospitalized. The rest of the patients suffered from a rather mild form.
"

source
https://www.lefigaro.fr/sciences/des-sequelles-cardiaques-chez-des-malades-meme-legers-du-covid-19-20200802

This post was edited by Saucisson6000 on Aug 2 2020 12:47pm

That's an interesting study, thanks for sharing!
Here's a link to the original study your figaro article is talking about:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/2768916

This study has several limitations that are talked about in the article itself:

First, in the discussion part, they cite 5 other studies that also found increased levels of clinical markers for heart inflammation in former covid patients. Then, they point out that these 5 previous studies on the subject did not find cardiac incolvement to be uncorrelated with the severity of the disease.


Second, they stress several limitations of their study:


The bolded part seems particularly troubling to me. If their cohort contained several patients who were still showing covid symptoms, this may completely skew or bias the data.


Third, the study did actually find a small but positive association between the severity of the disease (operationalized here by home recovery vs hospitalization) and one of the clinical markers of cardiac involvement (Native T1), and the fact that this difference is not significant for their third marker (troponin T) seems to be the result of all subgroups having a large share of patients where this marker takes on the base value of 3. If you excluded the 3s in the figure below and only looked at those patients with an increased level of troponin T, the difference between home recovererd and hospitalized covid patients should become significant.






To sum it up: the authors of this study cited five previous studies who, unlike them, did find an association between severity of the disease and markers of heart damage. They included several patients with a still ongoing covid disease in their study. And they did in fact find a significant difference between home and hospital recovered covid patients with regards to one of their markers, and potentially also for a second marker if we exclude cases where that marker doesnt react at all. Only for the Native T2 marker did they show data which is fairly clear in not exhibiting a difference between patients with the more and the less severe course of the covid infection.



Dont get me wrong, I dont want to shit all over this study, I just wanted to point out that it's findings run partly contrary to previous research on this subject and are much less conclusive than the newspaper article suggested.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Aug 2 2020 03:37pm