MedEwok wrote:
It can kill you via the feared Herpes-Encephalitis but that’s quite rare.
Very much like the corona virus then, only with a twist. Completely irrelevant for those under, let’s say 40 (just to pick a number less likely to cause quarrels 
), but rather deadly for those above 80 with an underlying disease. It has another mechanism as well. It mutates so fast and to such extent, you can get the disease again and again. Exactly how effective will vaccines be against such a virus? The producer say it can make a “tweaked” vaccine is 6 weeks. Well, first that is an exaggeration to calm people down. 12-20 weeks is more correct. Then it has to be mass produced and distributed, and two shots are needed, 3 weeks apart. We are talking at least 6 months to a year before an effective part of the population is vaccinated. And in the mean time, the virus has already traveled around the globe, and mutated in new strands.
Regarding the direct cost of the pandemic, I’ve just received a letter from my public health insurance company, informing me that due to the pandemic, the federal health ministry has increased the average health insurance premium by 0,5% of income, so they increase their fees accordingly.
I now pay 14,6% of income for health insurance, plus 1,2% of income as additional health insurance fee (the 14,6% is the legal requirement for all insurance companies, whereas the additional fee can be levied by all companies but it is up to them to decide wheter and how much they take) and 3,05% of income for public care insurance. Thus, a total of 18,85% of income goes to the healthcare system. Luckily, the income threshold is capped at 4837,50€/month, so if you earn more (like me), you don’t have to pay more than 18,85% of 4837,50€, which works out to 911,87€/month.
Given that I previously paid 865€/month, this is a significant increase, worth several landings at my base airport
MedEwok wrote:
which works out to 911,87€/month.
Just to put that into perspective for our international friends: German statutory health insurance premiums follow a “social” scheme: You pay depending on your income, not on your health status when you got into it. Part of this “social” scheme is, that this premium is for the entire family: If MedE had a wife w/o and income and 12 children, the insurance would cover all 14 of them and the premium would be the same. For dual income couples w/o children on the other side, this scheme is “very social”…
LeSving wrote:
Very much like the corona virus then, only with a twist. Completely irrelevant for those under, let’s say 40 (just to pick a number less likely to cause quarrels ),
Repetition of fake news doesn’t make them true: Long term effects of Corona are a fact and they can affect even those with very mild symptoms in the acute phase. The statement that “Corona has no impact for those under x years of age” is just fake news!
Malibuflyer wrote:
Repetition of fake news doesn’t make them true: Long term effects of Corona are a fact and they can affect even those with very mild symptoms in the acute phase. The statement that “Corona has no impact for those under x years of age” is just fake news!
“No impact” is a rather definite description and clearly untrue.
What might be better wording is “a relatively insignificant risk compared to the other risks we face in life”. Quite how young and healthy one needs to be for that to be the case is anyone’s guess.
Getting good data on ‘long covid’ is problematic. The ONS has some data here and I’ve had a look at it this morning. Part of it is about how long symptoms persist, which is another (and perhaps interesting) point but I don’t think it’s what we’re referring to when we talk about the long term effects of covid.
The other part of it shows incidence of certain major adverse outcomes expressed as a rate per 1,000 patient years, and they have compared with control patients that they match each hospitalised covid patient to based on various factors such as age, health, socio-economic deprivation etc. This data obviously shows increased incidence in the covid patients, but as they correctly surmise that is not enough to come to a firm conclusion.
There are various ‘inherent in the dataset’ problems, like the fact that the covid patients are people who have been hospitalised (and probably generally quite old, although they do not break it down by age which is a shame) and therefore are probably more likely anyway to have an increased risk of major medical events, regardless of what it was that put them in hospital in the first place. I hypothesise that if you did the same analysis comparing patients hospitalised for any reason with a control then you’d see much the same thing, and thus might be proving nothing more than ‘people who are in bad health are in bad health’.
Then you have the fact that risk is never spread evenly through this kind of population, so if you have a group of ~68,000 patients (which seems to be their sample size for non-critical care) and they show a rate of CKD of 56.1 instances per 1,000 patient years then it is important to remember that nearly all the risk lies with a very small number of those 68,000 – it is not correct to say that the 56.1 per 1,000 years is the risk for every member of the group.
What is quite interesting is that the critical care covid patients seemed to do better than the non-critical care covid patients in terms of cardiac events subsequently reported. Maybe @MedEwok or @kwlf can comment, but perhaps the critical care patients often don’t last long enough to have one?
Also they report the adverse events as diagnoses at or after the point of hospitalisation with covid. With things like diabetes, CKD and CLD I’d think it perfectly possibly that in a significant number of cases (given the typical patient profile) were undiagnosed underlying health conditions present at the point of hospitalisation, rather than subsequently ‘caused by covid’. A better design of data capture might have been to only start recording such diagnoses 2-3 months or so after hospitalisation.
Malibuflyer wrote:
Long term effects of Corona are a fact and they can affect even those with very mild symptoms in the acute phase
You keep on repeating this, over and over, but where is the data?
Do a google search on age vs corona death, and you will get millions of nice graphs. Here is one, from s41598_020_73777_8_pdf
.
LeSving wrote:
You keep on repeating this, over and over, but where is the data?Do a google search on age vs corona death, and you will get millions of nice graphs. Here is one, from s41598_020_73777_8_pdf
Obviously a mortality graph says nothing about the long term effects?!
LeSving wrote:
You keep on repeating this, over and over, but where is the data?
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=de&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=long+covid&btnG=
LeSving wrote:
Do a google search on age vs corona death,
Yes – for people who regard “death” as the only health problem one could have you are absolutely right. Btw: From that point of view HIV is also “completely irrelevant for people under 40” – because if you look at HIV/AIDS related deaths under this age in Europe you will hardly find any as well. Thinking of it, there are actually very few infectious diseases where people under 40 regularly die from. So nothing to worry about. And why did we put so much energy into irradiating Polio? Almost no deaths under 40.
Graham wrote:
Getting good data on ‘long covid’ is problematic.
Absolutely! Mainly because it is “long” Covid and for a disease that is only around for a year there simply can’t be data on real long term effects. We only have initial indicators – and they are quite alarming esp. if there are people around that show a certain carelessness because they believe that Covid only does harm to the old and sick…
Graham wrote:
What is quite interesting is that the critical care covid patients seemed to do better than the non-critical care covid patients in terms of cardiac events subsequently reported. Maybe @MedEwok or @kwlf can comment, but perhaps the critical care patients often don’t last long enough to have one?
I would assume you are spot on: Its kind of a selection bias as patients with predisposition for cardiac events are more likely to not survive the intensive care phase…
While death could be said to be a long term effect, I think that graph is completely irrelevant to the point at hand when talking about “long COVID”.
The only figures for long COVID in the UK that I’ve seen suggests the “long COVID” rate is about 0.6% of those infected (slightly higher than the death rate). Long COVID seems to be no respector of fitness or youth, at least in the UK figures I’ve seen.
Maybe LeSving graph means another “what does not kill us makes us stronger “
I don’t think we know yet the long term effects of COVID-19, we are far away from that, maybe none? or maybe really bad? one should just assume the worst, no need for a PHD to figure out that lack of oxygen over the few days in hospital will indeed cause permanent damage to brain & lunge but probably less long-term effect than heavy smoking…
It may matter for top level sportive performance guys or running marathons but for a loser life it may not matter much 
