Live data from Hacker News

Mysterious heart damage, not just lung troubles, befalling Covid-19 patients

khn.org

161–170 of 197 posts

Re: Mysterious heart damage, not just lung troubles, befalling Covid-19 patients

#161
post #139
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider the odds conditional on: trying not to get it. Probably better than 30% if you’re not in a group that has to work outside the home. Maybe 50-60% odds of avoiding? Still high odds of getting it, but not so high that it’s inevitable.

I don't think you have any real scientific basis for those numbers. I doubt most people can reduce their risk of infection to 50% unless they take extreme and unsustainable steps. Please state your assumptions and show your math.

The scientific basis is definitely there. Even the worst viral infections do not reach more than 70% of the population, and take decades to do so.

Re: Mysterious heart damage, not just lung troubles, befalling Covid-19 patients

#162
post #33

There's so much blind speculation in this comment section. The kind that's intriguing and fun when it's about engineering/math/whatever, but dangerous when it's about the health effects of an ongoing pandemic. I hope moderators do something about it.

its your train of thought that's the problem.

that's why health officials were telling us not to use masks, not just because supply is short and they need them for health workers but probably more so because:

- viral load is important and that's far too complicated for people to understand, just talk about it in binary sick/not sick.

- having better protection incentivizes people taking more risk, better not do that

- people might not comprehend that masks are imperfect and can fail, better just to tell them they don't work.

health is important, and the way you learn about things is by talking about them. treating it like a special scary topic that only experts should be able to talk about not only leads to disinformation, it leads to lack of trust.

Re: Mysterious heart damage, not just lung troubles, befalling Covid-19 patients

#163
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is percentage of confirmed cases that wind up with hospitalization. However we mostly don't try to confirm cases if it won't affect the care we give. We just tell them to self-isolate. We therefore will not have good statistics on what percentage of cases are confirmed until after the immediate crisis is over and we test to see how many have antibodies. So your figure is, "Of young people who have it severely en…

All good points. But paulsutter's message remains: young people are at significant risk. Yes, the risk for older people and those with pre-existing conditions in higher. But the parent poster's characterization of the risk for young people as "very little" is dangerous.

This is also why I don't really like that some propose various "herd immunity" schemes - we simply don't know what the virus actually does to people in practice, even if it does not outright kill them. So it seems very irresponsible to propose schemes like that at this point in time.

Re: Mysterious heart damage, not just lung troubles, befalling Covid-19 patients

#164
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would find a better authority than 'youtube doctors' for the health of anyone you love. Some are great, but all are in it for attention. The ultimate motives of many online attenion seekers, no matter their profession are, lets say, unclear.

They are better then random programmers on HN who think respiratory disease can't be linked to heart problem due to respiratory in name.

I don't think anyone's denied that respiratory diseases can be linked to heart problems. The question is whether they're linked through the normal mechanism of systemic failure, or if the coronavirus specifically targets heart tissue as the doctor in the article suggests.

Re: Mysterious heart damage, not just lung troubles, befalling Covid-19 patients

#165
post #111
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Infrastructure will begin to break down if we don't do regular maintenance. That means spare parts, which means manufacturing, which means raw materials. Food has a similar supply chain issue. Break the infrastructure enough that public sanitation stops working properly, and the Covid-19 deaths will be a rounding error in the excess death rate.

Except we are still doing all those things. Maintenance[1] is happening. Factories are working. Food is being grown. Truckers are still hauling. Read the shut down orders issued by your state. Read the list of essential jobs listed in those orders. All of those things that you listed are essential jobs, that are still being done. If your factory makes masks, you're essential. If your factory makes screws that are use…

Well, all the individual maintenance is being cancelled. Home maintenance; dentist appointments; tax accountant meetings; checkups; physical therapy. Heck even housecleaning, haircuts and sports.

There will be a cost to all this - small business starts that fail across the board, loans and mortgages in default, cars repossessed, restaurants closing everywhere. Hard to get a job for most people with so many businesses closed, hard to get to a job with no car.

We're all getting behind, it will be hard to catch up again, costs will go up after this is over, everyone will have more debt. It may take months or years for the hiccups to go away.

Re: Mysterious heart damage, not just lung troubles, befalling Covid-19 patients

#166
post #139
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider the odds conditional on: trying not to get it. Probably better than 30% if you’re not in a group that has to work outside the home. Maybe 50-60% odds of avoiding? Still high odds of getting it, but not so high that it’s inevitable.

I don't think you have any real scientific basis for those numbers. I doubt most people can reduce their risk of infection to 50% unless they take extreme and unsustainable steps. Please state your assumptions and show your math.

If 70% of people get it, you have a baseline risk of 30% of getting it.

My assumption is that a sizeable fraction of people either:

* Already got it

* Don’t take hand washing seriously or do it wrong

* Are bad at avoiding touching their face

* Unnecessarily touch surfaces when out (i.e. door with hand, rather than sleeve/bag, whatever)

* Don’t practice distancing well

* Are in a job where they must interact with the public

If you do all of the above correctly, my guess is you can raise your odds of avoiding from 30% to 50-60%.

It’s not based on any math, but I don’t think there’s any definite math to base it on. I could be wrong in either direction.

Nonetheless I think it’s sufficient to argue that it is not inevitable that and individual will get it and everyone should not even bother to avoid it.

Re: Mysterious heart damage, not just lung troubles, befalling Covid-19 patients

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, panic attacks have no "real" cause by definition. They are your body overreacting in response to a perceived threat that isn't really there; they are a type of cognitive distortion. If a panic attack was in response to a "real" cause, it wouldn't be a panic attack, it would be a normal response to a threat.

I know, but look, it is not the correct behavior of the body, right? So obviously something is wrong, and I find it hard to believe that the problem is from the mind if the patient is not himself stating it. In most cases, if he has an anxiety problem, he would straightly start by talking about it, like "I have been in wrong terms with my neighbors for years, and now just thinking they are next door is hurting my che…

> if he has an anxiety problem, he would straightly start by talking about it

In my experience, with an OCD component with general anxiety, it can twist your thoughts so much that it's difficult to unpick what the root problem is, other than a general and overwhelming feeling of "Something's wrong". I've often likened it to having two threads running - one is your normal, rational thoughts, and the other is irrational/incoherent, anxiety fueled nonsense, which often overrides the first - but it took me months (if not more) to be able to articulate it in those terms and keep some semblance of a rational thought process rather than just going into a blind panic for no reason.

When it was first happening, it definitely felt like something of a physical origin, as I could feel my heart rate going up and up, my mouth going dry, and breathing wasn't easy (and you think the panic is _due_ to those symptoms). However, as I was getting very similar symptoms from trying to ignore certain recurring thoughts (just coupled with an overwhelming compulsion to do certain things in response), it pointed me at an anxiety-based cause pretty quickly. Without that side of it, I'd not sure when I'd've come to that conclusion.

I'm now more or less at the point where it's 'just' my OCD obsessions that set me off, which are at least foreseeable and thus somewhat more manageable, but I'll still occasionally have periods where all I feel is "something _very_ bad's about to happen"/"something's wrong"/"I need to be anywhere but here" for no apparent reason. The analogy in other post about hearing the boss music is apt - that's exactly how they feel. Thankfully they're not full-blown panic attacks (no shortness of breath or chest pain), but heart rate jumps ~40BPM, not having a wall behind me _really_ freaks me out, and I can't concentrate on anything else or really talk to anyone. They're short-lived (30 seconds-10 minutes), but it's a really sudden onset (it hits me like a wall) and I feel jumpy for the rest of the day.

Slowing my breathing helps - deliberately breathing in for 5s, then out for 5s, and trying to focus on that seems to shorten the duration, and in the situations where I can tell one is coming (OCD triggered - I usually feel increasingly tense rather than it being so sudden), it can sometimes prevent them. Drinking water also helps for those - my mouth going dry is one of the first physical things I notice, and that just increases the anxiety. Keeping my mouth wet for that period helps stop that feedback loop.

Re: Mysterious heart damage, not just lung troubles, befalling Covid-19 patients

#168
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I deal with a panic disorder and what you're describing sounds super similar to what a garden-variety panic attack is like. Especially the part about your heart rate rising but your oxygen saturation staying pretty much the same (the difference between 94-97 and 97-100 is within the normal variation during physical activity). What's likely happening is that your brain is latching onto some small thing, like laying do…

Absolutely this. I've struggled with panic attacks that came on secondary to medical issues in the past couple years, and the elevated heart rate and perceived breathing problems are textbook. Other things to lookout for are: impending sense of doom (fixated on the idea something's wrong), lights appear brighter or have halos, bounding pulse (you feel your heart beating hard), eyelid twitching, amongst others. Block…

> Try to stay away from stimulants, like caffeine

Something of an aside, but I've actually found caffeine (400mg/day + variable amount in drinks) _helps_ with OCD-induced panic attacks. If I do have an attack, it seems somewhat worse, but it makes it _significantly_ easier to shift my attention away from obsessive thoughts, thus avoiding triggering the attack in the first place.

I was pointed towards it by this paper - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19573497 It's a pretty weak basis for making treatment decisions (n=24, caffeine was used as the control against d-amphetamine, both showed some effect), but my doctor and I reasoned that there was fairly limited risk in trying it. Other studies seem to have shown similar results - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6559101/

Re: Mysterious heart damage, not just lung troubles, befalling Covid-19 patients

#169
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain the gout - bloodcell - lung damage connection to a non clinician? (me)

well actually it's only some sorts of gout, caused by Polycythemia Vera https://rarediseases.org/rare-diseases/polycythemia-vera/ "Gout and kidney stone associated with polycythemia vera occur due to the high turnover of red blood cells, which results in higher-than-normal uric acid production." So it overproduces red blood cells, and the parent comment said there was a theory covid-19 was causing a decrease in red b…

I ask because I was recently doing background checks on a substance to mitigate nitric oxide induced lung damage (produced by damaged cells) which would work by by converting it to urea ... so maybe more than just amusing.

and for you https://monarchinitiative.org/disease/MONDO:0005571

Re: Mysterious heart damage, not just lung troubles, befalling Covid-19 patients

#170
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Until we see evidence of heart issues in patients without pneumonia complications That's exactly what they're seeing, and why this article was written: "An initial study found cardiac damage in as many as 1 in 5 patients, leading to heart failure and death even among those who show no signs of respiratory distress ." Unfortunately the article doesn't say what percent of people with cardiac damage did not have respi…

From the article: Patients who had heart disease before their coronavirus infections were much more likely to show heart damage afterward. But some patients with no previous heart disease also showed signs of cardiac damage. In fact, patients with no preexisting heart conditions who incurred heart damage during their infection were more likely to die than patients with previous heart disease but no COVID-19-induced c…

That's circular logic. If patient A dies of heart failure during a covid-19 infection, you should not be concluding that the patient likely had a heart issue prior to the covid-19 infection.

Sure, it might be the case, but you cannot draw any conclusion here unless you compare it to other pneumonia cases.

Post reply on HN