There's a difference between being exposed to dirt and being exposed to viral diseases, though. Playing outside in the leaves will likely trigger healthy immune responses. Contracting COVID-19 may lead to long term health issues.
> Contracting COVID-19 may lead to long term health issues.
It’s certainly possible but to put that in perspective, here’s a study showing 98% of people (self-reporting) were symptom free after 12 weeks.
It's not just dirt. Traditionally people lived in close proximity to a variety of domestic animals. Most viruses originated in animals and then crossed to humans. So our immune systems evolved to cope with that exposure.
I personally doubt we need zoonotic diseases to calibrate a healthy immune response. I also believe the close association of people and animals was more salient to European populations than elsewhere, and furthermore we didn’t evolve in an environment where you could expose or be exposed to thousands of people on a regular basis. So I’m not sure I’m convinced by an anthropological argument here. And IIRC, the hygiene…
One of the known things is that babies who get seriously sick somewhere in their first year have a better immune system for life. So yes, failing to be exposed to viral diseases can be bad for you.
Morbid but this sounds like burn-in ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burn-in ) All complex systems, us included, have bathtub curves ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve )
Perhaps this comment is dangerous and problematic. The idea that your ISP should be monitoring the semantic content of their customers is disturbing, and you imply that they should do something about content that, what?, they don't like? That they think is illegal? That the government tells them to report on? This is constantly recurring debate on HN. What is the appropriate level of censorship? Who should be censori…
In some peoples mind even questioning or being skeptical of many of the more extreme covid claims and actions is extremely dangerous. According to some “experts” we shouldn’t be allowed to research covid, look at public covid data sets, or even think very hard about it. We should, instead, have almost complete blind faith in a handful of “experts” and just roll over and do whatever they recommend. A ton of our action…
To be fair, some random persons datapoint wrangling can (and usually does) have large number of eyeballs than a life long trained professional with a PhD. While the data should be public and object to scrutiny (ideally by other experts in scientific community), how much insight would untrained people actually get? Apart from alternative facts and "just a flu". Many popular blog posts and opinions were proven to be flat out wrong.
If we don't trust the people dedicated to handle that kind of situations, who can we trust? I totally agree there has not been enough transparency (what panic would it cause if the scientists say "We don't know at this point. We think X Y Z, it might change completely in a month) about what we know, but I still would rather trust WHO/CDC (who have been proven incorrect multiple times) than some random forum with no credentials.
What politicians do based on these observations is a very different thing.
There's a difference between being exposed to dirt and being exposed to viral diseases, though. Playing outside in the leaves will likely trigger healthy immune responses. Contracting COVID-19 may lead to long term health issues.
Any respiratory virus can cause long term health issues in some people. Covid is absolutely not unique in that regard.
I'd love a citation, because I think it's certainly not "any". COVID isn't unique in that regard, nor very common.
Yet another news article that doesn't link the damn paper. "The hygiene hypothesis, the COVID pandemic, and consequences for the human microbiome" > This pandemic intersects with a decades-long decline in microbial diversity and ancestral microbes due to hygiene, antibiotics, and urban living (the hygiene hypothesis). High-risk groups succumbing to COVID-19 include those with preexisting conditions, such as diabetes…
Hygiene hypothesis still seems dubious to me. The notion that hygienic lifestyles can lead to a weaker immune system or microbiome is plausible, but I'd actually be pretty surprised if it translated into worse long-term outcomes like life expectancy. Being exposed to lots of pathogens can have some pretty big downsides. We're only just beginning to understand long-term COVID symptoms and it's possible we've missed long-term symptoms of lots of pathogens. I have had chronic canker sores my whole life (cause by retrovirus) that I definitely could live without. ERVs kinda freak me out too.
With working vaccines its the matter of when not if. What makes you think otherwise?
When the average 36 year old American overestimates their chance of dying from covid by 1000x and any comment that goes against the “be scared” narrative.... when I get called “dangerous” for posting public data from state covid dashboards because my post shows this isn’t that bad, relatively speaking.... a lot of people are gonna have some serious long term mental trauma. It seriously feels like people want to this…
> As occurred in the spring, COVID-19 has become the leading cause of death in the United States (daily mortality rates for heart disease and cancer, which for decades have been the 2 leading causes of death, are approximately 1700 and 1600 deaths per day, respectively4).Dec 17, 2020 [0]
How do you argue with statistics? Its leading cause of death.
> if new variants escape inoculation by the vaccine Do they? I've looked for information on this, but haven't found it. Do existing vaccines protect against the new variant from the UK?
So far they believe all the know strains are still covered. Nobody knows if that will continue to be the case. The MRNA vaccines are targeting the spike protein, which is what gives it many of it's infectious properties. If it does mutate to change or eliminate that spike, we might get lucky and those strains won't be as serious, but nobody can predict the future.
Just an FYI, spike protein is used by virus as means of entering a healthy host's cell. Without it virus becomes like a c4 without detonation cap. More less harmless.
how do you supposed herd immunity develops without low level exposure to viruses and organisms (which is what's in the dirt)? it's quite likely we've prolonged the pandemic by excessively curtailing exposure, which in turn dampens in vivo immune response necessary for natural herd immunity in the population. the 1918 flu, which killed 10-20% of the infected, was worthy of that kind of avoidance response, not this vir…
This is such utter nonsense. In countries which did allow the pandemic to spread healthcare systems were quickly overloaded and people died in droves, not just from the pandemic but also from not being able to receive care for other healthcare issues.
I think there are plausible counterarguments, but the results in, for example, Sweden look much like France, and the results in Belarus look much like other eastern European nations (which is to say, better than western European ones). Not that either Sweden or Belarus did nothing, but it does suggest that the measures taken by most countries, did not have an enormous impact, if any. Japan did less than most countries in Europe, but their total cases and deaths per capita are Again, regardless of what you believe, on balance, of the article's implications, the phrase "utter nonsense" suggests that it is not worth thinking about, and it clearly is worth thinking about and researching, at least.
Yet another news article that doesn't link the damn paper. "The hygiene hypothesis, the COVID pandemic, and consequences for the human microbiome" > This pandemic intersects with a decades-long decline in microbial diversity and ancestral microbes due to hygiene, antibiotics, and urban living (the hygiene hypothesis). High-risk groups succumbing to COVID-19 include those with preexisting conditions, such as diabetes…
Hygiene hypothesis still seems dubious to me. The notion that hygienic lifestyles can lead to a weaker immune system or microbiome is plausible, but I'd actually be pretty surprised if it translated into worse long-term outcomes like life expectancy. Being exposed to lots of pathogens can have some pretty big downsides. We're only just beginning to understand long-term COVID symptoms and it's possible we've missed lo…
Think of it this way: your body has machinery built to combat pathogens. If there are no pathogens to fight, the bar for what is considered a pathogen lowers until eventually those machines are attacking healthy tissue and can cause many issues.
Allergies, Lupus, and many others are already caused by similar mechanisms, and pushing society into ever more clean states will likely lead to more issues.
The only real cure would then be taking immune-suppresants.
Or we just need to embrace that nasty bacteria are a natural environmental feature important to our homeostasis