Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Brain imaging before and after Covid-19 in UK Biobank

medrxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 103 posts

Re: Brain imaging before and after Covid-19 in UK Biobank

#71

Post by kadoban »

yeuxardents wrote: post #52
ds206 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Reports of death after COVID-19 vaccination are rare. More than 342 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines were administered in the United States from December 14, 2020, through July 26, 2021. During this time, VAERS received 6,340 reports of death (0.0019%) among people who received a COVID-19 vaccine." https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/ad...

Other vaccine trials were shut down immediately with less than 100 deaths. Suddenly we are accepting of THOUSANDS of deaths due to a vaccine, possibly more unreported? Utter Scientific Religion level beliefs going on here.

VAERS is not, by any means, verified side effects or deaths of the vaccine. It's first-line, unverified reports.

This is also not a vaccine trial, there are far more people who have been vaccinated than would be in any trial, by orders of magnitude.

Re: Brain imaging before and after Covid-19 in UK Biobank

#72

Post by timr »

trainsplanes wrote: post #53
dotcommand wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone knew from that first cluster in Wuhan that this was much, much more dangerous. Everyone told you that. Everyone trustworthy, anyway. I hope you find the CDC to be trustworthy because the CDC says on their website that the flu is more dangerous than covid for young people. "For young children, especially children younger than 5 years old, the risk of serious complications is higher for flu compared with COV…

> because the CDC says on their website that the flu is more dangerous than covid for young people. Depends what you're defining as young people. Under 5 as in those quotes, maybe virtually no risk. But I know otherwise healthy people in their 20s who got sick over a year ago. Their sense of smell and taste is still completely fried with no sign of recovery. Maybe that can happen with a bad flu sometimes, but it seem…

> Their sense of smell and taste is still completely fried with no sign of recovery.

This is exceptionally rare. The vast majority of people who develop anosmia regain their smell and taste. And yes, it does happen with other viruses.

> Maybe that can happen with a bad flu sometimes, but it seems way more common with covid.

The danger here is the distance between what it "seems" like, and what it actually is. If you're basing your judgment on media reports, you have to understand that you're not getting a balanced picture. The news media dwells on the most exceptional examples, and neglects the (many more) examples of people who have no serious side effects at all.

> It seems like there's some nerve damage resulting from the virus that we don't yet fully understand.

The current best evidence is that the loss of smell is not nerve damage, but infection of the epithelial cells surrounding the nerves in the nose.

Re: Brain imaging before and after Covid-19 in UK Biobank

#73

Post by timr »

ajross wrote: post #57
Izkata wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All that masking and distance learning actually worked! Across US states, there is no correlation, let alone causation, between stringency of masks/social distancing/lockdown and outcome.

I'm curious what you're citing here. I've actually seen lots and lots of charts that show the opposite. Are you maybe thinking of some of the non-scientific arguments that included the initial (extremely large) March 2020 outbreak in NYC in the "mask wearing" bucket, despite the fact that almost all those infections occurred before the lockdown?

Here is the quiz the sibling comment is probably referring to:

https://www.covidchartsquiz.com/

Re: Brain imaging before and after Covid-19 in UK Biobank

#74

Post by rrock »

Izkata wrote: post #20
gotoeleven wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there some reason to expect that covid-19 is different in long term effects than a flu? This study is saying it causes substantial brain damage, right? What possible mechanism is there for this?

> What possible mechanism is there for this? Free-floating spike protein is capable of crossing the blood/brain barrier. It's one of the reasons some people are wary of the long-term side-effects of the vaccines.

I guess it’s a good thing that the vaccine makes spike protein within your deltoid muscle cells, so it can’t float over to your brain. And it all gets quickly degraded anyway.

Re: Brain imaging before and after Covid-19 in UK Biobank

#75

Post by qw3rty01 »

dukeofdoom wrote: post #63
snet0 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vaccine isn't expected to prevent all-cause mortality, though. People will die no matter whether they're vaccinated or not, the question is a) will they die because of covid and b) will they die because of the vaccine. Your statistics do not even approach this question.

This is governments own website, not "my statistics". Its a tracking system to report suspected adverse effects. As in a physician reported an adverse effect they noticed in the patient, soon after the admission of the vaccine. It does not include any potential long term effects. As we don't know them yet.

Directly after the quote you mentioned:

- 33 are under investigation

- 61 unrelated to the vaccine

- 52 had insufficient information to determine if the vaccine was linked to the death

and finally the piece of information we're interested in:

- 6 due to TTS (a known side-effect), all from people who received the COVISHIELD/AstraZeneca vaccine

Re: Brain imaging before and after Covid-19 in UK Biobank

#76

Post by dukeofdoom »

qw3rty01 wrote: post #75
dukeofdoom wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is governments own website, not "my statistics". Its a tracking system to report suspected adverse effects. As in a physician reported an adverse effect they noticed in the patient, soon after the admission of the vaccine. It does not include any potential long term effects. As we don't know them yet.

Directly after the quote you mentioned: - 33 are under investigation - 61 unrelated to the vaccine - 52 had insufficient information to determine if the vaccine was linked to the death and finally the piece of information we're interested in: - 6 due to TTS (a known side-effect), all from people who received the COVISHIELD/AstraZeneca vaccine

Sure except, I wish you just quoted directly. "61 of these deaths are unlikely linked to a COVID-19 vaccine."

Is not the same as 61 unrelated to the vaccine.

Re: Brain imaging before and after Covid-19 in UK Biobank

#77

Post by timr »

ajross wrote: post #65
Izkata wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Worst season in recent memory was 61k deaths among influenza patients. Last year saw 600k americans die of covid. Those aren't directly comparable because the various flus have been circulating for years/decades and people have died all across that time. While people do have cross-immunity with sars-cov-2 and other coronaviruses, sars-cov-2 is new so it's hitting those decades of people all at once. The currently e…

> The currently estimated IFR across all age groups is around 0.15%, putting it on-par with the flu Yeah, that's gonna need one hell of a cite. This is false.

The OP correct about best estimates for IFR at a global level, and you shouldn't be dismissing the number out-of-hand.

The difficulty with "global average IFR" is that it neglects the massive variation in IFR by age. This Nature paper:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2918-0

made an attempt to break down the IFR by demographic, and found an almost 100,000-fold difference between the youngest and the oldest groups:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2918-0/figures/2

As such, the "IFR" for a country is going to vary dramatically with the age of the population. It isn't particularly meaningful to talk about IFR as a single number, but it's decidedly true that for anyone under 60, the risk of death is measured in fractions of a percent.

For those under 25, the risk is measured in thousandths of a percent.

Re: Brain imaging before and after Covid-19 in UK Biobank

#78

Post by ajross »

Izkata wrote: post #70
ajross wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The currently estimated IFR across all age groups is around 0.15%, putting it on-par with the flu Yeah, that's gonna need one hell of a cite. This is false.

Here you go: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33768536/ > Acknowledging residual uncertainties, the available evidence suggests average global IFR of ~0.15% and ~1.5-2.0 billion infections by February 2021 with substantial differences in IFR and in infection spread across continents, countries and locations.

Good grief. I don't even have to click on that to know you've misinterpreted or the paper is garbage. We've measured 600k US deaths (with a real count somewhat higher, excess death metrics usually overshoot that by 20-30%)? You'd need 400M+ Americans to even make that work. What's the contention here, magic unmeasured multiple infections? People dying more than once?

Re: Brain imaging before and after Covid-19 in UK Biobank

#79

Post by croes »

dukeofdoom wrote: post #45
ajross wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, but that seems to be an impossible claim. In fact there are zero cases ( edit: two people have come by to cite statistics on all-cause death numbers, which aren't responsive here. PLEASE be careful with your numbers, people, those values include folks who died of car accidents and heroin overdoses, etc... ) where the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines are generally believed to have caused death, and 3 (three) deat…

Here is data for Canada. "Up to and including July 16, 2021, a total of 152 deaths were reported after the administration of a vaccine." https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/vaccine-safety/#a...

You are missing a vital information. 152 death in how many vaccinations?

44,694,799 total doses administered, if all of these were two shots than that would be over 22,000,000 people.

What is the death rate of 22,000,000 infected people without vaccination?

Re: Brain imaging before and after Covid-19 in UK Biobank

#80

Post by dukeofdoom »

croes wrote: post #79
dukeofdoom wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is data for Canada. "Up to and including July 16, 2021, a total of 152 deaths were reported after the administration of a vaccine." https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/vaccine-safety/#a...

You are missing a vital information. 152 death in how many vaccinations? 44,694,799 total doses administered, if all of these were two shots than that would be over 22,000,000 people. What is the death rate of 22,000,000 infected people without vaccination?

Here is why this is a bad hypothetical:

1) You are assuming that the current set of vaccines will stop the spread of this disease. This is already in doubt due to break away strains. In fact, it's possible that the currently vaccinated will be more susceptible to spread the new strains. This week's mask mandate was all about the vaccinated spreading the delta strain and having more viral load in their nose . Naturally gained immunity is know to offer more protection from being reinfected with the virus. People that carry antibodies because they had the disease are more resilient because their immune system recognizes the virus by more than just the spike protein.

2. You are assuming 22,000,000 would otherwise get infected with Covid. This is not necessarily true. Young people don't get sick. Herd immunity, therapeutics and better future treatments make this unlikely.

3. We don't know the long term effects of the vaccine yet, thus can't make an ultimate call on the actual comparative rates of deaths. Hypothetically, what if the vaccine reduces life expectancy by 10 years, of millions of people. Would it still be better than natural herd immunity.

Post reply on HN