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

Metformin shown to prevent long Covid

cidrap.umn.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 195 posts

Re: Metformin shown to prevent long Covid

#101

Post by saalweachter »

notacoward wrote: post #77
sBqQu3U0wH wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I developed heart problems just after getting vaccinated so it's pretty hard for me not to agree when people speculate that some sudden death, severe illness or whatever at a young age may be due to the vaccination. I know I am biased, but how can I not be?

> may be due to the vaccination Emphasis on may , or might. Your experience is certainly valid, and I'm sorry you have to go through this, but it's still a sample of one with no theory of causation. If a certain percentage of people are vaccinated, and a certain percentage of people develop heart problems regardless of vaccination, a few of those people will develop those problems immediately after vaccination. Such…

Eh, it's totally fair to draw a connection between Guillain-Barre, myocarditis, etc, and vaccination. They are all fundamentally the immune system overreacting and attacking your own tissues, and the vaccines are provoking an immune response. There's a clear mechanism for this to happen, so it's not shocking or a mystery.

The reason we accept this risk and get vaccines anyway is that all of these same conditions occur at higher rates when you are naively exposed to a virus. Myocarditis rates, for instance, are roughly 10x higher in any age group when you get COVID (without a prior vaccination or infection) than if you get a vaccine.

So if you aren't likely to be exposed to a particular virus, it's totally reasonable to not get vaccinated for it, just because there are side effects. I haven't been vaccinated for any of the various tropical diseases, for instance, because I don't travel anywhere. I haven't been vaccinated for rabies, because I'm not a vet and don't go spelunking. There's no point in rolling the dice on side effects when I have essentially no chance of contracting the diseases.

Once it became clear that everyone is going to be exposed to COVID, you stopped having the option to avoid rolling the dice on myocarditis or other immune-system disorders; it's just a matter of whether you want to roll the dice with a vaccine, or wait and roll them with your first infection, and have 10x the likelihood of getting hit with one of them.

Re: Metformin shown to prevent long Covid

#102

Post by mensetmanusman »

kramerger wrote: post #72
carlmr wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Now that we're in 2023, and pretty much everyone is either multiply-vaccinated ~or~ and has had COVID multiple times Isn't this the most common demographic?

Not in places were vaccine rollout was quick and frictionless with good coverage, thus reducing probability of transmission of the main strain and early mutations. I think a lot of people in Northern Europe have either never had covid or had a mild possibly unnoticeable infection

No, the r0 is too high.

Essentially everyone eventually gets Covid, vaccination or not, it's just that it's not worth testing continuously to see if your zero-symptom-life is currently infected.

Re: Metformin shown to prevent long Covid

#103

Post by SEMW »

contravariant wrote: post #93
gnicholas wrote: post #25

TLDR: > By day 300 of follow-up, 93 (8.3%) of 1,126 participants said they had received a diagnosis of long COVID by a provider. The cumulative incidence of long COVID by day 300 in those who took a 14-day course of metformin was 6.3% (95% confidence interval [CI], 4.2 to 8.2) compared to 10.4% (7.8 to 12.9) in the placebo group, or 39.4% lower. Interestingly, half of the participants in the study (which took place s…

Hmm, going by those confidence intervals this doesn't look significant, or is that just me?

The fact that the 95% confidence intervals of two variables have some overlap doesn't mean there's a >5% chance that the expected values of the two variables are the same.

Consider two independent random variables X and Y; the chance that (a sample from X is above the 90th percentile of the true distribution of X) is 10%, but the chance that (a sample of X is above the 90th percentile of the true distribution of X AND a sample of Y is below the 10th percentile of the true distribution of Y) is 1%.

(disclaimer: with actual science the stats are a lot more complicated and you can't just assume they're independent and multiply the two, it's just a simplified example to give intuition about why overlapping confidence intervals don't imply what the parent thought, IANAstatistician)

Re: Metformin shown to prevent long Covid

#104

Post by mistrial9 »

r0l1 wrote: post #80
op00to wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you get a test to see if you actually avoided Covid?

We did normal Covid tests for work. Maybe I should do an antibody test. Would be interesting...

antibodies are only measurable for a short time; long-term ability to defend is "learned" by the immune system but not measurable in any ordinary way; here in California coastal area there is a lot of social pressure about vaccination. Random people still insist that vaccination is important for healthy adults and sometimes under-18.

Re: Metformin shown to prevent long Covid

#106

Post by mensetmanusman »

nradov wrote: post #98
lm28469 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you've been continually tested every 2 weeks for the past 3 years you might very well have had it asymptomatically

There may be a misunderstanding about terminology here. COVID-19 is the clinical disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. If you are infected by the virus but asymptomatic then you don't "have Covid".

Covid has become the shorthand for the virus, this was inevitable when the actual virus is being communicated with something like a serial number.

Re: Metformin shown to prevent long Covid

#107

Post by spywaregorilla »

SEMW wrote: post #103
contravariant wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, going by those confidence intervals this doesn't look significant, or is that just me?

The fact that the 95% confidence intervals of two variables have some overlap doesn't mean there's a >5% chance that the expected values of the two variables are the same. Consider two independent random variables X and Y; the chance that (a sample from X is above the 90th percentile of the true distribution of X) is 10%, but the chance that (a sample of X is above the 90th percentile of the true distribution of X AN…

Mostly false.

Overlapping confidence intervals does not mean > x% chance that the two variables' expected values are the same. If the intervals overlap, the difference is not statistically significant.

Your example about random variables is largely misinformed. You're talking about things as if they are individual values. But we're talking about sample means. The probability that a sample mean for a large sample is above the 90th percentile is massively lower than 10%, and depends on n. The joint probability of getting two sample means above X threshold is irrelevant.

Confidence intervals don't tell you what the probability of the true mean being above X is. They tell you, bluntly, the range of values where the true mean could be, with 95% confidence ("If i were to do this experiment 100 times, based on the results I got, I would expect the true mean to be within this range")

You can play with some numbers and methods but you can rest pretty sure that a material effect size is probably not rigorously evidenced if the intervals overlap

Re: Metformin shown to prevent long Covid

#108

Post by op00to »

r0l1 wrote: post #80
op00to wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you get a test to see if you actually avoided Covid?

We did normal Covid tests for work. Maybe I should do an antibody test. Would be interesting...

I was very interested at the results of my spouse's antibody test! It was negative, and we thought for sure she had antibodies from infection. I have no scientific evidence, but she has genetic abnormalities in certain blood proteins, and I wonder if that assists with her resisting the infection!

Re: Metformin shown to prevent long Covid

#109

Post by Fervicus »

rbanffy wrote: post #74
sBqQu3U0wH wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I developed heart problems just after getting vaccinated so it's pretty hard for me not to agree when people speculate that some sudden death, severe illness or whatever at a young age may be due to the vaccination. I know I am biased, but how can I not be?

There is a small risk of developing myocarditis after being vaccinated, but the risk of dying of COVID in the US, for instance, was of 1.1% after being diagnosed. I’m really sorry you are going through this. People didn’t have time to better test the vaccines to ensure their safety before having to use them to prevent massive loss of life due to the disease. Perhaps we’ll find ways to alleviate the issues the vaccine…

And what was the risk for people under 40?

Re: Metformin shown to prevent long Covid

#110

Post by Izkata »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #102
kramerger wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in places were vaccine rollout was quick and frictionless with good coverage, thus reducing probability of transmission of the main strain and early mutations. I think a lot of people in Northern Europe have either never had covid or had a mild possibly unnoticeable infection

No, the r0 is too high. Essentially everyone eventually gets Covid, vaccination or not, it's just that it's not worth testing continuously to see if your zero-symptom-life is currently infected.

> to see if your zero-symptom-life is currently infected

No symptoms = not having COVID-19, GP was using the term correctly.

Conflating SARS-CoV-2 with COVID-19 is a big annoyance I have with the general usage of "covid".

Post reply on HN