> Coronavirus stories about individuals and long term complications.
Wat?
By definition, nobody yet has long term consequences from a virus that is less than a year old. Some people might have medium term consequences, but nobody has lived with it for decades yet.
Careful not to mix up definitions. "Long-term" in medicine does not mean "extended period of time." It more often means "requiring continuous monitoring or care over an extended period of time." COVID-19 patients are still actively monitored, especially now as we have meta-studies just released this month showing SARS-CoV-2 appears to have some preference to selectively target ACE2 (vasodilation). We don't have concrete alphas on any target yet, but we certainly have longitudinal studies in progress. It's been one year from the first cases appearing in Wuhan. We have traced and confirmed more than a dozen variants originating in post-Wuhan areas. The recent surge in new cases is owed almost exclusively to two variants with significantly higher transmissibility.
Last, I'd like to point out that while I agree this type of virus is relatively new to humans, and the -2 virus is very new, we do have a wealth of longitudinal knowledge from SARS and MERS cases to work with in conjunction with what we are discovering about SARS-CoV-2. So far, it is not the patients with respiratory illness that we need to be concerned about. It is the patients with zero respiratory symptoms, but high risk of other cardiovascular and autoimmune symptoms. I think we're more baffled by how this one virus can go from putting someone on a ventilator to putting someone at a significant risk of stroke in such a short period of time.
That said, I agree with you that these are apples and oranges. The brain-eating amoebas are a panic thing. COVID-19 is not something to shake a fist at. COVID-19 has been found in spinal fluid. Given SARS and MERS do not share this trait, we have a lot more reason to take -2 as a serious threat, regardless of its extremely high short-term survival rate.
Well regardless, i still don't know what type of point OP was trying to make.
The interest in this story is obviously not because anyone thinks there is an actual world wide risk of a massive outbreak of brain eating amoebas. Things can be both interesting and not the start of a zombie apocolypse at the same time.
> Things can be both interesting and not the start of a zombie apocolypse at the same time.
But then you shouldn’t sell it as one. The headline is pretty clickbaity given the reality of things, and sadly this is a common trend. I think that’s OPs point.
Seems pretty factual to me. One (small) US city warned about water supply contaminated with this microbe.
The water really was contaminated. The residents really were warned not to use the water supply. The contaminate really does kill people by eating their brains.
The headline did not say to go full panic mode for people not in the affected area. The headline did not say the situation was out of control. Which part of the headline was misleading or panic mongering?
It can be factually accurate and clickbaity at the same time. Extremely few people have to be worried about this in practice, but the headline reads like it’s from a cheap zombie movie.
> Which part of the headline was misleading or panic mongering?
They don’t state which city it’s about (so it could be any major one), and mention the water supply which implies everyone is affected. They want you to go “oh shit, this could be my town”. They do tell you that it’s only in a small dump somewhere in Texas, and that it’s only killed 34 people in 10 years, but only after you clicked. The headline is definitely alarmist given the benign contents of the article.
Wat?
By definition, nobody yet has long term consequences from a virus that is less than a year old. Some people might have medium term consequences, but nobody has lived with it for decades yet.