Burn1dwn wrote: ↑Sun Feb 07, 2021 5:59 pm
And Necro is right, COVID is just like the Flu except with Covid:
But yeah, just like the flu.
Both sharks and lions can kill you, but they still remain two entirely different classes of creature. Same with the Sars-CoV-2 virus (one of many associated corona viruses) and the class of influenza viruses that can infect humans. Despite being viruses, they are almost unlike one another. Naturally how they infect a person and how that person's body will react to having the virus are also very different.
We *still* do not know what the long-term effects of having a COVID infection are. Many people get it, are sick for some amount of time, then feel better and go about with their lives. Others succumb too darn quickly. Many patients lose their sense of taste and smell, some regain them and some don't. Many seem to have lingering after-effects even after they've stopped having an active infection. A number of patients have been found to have heart, lung, liver, and brain conditions they didn't have before their infection, and there are other after-effects noticed with COVID-19 patients.
These simply are not the same in every way as a patient who's gotten over influenza has. COVID seems to cause these after-effects, influenza seems to acerbate certain existing conditions involving the heart and pancreas, but usually is not considered to be their cause in a patient. This is an important issue with the nation's healthcare system, because even if we we staunch COVID-19 infections, we will still have a large class of patients with potential medical issues that will have to be treated, and those treatments will have potentially healthy cost to be borne by someone (patient, family, society?).
As an aside topic, who among you, without recourse to sources of good medical information, would be able to guess that chicken pox and singles are caused by the very same virus, yet have a rather unconnected set of medical conditions associated with them?