If you have not yet sold your coins, you have not yet lost, there is always a chance that the market will turn in your direction, but if you are desperate and sold the coin at a reduced price, then everything, you have a loss.
Exactly, the loss when the market starts to go down is an unspecified loss, this loss is just a virtual loss, it will never come true unless we sell it at that time, but a lot of people always take hasty actions like you say, panic and sell their property, they don't realize they always have opportunities and other methods in this situation, they forget that they can still wait. However, sometimes that action may be very reasonable when cutting the loss too early can give us a chance to accumulate altcoin at a cheap price and return with more profit but traders will need to be very sophisticated to do that