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Comment by edejong | Hacker News Reader

I would turn that around. There is a substantial amount of healthy individuals who end up in in ICU or worse due to the virus. This is certainly different from the common flu, for example.

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I may be misunderstanding you, but in case I was misunderstood: I didn't mean to say that the virus is harmless. It may have longer-term effects, and just because it is more deadly when certain conditions are met, we shouldn't just throw people who meet these conditions under the bus, or assume it's going to be harmless in other cases - it isn't.

But it's hard work not to fall for the paranoia that is fed (partly as side-effect) by the current attention-seeking headline-business formerly known as news.

According to Wikipedia, the flu causes 3-5 million severe cases and 650,000 deaths worldwide each year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza

Yes, but the mortality rate of the common flu is much, much lower. Mortality of admitted patients is around 11% according to latest Lancet article.

The key here is “admitted.” Reports from Wuhan all indicate the hospitality rate is much much lower than usual circumstances since the patient count is over the roof (due to CCP trying to cover up initial cases), and a lot of patients don’t get treatments at all as a result. The high mortality rate is expected sunce only the most acute cases are admitted.

Mortality of admitted patients of influenza in the U.S. is ~9% (https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html). That's not that much different, and the U.S. has a lower mortality rate than much of the world.

The flu kills hundreds of thousands of people each year. So far, this virus has killed maybe 200, out of 7,000ish infections.

We’re a long way away from knowing how dangerous this virus is, but the media hype is waaaaay ahead of reality.

The flu has a mortality rate of something like 0.1%, 200 our of 7000 is already 3%, 30x as deadly. Of course these aren't final numbers but the flu infects and afflicts vastly many more people than it kills.

Those 7000 infections are 7000 confirmed infections. Actual infections are going to be way higher than this (and hence, the mortality rate is going to be way lower) because of what was being discussed up-thread and in the article, i.e. infected people showing only minor symptoms and never getting admitted into a hospital where they would be tested for nCoV-2019.

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