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Comment by vackosar | Hacker News Reader

Death rate: Age 0-9: 0.0094% Age 10-19: 0.022% Age 20-29: 0.091% Age 30-39: 0.18% Age 40-49: 0.4% Age 50-59: 1.3% Age 60-69: 4.6% Age 70-79: 9.8% Age 80+: 18%

TL;DR dont infect ur parents as 60-69 has 1 in 21 chance of death.

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I’m at Ground Zero in the US (King County, on the East side is Seattle), where about 10% of the reported cases are dead. I’m your parents’ age, in the 1.3% cohort.

Gotta admit, it’s scary. One death took place in the hospital where I had a checkup, on the day of the checkup.

CMIIW: The same way age segments the CFR, so does smoking, existing conditions, etc. So if you're <40, not a smoker, no existing disease, the risk is even lower.

Having said that, it's still a bad situation, since getting infected increases the likelihood of others getting infected and dying, including people in higher CFR brackets. This is not like "getting cancer" or "getting hit by lightning", because there one person getting it doesn't affect the probability of another getting it.

Really please don’t infect _anyone_, as it increases the likelihood that someone else’s parent or grandparent will die.

Thanks for summarizing.

Plenty here are going to have parents in 70-79 (like I do) or 80+. And I really don’t like those odds.

These numbers may look insignificant but your base chance of dying in a given year is on a similar order. Have a google for life tables, the UK ones are available online.

For younger people, it's like having a fair part of a year's worth of life risk, for older people several years.

Do you want that risk for no benefit? There's also whatever problems you get that don't kill you. I suspect you waste a good few weeks of your life regardless of whether you survive.

Do you have a link for that? The first result I got is this life table for US 2003 on Wikipedia (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Excerpt_...), and the risk for an average 60 year old is around 1% per year. Do you mean to say 1% and 4.6% are on a similar order?

Of magnitude, yes. This is not the one I found yesterday but figures are similar.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

That's not reasonable. 1% risk of death vs (1+4.6)% risk of death (a) is closer to 1 order of magnitude higher (log_10(5.6)=0.75), and (b) 1%/year and 5.6%/year are nowhere near the same the way most normal people think about the risk of dying.

A 1 order of magnitude lower risk (0.1%) is basically negligible, like a regular flu. On the other hand, a 1 order of magnitude increase, i.e., around 10% risk of dying would already rate among the deadliest epidemics in history, and far above things like the Spanish flu, so comparing orders of magnitude is just not the right way to think about this number.

You might have a point there. But I think a lot depends on the error of the disease estimates, and it seems clear that they could well overlap with the range of natural death rates. Dependent on how you slice and dice it.

For sure old people are at at least a year's risk.

I wouldn't gamble with a 1 in 500 chance for me either.

That works out to 2000 micromorts, which compares to the accumulated baseline risk over 3 months of living: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort

I still wouldn't want to get infected.

Yes, bit more dangerous than BASE-jumping. No, thanks. When was the last time you did something that had 0.2% chance to kill you?

Also what this number kind of glosses over is how are the survivors doing. Half of those that get ARDS have life-long consequences. There are still 20.000 active cases in China, 1 month after the epidemic peaked there.

EDIT: I took BASE jumping risk from here http://www.wingsuitfly.com/risk/4572000812 not from the wiki reference

That's also the risk without some major reward. If you want to do base jumping you're trading that risk for an exhilarating experience at least.

Yeah but the report doesn't talk about the degradation in quality of life you'll have to endure if you survive. It may take you months/years to fully recover.

As a 30-something 2000 micromorts is like my entire yearly micromort budget. I mean, I wasn't seriously worried about dying in 2020 but risks over 1,000 micromorts are worth treating as a serious deal even if you shouldn't be terrified of them.

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