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Comment by bronipstid | Hacker News Reader

For comparison, the death rate across all age groups of flu is 0.1%. Extrapolating out, a failure to contain the virus will still mean tens of thousands of young healthy people dying in every country. That's why governments are finally admitting "Herd Immunity/Flatten the Curve" without total containment is not an option.

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> For comparison, the death rate across all age groups of flu is 0.1%. Extrapolating out, a failure to contain the virus will still mean tens of thousands of young healthy people dying in every country.

I’m not sure why you’re comparing the all-age mortality of flu to the age-specific mortality of COVID-19.

The relevant metric would be about 0.02% [1]

1. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html

Why not? It's just giving some context to people who may think .2% is a "low" mortality rate.

Thanks for the age specific number. That shows my point even more.

Ah, I wasn't sure what point you were trying to make, but I thought the all-age figure understates how much more deadly COVID-19 is compared to influenza.

Flat statements about what strategies are or aren't options don't seem helpful. It's not a good option, ideally we'll have total containment, but it's important that we not see it as a betrayal if it's decided in a couple weeks that total containment isn't feasible.

It absolutely would be a betrayal of the people you'd be giving up on to not do everything we can to help them while we still can. You can advocate for or against taking strong action but you can't tell people you're allowing to die to not be upset about it.

You certainly can't tell people not to be upset! Every death is tragedy; people have a right to be upset even about rarer causes of death that are harder to mitigate. (From personal experience, I can tell you that anyone who's seen an alcoholic family member die learns to sympathize with the Prohibitionists.)

But it's not a betrayal to acknowledge their pain while recognizing nothing feasible can be done.

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