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Comment by TheBlight | Hacker News Reader

I know this won't be a popular take but I haven't seen any compelling data to indicate what we're dealing with is any more deadly than a cold. No one has any idea how many people have been infected by this virus. It is assuredly many many more than current tests have revealed as the only people being tested are healthcare workers and at-risk individuals. I wouldn't be surprised if over a million people in the U.S. have already had it, possibly many more. That would imply a "massive wave" of people in need of intensive care isn't coming. No more than come about during an ordinary wave of other coronaviruses.

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Madrid is literally turning ice skating rinks into temporary morgues because they can't store all the dead bodies: https://news.yahoo.com/madrid-ice-rink-morgue-coronavirus-11...

edit: And South Korea has tested 345k+ and only 9k have come back positive: https://www.cdc.go.kr/board/board.es?mid=&bid=0030

The PCR test will only catch active infections. An antibody test would reveal if a person has ever been infected. I suspect that number in South Korea is much much higher.

So the dead piling up in Spain and Italy are apparently not compelling enough? I can't recall a common cold overwhelming medical facilities and emptying nursing homes like this. The thing that seems to elude the "it's just a cold" school of thought is that this is a cold for which there exists zero population immunity, unlike the existing coronavirus strains or even the flu.

"Zero population immunity" especially includes medical staff. I don't recall any cold season throughout which a country would be losing its doctors and nurses.

It won't be a popular take because there is little to no evidence to support this assertion.

There are sources out there you can trivially find to better inform yourself, please do so.

Please point me to a source which conclusively demonstrates the true mortality rate is higher than common influenza.

Like do we literally need to fly you to Italy to see the piles of bodies?

Comorbidity accounts for the vast majority of the deaths reported in Italy.

We cannot tell yet whether the total number who will die this season will be significantly greater or whether it is that the rate of deaths has increased.

It’s not going to be a popular take because it’s ignorant. It’s crushing health care systems wherever it spreads. The common cold doesn’t do that.

It’s possible the fatality rate is slightly lower than is commonly reported and the infection rate is slightly higher, but that’s not going to make a tremendous difference in terms of the number of deaths or in the impact it has on the health care system.

We do know though that the curve for number of infections is a logistic curve. And since we haven't hit the inflection point yet we know at a minimum (regardless of how many hidden/untested cases exist) we'll have twice the number of hospital cases than today (assuming action isn't taken to prevent it the current trajectory). Also the current strain is already a "massive wave" in locations hit by the virus longer. It's just that that massive wave is going to get worse https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/nyregion/nyc-coronavirus-...

We know what it looks likes for active infections we happen to catch with increased testing but there could have already been a peak of active infections and we would currently have no idea if it's behind us or not. We are totally ignorant as to what phase of the epidemic wave we are in.

Are you just militantly unaware of the news or something?

How do you explain hundreds of people dying every day in Italy?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197121...

You seem to be trying to suggest that COVID-19 is no worse than previous influenza epidemics. That does not seem to align with the facts on the ground. We are seeing historically high hospitalizations in many different countries, and certainly historically high rates of deaths. If your hypothesis were correct, we would have also seen this many times in the past.

We don't know what the mortality rate is because we don't know how many people have been infected.

But we know the absolute mortality because people keep dying by the thousands daily and we can measure that.

It doesn't matter. Hospitals are being overloaded and people are dying in hallways for lack of care. Ever seen that at this scale in influenza epidemics before? Maybe not since 1918.

> Maybe not since 1918

1957/58 H2N2 Asian flu 2 million global deaths atrributed

1968 H3N2 Hong Kong flu 1 million global deaths atrributed

I'm aware. 70k and 100k people in the US died, respectively. This was far short of 1918.

In Italy on average there are about 2000 deaths a day. Yesterday, there were 683 deaths attributed to Coronovirus.

In 2017 Italy had 25,000 deaths attributable to flu. And in the case of Covid-19, if a patient tests positive and they die it counts as a Covid-19 death regardless of whether or not Covid-19 is the actual cause of death. The majority of deaths in Italy right now are among the elderly with 3 or more comorbidities.

And 2017 had 365 days, so that amounts to 68 deaths a day. That would mean yesterday was 10 times worse than "flu"

They've got an ice rink in Madrid piled with corpses. Pretty sure that never happened from the cold.

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