Hacker News Reader

Comment by brenden2 | Hacker News Reader

These numbers seem much more realistic versus the previous doomsday predictions of 3%. To compare this to base rates, the age adjusted base rate for deaths in the US in 2018 was about 0.7%[0]. Depending on how you look at it, this is either really bad (i.e., 6x worse than the flu) or not that bad (i.e., less deadly than death by any cause).

3% would have been really bad, that's more than 3x higher than the normal death base rate.

[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db355.htm

Edit: fixed wording for correctness.

View on HN

The comparison is meaningless and maybe anti-productive. What you're saying harkens back to political fights about what are the numbers. The first sentence of the article is:

The overall death rate from covid-19 has been estimated at 0.66%, rising sharply to 7.8% in people aged over 80 and declining to 0.0016% in children aged 9 and under.1

Nearly 8% death rate for folks over 80 is pretty remarkable. If people out there start saying "it's just 0.7%! Less than the flu!" old people will not take the precautions they need to. Because of the contagiousness of this virus, it should be treated as the huge monster that it is by old folks.

And the worse thing is that those dismissive statements aren't even true! For reference, compared to covid-19 the the 2009 swine flu

* had a smaller death rate, around 0.02%;

* was less contagious, taking longer to spread;

* was less dangerous to older people because they were already exposed to other forms of swine flu in the past.

The comparison with the regular flu is even more lopsided.

There should be a rule that anyone publishing percentages is required to also publish the absolute number for their country. Based on comments I've read on social media, many people simply can't reason about percentages: they post about how the death rate is "only 1%" but are horrified when told that implies 2 million dead in the USA. One of those numbers seems very small to them while the other seems unbelievably large. They're the same!

The follow-on effects might even be worse than this.

Worldwide, people are living longer. If this virus is more problematic for older people, then they will take up all the medical resources. And they will continue to infect more health care workers.

The result, is that there are now less medical resources, to handle those that don’t have the virus, but have other medical issues. The medical system may collapse, and these people will die.

This is exactly the problem that hit Wuhan. Their medical system collapsed from the overload, that other people began dying. And those that didn’t have the virus, went to the same hospital to get help, and got the virus at the hospital. So now, they have both, their medical problem, and the virus.

Sadly, this appears to also be happening again, in New York City.

People over 80 already have roughly 8% chance of dying in a year anyway from other causes.

Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-51979654 https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/E96A/production/...

8% isn't that bad considering the base rate is about 13% for anyone 85 and over (sorry, there's no data for the 80 and over group).

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db355-h.pdf

Edit: just saw the comment from loftyal, who cites a base rate of 8% for 80+.

It will be years before we get proper studies, but there are also going to be deaths caused by the COVID-19 situation. I'm about to take my wife to a clinic because she sprained her ankle. All of the nearby clinics have been converted to handling COVID-19 cases only, so we have to go to one much farther away. Luckily a sprained ankle isn't typically life threatening, but if it was, driving that much farther could have led to a negative outcome.

No matter how much I hide at home and don’t do anything risky, I can’t help but worry about things like appendicitis. Something that most days would be dangerous but manageable if I catch it in time, would be much worse right now.

The reasons for it being so serious is not the death rate, but the rate of spread, due to lack of immunity, if you do nothing then hospital system gets overloaded and you will start seeing much higher death rates (see Italy, Spain) and not only from covid but across the board, heart disease, accidents people not receiving planned care and their chronic conditions worsening etc.

Italy and Spain have done from nothing.

It's not just the hospital system and it's not just the deaths, terrible as they are.

You don't want a significant proportion of people in other key industries - policing, food production and distribution, utilities, logistics - off sick at the same time, because those systems will start to fail.

And in many countries people in those industries are being sent home if they show any symptoms - never mind serious symptoms that require hospitalisation - because some of those jobs are public-facing.

There's an obvious danger that a relatively small number of workers who deal with the public can infect a very large number of people.

This is similar to the best estimates we've had so far for the death rate with great care. Even then doubling the yearly deaths is still a very large event, and that's if we can flatten the curve enough that the health system copes. If not multiply the number by 5x.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com