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Comment by pen2l | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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+.

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.

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