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Comment by darkwater | Hacker News Reader

Well, in the US for seasonal flu the deaths estimation [1] for this season are 24k-60k deaths, for covid19 is 60k-240k, where 60k is applying lockdown, not "everybody work normally". And obviously they are on top of the typical deaths.

[1] https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/09/its-difficult-to-grasp-t...

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The German survey showed an actual fatality rate of 0.37% vs the flu at 0.1%. We know herd immunity is in the cards due to the lack of mutation of COVID, and that kicks in at 60-70% of the population.

The German study also suggested up to 15% of people may already have it, so we can further reduce this number (an incremental 45-55% of the population getting infected) -- So, if we run some simple arithmetic, we'll see the number of fatalities will be approximately 60-70K.

This is in line with the number of fatalities in a difficult flu season. The difference is because COVID does not mutate (or has not yet), this will be a one-off, one-time, one-year issue. The flu kills 60,000 each and every year. The Swedes have it right.

We can mitigate this by isolating the vulnerable.

So yes, we are, in fact, overreacting.

[EDIT] I wonder if this is in fact in excess of deaths we'd see anyways. I'd imagine an 80.5 year old with 3 underlying medical conditions (average in Italy of the dead) isn't just as vulnerable to a bad flu as they are to COVID, so if COVID takes them, the flu won't.

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/04/09/999015/blood-tes...

Firstly, the German study analysed one small particularly hard hit town, so how you are extrapolating this to "people" in general is puzzling.

Secondly, there is a very wide range of reported fatality rates, with myriad factors known and unknown, so why you've chosen the lowest one globally (which, by the by, has always been an outlier and in any case is edging up past 1%) as the "actual" rate is, again, puzzling.

Finally, you are making a giant but unfortunately common logical error in using these already questionable death counts to make the case for an overreaction without attending to the obvious fact that without this "overreaction" every town, village and city on Earth would be Bergamo, where army lorries are conscripted to transport the dead from overwhelmed mortuaries, or worse.

Do better friendo.

> Finally, you are making a giant but unfortunately common logical error in using these already questionable death counts to make the case for an overreaction without attending to the obvious fact that without this "overreaction" every town, village and city on Earth would be Bergamo, where army lorries are conscripted to transport the dead from overwhelmed mortuaries, or worse.

Italy has the highest average age in Europe, and we know the virus is about 100X worse for people over 65 than it is for a 20 year old. Lombardy is the oldest region in the oldest country in Europe. The average age of the dead in Italy is 80.5 and has 3 underlying medical conditions. That's why it's so high there. I specifically called that out in the [EDIT].

I'd suggest doing some more reading.

The demographics in Gangelt skew older too, but otherwise they appear thoroughly average, and a totally reasonable representative sample. Especially as you yourself call out they were "particularly hard hit."

You don't see me claiming that the global death rate is 10% though, do you?

This actually isn't entirely on top of the typical deaths, as many of the folks dying of COVID are folks that were very likely to have died from their other underlying conditions anyway this year.

Especially now that we are counting all deaths in COVID-positive or presumed-positive individuals as COVID deaths regardless of cause of mortality.

The spike in mortality across northern Italy contradicts your claim that these people would have died anyways this year.

The estimate for the "no mitigation" scenario by the Imperial College is 2.2 million deaths [1] in the US. There is a large range of estimates that have come out since then to take into account the mitigation that has happened and how effective they have been. Lately things have been looking better but without some comprehensive contact tracing and isolation system we cannot "reopen" and drop those mitigations without moving back into the range of hundreds of thousands of casualties.

https://cleantechnica.com/2020/03/18/imperial-college-epidem...

That write-up was based on extremely early CFR data, with no population studies having been conducted at the time. Latest data is pointing to, as I called out, a fatality rate of 1/10th the CFR. This is especially true as we're counting anyone who tested positive for COVID as a COVID death, even if they were hit by a truck.

Is that why they are digging mass graves in New York?

With a CFR of 0.4%, 1 million Americans would die.

Of course, if more than 200 million Americans came down with CoVID-19 in a short span of time, the health system would collapse.

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