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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

I think the risks shouldn't be downplayed, but the news media, aka advertising industry, frenzy over this pandemic is disgusting. Nobody that contracts this virus should fear death, yet that is what the mainstream media is selling and people are consuming: fear, death, uncertainty.

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>Nobody that contracts this virus should fear death, yet that is what the mainstream media is selling and people are consuming: fear, death, uncertainty.

Except, you know, about 1 in 30 that contracted it in Northern Italian cities with heavy spread and not enough ICUs, and 1 in 10 or so over 70 or with a prior condition...

I think visualizing the odds with playing Russian roulette drives the odds home: 1 in 30 means randomly picking one revolver from five, of which one has a single bullet chambered, putting it to your head and pulling the trigger. 1 in 10, you have two (very roughly), 1 in 300 (0.3%), you have fifty.

I don't want to play the game even with fifty.

I chose my words carefully in my original post. Fear accomplishes nothing. Worrying about something (ICU Beds) you ultimately have no control over fixes 0 problems. "Worrying doesn't take away tomorrow's troubles, it takes away today's peace". People absolutely should take every precaution recommended by their local officials. But living in fear for their life is both unneeded and counter-productive.

If you are elderly than you should definitely fear death. But yes if you are under 50 it's more likely you will be killed driving to the hospital than by the virus.

Wait what?

Assuming a 10 mile journey, the probability of death is 1.25E-7.

CFR for 20-49 age group is 0.3% (probability 3E-3)

So either my math is wrong or you are wrong by only 4 orders of magnitude.

Keep in mind that CFR takes into account only those that are confirmed positive (which are mostly people who already have severe symptoms).

That said, parent comment's math is still way off (see my sibling comment).

Parent cited a postitive testing patient, driving themselves to hospital.

> if you are under 50 it's more likely you will be killed driving to the hospital than by the virus.

Apologies if this was intended to be hyperbole, but it is not true according to our current knowledge. Estimated fatality rate for adults 20-30 is 0.03%, 30-40 is 0.08%, and 40-50 and 0.16% [1]

The probability of dying from one single vehicle ride to the hospital is several orders of magnitude less than 0.1% or even 0.01%. There are 1.25 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles driven in the USA [2]. Even if the hospital is 100 miles away, your odds of dying on the way there are 0.000125%.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus_disease_2019#Progn...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...

I'm guessing the intent was more along the lines of "Car trips generally are more deadly on an annual basis and we don't stress about that. In fact, if you try to encourage people to walk, bike and take public transit based on the idea that car trips kill and maim, you will be generally blown off."

Don't forget that automobile fatalities are far lower now with significantly reduced traffic due to lockdowns. This analogy works without coronavirus existing and only then.

Fair enough, it was just an offhand comment I should have run the numbers. It looks like if you are under 50 and have COVID, you are ~3x more likely to die of COVID then to die of a car crash in that same year. So that's probably the better comparison when looking at risk, although it probably says more about how we underestimate the risk of car crashes rather than overestimating the risk of COVID.

Rough average COVID deaths per 100k infected under 50 (using average death rate from categories 0-50): 36

Deaths per 100k by car crashes in a year in the US: 11.2

If you got the covid, it's actually 4 orders of magnitude more probable to kill you than being "killed driving to the hospital".

Agreed. There are cases of people getting this that are not recorded because there are people who get sick and stay at home and go through it as best as they can. I myself never go to a hospital when sick I just stay home to recover.

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