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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

I actually dedicated much of my comment to addressing that, specifically pointing out that COVID represents a lifetime risk that's been front-loaded and so it's fair to compare COVID's infection fatality rate to your lifetime risk of dying in a car accident. I also called out explicitly that COVID has been front-loaded.

Also, it's not a fair comparison between the flu and COVID because the flu has that unfortunate feature known as horizontal gene transfer. That's why you can get re-infected by the flu each year, and why in spite of a massive vaccination campaign the flu causes 45,000,000 illnesses each year in the US alone (and 60,000 deaths) -- and 650,000 deaths worldwide.

Each year. And each upcoming year. COVID will, based on what we know so far, happen once.

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You also have to take into account the uncertainty in your risk evaluation. The fatality rate is largely unknown so it's a bit deceptive to quote numbers like 0.37% as if it could be measure up to the second decimal. The German study probably came with error bars that were larger than that. For the age group 50-59, maybe it's 1.3% according to NY state (for both males and females so if the person you responds to is male, it's higher), but it could very well be 2% (or 0.5%) without it being surprising.

There is also a big assumption in considering the risk to be front-loaded. This is not the flu, but it could very well come back next year or in ten years in a different form. We just don't know yet this virus with enough confidence to do this assumption. Anyway, it is a bit strange that the ability for this virus to mutate next year would impact the risk of dying by going out tomorrow which, I think, the person your responded to was thinking about.

Finally, you're saying the flu deaths this year is double what the coronavirus has done, but again the uncertainty is high: the CDC estimation for the flu is from 24,000 to 62,000 deaths this season [1]. So it could be the double, but it could be actually lower. Let's not do things like chosing the estimate that better suits the argument without saying it's a high end of the estimate.

[1] - https://www.kcrg.com/content/news/Americas-2019-2020-flu-sea...

> This is not the flu, but it could very well come back next year or in ten years in a different form.

There has been no evidence of substantial mutations so far in COVID. There's no evidence that COVID will come back in a new and different form, any more than there's evidence I'll come back next week as a velociraptor. I mean, it could happen, but it's not something I'll plan for until I start sprouting scales and and a giant tail. Mutations are pretty random and the vast majority of mutations are harmful to the virus.

It's worth considering we live with coronaviridae all the time, something like 15% of the common cold is attributable to coronaviridae. [2] There's as much evidence of the common cold becoming Ebola as there is of me becoming a velociraptor.

The flu death range is likely more to do with how good a job we do guessing which the predominant strain will be in a given year, as the flu vaccine efficacy rate ranges from 10% to 60% each year. [1]

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/effectiveness-studies....

[2] https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/cold-guide/common_cold_ca...

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