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Comment by daseiner1 | Hacker News Reader

or, just let what will happen, happen? i hear a lot about case numbers, almost nothing about mortality rates

Mortality is not the only thing that matters. We don’t know what this virus does to survivors, even potentially asymptomatic ones. The little that we do know appears to be alarming (potentially permanent lung damage, some potential cases of brain damage).

We already know about viruses that sit inside people asymptomatically for years and years before wreaking havoc. Of course we cannot live permanently paralyzed by “what ifs,” but planning that focuses entirely on mortality rate is ignoring a huge, huge piece of this equation.

I think you missed the whole reason to “flatten the curve”. The hospitalization rate is the problem, not mortality rate. 20-30% of people who get the virus end up in the hospital since there are no known treatments available. For now, if we have hospital capacity you’re very likely to survive COVID-19. If we run out of supplies and overwhelm the limited medical staff the mortality rate is going to skyrocket and we will run out of places to store the dead bodies.

20-30% of people who get the virus end up in the hospital

That's way too high. According to https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page, 0.65% of New York City residents have been hospitalized for COVID-19. Antibody tests show at least 20% of NYC residents have been infected, so the hospitalization rate is more like 3%.

There are stories coming out of people who have not died but certainly have not "recovered" in the sense most people would expect. See this for instance: https://twitter.com/DaniOliver/status/1279155358666305541 I don't really know how you expect students to complete their education if they're ill like that.

Also, even if that weren't the case and everyone did recover completely after two weeks, missing two weeks out of a 15-week college class is quite a bit. So even if your plan is to have your students get covid at some point in the term, have some fraction be asymptomatic, some fraction recover from it, and a couple of them die, you still need some sort of coherent educational plan for the large fraction that are going to be in the campus ICU for a couple of weeks.

Many survivors are left with permanent health effects.

You may not die, but you may not be able to practice your favorite sports ever again because of permanent lung scarring.

There is no evidence that there are significant long term health implications for the vast, vast majority of people infected by this coronavirus. If you have citations that state otherwise, please share.

This shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

The parent comment may be referring to the growing number of “long haulers” who have “recovered” yet seem to be suffering from chronic symptoms. [1]

This may be anecdotal, but it’s a growing number of people and worth taking seriously. This is a novel virus, after all.

1: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/06/covid-19-...

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Not necessarily "absence", but it does provide an upper bound. There are millions of people who have survived the virus. If it was common to be incapacitated for months, we'd have more than anecdotes.

I have been ill for 4 months now.

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