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Comment by iateanapple | Hacker News Reader

> Both the mortality rate and the long term impacts of COVID19 are both real and have not been overblown

The mortality rate for healthy people is incredibly low.

For example Singapore has had ~54,000 cases with a death count of only 27 since it was mostly young healthy people who got it.

Likewise there has been basically no excess deaths in many European countries for <65 years olds.

This is not at all how the media is treating covid.

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The mortality rate may be low over the long run. But certainly over the short run, it was very very high. It is not a normal thing for city morgues to run out of room such that they need to truck in refrigeration units to hold dead bodies. This has happened in multiple American cities. That cannot be called a low rate by any stretch of the imagination, unless taking an average over a very long length of time.

> But certainly over the short run, it was very very high

Was it very very high in the <65 not obese, not diabetic group?

We know it is dangerous to the old and some cities did a horrendous job of looking after their elderly.

Where "a very long length of time" = "more than a couple of weeks"?

> But certainly over the short run, it was very very high.

So what? If you're alive now, if you survived the initial wave of the virus, the risk to you, now, of getting the virus is much less than it was back in March.

And if you're trying to figure out if the risk of the vaccine is worth it to you later this year, you have to weigh it against the risk of dying from covid-19 at that point in time, not what the risk of dying from it was back in March.

What about the countries that did have a lot of excess deaths in the 25-44 and 45-64 age ranges? Like the US for example?

You are just picking and choosing random data points to make very broad statements.

Since it's highly unlikely that the lethality of the virus depends on which continent it's on, a more likely explanation is that people in the US are more likely to belong to any of the risk groups by being obese or by having diabetes.

Check the number of deaths by age group at EuroMOMO: https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps

The total number of covid-19 dead that were younger than 45 in the countries that EuroMOMO covers is in the low thousands, while the total number of covid-19 dead is in the low hundreds of thousands. That's two magnitudes lower risk compared to the general lethality.

Every individual has to do their own risk analysis, and see if they belong to any of the risk groups for covid-19, because that changes the individual equation.

Or the US bungled the response leading to massive infection rates.

That doesn't affect mortality, except that the more a country gets infected the better mortality will look since susceptibility to infection just happens to correlate to susceptibility to severely bad outcome

> You are just picking and choosing random data points to make very broad statements.

Is the data random? Would it really cluster like that across countries?

I don’t think your statement makes a lot of sense.

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