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Comment by born_a_skeptic | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a statistician or a scientist, but I don't it does any good to lump everything together over the past ~9 months and compare it to Influenza and Pneumonia.

Just think about it.

We barely knew anything about covid or how to treat it at the start of the year. Now, it seems like we have a better understanding and how to potentially treat it.

Compare this to Influenza/Pneumonia, which I'm just guessing we've been studying for much longer and already have treatments for.

You could probably add some sort of moving average 50 days and 200 days to provide a clearer picture of how we are currently doing.

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Why make this point and ask for a moving average? The fact that it is new and unknown is part of why it is deadly, and that is reflected in the statistics. Why try to erase one takeaways from this set of statistics?

Like I said in another comment, I could have been more clear on my initial comment.

> Now, it seems like we have a better understanding and how to potentially treat it.

I think you're being a bit optimistic here. There've been some procedural improvements. We have a few drugs which appear to shorten hospital stay but not reduce death rate. We have dexamethasone, which gives something like a 20% death rate reduction in hospitalized cases, but is not otherwise super-useful.

There've been modest improvements in treatment, but no silver bullet yet.

I don't think you can lump everything together

Why not? Do you think the number of previously recorded deaths will suddenly decrease because we've found a better treatment? These people died, they should be included in the statistics.

I think the point here is that once we learned how to handle Covid, it will not be more dangerous than flu.

The main question for me is if someone who got Covid and recovered can get sick again. I haven't seen any answer for that question I could trust. There are some headlines from time to time "got Covid again after recovery", but given the quality of media reporting it means nothing.

I edited my comment. I could have been more clear.

I should have added that I think it depends on what the creator of the graphics/information is trying to show. If it's a pure death rate comparison, then sure you could lump everything together.

However, if you want to show a more real-time comparison, you choose to segment the data based on time.

> Compare this to Influenza/Pneumonia, which I'm just guessing we've been studying for much longer and already have treatments for.

Do we? It's mostly the same symptomatic treatment afaik, influenza antivirals are barely effective. The real difference is that there is a vaccine.

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