Hacker News Reader

Comment by gridlockd | Hacker News Reader

The confusion lies in "just the flu". Actual Influenza is in fact quite dangerous.

However, we need to compare COVID-19 to Influenza to get some perspective. I would argue that Influenza is worse than COVID, for the simple reason that it kills more young people and children. The average age of a COVID fatality is higher than life expectancy. Influenza destroys more years of life.

We also need to make a distinction between the time frame in which the virus was new and killed a disproportionate amount of susceptible people, versus the time frame we are in now, where the virus is once again kills less people than Influenza - as the data clearly shows, though it isn't highlighted in the publication.

View on HN

>However, we need to compare COVID-19 to Influenza to get some perspective. I would argue that Influenza is worse than COVID, for the simple reason that it kills more young people and children. The average age of a COVID fatality is higher than life expectancy. Influenza destroys more years of life.

I think that's a very good point. And also one of the reasons the perspectives differ so much.

However we don't know yet about the long-term effect of COVID on younger people. It could still very well lead to a decreased quality of life for young people as we've seen in other posts about scarring of the lungs and permanent fatigue.

Granted influenza can cause similar after effects (like pericarditis and permanent fatigue), but it appears to be less frequent.

> Actual Influenza is in fact quite dangerous.

Agreed, but we don't destroy economies over it, we just get on with things and accept it for what it is.

Except influenza is nowhere near spreading as fast. If let unchecked, many millions of people would be dead - this has been avoided only by control measures, and we're not past it yet.

If it's similar seasonality to Spanish flu, expect 4 waves. This is start of the second wave, likely biggest.

> If let unchecked, many millions of people would be dead - this has been avoided only by control measures, and we're not past it yet.

This is an unfalsifiable claim, considering that virtually every country has done something to inhibit spread. It's also meaningless, because nobody is saying that nothing should be done to inhibit spread.

The question is, what should be done? How many people-years can we realistically save, and at what cost? Every year, almost 3 million Americans will die of any cause. If we take a CFR of 0.4%, and a "herd immunity" threshold of 70%, the upper bound of deaths in the US from COVID-19 is under a million. The average age of a COVID-19 fatality is higher than life expectancy, which means that half of these deaths would've occured under any circumstance, in the near future. We can see high excess mortality right now, but we haven't seen how that translates into lowered mortality in the future.

Sweden would be the control for the hypothesis, and while it wasn't no measures, there was no lockdown.

Sweden coped fine with minimal intervention from the government.

The rest of your comment is pure speculation. It now seems to be the given narrative that there will be a second wave despite coronaviruses having different characteristics from flu. I would argue that the current second waves in Europe are really the first wave continuing after lockdown restricting were lifted (plus a lot more testing). The number of deaths isn't rising much.

> Sweden coped fine with minimal intervention from the government.

Did it, though? https://web.archive.org/web/20201008174215if_/https://www.ec...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com