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Comment by seanbecker | Hacker News Reader

> less than double your chances of dying in a year.

The way this is phrased makes it sound like it's not a big deal. Doubling every individual's chance of dying within an entire generation is not something we should say lightly. Imagine if the base fatality rate was 50% rather than .5%.

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Maybe I’m crazy, but I view doubling a chance of dying in a year, and then returning to normal mortality for the next year, as far preferable to mass business closures, suspension of civil liberties, pulling kids out of school without evidence, mandating everyone wear masks, etc.

I guess I never realized how risk averse people apparently are. I imagine these same people never drive a car since those things are deathtraps by comparisons.

[A]n English person aged 55–64 years who gets infected with SARS-CoV-2 faces a fatality risk that is more than 200 times higher than the annual risk of dying in a fatal car accident.

Assessing the Age Specificity of Infection Fatality Rates for COVID-19: Systematic Review, Meta-Analysis, and Public Policy Implications https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160895v...

I glanced at the study and the fatality rates they use are absurdly high. They estimate .7% IFR for that age range which is way too high.

Anyway, my point was simply that if we took the same attitude towards risk that you all do with COVID and applied that elsewhere, we’d all be rolling around in hermetically sealed hamster balls until we died of boredom.

How convenient.

The study linked in the OP estimates a median .27% IFR across all populations.

The following numbers are from several month old seroprevalence studies so take them with a grain of salt but:

https://www.ryankemper.io/post/2020-04-29-the_case_for_endin...

Pegs the 50-59 age range around the median IFR. Whereas the >70 mortality is where things really start falling off of a cliff.

BTW my point was never “your chance of dying in a car crash is >= COVID”...although that statement would be very true for <40 age populations. My point was more broadly that people have a risk aversion to COVID that is unmatched by their attitudes towards risk in all other areas of life.

> BTW my point was never “your chance of dying in a car crash is >= COVID”...although that statement would be very true for <40 age populations. My point was more broadly that people have a risk aversion to COVID that is unmatched by their attitudes towards risk in all other areas of life.

Which was based on your observation of driving VS Covid19 mortality, or at least it appeared to be from the comment.

People have a very natural risk aversion for a new disease that is extremely likely to kill their parents or grandparents, that has unknown long-term effects, that has no known treatment, and that risks becoming endemic if not contained soon (and that has already killed more people than malaria).

You fundamentally misunderstand SARS-2 if you think it “risks becoming endemic”. It already is endemic and it would be regardless of whatever measures we took. It’s a zoonotic virus that is great at spreading. It is functionally impossible to eradicate.

...and it may have animal reservoirs: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/08/covid-19-hits-us-min...

"The Dutch government reported multiple cases of transmission from mink to farm staff"

If it can happen in a farm, there's a reasonable chance it can happen in the wild too. Cats also seem to be able to get it: https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200911/covid-19-may-strike...

Animal reservoirs make the flu pretty much impossible to eradicate.

The US has a mortality rate from car accidents per capita of 0.01%/year(1). The CDC's best guess infection fatality rate estimate(2) for the 20-49 age group is 0.02%/infection.

With a conservative herd immunity threshold of 50%, that'd put an uncontrolled COVID-19 pandemic and random car accidents about equal for that age group. For the 50-69 age group, the CDC estimates a 0.5% IFR, so COVID-19 would be 25x higher mortality than random car crashes.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... 2) https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

a) IFR is in fact higher according to that research, and b) US roads are far more dangerous than UK roads.

> IFR is in fact higher according to that research,

By "that research" you mean https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160895v... right?

Because it actually gives a slightly lower IFR than the CDC at age 55 (0.4% vs 0.5%), not higher. So I'm not sure what you mean.

> US roads are far more dangerous than UK roads.

Yes, according to the WHO(1) the US has a 3.6x higher mortality rate from car accidents than the UK, which gets us to 90x higher for the age group I quoted.

Anyway, I didn't want to contradict that figure. Just give perspective.

1)https://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/road_safety_s...

I was quite amused early on when people were talking about how brave truck drivers were for risking a COVID-19 infection. The per-year-worked fatal injury rate for truck drivers(1) is 0.024%. Meanwhile, a COVID-19 infection for the 20-49 age group has just a 0.02% fatality rate. Logging is even worse, at 0.14%/year-worked.

More than just risk adverse, I think a lot of people don't understand how risky life in general is.

edit: ...and I'll point out, those truck drivers may still have been brave! If you mistakenly think the risk is higher than it actually is, you're still brave for taking it on.

1) https://www.trucks.com/2017/12/26/trucking-deadliest-jobs/

Why are you assuming that you would return to normality for the next year? If this becomes endemic, the mortality rate doubles forever, especially since there doesn't seem to be long-lasting immunity to this virus.

Double 0.5% is 1%. Where'd you get 50%?

I believe the parent was making a rhetorical point: if your base fatality rate were 50%, then doubling it would mean you’d be guaranteed to die. Therefore, saying something “only” doubles your risk of death can understate the impact of what that doubling means in practice.

It's pretty simple: at my age randomly dying isn't something I'm concerned about at all. So doubling those chances is still not something I'm concerned about.

It's certainly not an existential threat to society.

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