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Comment by hcurtiss | Hacker News Reader

Except that in kids COVID is about as lethal as the ordinary flu. It’s more transmissible, but the number of kids we’ve seen suffer serious consequences across the US has been very, very low. We don’t make kids wear helmets everywhere they go, though it would be decidedly more efficacious from a safety perspective. It seems to me some relativity is in order.

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Isn't the concern that children act as a massive spread vector such that breakthrough cases in adults may still overwhelm hospital systems?

A couple months ago I would have maybe agreed, but the delta variant seems to really through a wrench into this line of thinking.

Serious breakthrough cases remain rare, delta has not changed this

This is outdated information.

Delta strain is worse - more dangerous for kids and those under 30.

More dangerous than what? Even if it were 200% more lethal, 2x a very small number is still a very small number.

Whilst I don't have the figures to specifically source, yesterday's daily pressing briefing for my area had the health minister saying that delta was 100x more lethal than the flu in children, or 1000%.

That is not a very small number.

Your health Minister seems to be spreading misinformation.

The mortality rate for my state is 4% of all cases. [0] The mortality rate for the entire country is about 5.6% [1].

There has not been a single certified influenza death in Australia since 2020. [1]

It certainly appears that my health minister was downplaying the difference, not playing it up.

[0] https://www.health.gov.au/news/health-alerts/novel-coronavir...

[1] https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/health/causes-death/provis...

Excess mortality rates aren’t relevant at all to the lethality of the delta variant in children relative to prior strains. Overall mortality isn’t even asking the right question, and it’s a very poor proxy even for the lethality rate of SARS-COV-2 (contingent on pervasive testing). And that we’ve eliminated influenza deaths is no argument that influenza is no longer lethal.

Unless Australians are an order of magnitude more vulnerable to COVID than elsewhere in the world, those numbers are more the result of low test rates missing infections than anything else.

In the US, the CDC estimates an actual mortality rate of 0.6%, compared to the ratio of cases/deaths of ~1.6%.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

Australia has had an order of magnitude fewer infections than elsewhere in the world. We have come close to eliminating its spread altogether several times, so it should come as no surprise that the proportion of deaths is higher than somewhere else that has failed to contain the illness.

How does that follow? How deadly a virus is for any given individual should be independent of how many other people got it (outside of situations where the health care system is overwhelmed and can't provide adequate care - but that'd make the numbers worse for the US, not better).

If the virus is under better containment, those more likely to be infected, are more likely to be comorbid with other conditions. Thus death rates when looking at the entire length of the pandemic are likely to be higher.

Delta is the first time Australia has seen widespread infection in healthy people.

> those more likely to be infected, are more likely to be comorbid with other conditions

I'm not totally sure that's the case - it's at least something you can't just aver as self-evident. I'd guess that those most likely to be infected early on are going to be people who travel or those who come most into contact with them (service & tourism workers).

But I also think it's a moot point. In the context of this thread - which is about how to move forward once we've accepted that containment is off the table, and especially about the risk that poses to the healthiest members of society (kids) - it doesn't make sense to cite numbers that you yourself acknowledge overstate the risk of COVID by being biased towards the most unhealthy members of society.

Australians now have to post a sign on their door saying they are in quarantine. People are not allowed to travel within the country. They locked down a state of 1.3 million people with 5 hours notice because of one case they said was from a pizza box.

They are also building giant quarantine facilities, indicating they are gonna do this for the long haul.

Australia is hardly a model country for how to handle an infectious respiratory virus.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-21/sa-tougher-border-res...

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8980913/South-Austr...

Which country or state is a model?

Seems to be a case of damned if you do and damned if you dont!

I live in SA, the state that got shut down for the Pizza Delivery incident.

By and large the citizens of this state support the actions of our state government!

We go hard, and go early!

For the most part we've lived through this pandemic with our lives going on as normal!

We dont have to worry, and we have very few restrictions.

Snap lock downs for a few days are a small price to pay that almost all of us are willing to pay!

We do it in solidarity for each other. Everyone wears a mask. Everyone checks in with QR codes. The few that dont are a small minority.

So when you say "they locked down a state" you mean we locked down a state. We the people of South Australia support our government's actions.

Please don't try to spin decisive actions into an oppressive narrative!

Masks, snap lockdowns, closed borders and mo international travel, privacy violating monitoring… Oh yeah, that sounds really normal.

What’s your end game?

What you sound like is a deluded and emotionally post-justifying case of Stockholm syndrome. There is nothing normal or in any way ideal or worth romanticizing about the measures you describe, or their absurd over-reach for increasingly minuscule justifications that have moved goal posts to a degree that moderate rational analysis and weighing of risks reveals as somewhat demented. How sure are you that so many people in your state so whole heartedly support such a normalization of social control on the flimsy clinical pretexts you describe.

Calling actions decisive doesn't spare them from being badly decided or indeed even oppressive. Decisiveness first requires solid reasoning, not just a defense that rests on an action simply being decisive.

Source?

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