Hacker News Reader

Comment by gilbetron | Hacker News Reader

Think of it this way, you have two choices:

1. You have a 0.0001% risk of death, and a 0.001% risk of hospitalization, and will maybe spread covid to 5-8 people. Long term effects unknown.

2. You have a 0.00001% risk of death, and a 0.0001% risk of hospitalization, and will maybe spread covid to 1-2 people. Long term effects unknown.

Which choice would you take?

(note the 2nd option is a conservative estimate of the effects of the vaccine, and the odds are probably less than what I wrote)

View on HN

The risk of hospitalisation for most people who get covid is way higher than 0.01% - it's about 1% for a 21 year old man, 2.7% for a 30 year old man and 8.5% for a 50 year old man - and only goes up from there.

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/covid-pandemic-mort...

I should've posted where I got the values for Covid risk, my bad. I used this: https://qcovid.org/Calculation and did it for a healthy 25 year old, and then rounded. I don't know exactly what the different between what I used and what the Economist used, but I'm guessing the Economist is using a dataset of people that skewed more symptomatic?

I wrote more in another comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28391526

Basically the qcovid calculator tells you the overall risk during a specific period of the pandemic . Most people didn't get covid during that period, which makes the overall risk appear very low.

However, if you do contract covid (which seems inevitable if it becomes endemic) then the individual risk of hospitalisation is much higher - 1%+ for even young adults.

you forgot to add an important argument: You forget to say that probably both are manmade.

Who do you trust more? 1) something probably created in a chinese lab? 2) something created by a list of different corporations and tested independently by at least 50 countries?

Lab released, maybe. Lab created, seems unlikely, although the line between lab released and created gets blurry. Genetically engineered (rather than created via "husbandry"), seems very unlikely given that nobody has noticed anything to suggest that it might be. So either it isn't, or China has gotten so good at it that we can't tell when they do it, which is terrifying!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com