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Comment by dekerta | Hacker News Reader

> The disease has a 0.3 risk of fatality, still less for Omicron

I'm not sure what you mean by "0.3 risk". 0.3% case fatality rate? But where are you getting that number from? COVID19 had roughly a 2% CFR early on when testing was limited and treatments hadn't been developed. It was around 1% for most of the pandemic. It is *now* as low as 0.3% in highly vaccinated countries, but still about 0.5% in the US.

It has been one of the deadliest pandemics in history. A million Americans are dead. I'm not sure how people can think the risks were over exaggerated.

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

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>It has been one of the deadliest pandemics in history.

By percentage of global population, I beg to differ:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics

It also overwhelmingly killed the very elderly, an age category which didn't even exist at the times of most of those other pandemics in the list.

There have always been 80 and 90 year olds in society.

False.

Sure, "didn't even exist" was an exaggeration, but you can't deny that it was a much, much smaller age category before.

> an age category which didn't even exist at the times of most of those other pandemics in the list

They exist now though? And they died, so we must count them among the dead. Nothing else makes sense here.

The deaths/case was only so high because they literally didn't have any testing available. Only those the absolute sickest even got testing. Then for a couple months you couldn't get a test unless you knew someone who had tested positive, which you didn't because they couldn't get a test either. Those inflated the deaths/case. Early on they tested an entire naval ship and 40% of the ship tested positive but was completely asymptomatic. This is why we all started wearing masks even if you weren't sick, because it wasn't just sick people who were cases. The case numbers were underestimated by huge factor, especially early on, and with Omicron the case number even though it is high, is still underestimated for the same reason, that people that don't get that sick just don't get tested.

I dunno, I don't think we, as a society, should be prioritizing the health of the old and infirm over the health of those that are young and healthy via policy.

The CFR statistics in that graph are misleading anyways, confirmed cases early on would have skewed drastically towards more severe due to lack of widespread testing. Similar arguments can be made for large spikes later on as the ability to get a confirmed case can dry up due to demand for lab tests.

The number of deaths alone is not very informative for gauging risk.

CFR is very different than IFR. And early data is worthless on this, since only the most severe cases would’ve been tested and confirmed.

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