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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

And yet for the vast majority of people it really was just a bad cold. I had a bunch of friends and family who got infected before vaccines were available, and that's literally how most of them described the experience.

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Ignoring the details, COVID's death rate in the US is about 1.17% (20K deaths, 1.7M infections), and let's say that on average 10% of infections require hospitalizations. You could still say that for the vast majority of people (~90%) it's like a bad cold, so your comment makes sense, but my thinking was focused on the risk/reward aspects.

To simplify all of this, if covid didn't exist, and you somehow found out that by going out of the house you have a 1.17% chance of dying, but if you stay inside, that chance is 0.002% (average chance of dying on any given day in US), would you still go outside or would you stay inside?

That 1.17% is a 585x increase over the usual 0.002%, and when I thought about how large that increase is, for me, it was very clearly not worth the risk.

That is misinformation. The CDC estimated the fatality rate at 0.6%, not 1.17%.

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

95% of people infected with polio didn't even know they had it, but we eradicated that disease anyway.

What's your point? There's no way to eradicate SARS-CoV-2 because there are multiple animal reservoirs and the vaccines don't reliably prevent infection.

My point is the fact that the majority of infected individuals didn't suffer from it does not mean it is not a serious disease. Hardly anyone was paralyzed by polio, but we view it as an extremely serious disease.

We never locked down society for 2 years because of polio.

We certainly didn't lock down society for two years because of covid.

According to Wikipedia on the initial polio pandemic: “On Saturday, June 17, 1916, an official announcement of the existence of an epidemic polio infection was made in Brooklyn, New York. That year, there were over 27,000 cases and more than 6,000 deaths due to polio in the United States, with over 2,000 deaths in New York City alone.[16] The names and addresses of individuals with confirmed polio cases were published daily in the press, their houses were identified with placards, and their families were quarantined.[17] Dr. Hiram M. Hiller, Jr. was one of the physicians in several cities who realized what they were dealing with, but the nature of the disease remained largely a mystery. The 1916 epidemic caused widespread panic and thousands fled the city to nearby mountain resorts; movie theaters were closed, meetings were canceled, public gatherings were almost nonexistent, and children were warned not to drink from water fountains, and told to avoid amusement parks, swimming pools, and beaches.”

Here’s an article with some quotes from people who were young during polio pandemics describing the countermeasures: https://cvm.msu.edu/news/perspectives-magazine/perspectives-...

We didn’t lock down society for 2 years because of Covid either.

You can’t even call the US response a lock down. My friends abroad had to register with the government to leave their homes to visit a neighborhood market.

We didn’t have anything like that.

The US had a more coordinated and stricter response to BLM protests, sending the national guard in to enforce curfews and shooting paint rounds at citizens sitting on their suburban porches.

Paralytic polio only happened in 0.1% to 0.5% of polio cases, as well.

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