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Comment by dr_dshiv | Hacker News Reader

Why do you say that? It's essentially the cold with a new name. The death rates are deeply exaggerated,since there is no random sampling in the population to establish the number of actual cases. It is the old and sick dying -- and dying at far lower rates than the actual flu, at the moment.

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4 independent estimates place the Infection Fatality Ratio at about 0.5% to 1.7% which is between 5x and 17x deadlier than the flu (0.1%): https://twitter.com/zorinaq/status/1230977769795776512

The cold is caused by an entirely different class of viruses.

Not true. The common cold is caused by varieties of rhinovirus and coronavirus.

"Rhinoviruses and coronaviruses are recognized as the major causes of the common cold syndrome"

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/12001053/

The common cold can be caused by a corona virus, but not this corona virus. They are different enough that this particular corona virus may or may not cause people to have mild, common cold like symptoms but so far there is very little evidence for that. To suggest that they are similar other than in structure is, frankly, ridiculous.

So no, this is not 'essentially the cold with a new name'. Stop spreading bullshit, if you manage to convince people of this and they end up having symptoms you might get them killed or avoid care/quarantine.

You are roughly equating being hit by a truck vs being hit by a bicycle because 'both have wheels' and therefore the impact is the same. The genetic payload is new to us and the result of exposing our immune system to a new virus (even though it is structurally similar to another virus) is what it is all about. The only reason the cold has as little impact as it does is because we have been exposed to it and small variations on it for a long time. Our immune systems 'know' the signature of the common cold virus by now. If our immune systems would recognize the new virus using the same mechanism you wouldn't need improvised ICU's for thousands of people.

Anyway, after this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22406556

my assumption is that you're here to troll anyway.

Actually our immune systems recognize COVID-19 virus too well and cause damage removing it. It's not the virus causing damage on its own - which is probably why small children are not affected by the worst of it.

The virus is known to cause cold-like symptoms, with just somewhat higher rate of pneumonia. (About 10-20x higher.)

It is exactly just a cold, but a rather bad one, just like Spanish Flu was just flu.

Do not underestimate cold nor flu.

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