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Comment by irq11 | Hacker News Reader

”COVID-19 is unlike anything before”

It’s almost exactly like every other respiratory virus, except that the case fatality estimates for old and sick people are higher.

There’s nothing mechanistically new about the infections we’re seeing. It’s a pretty bog-standard respiratory virus, in terms of its transmission and overall virulence.

”But if COVID-19 spreads to their country, people's daily lives will be significantly disrupted.”

If so, it will be primarily due to blunt attempts to prevent transmission of the virus in order to protect the sick and the old. For most people, this virus is little more than a mild chest cold.

Once this becomes a true pandemic, we will see a rapid shift away from quarantines and travel bans, and an increased emphasis on protecting vulnerable populations directly.

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I see you’re still hard at work spreading the falsehood that “it’s just like the flu, unless you’re old or sick”.

1. I find the lack of concern about dramatically higher mortality rates for the old and the sick to be reprehensible. They’re people, even if they’re older or sicker than you.

2. It doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense for China to shut down the economy over something so minor.

3. The hospitalization rate is a serious concern that you’re overlooking.

4. Most importantly, your premise that it’s no more dangerous than the flu for the young and healthy is completely false. The fatality rate for flu for 18-49 year olds in the US is 0.02% [1], and this looks to be at least 20x higher than that for that age group, based on the data we have so far.

World health officials, medical experts, epidemiologists, virologists, etc, all seem to be taking this very seriously and are quite concerned. I think I’ll take my cues from them.

1. Source: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm

The virus is like the flu unless you’re old or sick. These are facts and you are still wrong. More specifically:

0) In the case of the parent, I was saying that the virus spreads and infects people in the same manner as other upper respiratory viruses. It does, this is a fact, and fatality rates are not relevant.

1) I’ve never said that I have no concern about old or sick people. I said that young healthy people should not panic. You’re simply virtue signaling to stoke fear.

2) It would indeed be concerning if hospitals are overwhelmed. Currently, they are not (anywhere) and therefore, again, people should not panic.

3) Comparing tiny ratios with large error bars and freaking out over a “20x” difference in relative risk is pointless; the risk is still quite low.

It also overlooks the far more relevant fact that you’re thousands of times more likely to get the flu than covid-19. At this point, you should not panic.

Get the idea? Regardless of your obsessive-compulsive downvoting of factual information, the relative risk to most people is lower than...well, most things in life. That’s why my argument is, and continues to be, that most people, in most places, should not panic.

1) No one should panic, period, even if they are old and sick. But just because you're young and healthy doesn't mean you shouldn't be just as concerned because it's less likely to kill you specifically. Do you seriously not have any loved ones or coworkers or friends who are old or sick? Or can you just imagine that other people do?

2) Hospitals are overwhelmed in Wuhan, which is why they're furiously building more and sending thousands of medical staff there from all over China. I genuinely don't understand how you can be unaware of this and be so dogmatic at the same time.

3) The error bars are large, but it's not like they overlap or come remotely close to it. And again, your personal assessment that this mortality rate isn't worth worrying about means nothing to me, especially when virtually every credible expert disagrees.

Finally, please drop this lazy "do not panic" rhetoric. No one is panicking, or suggesting panic. The only hysterical person here is you.

All I’ve ever said, in response to your numerous citation-free rebuttals, is that healthy young people are not at great risk (fact), and they should not panic. So I’m glad we agree.

I’ve never said “don’t be concerned.”

Your other arguments are made up. Wuhan has built a number of facilities, but currently appears to have the epidemic at hand. No other areas have been “overwhelmed”, even within China. Representing medical facilities as “overwhelmed”, at the current time, requires citation from a reputable source.

Maybe in some theoretical future world it’s possible that medical facilities around the world will be overrun with sick patients. This is nowhere near the current reality.

Overlapping of error bars on fatality rates is irrelevant to my arguments; the absolute risk is much, much lower than the flu, for most people, in most places.

Everything you’re arguing here is a scare tactic, twisting kernels of truth to panicked ends.

The virus is like the flu unless you’re old or sick. More specifically:

0) In the case of the parent, I was saying that the virus spreads and infects people in the same manner as other upper respiratory viruses. It does, this is a fact, and fatality rates are not relevant.

1) I’ve never said that I have no concern about old or sick people. I said that young healthy people should not panic.

2) It would indeed be concerning if hospitals are overwhelmed. Currently, they are not (anywhere) and therefore, again, people should not panic.

3) Comparing tiny ratios with large error bars and freaking out over a “20x” difference in relative risk is pointless; the risk is still quite low. It also overlooks the far more relevant fact that you’re thousands of times more likely to get the flu than covid-19. At this point, you should not panic.

Get the idea? The relative risk to most people is lower than...well, most things in life. That’s why my argument is, and continues to be, that most people, in most places, should not panic.

How do you know that it's just fatalities in old and sick? If that's the case, I don't understand why many younger people in Wuhan are dying including the whistle blower doctor who was only 33 years old. We don't even know what the disease will do in terms of long term damage to survivors or the possibility of poor immunity and reinfection. I haven't seen any good statistics on the fatality rate vs age.

Because that’s what the numbers published say:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...

Look at the mortality by age table.

Also note the mortality rate outside of Wuhan seems to be 0.7%, a bit more than the common flu which I think is around 0.1% but not really a massive deal.

I don’t know where these numbers will land ultimately but I can think of many reasons why people with mild symptoms that are similar to a cold wouldn’t want to show up in a hospital full of infected people, or would think they just have a cold, so I would expect the denominator of the mortality rare in Wuhan to be understated.

For the moment the panic this thing is creating, fuelled by medias eager to make some money by crying wolf, looks like the real threat to me. Lots of people will loose their job as a result of the economic impact of the panic.

7 times is quite a lot more. That's like saying a Porsche is a bit more than a Toyota.

7 times a minuscule number may still be a minuscule number.

A 30yo male has a 0.18% probability to die that year. It's a small enough number that it is irrational to worry about it [1].

[1] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

Would you say a 61yo male is significantly more likely to die than a 30yo male?

Because that's the age where the actuarial table is 7x worse for a man than at 30.

A couple hundred thousand dead here, another hundred thousand dead there, and soon we're talking about big numbers.

But a .2% mortality rate from COVID-19 means that if you're in your 20s and catch it, your odds of dying this year will have more than doubled! You think that's not worth worrying about? On a global scale that is millions of potential deaths beyond the prior statistical expectation.

Relative differences can be completely meaningless if the absolute numbers are tiny. The chance of you being hit by a meteorite in your lifetime is 1 out of 700'000 and being bitten by a shark is 1 out of 8'000'000. Does that mean you should worry more 10 times more about being hit by a rock from space?

No, both are such small numbers that you shouldn't worry about either.

If you are looking at the mortality rate of CORVID-19 by age group you should do the same for the common seasonal flu. The 2018-2019 flu had a mortality rate of 0.0018% in the US for ages 18-49[0]. CORVID-19 is then 0.2%/0.0018% = 111.11 times more deadly for people ages 18-49 than the last seasons flu.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html 1.8 deaths per 100000 is 0.0018%

The doctor you mentioned was exposed to a lot of cases before proper quarantine, it's likely he was exposed to an immense viral load, which seems to be the reason healthcare workers are generally at risk even if they're young and healthy.

Entire families don't die from mild chest colds without hospital care.

Being infectious before showing symptoms is quite new. At least I haven’t heard of it before.

It is also possible to pass on the flu before experiencing symptoms

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/disease/spread.htm

You may not die if you are young and healthy but you may have a lifetime of lung damage.

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