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Comment by djmips | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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