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Comment by runjake | Hacker News Reader

... because... ?

Because some things are worth worrying about, and that anxiety is an impetus to take actions which may improve the situation for you and the people around you.

Because it has infected tens (probably hundreds) of thousands of people around the world, completely overwhelmed hospital systems, and there's very little reason to expect it will different where you are.

Fair enough.

Is it killing a significant amount of non-immunocompromised people? I haven't devoted a lot of attention to COVID-19, but would assume it doesn't have a high casualty rate among healthy people who practice the basics (rest and hydration)?

I guess one way to look at it is that it's a model for handling a much deadlier bug. And the world is doing a mediocre job at it.

A significant percentage of (probably 2 - 20%) of the cases require hospitalization.

As a point of reference, there are typically about 1000 free hospital beds[1] in the state of Kansas, for a population of 2.9M.

http://www.kdheks.gov/cphp/download/KS_PF_Plan.pdf page 22

These rates are taking the number of confirmed cases and dividing by the number of hospitalizations. The problem is that minor cases usually don’t get detected so they don’t get included in the denominator. A single confirmed case might correspond to a thousand infections. It’s too early to know.

Thanks for the elaborations! Very informative.

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