Hacker News Reader

Comment by torpfactory | Hacker News Reader

My wife is an ER nurse. (West Coast but not California) Kind of wondering if I’m going to have to isolate myself from her just in case. She’s almost surely going to be coming into contact with patients soon.

Starting to get real for sure.

View on HN

Probably not worth it, unless you're in a group most likely to die of the effects.

If anything, I wonder if one would prefer to get exposed earlier rather than later.

Of course, my wife works in a hospital in Santa Clara.

Sure if you don't mind lung scaring.

Even young and middle-age people have a 0.2% mortality rate, which at the US statistical value of life (~$10M) works out to $20,000. (And if you're a well-paid software developer, you can probable 5x that.) Whatever you would do to avoid losing $20k-$100k, you should probably do to avoid getting Covid-19 (modulo questions about how long immunity lasts).

One thing to note is that even though there are age range breakdowns from this initial analysis (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32064853), there is also a breakdown based on pre-existing conditions, with Cardiovascular, Diabetes, Chronic respiratory disease, Hypertension, and Cancer being 5-10X hazard ratios vs those with no pre-existing conditions.

Sadly, the paper is in Chinese, but you would probably want to look at the percentage of non-mild cases in your age bracket and adjusted for your pre-existing condition risk to see how your actual risk might be modeled: http://rs.yiigle.com/yufabiao/1181998.htm

But I think we'll just have to see how the medical response is in each specific locality to really get a good idea of what the real risk is.

I don't necessarily think that a dollar amount is actually the best way to think about it. It's very hard to think about what value you'd place on avoiding a hypothetical 1/500 risk of death (adjust based on percentage of population you think will contract this). Note that as a 40yo, your odds of dying period within that year is actually about 1/500: https://www.finder.com/life-insurance/odds-of-dying

You can then split this up by percentages for cause of death: https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2019/01/16/deaths (Chart 2, select your age category)

UK chart, but also some charts on annual death risk: http://www.bandolier.org.uk/booth/Risk/dyingage.html

And lastly, the almost useless CDC data/charts - they include leading causes and absolute number by cause and age-group, but not the population size so you have no idea what your odds are: https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/LeadingCauses.html

In any case, once you have the odds down, you can place the amount of effort you'd spend relative to the amount of effort you spend on other risks.

> I don't necessarily think that a dollar amount is actually the best way to think about it. It's very hard to think about what value you'd place on avoiding a hypothetical 1/500 risk of death

It's not that hard if you try. We face risk-benefit tradeoffs everyday. You either (1) have an implicit price you put on small risks to your own life in the sense that you accept risks below that price and reject ones above it, or (2) you are acting inconsistently, in the sense that you could strictly reduce risks to your life while making more money (or saving more time, etc.).

> Note that as a 40yo, your odds of dying period within that year is actually about 1/500:

Sure. And I think that if people could purchase immortality for their 40th year for $20k, they should probably do it.

> In any case, once you have the odds down, you can place the amount of effort you'd spend relative to the amount of effort you spend on other risks.

Sure, now just find out how much you pay routinely to avoid this effort (e.g., how much you pay your accountant to do your taxes), and you've got a risk-dollar exchange rate.

As you mention effort/value can be converted to dollar value, so I don't think we actually disagree that strongly - the missing word from my critique would be "fixed" dollar amount - using the hypothetical $10M lifetime worth.

There's more to it, but the point I was trying to make is that the amount of time/effort/money you spend worrying about coronavirus should (rationally) be relative to what you spend for other similar risks.

For your last example, I think that what you pay to save time or effort saving services might be on a different calculus since there's a guarantee of how much time or bother it might save you, vs a potential downside calculation.

> the missing word from my critique would be "fixed" dollar amount

Sorry, are you just saying different people may have different amounts? Sure, sure. But for a given individual the amount has to be fixed across the choices (at least all the choices close enough in time that the money is fungible).

> since there's a guarantee of how much time or bother it might save you, vs a potential downside calculation.

When I decide to wear a mask to the store, there is a guarantee of how much bother it costs me. The only thing that's uncertain is the risk to my life. But, as previously argued, each person should have a linear risk-dollar exchange rate for small risks.

That data looks it's from this Chinese CDC article in English: http://weekly.chinacdc.cn/en/article/id/e53946e2-c6c4-41e9-9...

Lot's of useful data: Age is very significant: 0-9: 0%, ..., 60-69: 3.6%, 70-79: 8.0%, 80+: 14.8% i.e. the kids will be fine, but watch out for the elderly. Men are more affected (2.8%) than women (1.7%). The regional breakdown is apparently a useful approximation of mortality rates when the healthcare system is overwhelmed (Hubei 2.9%) vs not (outside 0.4%). "Health workers" (all employees in a hospital setting) is 0.3% which amongst all the occupational buckets is the lowest. 81% of cases is mild symptoms.

It could mutate still.

I can't believe you just changed the value of your life to a money amount you would theoretically lose.

You don’t know about actuary tables?

So the mortality rate is 0.2 %. You're missing the likelihood of contracting covid in your calculation. If you calculate with that the risk is even lower.

Even if you're in the demographic not likely to die, you will be in contact with people who are likely to die from the virus and you can infect them.

And also if he gets sick, it will make things more difficult for his wife (who will probably recover earlier). That hurts the health care system.

>"Exposed earlier rather than later"

I don't think we know yet how easily a previously exposed person can get reinfected. We do know that people can catch a cold multiple times in a short period, and those are varieties of coronavirus. Mutation rate will also play a factor.

There are at least 100 active viruses with similar symptoms labeled as the common cold. My understanding is that healthy people tend to have a high degree of immunity to a particular strain they have come in contact with, for at least a few years. If someone gets "the cold" multiple times in a year, they are almost certainly getting different strains.

This is a coronavirus like them though, so likely to mutate. Also the flu has fewer dominant strains, and reinfection still common, especially for people already at higher risk or compromised immune systems. But yes, Chances of reinfection should be lower than initial infection, but are non-zero, and while your body keeps you symptom-free while fighting off the reinfection your still, short term, a carrier.

Later, because they're more likely to have some sort of treatment, there's a large number of studies going on now.

Here's an article from the WSJ about how using serum from recovered measles patients prevented an outbreak decades before the vaccine was developed.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-a-boys-blood-stopped-an-out...

Drawing things out so that you're not sick at the same time if possible seems like a win for both of you, and for the health care system in general. The slower it goes, the less health care providers get slammed with too many people to cope with.

Yeah I think the issue is that you can be contagious without being symptomatic. I don’t want it on my conscience that I may end up infecting others, even though I personally will probably be fine.

Edit: spelling

It 100% is better to get it early or not at all.

One of the biggest risks is running out of ICU beds, ventilators, ECMO machines due to the 10-15% hospitalization rate.

If it goes wide enough then there will not be treatment available and the mortality rate will skyrocket.

> Kind of wondering if I’m going to have to isolate myself from her just in case.

Maybe you should question your marriage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com