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Comment by enumjorge | Hacker News Reader

Overreacting? Did you miss the headline of the thread you’re commenting on? This is officially a pandemic. And instead of reading that and thinking “wow, this needs to be addressed with serious action” you instead thought that hundreds of governments across the world are working in tandem to make it easier to raise false flags in the future. Yikes.

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If that’s their thought process about a pandemic announcement from the WHO I’m not sure the conspiracy theorist is just “inside” them any longer.

Over 49 thousand people die from Pneumonia every year in the United States[1]. Under 5 thousand have died globally from COVID-2019[2]. Does this information change your perspective?

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/pneumonia.htm

[2] https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati...

No, not at all. Because covid is just in the earily stages of spreading. At it's best it will kill far more than 50k this year alone and become endemic so it continues to kill at many on top of flu. At its worst it stands to kill a lot more.

The number of cases in China was been steady for around a week. If we extrapolate from Hubei that should give a decent picture. Around 0.1% of their population were diagnosed with covid and of those diagnosed around 4% died. If we apply the same rates to the United States (328 million * .001 * .04) we get 12,960 deaths. Keep in mind that is somewhat of a worse case scenario. In Henan province the fatality rate is less than half of what it was in Hubei, 1.6%.

It's not a "worse case scenario", it's successful containment through quite strict quarantine measures. Since neither USA nor Italy are taking measures remotely comparable to what Hubei or Henan did when they had a similar amount of spread, we should expect these countries to have a much larger spread than Hubei did, it's really not reasonable to assume that they would be able to limit this to "around 0.1% of their population were diagnosed with covid" - it's plausible that more than half of the population could get it, and leaders of many western countries have acknowledged that.

The population density of Hubei is over 9x that of the United States, the quality of care is better in the United States, and there was basically no action taken for the first 2 months of the outbreak.

"it's plausible that more than half of the population could get it, and leaders of many western countries have acknowledged that."

Will there ever be apologies for spreading mass hysteria?

Will there ever be apologies for downplaying justified warnings and saying "it's just the flu" with dire consequences?

E.g. in a recent turnabout Vice President Mike Pence said today that there has been “irresponsible rhetoric” from people who have downplayed the seriousness of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak.

Will if Mike Pence says it, then it must be true.

Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

Well, yes, but that's with the extreme measures taken by China. And the spread in Italy doesn't seem close to stopping yet.

Edit: also pneumonia is caused by a large number of causes. If covid-19 killed as much as all respiratory diseases it would already be scary.

Let's look at South Korea. The number of daily cases has been declining for a week. There are currently 7,869 cases there. Let's just say that despite the current trend the number of cases manages to increase to 20,000. That would mean around 0.04% of the population of South Korea would be affected. They currently have a death rate of 0.8% but there are still many active cases. Let's say that doubles to 1.6% which would put it in line with regions of China other than Hubei. If we apply that infection rate and mortality rate to the US population (328,000,000 * .0004 * .016) that gives a total number of deaths of 2,099.

The numbers don't need any mitigating factors but those do exist as well. I don't see South Korea doing anything more extreme than what could be done in the US so that doesn't show the US would be worse. The population density of South Korea is 15x that of the US so that would probably mean the infection rate would be lower in the US. The median age is also higher in South Korea and since this disease affects older people more that would also make the outlook for America better.

From a Penn State epidemiologist (note that the quote below speaks of the "infection fatality rate", which is different from the "case fatality rate", the difference is explained in the article)[1]:

"Scientists working at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Imperial College London and the Institute for Disease Modeling have used these approaches to estimate the infection fatality rate. Currently, these estimates range from 0.5% to 0.94% indicating that COVID-19 is about 10 to 20 times as deadly as seasonal influenza. Evidence coming in from genomics and large-scale testing of fevers is consistent with these conclusions. The only potentially good news is that the epidemic in Korea may ultimately show a lower CFR than the epidemic in China.

...

"On balance, it is reasonable to guess that COVID-19 will infect as many Americans over the next year as influenza does in a typical winter -- somewhere between 25 million and 115 million. Maybe a bit more if the virus turns out to be more contagious than we thought. Maybe a bit less if we put restrictions in place that minimize our travel and our social and professional contacts.

"The bad news is, of course, that these infection numbers translate to 350,000 to 660,000 people dying in the U.S., with an uncertainty range that goes from 50,000 deaths to 5 million deaths. The good news is that this is not a weather forecast. The size of the epidemic, i.e., the total number of infections, is something we can reduce if we decrease our contact patterns and improve our hygiene. If the total number of infections decreases, the total number of deaths will also decrease."

[1] - https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-this-epidemiologist-is...

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