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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

Yes, we need more panic. Maximum panic please! For a disease that has a 0.5% fatality rate, and the medium death age is over the average life expectancy of one's country. And most scientists believe we can't stop it anyway. Yes, let's burn down the modern world and suspend all civil rights for this.

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The fatality rate is only as low as 0.5-0.9% in countries that aggressively locked down, quarantined, and built temporary medical facilities in order to flatten the curve so health care facilities could keep up with urgent cases.

In places where no aggressive action is taken, fatality rates are much, much higher (3-5%) — because otherwise treatable cases can not be treated, and the marginally more ill die for lack of treatment.

The difference between 0.9% and 3% of the US population (per Census.gov ~329 million estimate) is 6.9 million people.

https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...

Something something 20% hospitalization rate * number of infected people >> healthcare capacity of any country -> a lot more than 0.5% of fatalities, + all the other deaths for all other kinds of medical emergencies, which only happen because doctors have to aggressively triage patients.

Obviously we should try and slow it down. But there's a fine line between slowing it down and overreacting.

Overreacting would be nuking the affected cities. Locking down a country to give healthcare a chance to cope will have some unpleasant economic consequences, but it won't "burn down the modern world and suspend all civil rights".

Yes we should be so flippant about hundreds of thousands of people dead. How dare you ask me to sacrifice going to a restaurant for that?

0.5% is a textbook number, not the sorry-the-hospital-is-full number, which has in some places been closer to 5%.

Well, it's the real number in places that took this virus seriously and have enough case history to develop accurate numbers: China outside of Hubei; South Korea. Likely other east Asian countries that are showing slow growth rates will have similarly low death rates due to not overflowing their hospitals: Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore.

You're completely correct that the rate is more like 3-5% in Iran, Italy, and probably the US at this rate.

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