Comment by tuna-piano | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tuna-piano | Hacker News Reader

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His point is like looking at grey skies and a weather radar of an approaching hurricane and saying "Just because the sun isn't out doesn't mean we should cancel our picnic on the beach!".

Coronavirus is not a disaster today, it is a looming disaster. Without human intervention, Coronavirus would be pretty sure to kill millions in the US in a short period of time (1+% fatality * 33+% of the population).

Yes, the chances of you or anyone you know dying today from Coronavirus is practically 0. Coronavirus is not a disaster in the US today. If a vaccine for Coronavirus was scheduled to be given to everyone tomorrow, it would not be a disaster, and we would not stop economic activity for it. But there isn't a vaccine tomorrow, so look at the virus forecast and take precautions.

Stop with the fear-mongering, it was not going to kill millions.

That math is correct. We have no immunity, there are ~330 million people in the United States, >30% of us will catch it, and, barring advanced medical treatment > 1% of those will die.

330m x 0.3 x 0.01 = 1m . If those lower bounds are exceeded, it will be more.

Without human intervention, it would infect 40-70% of population. Multiply by the death rate and the fact that most hospitals would be completely overwelmed and you do get millions of death.

The death rate is NOT 1%. Of victims in hospital, perhaps, but not out of the general population that gets it.

Mortality in South Korea is running around 0.6% to 0.7%. It's not likely due to missing lots of mild cases, because they're testing 10,000 people every day, most of them asymptomatic. They've managed to keep the rate low because they took early serious measures to control the spread and avoided overloading their hospitals.

Italy has overloaded its hospitals, and now their doctors are forced to choose who they will save and who they won't.

I don't think it's clear at all what the death rate would be in a situation where we didn't intervene in the natural spread of the disease. It would make sense (and there is some data to support) that when the health system is overwhelmed, the death rate increases drastically.

One percent of one third of 328 million is 1.09 million. So more than a million, and those mortality and infection rates seem optimistic?

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