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Comment by zaroth | Hacker News Reader

For example, 97.1% of fatalities in Italy are over 60 years old, and 99.9% of fatalities are over 50 years old.

The 65+ crowd isn’t living paycheck to paycheck and working every day to pay for rent and groceries. There are a lot of people living paycheck to paycheck who are at basically zero risk from this virus who should be allowed to work.

Since we’re talking about a few trillion dollars of economic damages, I would expect something a bit less hysterical and a bit more focused on the actual at-risk population.

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"Let the young people go to work" means you now have to somehow completely isolate everyone over 60... while still providing them health care from uninfected people... while almost literally everyone else in the country is getting infected.

And even then, 3% fatalities under 60 with a 2% fatality rate means that 0.06% of those people under 60 will die. In the US, that means a minimum of (napkin math: 327 million * 85% * 0.06%) 1.66 million people, and almost certainly much more than that, because all of those under-60 severe cases are wildly overloading hospitals and so are unable to get the care they need.

All of this is the strategy that the UK is currently undertaking, which can be generously described as "completely insane" because they don't have the support system for all of those over-60 people to safely self-isolate or the hospital capacity to handle the flood of severe under-60 cases that will show up over the next month or so.

It seems like the alternative is to completely isolate everyone so I’m not sure why isolating just the at-risk population is worse than that.

We have ~100 cases in MA currently. On April 20th when we have ~100 do we have to lock down the state all over again?

The alternative is to implement incredibly thorough public safety measures like those currently in place in China and Korea, where mass screening, comprehensive and constant public sanitization programs, strict controls on travel and public events, and mass emplacement of new temporary hospitals are in place. Both countries are doing extremely well in controlling the spread of the virus on a per capita basis, and doing well enough that they will probably soon be able to lift those measures piece by piece as long as they also keep tight control of external travel.

This means actually spending money on public health infrastructure, though, so it seems unlikely to happen in the US.

Economic hardship does not kill those under 35. You need to focus on the social good.

Think your decimal is off. 327 million * 85% * 0.06% is 166 thousand, not 1.66 million.

I think that you're missing the point that younger people are still at risk of infection. They're far less likely to die, and so make great carriers.

I’m not missing that fact at all. People who are at risk should self-isolate, and we should put policies in place to assist the vulnerable population in doing so.

The most at risk population is also very unlikely to depend on a weekly paycheck.

You're conveniently avoiding engaging with the part where "let people just go to work" means that the death rate in under-60 severe cases skyrockets because hospitals can't handle that many people needing ventilators and round-the-clock care all at once.

People with mild symptoms aren’t going to the ICU at all. And overall disease severity even in hospital cases is significantly lower in people < 50yrs .

> a lot of people ... at basically zero risk from this virus

This is a super dangerous myth. Death is not the only risk. Here’s what this coronavirus does to the body:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/02/here-is-w...

TL;DR: It’s nasty, can leave lasting damage.

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