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Comment by deelowe | Hacker News Reader

It's not going to be 80 year olds dying if the hospitals are overwhelmed. 40% of people in ICU in italy are 19-40, basically, those who make up the majority of the workforce.

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19-40 makes up 0.25% of the deaths (4 in total) [0]

In the US, of people aged 20-44, "only" 2.0-4.2% are admitted into ICU, significant, but making up only 12% of the ICU admissions, and 20% of the hospitalizations. [1]

0: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2763401 1: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6912e2.htm?s_cid=mm...

I think you're confusing "dead" with "in the ICU". If you listen to the various interviews with Italian Drs, you'll learn that to make a recovery from the full-blown infection requires spending weeks on ventilation. So looking at the deaths count does not accurately capture the real problem, which is that you have an accumulated pile of people who are severely sick but will probably make some sort of recovery eventually. In the meantime your health system is offline.

> 40% of people in ICU in italy are 19-40, basically, those who make up the majority of the workforce.

Correction: 11.9% of people in ICU in Italy are 19-50; 51.2% are 51-70; and 36.9% are > 70 [1].

[1] https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Bolletti...

I don’t believe that could possibly be true. The current ICU makeup in the US is 2-4% for ages 20-44. That’s a 10-20x increase you’re proposing. And yes, you can say that they’re triaging, but for this to be possible you’d need truly enormous numbers of infected individuals AND tons and tons of triaging going on which doesn’t feel accurate based on what news says.

I highly doubt that number. Do you have a reliable source for that?

It looks startling, but could be true. Reportedly, the health workers in Italy had to do some fairly brutal prioritisation in triage. If you have a lot more patients requiring ICU than you have stations, you end up with a high proportion of younger patients in ICU even if they are a low proportion overall.

The classic fake news model: post some shit with no evidence that is immediately validated by some other worried internet person.

Basically the current state of the internet in a nutshell right now. People assume any valid question of any data means that person is a denialist nutter or something. Fact is, we are working with very biased data and people, even the smart folks here, are misinterpreting it. The virus exists, but there is no data that tells us how widespread it is in the population. Odds are very good this sucker has been adrift for weeks or months and many of us already got it. But without good, random sampling we cannot prove or disprove that hypothesis.

About the only place I’ve seen where rational talk is allowed without getting flame to death is /r/covid19.

Hacker news, unfortunately, appears to have devolved into yet another place full of panic stricken people.

Your aggression is unwanted and unnecessary. I haven't validated anything; I speculated, with appropriate qualifiers.

I'm happy to defer to actual stats if you have any.

Page 5 of the recent well-respected Imperial paper on modelling approaches to managing the outbreak has statistics on hospitalisation that I imagine are the current best estimates.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-infectious-disease-ana...

For example, 3.2% of cases aged 30-39 require hospitalisation. Could that rise to 40% after triage? I'm not sure, it seems high, but it depends on what pressures the system is under.

Can't find the Italy link, but here's an article talking about hospitalizations and young people including alarming ICU cases: www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/03/19/younger-adults-are-large-percentage-coronavirus-hospitalizations-united-states-according-new-cdc-data/

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