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Comment by yotamoron | Hacker News Reader

Corona is killing a negligible % of the population, mostly very old and very sick people (checkout the official data from the Italian health ministary - average age of dead patiences is 79.5 years, all of them with severe background illness, in a part of the country where 29% of the population is at least 60 yeard old. Those are the facts.). If anyting, what we are experiencing is not a corona pandemic but a massive, global hysteria pandemic - much more dangerous.

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You can't argue with the fact that hospitals can't take the pressure even at negligible death rate.

Hospitals fucked = lots of other people are screwed as they depend on unrelated treatments.

Heath system going out has huge cascading problems for society.

>Heath system going out has huge cascading problems for society.

Worse than the huge cascading problems caused by making a double digit percentage of the population unemployed indefinitely?

Well, there are a bit north of 1.2M Americans who die of heart disease or cancer every year.

That's deaths. With a functioning, advanced health care system.

Those numbers don't get better without that.

In America at least, the functioning, advanced health care system is a barely accessible to people who are unemployed, and the government doesn't look like it's going to do anything to change that soon.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_debt#United_States

"Studies have found people are most likely to accumulate large medical debts when they do not have health insurance to cover the costs of necessary medications, treatments, or procedures"

In most cases, no job = no health insurance

You mentioned accessibility, which is guaranteed.

If you want to talk about insurance and affordability: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Protection_and_Affor...

That's what the entire marketplace concept was about. Admittedly, there are issues, but it's an improvement and something we can go farther with.

You think there would not be widespread panic if we just let the health system melt down?

What do you think a world without a health system would look like? Unemployment is going to be very hard to deal with, but it really feels like the best option out of the very difficult choices we have in front of us.

Fact is, shit is seriously bad whichever way you look at it.

If we look at the Spanish flu, which was worse than this, there wasn't much panic and the economy recovered fairly quickly. Here's a random article I found online arguing that we'd get better results (both for public health and the economy) by testing more and isolating the at-risk populations than by quaranting everyone: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/opinion/coronavirus-pande...

Spanish flu was right after WWI. That affected economy and its recovery quite a lot.

Also, disease and death from disease was more a cultural norm at the time. From scarlet fever, diptheria, rubella, smallpox, dysentary, cholera, mumps, measles, chickenpox, on and on. Disease hadn't been conquered to the extent that the 21st Century world assumes. We've lived for almost eighty years with penicillin etc. This shapes how we will handle the pandemic.

A prolonged lockdown will cause - as a certainty - such a huge economical crisis, that all those people at risk we are trying to save today - will die tomorrow from non-existant care (along with many many others who will die and suffer). The sad truth is that a lockdown and huge economic crisis that will definitely follow can't really save them (other options might help - but not this one).

Merkel publicly estimated 40-70% of the population of Germany would catch Corona this year. Let's assume that holds true for the US. The most reliable public numbers so far suggest 1-3% death rate. Let's assume that holds true in the US also.

US population is 330 million. The lower bound of the estimates above (40% catch, 1% of those die) is 1.32 million people die. The upper bound (70% catch, 3% of those die) is 6.9 million people die.

Just to put the above numbers into perspective. A fairly normal number of deaths in the US without Corona is 2.6 Million from all causes. We're looking at potentially more than tripling the number of people who die this year.

I don't care to get into the debate any deeper than that, just want to make sure we all understand the stakes.

edit: corrected doubling to tripling

With your upper bound estimate it would be a 360% increase if you included the 2.6M from all causes.

It's killing whole percentage points of the identified infections.

If 1 billion people get infected, that's 10 or 20 million people (or more). And so on with larger numbers of infected.

That's not 'negligible'.

But how many of those people would have died anyway? Somebody over 80 has around a 10% chance of dying every year. Somebody over 80 with Corona has a 20% chance of dying, so the risk of dying is doubled.

You’re conflating all-causes death with novel death. It takes the expected death rate of the cohort from 10% to (given full penetration) 30%.

This is an excellent point. I'm from Israel, and yesterday it was announced that the first corona victim has died. The poor guy was 88 years old, suffered from multiple background illnesses - and suffered a heart attack a few days before he died - it so happens that in addition to all of the above he had corona. Now, honestly - is this REALLY a corona victim? Now check the data from Italy - most deaths were like that, and most of them could have equally died from the flu/common cold/brain stroke/just being old. How far and deep will this madness go?

i don't understand why you got downvoted. We don't consider someone dying from a cold if he's 80yo with heart attack.

We're introducing a novel way of counting casualities, and this is problematic whenever we want to account for the severity of the virus.

Now on the other side, hospitals usually aren't flooded the way they are at the moment, or at least that's my impression. So there is definitely something special about the epidemic (although we don't know why : maybe it's just extremely contagious, and makes everybody become sick about the same time, instead of a natural spread for the flu ?)

If the heart attack was caused by the cold, we'd say the cold killed the person.

Cardiac arrest has been noted as one of the results of COVID-19; it's not just the ARDS that gets you, but at some point, most terminal patients arrest.

Let's for the sake of the argument ignore all the deaths that would happen with proper care, young and old alike. A low double-digit percentage of all identified cases require hospitalization to survive. A double-digit percentage of those will die if they don't get intensive care. 40-70% of the population is expected to contract the disease this year.

It's not madness to take very strong measures to prevent that wave of hospitalizations from overwhelming the healthcare system. Most healthcare systems operate close to capacity, and people won't stop getting sick for other reasons while the epidemic is ongoing. This is the situation facing all countries with an advanced Covid19 epidemic.

But hey, it's a free market. Maybe one or two free-world countries will go on with business as usual, and we will get to see in practice whether the rest of the world was excessively careful. I wouldn't want to stake my parents' health on that when all indications say otherwise, but maybe someone else is OK with the gamble.

The percentage is from confirmed cases. For many many people, corona infection has none or very mild symptoms, and they aren't even tested. Since we don't know the actual number of sick people (which can only be estimated, with some estimations talking about several times more patiences then confirmed cases), the actual percentage is unknown.

Yes, I wrote 'identified infections' and spoke of the general magnitude rather than using the 3.4% from the WHO.

In South Korea, where testing criteria are relatively broad, the death rate for the positive test group is over 1% (100/8700).

> checkout the official data from the Italian health ministary

Post link plz

Here is something from somewhere from yesterday https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Infograf...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-tho...

Not the op and I don't know where the age data is but for the regional data on confirmed cases, tests and deaths, iterate the "24" in this URL up by 2 each day at 6pm Italy time to see them. Alternatively go to the main domain and go to the 'news and media' section

http://www.salute.gov.it/imgs/C_17_pagineAree_5351_24_file.p...

> all of them with severe background illness,

Diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity: these aren't what people think of as "severe background illness", but all of these seriously increase risk.

When you are 80 years old - those are serious medical conditions.

That’s true only when hospitals are functioning. Corona spread saturates hospitals and then mortality goes up to near 10%, from the virus itself as well as other unrelated causes which get no ICU treatment.

>Corona spread saturates hospitals and then mortality goes up to near 10%

Some evidence of this? Hospitals were completely overrun in Wuhan initially, but the mortality rate didn't get anywhere near 10%.

Italy: 47000 cases, 4000 deaths. This does not include the collapse of the ICU system, meaning people with stroke, heart attacks and other life threatening conditions do not get optimal (or any) treatment.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/

I’ll respectfully disregard Wuhan numbers - no one knows for sure what’s the count other than the Chinese government.

Hospitals are saturated, because people are panicking. For almost all people, just staying at home for a few days is enough.

You don't get admitted to ICU because you're panicking. You get admitted to ICU because multiple doctors think you need to be there.

London hospitals have started to become overwhelmed with patients, and this is only going to get worse. https://www.hsj.co.uk/news/hospitals-critical-care-unit-over...

Maybe, maybe not. Until we get the hard data regarding what is happening in London, we can't say anything definite. Look at Italy - it was a horrible pandemic - until we got the data, which made it much more reasonable.

So now Italy's pandemic has gone from "horrible" to "reasonable?" It's CFR is increasing, not decreasing. The number of cases is increasing exponentially, not flattening, and the death rate in human terms is approaching 1K per day. I don't know what world you live in, but here in reality, this is horrible.

Just as a side note, Italy had almost 50k death in 2015 - from respiratory diseases alonr. No one was crying 'Pandemic!!' when that happened. Adjusted to population size, this is 4 times mord then here in Israel. Italy has 21% smokers rate, many many of them are old. These data (and more) is unique to Italy, and the reason why corona is so deadly THERE. And in any case - what would be the death rate and for how long if the entire world implements alengthy lockdown?

In the US, 1 person dies of cardiovascular disease every 37 seconds. Since no body cries in the media 'Pandemic!!' (although it is a very real one), I guess that its not the total number of deaths per day that is shocking, its the exponential growth. The growth is indeed exponential, there is no doubt about that, but what is its potential? Judging from the data we now have from Italy and the rest of the world, it has a very small overall potential - the very old and very sick (obviously we have to take care of them, but a global hysteria??). What is the equivalent? Say you started a new web service, that is wonderful and very attractive and cost effective and what-have-you - but only for people who's name start with the letter K. The media is exploding with compliments, subscriptions are going through the roof, all the celebs who's name start with the letter K subscribe and praise etc etc, and you indeed get an exponential growth - for just a few days. Then the source dries up. No new subscribers. All the potential market is exhausted. You end up with a few million subscribers - and no more growth what-so-ever, exponential or linear.

> Look at Italy - it was a horrible pandemic - until we got the data,

Italy just had 793 deaths in one day. If you really want to "look at Italy" why are you ignoring all the Italian doctors?

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/coronavirus-...

https://www.euronews.com/2020/03/12/coronavirus-italy-doctor...

At the moment one Italian dies from covid-19 every two minutes. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-51984399

In 2015, 1 italian died of repiratory diseases every 11 minutes or so. Covid-19 is a respiratory disease, and given the fact that Italy has a vast population with severe respiratory issues (unlike many many other countries), covid-19 just made the already bad situation worse. This is definitely NOT the situation in the rest of the world.

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