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Comment by IkmoIkmo | Hacker News Reader

Rather than frame it like this, it would probably be more useful to talk about whether these people differ from a typical person.

For example, about 80% of adults in the US are either overweight or obese, with some extremely obese. With that come many issues, e.g. diabetes.

So, are we talking about typical people here, many of whom (us) have some form of health issue, e.g. a 40 year old who is overweight and may have high blood pressure because of it, which is very common? Or are we talking about people we consider truly sick and fragile, e.g. a 82 year old who was hospitalised for a heart attack last year, has vitamin deficiencies in the bloodwork, and smoked for 30 years and survived cancer.

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From the report:

Median age of patients who died: 80.5 years

Median age of patients with infection: 63 years

So the data would seem to suggest that the overweight 40 year old is not likely to die and is far below the median for even getting the infection (and going to the hospital.)

Not likely to die with ventilation and medical care.

But what's the likelihood of the overweight 40 year old dying without critical care because the hospital cannot provide it?

Keep in mind, in this time of limited doctors and equipment, Italian hospitals are forced to choose who gets treatment, and they are preferentially treating young people without preexisting conditions.

Being over 70 is pretty risky. Being over 70 and admitted to hospital is very risky. But so far it seems like covid-19 increases that risk a lot.

https://medium.com/wintoncentre/how-much-normal-risk-does-co...

It seems to me that impact on life expectancy should be considered. For somebody who's very old, a very high mortality rate may represent a fairly small impact on life expectancy.

Numbers from: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

In the general case: a 70 year old man is expected to live another 14 years, while a 90 year old man is expected to live only another 4 years. So something that kills half of 70 year olds is depriving the 70 year old of much more life than the 90 year old.

What is a "typical person"? As the article states, most of these people are 70+ years old.

It would be interesting to know the prevalence of these illnesses among the cohort of 70+ year old Italians, but that would require more searching/translating than I care to do now. But feel free have at it.

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