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Comment by downerending | Hacker News Reader

Here's the actual study: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.08.20057794v...

ZDnet title seems a bit off, as first factor in their decision tree is age, not obesity. Also, this doesn't appear to attempt to unwind causation vs correlation. As I read it, it's just, if you could only ask a few questions to make your decision, what should you ask first? Useful for admitting, but probably less so for understanding what's actually going on.

Looking at the numbers in the paper, high blood pressure, for example, seems like a powerful predictor of problems. Presumably that's captured by the obesity question, even though those two conditions are only partially correlated.

Also interesting is that they don't see race as a factor. Other reports seem to indicate that African Americans are doing significantly worse.

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It’s worth noting their definition for obesity is BMI>40 as opposed to the normal definition of BMI>30. BMI>40 is considered “class 3” or “extreme” obesity.

In Table 1, BMI between 30 and 40 was also strongly correlated with hospital admission: 659 people in that group were admitted, 256 were not.

Race is on there, it's at the bottom of their prediction tree.

Also obesity is correlated with diabetes, another important factor, as well as heart disease and even age itself

>Also interesting is that they don't see race as a factor. Other reports seem to indicate that African Americans are doing significantly worse.

We are quickly discovering through this pandemic that a sizable proportion of the population is prioritizing political correctness over human life. The risk tree doesn't even ask about race beyond establishing whether the patient is white or not.

As we tiptoe around the bush, black populations are some 5x overrepresented among covid deaths in multiple unsurprising communities: Detroit and NYC come to mind. Apparently we'd rather see these people die than admit that there is a consistent cultural issue in US ghettos where people are far less likely to listen to authority (and quarantine) and far less more to have multiple comorbidities (obesity, diabetes, smoking).

I don’t see how “political correctness” is a factor in this analysis.

It sounds like socioeconomic status is correlated with race in America [0], there’s a strong correlation between one’s socioeconomic status and one’s ability to enforce self-isolation and social distancing [1], and there’s a clear causal relationship between self-isolation and social distancing and one’s likelihood of contracting COVID19.

So it doesn’t seem too hard to see how NYU doesn’t believe race to have a causal relationship with disease severity without resorting to claims that “political correctness” is influencing their analysis.

[0] Hard to object to this, given the institutional racism present in the country.

[1] Many essential jobs (sanitation, public transit, supermarket, food prep, warehouse worker, etc.) are not well paid and don’t offer the flexibility to preventatively take paid sick leave and/or work from home.

>It sounds like socioeconomic status is correlated with race in America

At what point does personal responsibility factor in to the outcome of communities? These people have had access to Internet now for a decade - even in the worst urban hoods in, say, NYC there is cheap transportation to public libraries - nothing has changed.

Racism and poverty are perhaps partly to blame but a group of people needs to make investment of time and effort into itself, individually and collectively, for outcomes to improve. For some reason the problems plaguing the black community are unique among poor communities of all ethnicities and origins.

And now these same behaviors are having direct, real consequences not just for these communities but for the nation at large.

Yes, people belonging to other socioeconomic groups also are violating stay at home orders - but not in the same proportions, as evidenced by the disproportionate death rate from COVID19.

Instead we have multiple news outlets asking why are communities of color being disproportionately affected? And simultaneously

1. Insinuating that all minorities are being ravaged to the degree that African Americans are

2. Implying that the only possible explanations are external to the people being effected.

People are dying because of this rhetoric.

> At what point does personal responsibility factor in to the outcome of communities?

I'm from the Detroit area. Unless you have experience with that environment, it's difficult to understand.

An example is that I've met families where nobody in their known family tree spanning 200 years has graduated from high school.

So any assumptions you have need to be reset.

However, it's an interesting question to ask, "What would help a group develop personal responsibility, or enable children to graduate from high school?"

Not sure what the answer is, or for the matter, if anybody wants to be helped.

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