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Comment by pacala | Hacker News Reader

I would love to bound the death rate, both lower and upper, ideally by age group. Right now I'm torn between 'it's a nasty flu, soldier up' vs. 'it's a supernasty disease that's going to severely upend life once it becomes endemic'. With the caveat that, given how easy it spreads, we might not be able to realistically do anything to prevent it becoming endemic.

Would you please be able to expand on the 'seasonal flu' point you made?

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The fatality rate of the seasonal flu is around 0.1%. We originally thought that COVID-19 had a fatality rate fo 2-3%, but now that antibody testing is more and more widespread we are finding more and more cases of people testing positive for antibodies - indicating they had and recovered from the virus - without ever having any symptoms.

A study from Santa Clara just recently found that there are probably 50 to 85 times MORE infections than originally thought, just that the vast majority of them were asymptomatic.

Should we be focusing our energy on protecting our elderly and immunocompromised? Yes, absolutely.

Should we be mandating that people stay home, putting millions of perfectly healthy people out of work? It's absolutely insane to me that this was even considered, let alone implemented.

I agree, the fatality rates reported in the media smells of overhype. A lot. Over here in WA, the testing policy is along the lines of "Test patients hospitalized with severe lower respiratory illness or people working in critical sectors, and then maybe consider people with 100.4+ fevers and/or shortness of breath" [0]. That population selection has an elevated death risk, and also muddles the positive/negative ratio: symptomatic people test positive, whereas health workers test negative. We get high negative test ratios, falsely indicating we're early in the outbreak, and also high mortality ratios among positives, falsely indicating a high fatality rate. Extrapolating to the entire population is wrong and irresponsible.

The flu and vaccine point is also well taken. For the entirety of human history the flu was a health risk for the elderly and life expectancy [excluding under 5s] was 60-70 [1]. The contemporary expectation that everyone should make it into their 80s and 90s is a strong outlier.

OTOH, people counter by pointing out that NYC is already at 0.16 [14000 / 8400000] fatality rate [2], and it's unclear how many more until this wave recedes. Then anecdotes about dead healthcare workers, reinfections, mutation rates, etc.

[0] https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/1600/coronavirus/...

[1] https://www.quora.com/Excluding-child-mortality-what-is-the-...

[2] https://covid19tracker.health.ny.gov/views/NYS-COVID19-Track...

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