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Comment by Funes- | Hacker News Reader

>we are still at the "those people were going to die within a year anyway" phase.

No, we are not. Young and healthy people are dying too. And that's with global confinement taking place. Just imagine in what kind of hell we would be if people were still roaming around freely; heaps of people would die just because they wouldn't have access to sanitary devices (ventilators, for instance) nor medicine. In any case, if you had a close relative suffering from cancer who would otherwise live more than a year if they didn't get the virus, you wouldn't spout such bullshit. Same thing goes for your next uninformed statement:

>the "I am okay and have a BMI less than 30 so therefore people like me are okay" phase.

Yeah, no.

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There is a trend here on HN to react very cautiously and critically to studies showing “positive” results, I.e. lower apparent death rate, preliminary evidence for drug efficacy etc. This is a good thing but it should be applied in equal measure to everything. This doesn’t happen as this post shows. Where does your believe that healthy people die come from? Why is it okay to make this statement in such vigor as you do? Show me a well designed study that proves this point. I am not aware of any large scale pathology efforts pointing in this direction. Until this is unequivocally shown, statements like yours should be treated with the same reaction your parent received. It’s your opinion. Don’t state your opinion as facts.

Have a look at the ICNARC reports. These show that lower BMI and no comorbidities is low risk, but not no risk. https://www.icnarc.org/Our-Audit/Audits/Cmp/Reports

Thank you for the link. It's great that we get these numbers now. The relevant table for this discussion seems to be table 10. From this it does become clear that a majority of all people who died did not have any severe comorbidities.

However, playing devils advocate I would argue that 1) not all comorbidities are known. In this study they write: "Very severe comorbidities must have been evident within the six months prior to critical care and documented at or prior to critical care".

This is why I think pathology studies are needed. There are healthy young people who suddenly die while playing football because they have undiagnosed heart problems. Given the relatively low number of young people who die, I am not sure we can exclude this right now.

2) I could not find a breakdown of age for those people who were classified as having severe comorbidities. Even though this number is likely low, I wonder what the overlap is between severe comorbidities and those who died young.

Having said all this. I also believe that current behaviour should be conservative if there is uncertain data. Discussion should be allowed though.

The other point (that supports you) to make is that the ICNARC paper only looks at those admitted to ICUs. There may be lots of people who are seen by ICU as having very low chance of recovery, and then not admitted to ICU. These people may die at home or in a care home or nursing home.

Here in the UK there are news stories everyday in the mainstream news outlets of nurses and doctors dying. Some of whom were young and otherwise healthy.

The current theory is that viral load is a factor in the severity of your infection. If you are exposed to it often and in larger quantities, you get a more severe infection. Therefore, healthcare workers are more likely to get a severe infection.

For example, the nursing home workers in Seattle were using CPAP machines on their patients that aerosolized the virus and exposed them all to large amounts of the virus. Theory also applies to subway riders, as outbreaks appear far more severe in areas that rely on public transport with NYC infections following the subway stops with a relatively high correlation.

Yes, there is anecdotal evidence that healthy people with high viral loads can die from this virus. It is a good null hypothesis to assume this virus could kill you. Everyone should be cautious right now. That does not mean it should be treated, and promoted, as a scientific fact to shut down discussions about the hypothesis.

Young and healthy people are dying, but I think it's important to have some numbers for context. Italy publishes bi weekly full reports on it's deaths, here is April 20ths: https://www.epicentro.iss.it/en/coronavirus/bollettino/Repor...

It's not unfair to state that this disease, is much, much more dangerous for the 65+ age group. That being said I don't agree with the grandparent OP.

> As of April 20 , 238 out of the 21,551 (1.1%) positive SARS-CoV-2 patients under the age of 50 died. In particular, 54 of these were less than 40 years (34 men and 20 women), age range between 0 and 39 years. For 6 patients under the age of 40 years no clinical information is available; the remaining 38 had serious pre-existing pathologies (cardiovascular, renal, psychiatric pathologies, diabetes, obesity) and 10 had no major pathologies.

So, out of the 54 people under 40 that died (~0.25%), 38 had significant other issues. And only 10 (~0.05%) were otherwise healthy people.

I’m tempted to agree with OP that it seems like it’s more of a bad flu for younger people.

Of course, it would be interesting to know how many of those younger people actually needed medical intervention to save their lives. Maybe the death rate amongst older people is so much higher because doctors prefer to treat/save those that have a chance when hospitals are overwhelmed.

Also how many unreported and cleared covid patients will end up with permanent injury?

In another post I described how I’m tracking a cohort here in the US of healthy young MDs who are experiencing symptoms consistent with lung injury +42 days after symptom clearance.

A bad flu does not limit you from athletics for life. COVID might. We just don’t know.

> I’m tempted to agree with OP that it seems like it’s more of a bad flu for younger people.

The point of the article we are discussing here is that with COVID-19 this is not a binary live/die situation. You can live but still have serious lasting lung damage, possibly lasting neurological problems as well. I'm not aware of the flu having similar effects after recovery.

Fair point, we need more relevant research to know how prevalent this is.

I did find multiple references to 20-30% reduced lung capacity.

The person to whom you were replying did not assent to the views quoted. You can dispute the views to the person who reported them, but it will not change the opinions of those who hold the view. It is probably better to engage with the actual question of "I wonder what it will take to change people's minds".

> Young and healthy people are dying too

A datapoint against that: We have a renowned pathologist in Hamburg (Prof Püschel) who examines every corona death in the city - about 60 so far. He was quoted multiple times that every single victim had severe preexisting conditions. And that none of them would have lived another year.

He also challenged the idea that healthy/young people are in danger and gave the example of a young (I think ~30 yo) corona victim in Hamburg who actually had undiscovered severe illness.

edit: So this will get -4'd soon - okay :o

But aren't there many cases around the world of apparently healthy doctors and nurses and others who died of coronavirus? You could say "Oh, yes, they all had an undiscovered severe illness that would have killed them within the year".

But generalising from one city with only 60 odd deaths to a necessary outcome in the face of apparent evidence to the contrary from places with much higher bodycounts seems like it's a long bow to draw. It is much more likely that the people who die easiest have preexisting conditions, so when you have a low bodycount it is mostly occupied by people with preexisting conditions.

'Viral load' is said to be a factor here.

There are over 2.5 million confirmed cases of the virus worldwide, most of which are pre-recovery. Using a sixty person sample in Hamburg to make a definitive statement of severity is beyond the realm of idiocy. It's criminally negligent.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/05/magazine/first-coronaviru...

He’s 33. You can find plenty more young and younger cases if you look. They are rarer than older cases but the idea that young people in general are not in danger is ridiculous.

Hell, I’m 37, maybe on the border of young, and had to be hospitalized due to COVID and I had no preexisting conditions.

Consider looking at a larger sample size than 60.

> Consider looking at a larger sample size than 60.

You used a sample size of one

Every single human being has preexisting conditions.

I wrote severe

Sweden doesn't look like hell. 99% of deaths in Italy were over 65. Study after study, LA, Massachusetts, Chicago, etc. show that many, many more people have gotten COVID asymptomatically and the actual mortality rate thus far is miniscule.

Death projections continue to be revised down in the US and almost everywhere outside of NYC is far behind expected deaths and hospitalizations. NYC is sharing their ventilators with NJ because they don't need as many as expected.

At this point it is the alarmists arguing against evidence and actual data, now that we have some. It is rather amusing to behold.

> 99% of deaths in Italy were over 65.

Do you have a source for that? Publicly available information [0] points at approximately 80% of deaths being 70 and over, not 99.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1105061/coronavirus-deat...

> At this point it is the alarmists arguing against evidence and actual data, now that we have some. It is rather amusing to behold.

You were also the one claiming US deaths will be under 60K per your imaginary CDC projections, but these are 56K right now and there are still 1K deaths per day.

And, no, 99% of deaths in Italy are not over 65. That's also imaginary.

So, your ability to make up data and then "reason" with it seems strong.

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