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Comment by nil-sec | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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