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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

Also what is odd is that we seem to have gone from “social distancing and lockdown to slow down the progression of the disease to within the capacity of the healthcare system” (flattening the curve) to “this virus is the new ebola and anyone who doesn’t have extra protection is putting their life at risk”. While at the same time the additional testing and antibody testing are confirming that the virus is marginally more lethal than the common flu.

Now I understand why medical staff would need extra protection as 1) we badly need them healthy now, and 2) they are facing heavy viral exposure which apparently really increases the risks. I can understand why clerks in grocery stores, bus drivers, anyone with frequent contacts with the general public would also want extra protection, as they may have much greater exposures than anyone else. But employees in a warehouse? Really?

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> additional testing and antibody testing are confirming that the virus is marginally more lethal than the common flu

15,411 people have died of covid in NYC, though excess death numbers suggest that this is an undercount and it's more like 19,200. [1] The population of NYC is 8.4M. If everyone in NYC had been exposed this would give a death rate of ~0.18%, or ~0.23% after adjusting for excess deaths. Antibody tests say ~21% [2] of the population has had it, so multiply by 5 and it looks like if everyone got it about 1% of people would die. That's about 10x more deadly than the flu.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/nyregion/coronavirus-anti...

If you cite numbers from Cuomo’s presentation why did you leave out his estimate of a mortality rate of circa 0.5% [1]?

[edit] also these rates are heavily skewed against 70+ years old and people with existing conditions. The risk to a random warehouse worker is really immaterial.

[1] https://youtu.be/TisDYYWJgBA?t=967

Five times worse than the flu is “marginally” more?

Five time a tiny number may still be a tiny number. The odd to win the UK lotto is one in 45m, the odd of winning Euromillion is one in 140m, the UK lotto is 3 times higher! Either way you won’t win either.

The odd of dying from this virus for a warehouse employee worker under 40 with no serious medical condition is not something they should worry about.

Yes but it’s very contagious, asymptomatic while contagious _and_ many people who aren’t at risk of death do come into contact with those who are. There are tens of millions of people in the UK who are vulnerable to severe consequences if they catch the disease.

> Five time a tiny number may still be a tiny number.

A tiny proportion of a gigantic number is still a massive number.

Plus, most of the population has some level of immunity to the flu. Meanwhile, for coronavirus, every human being on the planet can be infected except the tiny number who have already survived it.

> The odd of dying from this virus for a warehouse employee worker under 40 with no serious medical condition is not something they should worry about.

Until we have longitudinal studies showing that there's nothing to worry about in the long term, this is a reckless assumption.

It seems you’re saying death is ok because it’s a small amount. Any death is bad if it could’ve been prevented.

> If you cite numbers from Cuomo’s presentation...

I didn't watch Cuomo's presentation, and don't generally consume news via video. The two links I gave were to the NYT.

How do you get a mortality rate of 0.5% when you think 0.2% of the city has already died and 20% of the city has been exposed?

> the virus is marginally more lethal than the common flu

That's simply not true, and I don't understand how people keep repeating it. If you take the current New York study as the best available evidence, you get a symptomatic infection fatality rate of somewhere between 0.5% and 1.5%. That's an order of magnitude more dangerous than the flu.

I think some are looking at the step function on the IFR. With 90% of the deaths here in WA being people above 60, it is very misleading to look at a single population summary metric.

Put simply, this is more contagious than the flu, likely due to it being novel. It is vastly more deadly than the flu for elderly. Probably more than just an order of magnitude. That is, if you take out the people under 40 from the case rate, the IFR shoots way up. At a frightening level.

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