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Comment by eric_b | Hacker News Reader

It's remarkable that people are begging their governors to take away their civil liberties.

Table 2 is all a rational person should need to see to realize the quarantine is the work of fear-mongering by politicians and the media:

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm

(For those who need an explanation - over the last two months, the data compiled in this chart shows that for people under 54, they are vanishingly unlikely to die from COVID. It shows that there is no rational reason that people under 54 should be locked down.

The flu killed 5x more people under 24 in the last two months than COVID did)

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Help me understand your position.

I look at table 2 and see almost 30k people that died DESPITE a nationwide lockdown. Given what we know about the virus, that number would've hit 2M-4M had we not had the lockdown. What am I missing?

I think the idea is that as more data comes in it looks like this virus is not as bad as was first feared. There is no current data supporting a U.S. death toll of 2-4 million.

And a lockdown at this point doesn't save any lives, it only postpones the inevitable spread of the virus. It is not reasonable to stay in lockdown for a couple years until there is a vaccine, not for a virus that kills only 1 of 500 people.

yes, additionally, it is probably better to face the tide of covid cases during the warm weather rather than waiting for cold weather to compound its severity

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to see in Table 2. I see more dead than Influenza. And that's despite most everything being closed. We don't close the country for influenza. So clearly this thing is way worse.

Fear mongering? You can literally see the exponential growth just looking at the number of digits in the first column of table 1!

You know 7,600 people die every day in the US right? 2.8M a year. We don't shut anything down for those.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm

Im not saying COVID isn't a big deal. I'm saying the response was an overreaction. We need perspective on the actual severity. If the serological studies coming out are accurate, the total number of deaths is likely ~250k max. That's an alzheimers + suicides. National policy needs to be driven by statistics not emotion.

>> If the serological studies coming out are accurate

That's a BIG optimistic assumption to make. And every optimistic assumption that's been made relative to COVID has only fucked us over further. I'm not sure I'm ready to buy into that yet, cuz if it's off and the CFR is tipped the other way, we could be talking up to 30M deaths, not just 250k...

Real-world hospitals in the US in areas that were hit hard by COVID-19 were/are overwhelmed by it. And even areas that aren't that hard hit can't provide enough tests to know who is actually infected.

Covid-19 deaths are what they are because social distancing works. Even then, it’s the second cause of death. Only surpassed by heart disease.

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