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Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

Anyone could have told you that. Or rather, anyone could have told you that if we make some attempt at 'slowing the curve' in order to try and keep the number of ICU-requiring cases below the number of available ICU beds then it will take years if not decades to achieve herd immunity.

You could just go for broke, let everyone catch it at once, and RIP 5-10% of your population. Even then it'll take most of a year to run its course and that year will be much, MUCH worse than just not being able to go to the pub or get a manicure.

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Also, we'd probably see other effects too from the folks who survived but now have scarring in their lungs or increased risk of blood clots. Not a pretty picture.

Yeah, it's scary how much evidence is building that this virus leaves long term or permanent damage in a significant fraction of survivors.

Also the next thing that comes along (and as our human monoculture grows, that will happen more and more frequently) might be much scarier. I feel like the silver lining to our current situation is that it's forcing us to set up our society to limit contagion so that when we do run across a new pathogen which is highly contagious, has a long incubation time, and is highly deadly, maybe we'll stand a chance.

If you want to lose sleep, consider what would have happened if this had been something really nasty, like airborne Ebola.

Covid is actually not a highly deadly virus and on balance we've handled it quite poorly "because economics."

There are much nastier pathogens we might have to deal with in the future.

Sssssh COVID-19 is super scary and we need to set our society up to deal with scary pathogens because of it. Right now. We'll figure out the economics later. /nod

(Well just warning them beforehand didn't work so let's use this to get the ball rolling, huh?)

The best thing to do if you don't think the virus is as dangerous is just to live your life as usual.

Or even better, go volunteer at a hospital, I'm sure they could use the help. But leave the PPE for the people who are worried.

I didn't say it's not dangerous. I said there's worse to come and that setting ourselves up to deal with this coronavirus will stand us in good stead for the next one. Imagine if a virus came out that combined the lethality of MERS with the contagiousness and asymptomatic spreading factors of SARS-Cov-2.

Ebola is so deadly and symptoms so immediate it would likely burn itself out before going pandemic.

That is, ironically, why it's less scary than something like antibiotic-resistant bubonic plague or a cross between MERS and SARS-Cov-2.

People are dying in their homes both from not going to the hospital and from suicide. This isn't just about whether people are killed by one particular virus.

Depending on which country you're talking about, maybe it's also about having a humane and compassionate healthcare system.

This isn't restricted to one country. The UK is one of the few countries with universal tax-funded healthcare that's free at the point of use, and we're still having problems with people dying in their homes rather than going to the hospital due to fear of the coronavirus.

Those numbers are tiny compared to the virus deaths, and even more tiny compared to the death rate if the virus was simply allowed to cull as many people as possible.

CDC is estimating that a little less than 40% of the excess deaths in the past few weeks were not caused by COVID-19: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

That is not what I get from this page.

> These deaths could represent misclassified COVID-19 deaths, or potentially could be indirectly related to COVID-19 (e.g., deaths from other causes occurring in the context of health care shortages or overburdened health care systems).

That is not saying "those deaths were not caused by COVID-19". They explicitly mention that these could be misclassified.

Nice catch, thanks. Most of them are not, you'll find out:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/patients-with-heart-at...

https://boston.cbslocal.com/2020/05/04/coronavirus-covid-19-...

https://www.nydailynews.com/coronavirus/ny-coronavirus-queen...

I don't think I've even seen anyone figure out what that number is. On HN there have recently been articles posted that suggest that nobody actually knows how many people are dying. How did you conclude that non-virus lockdown deaths are "tiny"?

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