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Comment by lastres0rt | Hacker News Reader

Stop pretending this is just "the flu" either.

When we talk about flu stats: most people have some immunity to the flu thanks to flu shots (even if they haven't gotten one for this past year) and general herd immunity, which we DO NOT HAVE for this virus, and won't gain without either a vaccine or a few million dead from this thing running rampant.

The stats you're quoting are WITH the level of serious intervention we've had so far, which is why as certain states are reopening, we're starting to see the numbers ticking back up again and looking just as bad if not worse.

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I don't think he did compare it to the flu. But look, as unpopular as that comparison is, we just don't have numbers that support the original estimates that caused lock downs of 2 million dead in the US. The media pushed worst case over and over, and still is.

I think an uncomfortable stat this coming year will be just how few people will have been reported to died in 2020 of regular flu. It's not saying Covid19 isn't bad in any way to realize that number, will be almost nothing, and that will be suspicious to people going forward for NextTime.

We don't have those numbers because of the lockdowns, which were obeyed in part because of the media coverage. The alternative would have been China's approach of physically locking people inside their homes, or much lower compliance and higher infection and death rates.

There is the small matter that deniers make the claim that government lockdowns are forcing people to stay home, not work, etc. When the data tends to show people were starting to shelter in place well before governments took action.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-didnt-wait-fo...

You sure?

https://mobile.twitter.com/ClayTravis/status/126135332711324...

How do you square this with what happened in Lombardy, Spain, France and other places in which the healthcare systems were overwhelmed and tens of thousands of people died in just a few weeks?

Do you know how many flu deaths happened in Italy during the 2016/17 flu season?

Compare that to the Coronavirus deaths. The numbers are really close.

Italy isn’t particularly an outlier in terms of Coronavirus severity when you look at their historical flu numbers compared to the rest of Europe. Their Coronavirus deaths follow the same trend as with their flu fatalities. Really nothing surprising in Italy, but the media lost their minds over it.

https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(19)30328-5/ful...

Did Italy lock down for 2 months in 2016/17 to combat the flu?

Do you think that information is relevant to a comparison?

I asked you about the collapse of the healthcare system in Lombardy, within a few weeks of the virus appearing. When has the flu done that?

You're presenting what happened in Lombardy as some sort of mass hysteria. Was the healthcare system overwhelmed, or was that a mass hallucination?

There have been 30,000 confirmed CoVID-19 deaths in Italy, which is about double a normal flu season. What do you think that number would have been without any social distancing measures? As I see it, the numbers are not that difficult to estimate. About 70% of people would need to catch CoVID-19 before herd immunity brought R below 1. With an IFR of 0.5%, and a population of 60 million people, that would mean about 200,000 deaths. Is that enough to "lose one's mind over"?

Well, the Lombardy healthcare system was certainly overwhelmed, but I'm not sure you can say it 'collapsed' (what does that even mean anyway).

> When has the flu done that?

The flu overwhelms hospitals quite often. For example, the 2017-2018 flu season saw many hospitals around the world setting up tent wards: https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...

Collapsed as in:

* Not enough doctors, nurses, beds and medical supplies to treat all (or even most of) the patients.

* Extremely stark triage decisions. Deciding not to treat patients who would normally be treatable, instead leaving them to die.

* Doctors and nurses working to the limit of exhaustion.

* Normal care essentially stopping. All medical resources being focused on one disease.

* Morgues unable to handle the number of dead.

Finally, double the regular number of flu deaths occurred in just a few weeks, and that was with extreme social distancing measures. Without those measures, the death toll would have been far higher.

You're describing this as some sort of mass hallucination. I don't see how that's a defensible position.

> but I'm not sure you can say it 'collapsed' (what does that even mean anyway).

If there was any doubt that you're being disingenuous and purposely deceitful, the fact that you've decided to resort to petty arguments on semantics to desperately avoid facing the facts is enough to clear up that doubt.

Yes you are exactly right. It has always been normal to send the dead bodies to neighboring towns, when your crematoriums are full, and they did it every year in Lombardy. No one just noticed previously. I think we need to blame their mayor, for not encouraging building bigger better crematorium.

The inferred IFR from serological prevalance and deaths in NYC is ~1%. NYC's demographics skew favorably compared to the nation, but assuming ~60% of the country would get COVID-19 if not for restrictions, 2 million is right on the money.

Assuming 12.38 million people would die of it, 12.38 million people would die of it.

Stop assuming things.

It's a conservative assumption based on a low estimate of R_0 without mitigations.

It's hard to make inferences about the world without assumptions.

You're the one trying to make OP prove a negative.

And this also ignores those who survive COVID-19. Roughly 5% are being hospitalized with potential long term effects. Everyone assumes that we're over the hump. The only place in the US that I would consider over the hump is NYC. Everywhere else has nowhere to go until herd immunity is reached.

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