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Comment by mritun | Hacker News Reader

Fear is the right response to pneumonia.

If you haven’t had it you won’t understand. I can’t swim but if you’re a swimmer you might understand a parallel - it’s like not being able to swim - your head bobbing on water surface, sometimes you can breathe other times you are just gasping. If you’re in water the people will see you’re drowning and a life guard will pull you out.

Pneumonia is this “almost drowning” for weeks!and then bring barely able to breathe for months.

Again: fear is exactly the right response to pneumonia!

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> Fear is the right response to pneumonia

Yes, but not so much fear that you ride out your stroke or heart attack at home because you think venturing out of your house and into the ER is wading into certain death via pneumonia.

That is the level of fear that the media has induced in some people and it's even more dangerous (at the individual level) than too little fear.

The media? Or social media? Or random blogs and forums? It’s easy to accuse a general “media” but we get bombarded by so much content that it’s hard to really pinpoint who’s doing the fear mongering. Anecdata, I found the coverage in my city (Toronto) being much more accurate by the traditional large media than the random crap I’ve been reading on twitter / local reddit / click-baity blogs. And I wouldn’t put the 24 hours cable news channel in the same category as the newspaper either. “Medias” can mean so many things.

So far COVID-19 has killed 0.25% of NYC, with that number continuing to rise. The idea that fear is more dangerous than that is facile.

Edit: Updated fatality percentage from 0.16% to 0.25%, to reflect the latest numbers.

I live in Ontario where ~250 people get diagnosed with malignant tumors on an average day vs. 500 people getting diagnosed with COVID at the peak of the pandemic (now ~350).

Months after the lockdown started and the surge was successfully averted, we're still not doing cancer surgeries and diagnostics. I don't understand how this level of fear and conservatism is saving more people than it's hurting. COVID is nowhere near as dangerous as a malignant tumor.

There is a middle ground of appropriate fear that we've blown past.

What if Ontario was like new York State? Then Ontario with a pop of 14M vs 19.5M would have lost around 15,000 people not 1600 as current.

There is also this assumption that people will haplessly get infected as if they were livestock. Which they are not. The will stop going up, stop spending money, avoiding work if they can. That's baked in and not something the government imposes. Except to impose order on the process. An orderly early lockdown is better than a late chaotic panicked one.

No it's absolutely not. Your risk of dying, or of having life altering chronic illness, from not immediately seeking medical attention if you are having a heart attack or stroke is far higher than your risk from COVID, and those people aren't showing up at hospital right now.

Update: updated the stat to 0.25%, based on the official fatality count of 21,045 and a population of 8.4mil.

In 2018, NYC’s premature death rate was 189 per 100,000, or 0.189% of the population. In a single quarter COVID-19 has already surpassed all causes of premature death combined. And that’s before the epidemic is done, and before we’ve had a chance to re-test earlier deaths to adjust the numbers properly.

You’re not wrong that some people will die from otherwise treatable heart attacks, and that’s tragic. But to assert that more will die from staying home than not requires some pretty extraordinary evidence.

This is a terrible take.

Assuming you have a heart attack, your chance of dying is 20%. Higher if you don't get treatment.

That's as high or higher than your chance of dying from covid-19 assuming you're in the highest risk group.

A conservative estimate of likelihood to catch covid if you go to a hospital at this point is 5%. In reality it's probably lower.

These end up mostly cancelling out, so if you the I the chance you're suffering from a heart attack is higher than the chance of catching covid you should go to the hospital. (And this is me still fudging the numbers to make covid look comparatively more dangerous than it really is).

People will needlessly sir if we collectively overstate tht dangers of covid. That's without a doubt true. People will also die if we understate them and don't take reasonable precautions.

> A conservative estimate of likelihood to catch covid if you go to a hospital at this point is 5%.

Really? Where is this number form?

The fact that hospitals aren't pouring new Covid patients out of their ears. Major hospitals are handling lots of cases, and have many more than one hundred employees. They're not hotbeds of transmission, from what I've seen.

You're certainly at more risk in a hospital than at home, but it's not that crazy. Since it seems like you're in the bay area, consider that for the chance to even be 5%, something like most new Covid cases in the bay would need to come from hospital employees or patients. I don't think that's happening.

Haha, no, I am from the Central Asia. All you you just said are handwavey arguments, "I think", "I believe". I think for example, that chances of catching Covid in hospitals in US, at the peak of the epidemic were way above 20%. How is this an argument?

Data backed arguments and your imaginings aren't the same.

What is the definition of premature death?

What about the people who have the symptoms of COVID-19, where it's not severe enough for them to be hospitalized for that, so the messaging is for them to self-quarantine; but then they also get struck with some other problem (such as a heart attack)? I feel like I've heard no clear messaging on what such people are supposed to do, even from the most rational/level-headed medical authorities.

I imagine being in those shoes feels a lot like it would have to need surgery when you're HIV positive, back when HIV was an eventual death sentence: you'd feel guilt/shame for exposing your doctors to this coincidental problem you have, that might get them sick.

And so these people don't go, and end up dying of these other problems, likely at a much higher level than the people who are just staying indoors out of paranoia.

If you have a heart attack you call 911. There hasn’t been much messaging about that because, frankly, it’s assumed to be obvious.

People tend to call 911 while they're having a heart attack; but a first heart attack doesn't tend to kill people, so if they live through it, they tend to think it isn't an urgent problem in need of calling 911, and instead just go to the hospital at their earliest convenience. The problem here guilt/shame delaying "earliest convenience."

Washing your hands and covering your mouth while you cough is obvious too; that doesn't mean the messaging is unnecessary.

It isn't obvious, unless you happen to suffer from hypochondria.

I can understand. I had it and got tested positive for antibodies recently.

I had symptoms but it honestly was more like a mild flu.

So please stop your fear mongering and holier than thou attitude, just because you had it and it was bad doesn't mean that everyone will be the same. In fact serological studies prove that the overwhelming majority barely have any symptoms, and of those who do even fewer develop into a severe illness.

> So please stop your fear mongering and holier than thou attitude, just because you had it and it was bad doesn't mean that everyone will be the same.

I'm not sure you fully understand the problem you're trying to discuss. The problem is not just about ourselves catching it. The main problem is us acting as transmission vectors to anyone and everyone around us.

You may believe you are magically enchanted to not have any lasting consequences from a covid19 infection, but I'm quite sure that you come across people who may fall within one of the risk cohorts. Thus you crossing their path might very well be a death sentence to them. But that shouldn't bother you, right?

The vast vast majority of the cases are mild if you are strong and healthy.

How many people are strong and healthy?

Ok here is a random stat, by definition itself 10% of people will be in bottom 10 percentile of the health risk profile and at huge risk.

I am not countering you but the parent. Old age itself is a pre-existing condition and then we develop more for each day we live (obesity, heart attacks, diabetes). I know the numbers of true risk may be different but can we manage 5-15% of people falling extremely sick?

The US has an enormous population of elderly, obese, and diabetics. Trying to pick a random risk factor doesn't really work.

Strictly, this isn't right. You can have more than ten percent of a population below the tenth percentile of a measure. Consider how this stat squares the percentage of people with less than (or more than) the tenth percentile of finger count.

In most countries, most people. Problems with obesity and chronic health conditions are relatively recent in the history of mankind.

Almost 80% of people in the US are overweight as of 2015, with 35% suffering from obesity and 5% from extreme obesity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States

Hence why I said most countries.

And you're still incorrect. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-adults-who-are-o...

“People in another country who are less fat will be fine” might be technically true, but it’s less than helpful when you’re trying to decide what to do right here and right now.

It is interesting to consider what the death toll from exporting American food culture worldwide is. I think it would really help put the death toll from corona virus in perspective.

Why are people obsessed with turning disease into a chance to pass moral judgment?

I guess it can help with coping with one's own fear and helplessness. Those people brought it on themselves, so I'm good because I didn't do the bad things they did, and it's less of a problem if they suffer, because again they brought it on themselves. Something like that maybe. I don't really get it either.

See: "Illness as Metaphor" (1978) by Susan Sontag

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illness_as_Metaphor

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