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Comment by steveeq1 | Hacker News Reader

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?

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.

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

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.

“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.

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

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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