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Comment by censorsheep | Hacker News Reader

I am definitely an anti-lockdown person. I wanted to see the numbers for myself so I used data from the CDC's site and the WHO's site. Please check my math and reasoning https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/3668979/is-this-an-...

My calculations for the Coronavirus death rate:

<5 0%

5-14 0%

15-24 0%

25-34 .04%

35-44 .12%

45-54 .37%

55-64 .9%

65-74 2.1%

75-84 5.5%

85+ 16.9%

Based on this data I think the lockdown is an absurdly heavy handed approach. Subjective opinion increases -> It's about older voters. In Eric Weinstein's words "they are hoarding well-being on every front" to the point that they will gladly screw over the younger generations.

We need to end this nonsense ASAP.

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Consider that the first-order effects of just _older people dying_ may not be everything entailed with this outbreak:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kawasaki-disease-coronavirus-il...

A _novel_ virus means we don't know what it does to everyone yet. At a minimum, closing the schools globally probably has saved millions of children from this "new polio"... for now.

Perhaps also maybe grandparents would like to live long enough to see their _healthy_ grandchildren again.

I'm not against caution, but don't take credit for saving kids without hard facts. It is an unnecessary appeal to emotion.

Worse, it has a shaky basis with everything else we do know about the virus. Which is that it is highly contagious and the earliest community spread cases we knew of in WA included a student. Which is to say it remains to be proven that we did keep the kids from getting it.

Again, I'm not against caution. And I am not pushing for reopening the schools. I am pushing for testing the students to see if that ship sailed or not. If it had, I would actually push for more expensive measures on older populations.

It is a novel virus, but not a magic virus like the press says. Take for example the brain infections: it's a feature of other coronaviruses (and I only found out by reading the literature), not just this one.

The school closure was criticized basing on current evidence in an editorial[1] on Disease and Childhood (sister publication of the British Medical Journal). They also go over the reports of Kawasaki disease saying that there needs to be more evidence to support the claim.

Also a limited test in two schools in New Wales, where contact tracing was used, there was one reported infection of a student by another out of 853 recorded contacts. There are indications that a. grave effects are rare in children (rare does not mean zero) and b. children aren't as good "spreaders" of this disease as adults.

[1] https://adc.bmj.com/content/early/2020/05/05/archdischild-20...

> closing the schools globally probably has saved millions of children

Actually I don't think we don't know the infection rate among children[0]. Keeping them isolated among adults 24 hours a day could be having the opposite effect.

[0] Although one Icelandic study claimed 0 (zero) known transmissions between children.

For south korea: (check south korea coronavirus wikipedia article for numbers to double check if you want) 80+ 24% 70+ 10% 60+ 2.6% 50+ .7% 40+ .21% 0-30 0%

so I think your numbers are a bit low but order of magnitude correct. Also of note, S. Korea fatality rate is like 2.4%, in spite of the fact that 20 year olds were dramatically over represented in infections and none of them died - though, because of korea's older demographics, if you extrapolate to the US you get a 1.4% fatality rate (though I think it could be a bit higher because americans are fatter)

This is the CFR (known deaths / known cases of people infected), not the IFR (best estimate of deaths / best estimate of infected). Most cases are mild, so many people never seek medical attention and never become a case. South Korea has done a good job tracing contacts, so they're finding a much larger share of total infections than elsewhere; but they're not claiming to find every single one, so their CFR is still an overestimate of the IFR.

Estimates of the IFR come either from isolated populations that were fully tested by PCR (often ships, like the Diamond Princess) or tests for antibodies in a random sample of the population. The antibody studies are tricky when the incidence of antibodies in the population is low, since the tests have some nonzero false positive rate, but much easier in a place like NYC (with ~20% infected).

ETA: But any single IFR is misleading--this disease really is no more lethal than the flu for children (which doesn't mean no one dies, just that very few do), but is >10x worse for the elderly. To ignore that promotes both needless panic in the young and dangerous complacency among the old.

Sorry, what's your age ?

edit: OK I got one downvote instead of an answer. Wasn't the question gentle enough?

The death rate for my age is .37%, it seems that the death rate for your age may be not important at all -correct ?

It wasn't me that downvoted you. I don't do that, even when I can. I can't on HN btw.

I'm in the 35-44 range.

A lot of people are making arguments without keeping things in perspective. First, people die. That is a fact of life. Our attempt to smooth out nature will be smyted in time. It will snap back. We are spending too much money. We are creating a fear-driven easily controlled society. We are encouraging censorship.

All of this stuff is very bad. Do you agree with that?

There are negative effects of shutdowns, yes. I would argue that the case hasn't been made that allowing the virus to run rampant among society is the lesser of two evils.

Given the risk level, on an average basis, the question seems to be, "Are you willing to kill off either yourself, or more likely someone you know, so that we can all enjoy the ability to go stand in stores?"

A large percentage of the population (doesn't even have to be anywhere near a majority) is going to answer "No" to that question. Regardless of lockdowns, regardless of what the government says they are allowed to do. People will maintain their own personal "shutdowns" regardless of how the government (or those who assess the risk differently) tell them to feel.

> Given the risk level, on an average basis, the question seems to be, "Are you willing to kill off either yourself, or more likely someone you know, so that we can all enjoy the ability to go stand in stores?"

This is an absurd appeal to emotion — it implies that you should treat COVID-19 as something you will deterministically die from.

The correct framing is “what _probability_ of increased death for yourself or someone you know would you accept in order for the lockdown to be over?”

Well, “someone you know” is extremely vague, but just speaking for myself, I’d probably accept a 10% risk of my own death to end the lockdown (which is many orders of magnitude higher than the actual risk).

No I don’t think my grandma dying is worth all this being over. I do think some small risk of people dying is worth it, though. Everyone thinks that way about everything, even if it’s hard to admit. If they didn’t, they would never have gone outside even before COVID-19 was discovered.

> This is an absurd appeal to emotion — it implies that you should treat COVID-19 as something you will deterministically die from.

It's not an appeal to emotion at all. If we allow the virus to run unabated through the population, it's a statistical likelihood that someone you know will die from it. I think "someone you know" is generally understood to mean friends, acquaintances, near and extended family members.

Of course, we're only talking about probabilities and at the end of the day there would be people who would end up having no one they know die, and others who would see half their families wiped out.

> I’d probably accept a 10% risk of my own death to end the lockdown

Accepting a 10% risk of death to "end a lockdown", of all things, so that people can go stand in stores, is completely incomprehensible to me, which just goes to show that not everyone's risk tolerance is the same.

You can't dictate to others how they feel on this topic.

> Accepting a 10% risk of death to "end a lockdown", of all things, so that people can go stand in stores, is completely incomprehensible to me, which just goes to show that not everyone's risk tolerance is the same.

It is not about wanting to stand in stores. It is about avoiding long-term damage to the material conditions of millions, maybe billions, of people.

Do you not think the lockdown will cause a huge increase in poverty, homelessness, and starvation?

> Do you not think the lockdown will cause a huge increase in poverty, homelessness, and starvation?

Perhaps. But that's something that should be quantified and included as part of the risk assessment so that rational decisions can be made. It's also something that can be planned for and mitigated.

It also plays into the idea that the economy is "shutdown" or that there is a universal "lockdown" happening or that the economy needs to be "reopened" because it is no longer producing anything at all. Large parts of the economy didn't have to (and did not) shut down and they have continued full-steam ahead.

Yes. What you said.

Few people are brave enough to explicitly say "yup it's worth N deaths to do suchandsuch", no matter how important the suchandsuch is.

If you gave people a complete understanding of the scenario, that "stay inside until the risk is gone" means "stay inside until at least 2021, maybe longer, while the rest of the world gets to stand in stores and eat at restaurants again", I doubt any significant number of people would sign up for it.

How can you reduce all of the freedoms we've lost in the lockdown to "go stand in stores." That's life to you? Standing in stores? It will not be possible to have a rational argument about the cost/benefits of lockdown if people aren't going to acknowledge how many features of our lives have been sacrificed.

Can you provide a list of the freedoms we've lost? Honestly, perhaps my thinking on what I or others have lost in this is too narrow.

People are being asked to make the temporary sacrifice of practicing physical distancing. That's what it boils down to in terms of "freedoms lost".

And because, frankly, we have been utterly unprepared to deal with this completely predictable viral outbreak, much of our society is unprepared to conduct business in a way that allows or supports physical distancing. So people are scrambling.

Yes, there will be severe economic hardship for many people. No one denies that. But as I said, for many people they are making an extremely difficult choice between economic hardship or what they perceive to be the health and wellbeing of family and loved ones.

Where I am in the USA, people are seriously proposing not to resume in-person elementary school in fall. Public education is one of very few equalizers in society here, and the children who fall behind because their parents can't/won't/don't supplement the videoconference lectures may never catch up. That cost is hard to quantify for me, but it seems tremendous, unquestionably worth a significant chance of my (but mostly others', since coronavirus mostly kills the elderly) death.

Do you agree? How many quality-adjusted life years do you think it's worth paying to keep the kids in school? The answer can't be zero, since just driving them there costs something. This isn't a pleasant question, but it's one that society has to answer.

I really don't like the binary argument about "lockdowns". It creates the impression that the pro side wants no one leaving the house except for food, and the anti side wants to resume status quo ante corona. The real answer is of course in between--that some measures, like masks and not standing too close are clearly worth it, while others, like banning all outdoor exercise, are not. Perhaps some people arguing for or against "lockdowns" really are at those extremes, but I doubt most are.

Keeping kids out of school and not receiving a proper education is a serious issue, and keeping schools shut down is certainly not sustainable at all.

But, and this speaks to your point about binary arguments, why are our only options presented to us "open schools as we normally would" or "keep them closed"?

It seems to me that there are many ways that education systems could be re-tooled by the time school opens in the fall to enable education while substantially reducing risk of infection. To me the question is if there is a will to make those changes and compromises. It really seems to me like there isn't, and I think that is the part that distresses me the most among all of this.

I certainly agree that elementary schools (a) should reopen on site, and (b) should reopen with measures to slow the spread of coronavirus. I've already seen discussion of (b) in the press, and that gives me some optimism. I hope a month from now, we're arguing e.g. about whether kids should be held entirely in a single class (to minimize the total number of kids that one infected could expose) vs. allowed to take electives. That seems a lot more productive to me than just pro/anti "lockdown".

And while I'm here, I think the proposals to move university education entirely or mostly remote are insane. College students are themselves at very low risk from this, and they live mostly with college students. We should take measures to protect those at risk (help students living with their parents to instead live with classmates, let older professors lecture remotely while TAs run the class, etc.), but the cost of moving that online-only again seems huge to me.

I'm scared of people.. their laziness in thinking and consequences of it. I wish people wear masks by self if it may be needed - not because someone told them so, like being responsible for others acting first on self could prove that no one need to 'take care' of you if you don't want it, otherwise you just allow to treat self and others like you may need it.

Likewise, I'm scared of people, for their laziness in accepting the consequences of annihilating our culture for a few extra points of risk reduction.

Your numbers seem to be roughly correct based on the studies I've seen. Maybe a bit of an underestimate given that the latest serological studies are suggesting a higher than originally predicted IFR, but close enough for discussion.

> I'm in the 35-44 range.

Me too. Leaving aside the danger to older people, let's selfishly consider our risk.

My baseline fatality rate is something like 1 in 1,000. That's not odds I'm absolutely wild about - I wouldn't be keen on getting on an aeroplane with a 1 in 1,000 chance of crashing - but not something I'd worry too much about.

What's considerably scarier and what you don't seem to be considering is the hospitalisation rate. This could be in the region of 3-5% for our age group. A case requiring hospital treatment could easily be lethal if you have an overwhelmed health system. Even if you survive, you may then be facing serious long-term health problems.

Odds of a bad outcome approaching 1 in 20 are a lot more thought-provoking than 1 in 1,000.

> We are creating a fear-driven

Fear is a good thing in general, providing it doesn't stop you thinking rationally. It keeps people alive.

In many parts of Europe, we have used lockdowns to successfully suppress the virus. 5% mortality of a whole generation is something we cannot accept. Long term health effects are a risk we cannot take. Our societies will at least try to make sure the economic burden is evenly distributed.

We are ending this nonsense, but step by cautious step, and in such a way that people will feel safe outside their homes.

Why does everyone only care about death rates?

Life isn't binary. Life isn't just life or death.

Do you want to end up in an ICU? Intubated for weeks? Not being able to properly function afterward?

It's so silly to look at a binary dead/alive statistic when this virus can make you damn sick.

People are typically more afraid of dying than getting sick. For many, it's more difficult to justify a global depression which runs the risk of reaping more destruction than the virus itself based on a bunch of people getting sick, compared to a bunch of people dying.

It's easy to criticize now that we have some good data. In my humble opinion, lockdowns were decided in Europe because governments started to plan for the worse since China's data was definitely not trustable anymore.

I couldn’t proof-read it but I appreciate your calculation and the spirit.

Life is irreversible. I’m curious to know what the plans are if lockdown ends asap.

On the other hand, I also feel that the commitments and policies in this society are more about protecting the elderly and their way of living (their wealth, single family homes, less sustainability, car-based city planning). Some may be debatable. But isn’t protecting each other part of humanity? I hope we are not in a stage where we have to decide which groups to sacrifice. If US is a still free country, is freedom-from-danger also a form of freedom as well?

We’re protecting things older people like by sacrificing the ability for younger people to live, that’s not really acceptable.

Here are the current numbers from Italy, which has been dealing with the virus for a while, has a good health care system, accurate reporting, and widespread testing.

https://lab24.ilsole24ore.com/coronavirus/en/

Sorry, don't take the Italian data as accurate (yes, I live there). Daily numbers may not be from the past 24 hours because reporting is at saturation (they can be up to several days in the past), also sometimes there are delays up to weeks in reporting cases, and many recovered people aren't listed yet as recovered because there have not done the second test to confirm they're virus free (2 negative tests within 24 hours is the current metric).

There's a widespread lack of reagents, and the government is pretty slow at procuring them.

The only reliable data there is ICU admissions, and yes, they're going down.

But don't call reporting as accurate: it's not even close (although testing capacity has increased a lot in the past weeks), and not even the testing is widespread (many are calling for increased testing regimes).

Well... ok, maybe it's imperfect, but the US has the same problems, if not worse. China? No one really takes their numbers seriously. So it's about as good as it gets for the time being.

We don't know how many of the "mild" cases will have permanent lung damage.

There's no particular reason to expect it's a high number. We're going to have to make decisions under conditions of uncertainty, because there's no way to become certain of such things in any reasonable timeframe.

I agree.

If politicians want to do testing and tracing for nursing home and hospital staff, fine. Otherwise, end the lockdown.

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