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Comment by stanfordkid | Hacker News Reader

4% of mortalities are <65, with ~1% mortality rate overall.

2017 flu had 60k deaths, despite likely undercounting.

As Nietzsche once put it: “insanity is rare in individuals, but common in the herd”

Statistics on flu deaths are effectively fabricated through statistical voodoo. Health authorities count up how many people died from pneumonia, subtract the number of people they think ought to have died, and label the difference "flu deaths". I'll grudgingly admit that there are valid use cases for this kind of thing, but it's meaningless to directly compare it to a count of people where a doctor wrote "COVID-19" on the death certificate.

doesn't this cut both ways though?

you could be severely sick with some other disease then get COVID19 in addition, what killed you?

I think 10 years from now we will look back at this time as the time where everything was counted as COVID19

It does - there are surely some number of deaths that would be recorded as flu deaths if doctors considered that a reasonable thing to do. I don't think any conclusions in any direction can be drawn from the comparison.

Despite the your downvoters, there is good evidence to suggest we are already doing that in the US. According to the CDC, for the week ending in 5/9, there were more COVID19 deaths than there were "excess" deaths.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm

These data are subject to being modified after the fact.

> there were more COVID19 deaths than there were "excess" deaths

This still makes sense if the lockdown has lowered other causes of death like car crashes.

Fair point. Though the excess seems to already eclipse car crash deaths in their entirety, and I'm not sure if other major causes of accidental deaths (e.g. drug overdoses) would really be expected to go down during a lockdown.

https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-mortalit...

If we can have 60k deaths labeled "due to random fluctuations", as you seem to be claiming, why should there be mass panic and shutdown of all human activity from 90k deaths due to covid?

I don't mean to say that Covid is not a problem -- of course it is. But the response is not correct given the magnitude and nature of the problem.

To me it seems like massive government investment in protecting at risk populations is the answer.

Around a quarter of cases are working age.

A non-trivial proportion of those become seriously ill for months. It's possible they're going be left with permanent health problems.

I know of one music app developer in his forties with no health issues who spent more than a month on a ventilator. He recovered - barely - but it's going to be a while before he's back to working full-time.

Nonsense about flu statistics is just ignorable whataboutery. Covid is a very nasty illness, and until a vaccine is developed it has potential to do huge direct damage.

Without lockdowns it would have spread like wildfire and a lot of people would have been off work at the same time. Some food supply chains in the US are already struggling.

Imagine what would have happened with only ten times more casualties.

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