'Dramatic decline' in average age of Florida coronavirus patients | Hacker News Reader

'Dramatic decline' in average age of Florida coronavirus patients

wptv.com

14 pointselsewhen14 comments

Patients in this article refer to positive tests and no hospitalizations. The article also mentions that they are currently not showing symptoms or only mild symptoms. This is expected based on our understanding of the disease. Media editorializing the headlines to be misleading to the general public is also expected based on the past few months.

Huh? How is the headline editorialized? It's factual and includes a quote from the governor.

Using "average" and "median" interchangeably seems editorialized to me.

Because someone becomes a patient when they're being treated by a doctor, not when they simply test positive but have no apparent problems.

I agree. I think it would be a more factually accurate title if it said something like "Dramatic decline in average age of COVID-bearers" or something like that.

"Patients" implies hospitalization, I think.

Possibly the correct headline is something more like "Florida has nearly enough tests now".

The average age of a COVID patient should be roughly the same as the average age of the population. If it isn't that suggests, on the face of it, biased testing.

> If it isn't that suggests, on the face of it, biased testing.

Not true at all. Covid-19 doesn't infect people equally. It seems children are less likely to be infected at all, not just sickened.

It doesn't spread equally, because certain age groups are more likely to live in group housing.

And what is Florida's "population"? Lots of people vacation there. Do you count them?

There have reports both ways. It seems quite reasonable that nobody has been looking very hard where there aren't any symptoms. https://www.livescience.com/can-kids-get-coronavirus.html

Since the beginning, Florida has been acting to protect the most vulnerable to serious complications. And it's working. It is widely understood that young healthy people are very low risk so those same young healthy people are using that information to get back to life with very little risk.

What I find interesting is that many are asymptomatic. If this is true, and means that the disease does not cause meaningful harm, should we be worried? Is this going to be in reality more like a 24 hour bug?

I think at this point it's generally accepted that - for the most part - there is a radically different response from younger healthy people versus immunocompromised people.

That's not 100% true, but close. For many people it's true that this would be effectively a bad cold. But two things: 1) they will infect others, and 2) there are a lot of outstanding questions about long term effects of short term disease.

For young people going through the disease asymptotically and having anti-bodies is like winning the lottery: they can socialize freely and stop worrying about infecting their family with the virus.

So unless the age of hospitalization goes down, it's a good sign.

This is if you get long lasting antibodies from an asymptomatic case, which seems to be unclear.

This seems to be early researcher needing more confirmation, but see for example here: https://www.newsweek.com/coronavirus-antibodies-lost-10-wuha...

Asymptomatic yes, but still spreading the virus. The fact that some are asymptomatic only worsens the case of COVID-19 because they will not know to stay home.

Those that get sick, which could be your parents, seems to become very sick and in demand of prolonged care. There are clear indications that brain injuries is part of that picture. Without health insurance, you are in really big trouble, and possibly stripped of the after care with possibly long term effects.

In what way is it “good” that you have a large population of silent spreaders? You should be very worried.

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