Comment by ReticentVole | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ReticentVole | Hacker News Reader

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COVID-19 is endemic. Even if first-world countries like the ones you mention can control it, it just takes one infected traveller from a 2nd/3rd world country to restart the whole thing.

The reality is that COVID is a relatively minor ailment, which is not deadly for the vast majority of people - the CDC estimates its IFR at 0.26%:

https://in.dental-tribune.com/news/new-estimate-by-the-cdc-b...

There are already no excess deaths in the USA: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

I think its quite likely that without the media storm, we would have put it down as a really bad flu, once in a quarter century, and got on with life. Last time Sweden's death rate was this high was during their 1993 Flu pandemic (an event which is entirely forgotten).

If we value life, we are about to bring a huge amount of misery to the world from our lockdown policies, already pushing 71 million into extreme poverty: https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/updated-estimates-impac...

And allowing existing, mundane diseases to spread rapidly: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/14/health/coronavirus-vaccin...

The underlying factor is the aging of populations in the West. Look at the forecast age profile for Italy in 2050: https://www.populationpyramid.net/italy/2050/ about 13% of the population will be aged over 80! Mundane flu waves will kill scores of people, simply due to the demographics.

It is unfair to throw the rest of the planet's population under the bus to protect Baby Boomers in the West.

Its also remarkable that we can muster such effort to 'save' a fraction of the population, already sick and elderly, yet do very little to combat climate change which will impact humanity and the planet forever - not to mention the lives saved now from reducing air pollution.

Any discussion of Covid-19 that merely focuses on death rate and not DALY[1] is intellectually frivolous. There's not a medical intervention in the world that can save lives, they can only be prolonged.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disability-adjusted_life_year

The economic downturns are cause by the pandemic, not the lockdowns, and the lockdowns are the result of poor response to the pandemic that resulted in uncontrolled community spread. People keep mixing up cause and effect in talking about this. Taiwan and South Korea didn’t have lockdowns.

Taleb has a good debate with Ioannidis about why his forecasting on the epidemic is wrong. I side with his view:

https://forecasters.org/blog/2020/06/14/covid-19-ioannidis-v...

Is your argument that at the moment there are no excess deaths? Because the CDC data you links says there have been a lot of excess deaths. Why do you think there won’t be a log more when we have uncontrolled spread in many regions in the US?

> the CDC estimates its IFR at 0.26%:

You've misunderstood this. Why didn't you link to the original CDC document? Please could you show where CDC estimates IFR at 0.26%?

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

> New data on COVID-19 is available daily; information about its biological and epidemiological characteristics remain limited, and uncertainty remains around nearly all parameter values.

> The parameters in the scenarios:

    Are estimates intended to support public health preparedness and planning.
    Are not predictions of the expected effects of COVID-19.
    Do not reflect the impact of any behavioral changes, social distancing, or other interventions.

The CDC only lists the estimate for CFR (.4%) on that page.

If you consider their projection that 35% of all infected cases remain asymptomatic (same page), the overall infection fatality rate (IFR) drops to just 0.26 %.

But they give 5 projections, and they say that none of these are accurate estimations, they're only to be used for modelling, and that they will change as new information is found.

Here's Dallas: ICUs are filling up with Covid patients.

https://twitter.com/Mary_Plastic/status/1274525635638149120?...

Because the ICU is full of covid patients that means there's less capacity for young people after road traffic accidents.

I mean, what do you make of Brazil? Is it full of "Western Baby Boomers"? And India? The new cases have largely shifted to those places where the first wave is/was slower, outside Western Europe. Whether the West should force them to do anything is moot.

Your comment sounds to me like yet another assessment of the situation that is based on the implicit (false) idea that the situation is static. Or that many places are not already reopening and seeing the consequences.

It's not just that there are active cases, but there are more cases every day. It's not just that there are new cases every day, but that the daily new cases are increasing. It's not just that the daily new cases are increasing, but that the rate of increase is increasing. I think that's like...the third derivative?

The global daily death rate does, and would be expected to, lag new cases substantially, but it has stopped declining and looks to be picking up.

Your last point is why you got an upvote. For the economic cost of this lockdown we probably could have eliminated coal entirely from the world's energy mix (except maybe metal refining), which would have cut CO2 emission to pre-1990s levels.

On the flip side we went utterly apeshit as a culture (and still have not recovered) over terrorism, which has killed only a tiny fraction of COVID or even the flu.

I don't quite buy your rosy numbers on COVID, but that being said this does show how irrational we are about risk. IMHO we way overreacted to 9/11, are possibly overreacting or at least mis-reacting to this, and are ignoring climate change which could be much worse than this.

Sorry you’re getting downvoted for posting facts. Hacker news has always been filled with free thinking, intelligent people. I’m not sure what happened.

Can you point to data for a comparable really bad flu year?

Also, please can you post a link to the CDC document where the IFR is listed at 0.26%?

Here’s the CDC link: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

I’ve seen stuff comparing it to the flu but I’ll have to dig around.

Here’s a flu comparison:

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...

In the U.S, 119,131 people have died of COVID-19, as of June 20, 2020.

In the U.S., from Oct. 1, 2019 – Apr. 4, 2020, the CDC estimates that 24,000 to 62,000 people died from the flu.

So I’d entertain the idea that COVID is 2-4 times worse than the Flu. (But you could imagine a bad flu season coming close to that.)

However Flu targets more young people so perhaps if we look at years of life lost that gap would close further.

People comparing flu to covid need to be aware that sentences like this (from your Hopkins link) pack a lot of hidden stuff about the different ways of counting death:

> In the U.S., from Oct. 1, 2019 – Apr. 4, 2020, the CDC estimates that 24,000 to 62,000 people died from the flu. (The CDC does not know the exact number because the flu is not a reportable disease in most parts of the U.S.)

Those estimates are complex statistical modelling that use a combination of laboratory confirmed cases, death certificates, excess mortality, but also sampling of calls to primary care for flu like symptoms.

The Covid-19 deaths talked about on the Hopkins page are complex, but they come from states and many states are reporting deaths for people who were confirmed by testing to have had covid-19, or where covid-19 was listed as the cause of death (but not just listed) on the death certificate.

I’d prefer to keep pretending it’s Ebola.

Exactly! But you are not allowed to say this.

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