Hacker News Reader

Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

The risk is so incredibly low thought, especially since most of these students will be under 30! There is something important about in-person classes you don't really get online and I'd hate to be forced to be online only.

We've lost a whole year, to a virus that is nowhere near as deadly as anyone thought it'd be, and it will likely die, or we'll reach herd immunity, long before any virus can be safely manufactured.

I feel like a lot of this is fear, hysteria and an completely inability for humans to properly assess risk, mixed with just a plethora of bad and conflicting information.

View on HN

As somebody who is just wrapping up university, got the coronavirus, and know other young and middle-aged people who got the coronavirus, the virus can both be super mild and super aggressive from one person to the next.

I was mostly physically fine but I was miserable for the entire time I had it. One other person who got sick went from that same mild shitty experience I had to not being able to breath in a matter of hours.

Older people get it worse but from what I've seen and what I've heard from a family member(they work with COVID-19 patients), it's basically a coin toss whether somebody ends up asymptomatic, gets it mildly, or gets it absolutely brutally.

Another thing to consider is that universities will still have to deal with students going out and getting absolutely tattered at bars and parties. We've already seen smaller incidents of this resulting in an explosion of cases. Knowing how university culture is, things will get bad very quickly.

Even ignoring the party culture, students will come to class sick out of fear. I've felt bad doing this in the past but the unwritten expectation for classes with attendance is "show up unless you literally can't walk". If you actually reach out to the prof, they'll tell you to stay home but most students will just assume the worst and try to show up.

Sorry for ranting a bit but I just can't see universities safely opening up with how the culture is at the moment. Online courses are not nearly as good in most cases (and I say this as someone who generally prefers online or recorded lecture courses) but it'll be a disaster to have in person courses with how things are.

I am trying to understand this comment in this context. The commentor above you talks about the statistical fact that cases under in younger people are not only rarer, but very low chance of getting hospitalized, and an even lower chance of death.

You then respond with an anecdote of experience talking about the potential outcomes of this virus. Why exactly is this? Of course there are terrible potential outcomes in everyday actions we take. We might face a car crash, we might get hit by lightning. Why should we treat this matter any different than that?

Only difference I see being is that this is infectious, and with the professors usually being of older age, there should definitely be some protections in place. But lets at least shift towards talking about being infectious, and not talking about plainly getting COVID, because the implications of that are on complete different scales of magnitude depending on your personal charasterstics.

Also, you seem to talk in your latter parts of the comment about things that are not set in stone. E.g. Class attendance could be made nonmandatory and not affect grades. Also, parties could on campus could be restricted.

I like your phrase "statistical fact". I don't really know what you mean when you use it, but thinking back on my statistics class, I think it's a pretty funny turn of phrase.

By that phrase I mean "The risk is so incredibly low though". Which to me is a statistical fact. But I think I get what you mean - statistics/data can be combined with language or visuals to enforce multiple different interpretations.

> commentor above you talks about the statistical fact

No, the commenter above talked about the "risk", and cited that one fact. Both of you are forgetting that sick people are infectious. We're trying to control an epidemic here, not save the lives of some particular GT students. If they get sick they'll make others sick. One of those cases might be your grandfather.

I am not sure if you read my comment through. I mentioned sick people being infectious, and urged the discussion to move towards how sick people infect others, and how long they are infectious.

I would love to learn more about how sick people transmit the disease, and when are they the most "infectious". I have heard something related to a period of few days before showing first symptoms, but I have yet to discover more indepth discussion around it.

For example, its pretty hard for me to undertand how you can be "very infectious" when you do not exhibit symptoms such as coughing or sneezing. Would love to learn more!

> the statistical fact that cases under in younger people are not only rarer, but very low chance of getting hospitalized, and an even lower chance of death

What are the latest — preferably peer-reviewed — figures on hospitalization and death rate by age? I was trying to find them the other day, but all I could find was papers from many months ago.

>> Even ignoring the party culture, students will come to class sick out of fear. I've felt bad doing this in the past but the unwritten expectation for classes with attendance is "show up unless you literally can't walk". If you actually reach out to the prof, they'll tell you to stay home but most students will just assume the worst and try to show up.

You touch on two good points. I've been both the student and the prof. When a kid comes to class sweating, barely awake and obviously unwell, too many profs assume that they are simply hung over from the night before. I think that is root of show-up-if-you-can-walk. But my reality as a student was totally different (UBC late 90s->early 00s). Most kids didn't party. Most didn't drink more than once a month. There was a core of frat kids who lived like animal house, but the vast majority of us were too busy. We had jobs. We had to study. We had to commute in to school each day. We spent the weekends skiing or rock climbing, not passing out on the floor.

I had a fulltime job. The one time I fell asleep in class my prof asked me what was wrong. I said I was "up late last night". He assumed I meant that was out partying. The reality was that something broke at work. I had to work into the small hours. My prof had not even considered that I had a real job (not a part-time waiter) totally outside of school. We need to get past such dated assumptions about "students".

I agree with the other stuff, but I definitely think, at least for now, the culture on showing up sick has changed. If you go into public, especially show up in an enclosed space and have so much as the sniffles, you are going to be run out pretty quickly.

It varies wildly. Especially amidst young people, many of whom feel that the virus is not a big risk for them due to their age group. One young friend of mine recently expressed that they want to get sick, because they're sick (pun intended) of living in social isolation and constant vigilance.

>> One young friend of mine recently expressed that they want to get sick

I am hearing this more and more. Whether it is for future "immunity passports" or just to get past all the fear, many young people see COVID-19 as inevitable. Better to get it now during lockdown than after everyone heads back to work/school.

One thing that is cropping up is the fact that young people really do not appreciate old people telling them what to do with their bodies. Grandma telling you to disinfect your hands is one thing. Grandma telling you that you aren't allowed in the same room as your boy/girlfriend for the next year is another. Listening to the police talk about the parties they break up, they sound like chaperones at a school dance trying to enforce a no-touching rule.

I can appreciate the sentiment and have said something to that effect myself, but as a parent post rightly pointed out -- the onset of severe, hospitalisation-worthy or fatal illness is basically a coin toss. Yes, it seems to be more likely in older people, but it is far from unheard of in younger people.

Furthermore, there's still a great deal of uncertainty as to what chronic or long-term effects infection can visit even upon those who recover. While most accounts of that concern those who suffered serious complications, it's far from clear that those with mild symptoms can't be affected similarly.

Realistically, going out of one's way to get infected is dangerously irrational with as little as we still know.

Except that a statistically huge number of people have gotten this and recovered. 1 in 6 people in London has recovered (as reported by antibody testing). Those people certainly know how it will impact them. We are no longer in the "we don't know" phase. As for long term health, this seems no different than any other pneumonia which can have measurable effects for years.

This is untrue. The Kawasaki-like inflammation in children and increased stroke risk in all patients after recovery are far more serious than pneumonia recovery. We have no clue about long term effects because the disease is new, nor the duration or extent of immunity.

Reminds me of "chicken pox parties" in the 80s and 90s. Which we have now learned are a terrible idea.

COVID-19 is causing strokes in young people [1]. While young people are hospitalized at a lower rate, it still happens. Texas, which has until recently been "reopening", with no mask requirements, has a very high rate of infections. Using Travis county as an example, ~30% of cases are in the 20-29 age bracket [2]. It would be disingenuous to imply that young people are isolated from the rest of society and not spreading the disease to older people who are more likely to die.

In 2-3 months, 132,000 people in the US have died from COVID-19 complications. The CDC estimates yearly flu deaths at 12,000-61,000 [3]. Further, we are now seeing a huge increase in the rate of cases in states which have had lax distancing and quarantine policy--see Travis county data again for example.

Is a year of in-person class worth the risk? Hard to say. No reason to dismiss legitimate concerns as "hysteria", though.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/health/coronavirus-stroke...

2. https://austin.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#...

3. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html

Look there are two groups in the US. A risk taking group that sees the COVID-19 death rate as acceptable and not nearly bad enough to stay locked down. They believe that the purpose of the lock down was to "flatten the curve," particularly the death rate, and not to "stop the virus."

The other group wants to "stop the virus" and does not accept the risk of death of others.

There is no bridging the gap with data, it is a value judgement. You can't argue someone out of their values.

You especially will not be able to convince the risk takers, because they are risk takers, and the mortality of this virus is so low that a huge number of people don't personally know a single person who has died from it. Perception matters a lot.

If COVID-19 had a 10% death rate, or killed children like Tuberculosis, you could more easily argue down the risk takers.

According to CDC data, 81% of deaths from COVID-19 in the United States are people over 65 years old, most with preexisting conditions. If you add in 55-64-year-olds that number jumps to 93%. For those below age 55, preexisting conditions play a significant role, but the death rate is currently around 0.0022%, or one death per 45,000 people in this age range. Below 25 years old the fatality rate of COVID-19 is 0.00008%, or roughly one in 1.25 million.

These are odds any risk taker would take.

This accounts only for death. The virus is leaving some unfortunate people with long-term pulmonary, cardiac, kidney, and/or liver damage. Some are even developing diabetes symptoms after the infection subsides.

We seriously need to consider long-term damage to health as part of the equation.

I would like to see the statistics on these reports, not just mortality rate.

There’s already evidence it causes immune system disregulation, similar to HIV:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/health/coronavirus-immune...

The idea that we know anything meaningful about what impact COVID will have on people’s long term health is foolhardy to the extreme. Extreme precaution is the only reasonable path in the face of these kinds of unknowns.

How often does covid leave people that type of damage? I've heard of individual cases but haven't seen how rare or common it is.

I think this is still under study. I've heard a number of 67% of mild/asympotmatic cases having evidence of lung damage (https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/06/23/8645362... says 57%). I also saw an interview with an Israeli Dr. who is doing a study (that study is in progress) who said significant numbers suffer from symptoms like fatigue, shortness of breath (I think this may be the same one: https://www.timesofisrael.com/its-frightening-doctors-say-ha... ).

I think the bottom line is we don't know for sure but if needed a little more evidence this isn't just a walk in the park I think we got some.

In addition to the fact that you're neglecting to take possible long-term health consequences into account, you're also failing to consider the health risks to people other than the students, like faculty, staff, and even the parents and grandparents of the student body.

No the risk takers are taking all of that into account and dismissing it as acceptable.

It is a difference in values. You are arguing as if presented with same data that you have there is only one obvious and rational conclusion, but that is simply not the case. If someone has different values they can come to a very different conclusion.

This perspective equates to “I’m fine with masses of people getting sick and dying unnecessarily,” which basically makes you a nihilist. I guess that’s a “difference in values,” but not one on which we should base any collective decisions.

Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam and New Zealand have this situation under control without mass injury or loss of life. Turning away from those examples because you don’t care is basically the same as any other form of science denialism.

I'm specifically responding to your last section:

These are odds any risk taker would take.

I read this as being focused on the students, and ignoring the fact that many of the potentially affected people would be in the 65+ group that is most at risk. You seem to be ignoring that in favor of focusing on the minuscule risk of death to college students themselves.

Problem with the odds is that they are moving. What does the death rate jump to with overrun hospitals?

What does the death rate jump to for all other medical emergencies and illnesses with an overrun medical system?

I'm not even in the US but I feel like I have to respond (I'm in Canada so in a sense the US situation is impacting me as well).

There are large groups who don't believe in science, that believe the dinosaurs never existed, some even think the world is flat. Among other beliefs. And yes, those people will not be convinced by any amount of data or evidence. I guess that's life.

And yet, there's is no doubt in my mind that the right thing to do is to take measures to control the spread of the virus.

We're not talking about "stay locked down", we're talking about practicing common sense measures that bring the epidemic under control, like wear masks, physical distancing, wash your hands. The counter-arguments that we're hearing from some circles about how maybe masks infringe on people's rights are just beyond belief.

Right now the US has 130k deaths with maybe 5%-10% of the population having had the disease, it's not just about deaths though, how many people have been very seriously ill, how many will suffer some consequences for the rest of their lives? We don't know what longer term risks are, we don't even know if getting the disease makes you immune. Even without knowing that the social and economic costs of just letting this spread uncontrollably are huge.

Now those people who are "risk takers" aren't just risking themselves getting sick. Their family can get sick. Their friends can get sick. Their friend's family can get sick. Do you want to be the guy who got your friend's father sick and he dies? I'm sorry but there's no excuse. Anyhow, we don't have to convince the risk takers, we can force them to behave the way that society expects them to behave. We don't say hey let them rob a bank, the risk is low, they're just risk takers...

And it's really not the US, it's the world, we have over 500k deaths worldwide (that we know of), and we're only getting started.

No the risk takers are taking all of that into account and dismissing it as acceptable.

Take Sweden for example, many people view it as a success and the higher than the rest of the EU death rate perfectly acceptable.

Life isn’t life to some if you can’t live it.

The data isn’t black and white. Of course you are comfortable forcing people to behave, Canada is fairly totalitarian in policing of speech, etc. Would never fly in the US.

Canada isn't totalitarian in policing of speech or anything else. The US is perfectly happy to force people to behave, look at the rate of imprisonment vs. many other countries. Look at how peaceful protests are being handled in the US vs. other countries.

Let's just apply your argument to speeding. If I'm a risk taker why can't I drive 100MPH in a residential neighbourhood? Heck, life isn't worth living if I can't get that thrill. Tell that story to the US cop that pulls you over. Naturally the others you are putting in danger, their lives are worth nothin'.

You're right, it's all about values.

It is the difference between people who care about others and people who do not. Civilised society rightly considers the latter a menace and deals with them accordingly.

Sweden is now a pariah state in the EU, its borders have been closed by its neighbors.

> Canada is fairly totalitarian in policing of speech, etc. Would never fly in the US.

I'm an American living in Canada and that's just straight up incorrect. The level of discourse is effectively the same as in the US.

Please if you could (honestly curious) post links to the sources for these mortality rates by age group. I'd love to show them to a few people I know, and see where they come from.

And do those rates apply to those who have been infected or to the population in general for these age groups.

> The risk is so incredibly low thought, especially since most of these students will be under 30!

That "risk" is the personal risk of dying of those particular students. You're not including the people they'll infect. Go check out Georgia's growth curve. One extra case could easily produce dozens of others in a density like that.

It absolutely stuns me that after MONTHS of pandemic there are people who still refuse to understand this.

Understanding it would entail taking responsibility for actions already taken, and the harm already caused by those actions.

People want to be "good". They want to feel that their actions, if not perfect, are at least morally defensible. This seems to lead to a sort of tipping point where once a person has acted in a way that would make them "bad", it becomes easier to construct a new narrative where refusing to wear a mask is heroic and patriotic, than to process the remorse of having made a terrible mistake. And that's especially appealing if there is an entire group of people eager to tell you that you're right and good, in order to reinforce their own worldviews.

The bottom line seems to be that in order to lead people back to reality, you need to find a way to let them feel good about their choices. Maybe that means nodding along when they say "The science was unclear. We couldn't have known." I'm not sure. I've been thinking about this for a while now, having relatives in Sweden who just don't seem to take the pandemic seriously. The problem is that their institutions still haven't reached the point of admitting that they were mistaken, so the public can't seem to begin that process either.

>>The risk is so incredibly low thought, especially since most of these students will be under 30!

Covid has the potential to cause long-lasting organ damage even in young patients.

Furthermore, hospital ICU capacities are always a concern. Once ICUs fill up, non-covid patients cannot be treated in intensive care either.

This[1] tells us 2017-18 was a bad influenza year in the USA with 61,000 deaths, 2018-19 34,000 deaths.

This[2] tells us Coronoa deaths in the USA to date are 129,576.

How do you reconcile your opinion this doesn't represent a considerable risk with these numbers?

1. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html

2. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/us-c...

Please bear in mind that these flu deaths occur in a context that includes a large percentage of the population having been immunized via flu shots and lingering resistance from having beaten previous attacks of the flu. The coronavirus on the other hand is moving through a population with until recently virtually no innate immunity and obviously no vaccination measures in place. Taking these into account puts its higher number of fatalities into a bit more perspective (and still leaves us far short of previous estimates about how many people would soon die in the U.S). Overall, globally, based on the latest information, the known number of deaths is well below what many were estimating at the beginning of the year, and we are now several months into this. This is worth keeping in mind too.

Also worth noting that the whole world went through two different pandemics in the 50's and 60s in which over 1 million people died worldwide. Things went back to normal quite soon afterwards and much less hysteria about shutting down economies, borders and all social life was evident. (in both of these pandemics over 100,000 people in the U.S alone also died)

Hey, thanks for the thoughtful response.

Yeah, I keep flipping between feeling exasperated by the situation, and then remembering the perspective you've detailed here.

Side note, I think you mean adaptive immunity, this is the part of the immune system creates immunological memory. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_immune_system

Innate immunity is the non-specific part of the immune system and includes aspects such as removal of foreign substances, physical and chemical barriers (eg, skin, clotting factors in blood) and other anatomical barriers like the blood-brain barrier. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innate_immune_system#Anatomica...

Yes, apologies, adaptive immunity is what I was referring to, slipped up on the terms there,

> inability for humans to properly assess risk

Would you be willing to entertain the same thought for yourself?

How about faculty? Professors are, on average, more than 40 years old. Do you think they should teach in person?

During lecture at least, students are always at least 6 feet away from the professor. Moving to and from classes is a different story, though.

6' is nowhere near enough distance to be safe indoors in a room with potentially up to hundreds of other people in it. The virus can stay airborne for hours in enclosed indoor spaces.

If you have a lecture hall of 100 people that meets regularly each week, and the people in it aren't wearing good masks, it's practically a guarantee that by the end of the semester everyone there will have gotten it.

Yep. Don't forget about air conditioning, as well as shared facilities such as restrooms, break rooms, cafeterias, and so on.

And don't forget _bad_ air conditioning / poor ventilation in old buildings, with which universities are replete.

The 6' rule isn't a magic bubble of impenetrability. It's just a rule of thumb that (1) most people can easily interpret and enforce and (2) is expected to reduce the rate of spread "enough" to make it worth enforcing.

Likewise masks don't make you safe, they make you safer, etc...

Careless young people have been a major vector for the spread of coronavirus.

Many of them might survive, but they're putting the rest of us at increased risk of death.

That's not ok.

I think your comment would have been much stronger if instead of "Many of them might survive" you said something more akin to "The overwhelming majority will survive". Falsely weakening it as you did will cause people to distrust the rest of your message, which I feel is accurate as it stands. Why did you choose the phrasing that you used?

They care about you about as much as you care for them. This is just their way of saying thanks for global warming and all the government debt.

Apart from the fact that there is still substantial (if less) risk to younger people the real reason for lock down is to reduce the spread.

It's proved impossible - even with very strong measures - to protect at-risk groups by isolation. See both Australia (where a very large number of deaths were in supposedly isolated nursing homes) and Sweden (same).

As an Australian, your second point is hard to vindicate. The total death toll in Australia is 106 as of one hour ago as reported by the state-funded ABC[0].

While it's true that just one of those was a person under the age of fifty[1], and unfortunately I live in the _one_ state that's experiencing a second wave via community transmission and sadly expect these numbers to grow, this isn't comparable with the numbers seen coming out of Sweden.

In fact, it's an order of magnitude lower, for a country with more than double Sweden's population, so to suggest that at-risk groups are experiencing a similar level of risk is baffling to me.

[0]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-06/coronavirus-australia... [1]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-17/coronavirus-cases-dat...

(I'm Australian)

62/106 deaths from COVID in Australia have been in nursing homes[1][2].

The point isn't that Australia hasn't done well (it has!). The point is that even in the best possible circumstances it still proved impossible to keep nursing home patients safe.

In Sweden the plan was to keep nursing homes isolated too, and it didn't work there either.[3]

[1] https://www.health.gov.au/resources/covid-19-cases-in-aged-c...

[2] https://www.health.gov.au/news/health-alerts/novel-coronavir...

[3] https://www.thelocal.se/20200506/coronavirus-what-went-wrong...

Sorry about missing you were down under, I only checked after hitting submit. And thanks for clarifying, I had no idea Sweden moved to isolate nursing homes.

That said, I'm still hesitant to equate the risk level to the elderly from community-wide lockdown measures with isolation policies restricted to nursing homes. I don't have any data to support it, but I can't help but assume that lower community transmission overall correlates with fewer transmission vectors into nursing homes. Supposedly this would turn up in the proportion of those in nursing homes that's suffered coronavirus. In principle I agree with you; the hotel scandals in Vic bear that out, ironically, and sadly. But the difference in magnitude has to count for something, as bad as any toll is.

Yes, a reduction in community transmission should reduce transmissions into nursing homes (and more broadly to vulnerable people generally).

That was the point of my original comment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com