Hacker News Reader

A preprint I was reading yesterday noted an 8 fold increase in risk of stroke in COVID patients vs severe flu patients. COVID is dangerous, it’s not the flu, but nor is it the Black Death. It’s far more dangerous for the elderly than flu. But more importantly for everyone else, Lock downs are a response not to the individual risk of the disease but to the collective risk of not having a functioning healthcare system.

>A preprint I was reading yesterday noted an 8 fold increase in risk of stroke in COVID patients vs severe flu patients.

The problem I have with these statement is the lack of context. Does the additional risk of stroke in COVID patients meaningfully impact the overall risk profile? If an elderly person has say a X% chance of death from COVID, and a 0.00X% of stroke, news reporting on this for public consumption is just fear mongering.

SARS-CoV-2 has an IFR that's ~5x that of regular flu and spreads significantly faster.

It's worth pointing out that it's killed more people than all natural disasters and terrorist attacks in the US combined. So if COVID-19 is a poor killer, so were Osama bin Laden and Hurricane Katrina.

And that's with the lockdowns. Without them, we'd probably be at half a million deaths by now. The lockdowns also bought us time to develop more effective treatment strategies.

I'm saddened to see people on HN selectively represent facts to try and spread the narrative that SARS-CoV2 isn't very dangerous. Which as far as I can tell is just completely false.

The reality is that it is in fact dangerous. People try to point to the idea that it only kills a low percent of the population and not putting into perspective that a disease killing around 1% or so of all humans would be a rather big deal.

I completely agree. I don’t understand why people aren’t taking this seriously. I have COVID-19 right now and it’s awful. I’m a healthy 32 year old and I’ve been lying in bed for 4 days and I only have what I think is mild symptoms. I can easily see how if I had a pre-existing condition or was unhealthy that it could kill me. I think the problem is that some people don’t believe it until the see or they just don’t care. It’s so sad. I work at a Starbucks and people come in everyday without a mask and are offended when we tell them to wear one, and it’s for their safety!

How can you argue that it's dangerous when the scientific evidence is so overwhelmingly to the contrary?

Your entire post contains many unsubstantiated beliefs:

- Nobody is arguing the death rate is 1% anymore, that number is far, far too high. Apparent IFRs have been constantly falling and even the CDC - quite incentivised to support panic given their actions so far - now say it's around the level of seasonal flu.

- The idea that the virus would infect 100% of all humans alive isn't based on any actual real disease. No disease ever known has infected literally everyone on the planet.

There is huge amounts of data showing the virus isn't dangerous. People aren't "trying to spread a narrative". They're pointing out the real data on things like excess deaths, or the huge number who show mild symptoms.

Hundreds of thousands of people are dead

I have to ask, should we e flag posts that say this IF they don't back it up with evidence?

Na. It's not against the rules, and it would be too much work for the mods if it was. Just point it out, and/or use the buttons. It's also a great source of prediction/assumption data... atleast for non-throwaway accts.

It is dangerous, but how dangerous?

Every year, about 1% of the population in the US dies. The median age of COVID deaths is above life expectancy. If you are elderly, death from pneumonia is quite likely even without COVID.

For a middle aged person, ordinary Influenza is statistically more dangerous than COVID. For a child, Influenza is vastly more dangerous. Efficacy of Influenza vaccination varies seasonally and averages around 50%.

Furthermore, COVID death rates are going down across the board, even while cases are rising.

> Every year, about 1% of the population in the US dies. > The median age of COVID deaths is above life expectancy. If you are elderly, death from pneumonia is quite likely even without COVID.

People using the "they were going to die anyway" argument need to explain why they didn't die last year, or next year, but died this year, and died in huge numbers. Excess mortality is pretty high.

Research tells us people are dying more than 10 years early.

https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/5-75

> Results: Using the standard WHO life tables, YLL per COVID-19 death was 14 for men and 12 for women. After adjustment for number and type of LTCs, the mean YLL was slightly lower, but remained high (13 and 11 years for men and women, respectively). The number and type of LTCs led to wide variability in the estimated YLL at a given age (e.g. at ≥80 years, YLL was >10 years for people with 0 LTCs, and <3 years for people with ≥6).

> Conclusions: Deaths from COVID-19 represent a substantial burden in terms of per-person YLL, more than a decade, even after adjusting for the typical number and type of LTCs found in people dying of COVID-19. The extent of multimorbidity heavily influences the estimated YLL at a given age. More comprehensive and standardised collection of data on LTCs is needed to better understand and quantify the global burden of COVID-19 and to guide policy-making and interventions.

> People using the "they were going to die anyway" argument need to explain why they didn't die last year, or next year, but died this year, and died in huge numbers. Excess mortality is pretty high.

That's not the argument I am making. A lot of older people indeed died sooner than they otherwise would have. COVID is statistically more dangerous to them than Influenza, but also COVID spreads more rapidly than Influenza in a population with zero immunity.

> Research tells us people are dying more than 10 years early.

This is significantly lower than the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, which averaged above 20 YLL per case:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3792731/

This underlines my point that for younger age groups, COVID is statistically less dangerous than Influenza.

Again, the question is not whether COVID is dangerous. It certainly is. The question is, how dangerous?

If I’m reading your link right, it’s 22 years of life lost per 100,000, not per case. I could be misunderstanding.

They didn't give an average per case in this study, I arrived there by dividing the total amount of years lost by the amount of deaths (1,540/72 = 21.39).

That just happens to be close to the years lost per 100k.

Is this why they say nicotine may be a protective drug?

Cigarette smoking products suppress anti-viral effects of Type I interferon via phosphorylation-dependent downregulation of its receptor - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2567056/

It might be the smoke and not the nicotine.

Lots of non-smoking methods of getting nicotine that may not help.

And lots of ways of breathing in smoke that don’t involve nicotine.

Also, hidrohychloroquine downregulates interferon activation... too good to be true? https://academic.oup.com/rheumatology/article/59/1/107/55230...

> to promulgate the narrative that SARS-CoV-2 is unusually dangerous

What is wrong with you? There is no evidence in your post to justify anything you say, you are either wishing things away or actively spreading FUD.

Flu: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/comparing-...

"The 25,000 to 69,000 numbers that Trump cited [as influenza deaths] do not represent counted flu deaths per year; they are estimates [...] In the last six flu seasons, the CDC’s reported number of actual confirmed flu deaths—that is, counting flu deaths the way we are currently counting deaths from the coronavirus—has ranged from 3,448 to 15,620, which far lower than the numbers commonly repeated by public officials and even public health experts."

> SARS-2 is a great spreader and a very poor killer

And actual mortality figures https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

> with outcomes overwhelmingly positive

Why the hell are you posting this? Your disinformation may contribute to people dying, are you ok with that? I'm all for contrarian views if they are backed up with evidence - so produce some.

CDC Influenza and pneumonia deaths by influenza season and age: United States, 2008–2015: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/health_policy/influenza-and-pn... (these are not estimates, see the footnote)

  2015-2016
  Flu: 7,961
  Pneumonia: 131,858 
  All: 1,769,940

Excess deaths are all that really matters. Why not talk about those instead?

Thanks for that. I don't understand the discrepancy between the article and the link you posted, however from your cite of 7,961 flu deaths (in the US) agrees with what the sciam article said.

> Excess deaths are all that really matters. Why not talk about those instead?

Good point, but I don't have them. What my and your posts seem to show is that flu is a heck of a lot less mortal than this covid. Which is the point.

NP. Regarding your last point, my understanding is the pneumonia deaths are on the same pdf because they are end game deaths from getting sick. Likely with one of the flu's. The COVID-19 death stats on the other hand, are inflated: http://v6y.net/1541e03e6cfd1442590bc7b5476f88c30a29a0d881bdb...

What really matters is excess deaths.

https://aspe.hhs.gov/cdc-%E2%80%94-influenza-deaths-request-...

(Table 1, down to 71) https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm

We maxed out at 140% between 4/11 and 4/18/2020. One could try correlating that with the lockdowns.

While I don't necessarily agree with this post (see below, plus I haven't had time to read your links properly), I don't see why it's downvoted - if there's a reason the downvoter should say why.

Anyway, I don't buy your reason for pneu & flu being on the same page, flu may be a subtype of pneumonia but there are many causes of pneumonia, and I don't expect flus to blow up into pneu. Then again, I'm just guessing.

Your second link is not official government statement - indeed it was so weird I didn't understand what I was reading at first - it's a letter expressing a person's opinion, not a government position. I don't know it's value.

The table's interesting, but the percentage of expected deaths don't make sense (read: I don't understand them). It may be down to time lag on reporting, but it's a big lag.

Anyway, well done for providing figures!

As you know so far it has killed 133K people (out of 3000K infected) in the US alone, you consider this number not high enough to instate a "lockdown", so the question is what number would have been enough for one to be necessary according to you?

That translates to around 0.4, which is in-line with normal influenza seasons.

133k in 3000k is more like 4.4%, so an order of magnitude higher.

Oops. Missed a zero, classically. So that does make it look more alarming. However could still be heavily effected by things such as low testing amounts, or vulnerable people front loading the numbers.

Deaths from Covid have already passed 100k, way more deaths than any flu season since those infamous pandemics, and that's despite lockdowns. No amount of fiddling with numbers changes that.

> or vulnerable people front loading the numbers

So vulnerable people dying should not contribute to covid mortality statistics? Why is that?

I mean that when we are in the middle of a pandemic most likely deaths are frontloaded in that those that are going to be affected the most, will most likely be the most effected by now. If that makes sense.

So it's more of a thing to keep in mind when comparing mortality statistics of an in progress pandemic to past pandemics.

Nope. Is 0.4. check again.

Hm, it really isn't, but you don't have to take my word for it.

https://www.percentagecal.com/answer/133-is-what-percent-of-...

"It is tempting to surmise that the complicated pandemic definitions used by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of the United States of America involved severity in a deliberate attempt to garner political attention and financial support for pandemic preparedness." [1]

1. https://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/89/7/11-088815/en/

I’m getting a little exhausted with doom and gloom that fails to contextualize exactly how much worse things are than an abnormally bad flu season + pneumonia season. If you tell people that they will have lingering effects from a flu or cold, they are much more likely to report lingering effects. People are quite suggestible and medicine is complex.

You seem to be implying that stroke can be psychosomatic. That's certainly a novel take.

That’s not what I was implying at all.