Comment by NoOneNew | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NoOneNew | Hacker News Reader

Look, 1 death is 1 too many. But let's step back for a moment from this "The world is ending" dialogue.

Global deaths as of 08/10 according to the John Hopkins' tracker is at 732k. It hasn't been a year yet, but lets say the world will be at 1.4mil by New Years Eve. Double the current at a 9ish month rate to a 12 month rate. Just for worst case scenario giggles.

That puts it roughly even with worldwide road injuries and under diabetes. A bit more than the amount of people dying from diarrhea. I said it in another post, 9+ million people die from heart disease due mostly from really poor diets and lifestyles (the fat, lazy kind more than the malnourished kind). And no one cared about any of those. If you're going to cry about the world is going to end, don't you think those would red flag for that sentiment first?

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/the-top-10-...

https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/topics/causes-of-de...

Modern medicine is fucking awesome. This could have been a death sentence for a hell of a lot more people. More people died in others pandemics and the world kept spinning. Let's keep that in mind. Hell, the sheer fact we have germ theory has fucking saved more lives than we can ever imagine. Yea, things are bad, but they're no where near as bad as they could be. If folks in history could see how we're emotionally reacting to our situation right now, they'd laugh.

Yes, don't be stupid, cough into your elbow, wash your damn hands (it scares me how many people did not wash their hands on a regular basis and admitted to that before all of this) but stop crying and pretending the world is going to end. That mentality doesn't help at all and you're equally the problem if you toot around "The end is near" like a hobo on the side of the road with a cardboard sign.

You are missing the subtle point that all those deaths occured despite all the measures. Most of Europe and Asia and the reasonable countries of the Americas shut down and took 6-10% off their GDP and still so many people died. And this doesn't even count all the undiagnosed ones from USofBadStatistics to the usual dictators which falsify data to the developing world which doesn't have any decent one.

Not to say the other things aren't major issues and in many cades have rather straightforward soputiopns (soda and fast food tax, massively inconvenience/tax smoking and drinking, actual driving lessons, rule enforcement and road improvements in developing countries, clean water and basic medicine for more places, ... But all this doesn't take away the seriousness of the pandemic. The world continued after black death, but with up to 1/3 and in some places 1/2 the population dead. So life will go on no matter how many die, but this doesn't excuse inaction.

> You are missing the subtle point that all those deaths occured despite all the measures.

That's assuming lockdown was effective...hint: the most vulnerable/elderly mostly died anyway.

Simple math. Herd immunity requiring 50%. World population 7.6B. So 3.8B infections. Hospitalization rate is roughly 10%, so 380M hospitalizations. IFR is roughly 1%, so 38M fatalities.

So again, 3.8B infections, 380M hospitalizations, and 38M fatalities. Even assuming a magnitude of error, we're still looking at 38M hospitalizations and 3.8M deaths.

Michael Osterholm had a really good analogy into COVID. We're wrong to thing of it in waves; it's more like wildfire. Where it finds fuel, it will burn until the fuel is gone.

No, herd immunity requires >90, if not >95℅. and that assumes that herd immunity is even possible - there are plenty of indications that the covid-19 cured don't have long-term immunity. That leaves only either eradication, which the US, Brazil and Russia ruined for all of us, or that it ends as part of the annual flu family.

I was trying to be generous with the 50%. I believe it will be around 65% when all is said and done.

It's a little more complex than that. The herd immunity threshold estimates have assumed that everyone is equally susceptible. However the reality appears to be that some people have at least partial immunity, perhaps based on genetics or prior exposure to similar viruses. This is an active area of research, and for now the level and extent of population immunity remains an unknown variable.

The best estimate from the CDC indicates an IFR of 0.65% in the US. That's a major difference from 1%.

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

A recent sero-prevalance study in Mumbai found that 57% of people in the slums had antibodies, which would put those areas close to the theoretical herd immunity threshold. Despite limited access to advanced healthcare there the IFR was under 0.10%, although it's possible that some deaths weren't accurately recorded.

https://www.cnbctv18.com/healthcare/57-sero-prevalence-in-sl...

A change from an IFR of 1% to 0.65% would still mean 25M fatalities. And that's a CDC IFR from a country with vast, vast resources. As this circles the globe looking for firewood, it's going to burn a long time.

I'm extremely skeptical of the link you provided. Small sample size and there's no other supported data to indicate an IFR in line with influenza.

You are entirely correct in what you say, and if this was just a virus that most people get sick then recover from, then I'd agree with the point you are making. But there are reports of lingering after-affects that suggest that many people may take years, if ever, to recover from Covid-19:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/brain-fog-heart-dama...

https://www.heart.org/en/news/2020/07/06/months-after-infect...

So I think for that reason, maybe we should indeed have a "The world is ending" dialogue...

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