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Comment by helaoban | Hacker News Reader

An almost meaningless number when not controlled for age, ethnicity, general health etc.

I don't understand how this number can be reasonably used to say anything about basically anything.

From the document you site:

  > Many such serological surveys are currently being
  > undertaken worldwide [10], and some have thus far 
  > suggested substantial under-ascertainment of cases, with estimates of IFR converging at approximately 0.5 - 1% [10-12].

But if we follow reference 12, we get the following IFR study from Stockholm[1]:

  > Results:

  > Age 0–69 Population %: 88.3, IFR: 0.09%
  > Age 70+, Population %: 11.7, IFR: 4.29%

Now, which number applies to the vast majority of us? And this is not even controlled for anything but age.

People, come on.

1. https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/53c0dc391b...

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You said there was no data available, and I provided a reference.

The data you cite has a large age group as well (0-69), which has the same problem you describe. See the comment by user kmm below for a reference with a better breakdown of estimated IFR by age groups. The reference also shows how the IFR increases exponentially by age.

If you want to see what number applies to you in particular, then you need an specific breakdown. But if you need to see what is the risk for the population in general, then the estimated total IFR, sampled from that same population, is valuable. Think of individual risk vs systemic risk.

I absolutely agree with your general argument about the context of _average_ mortality rate.

However another aspect that is still very nebulious at this point is post-infection sequelae.

Some of the patients who survived SARS-1 infection (in the SARS 2002-2004 outbreak) had lung scaring, loss of VO2 max, and other pulmonary related disfunction, more than 10 years after infection. [0]

We have seen a lot of pre-print articles discussing SARS-COV2 lung damage, heart and blood vessel damage, peripheral nerve damage, etc.

So if we want to be factual and give people a chance of making an informed decision, then we should also take this aspect in consideration.

At this point, we simply don't know enough about who will be affected and how severely but if take what we learned from SARS-COV1, than it is iresponsible not to disclose that life long injury or damage with _varying_ degrees of intensity across potentially multiple systems is very likely for _some_ of the survivors of SARS-COV2.

My point is an informed decision of not following health authority guidelines (which, at this point of social isolation, I do not judge), should not be reduced to something binomial like survival/death, it's just not that simple (as with most things in life).

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7130167/

You want controls for ethnicity, but cite a Swedish public health report.

You realize the impact in the US is dramatically greater amongst the black and brown population?

Possibly due to: the higher likelihood of being in essential jobs in areas with greater population density than Sweden.

Or, you need ethnicity controls because, eugenics?

> Now, which number applies to the vast majority of us? And this is not even controlled for anything but age.

How about instead of focusing solely on the IFR of young people - bring into the conversation how those same young people may not 100% recover.

What about discussing how those same infected young(er) people may not die but they may pass it to other people that aren't so lucky?

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