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Comment by Klinky | Hacker News Reader

This doesn't pan out when children have developed severe inflammatory responses, young adults have died, and not all people with comorbidities have had severe reactions. You can't just say it's fat and/or old people who are having severe symptoms or dying.

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We have to look at the bigger statistics. Some young children die of many things that the vast majority of them easily survive, but that doesn't mean we need to lock down every flu season.

Flu is harder to transmit and there is vaccine infrastructure available every year, despite that, it can still be very severe. Let's add a coronavirus with potentially greater severity than a flu, which has no vaccine, and has easier transmission, with a severe flu season this year and just watch the bodies pile up.

> with a severe flu season this year and just watch the bodies pile up.

There is no evidence of this and you are continually creating worst-case scenarios.

Please stop.

Do you know that this year will not be a difficult flu season? Do you know the ramifications of combined flu and COVID-19 infection?

If the flu season is severe, then it could be quite catastrophic when combined with COVID-19. We should definitely be preparing for worst-case scenarios, and not downplaying potential severity because it's inconvenient.

Influenza and Noro/Calicivirus (Winter vomiting disease) stats for Sweden this year. Social distancing and increased hygiene measures implemented mid March, about week 11, killed them off much earlier than usual.

Influenza: https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/globalassets/statistik-u...

Calicivirus (Vinter vomiting disease): https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/0ad710ef37...

Technically that was "last flu season", not the upcoming flu season, and it was relatively mild. It is hard to predict if 2020-2021 will be similar, or 2017 levels, or 2009 levels. At minimum it will add more strain to medical services.

It shows that "okay" measures against COVID are strong enough to push the R_eff value for those viruses well below 1, unless something extraordinary happens. I.e. no extra strain for medical services.

As said, this hinges on social distancing and hygiene measures being kept enforced. If you open a country fully again and get two simultaneous peaks then you are in for a bad time.

I think we're on the same page here. My catastrophic scenario involved no mitigation steps and removal of lockdown. The goal was to dissuade people from thinking since things are "fine/better" right now, lockdown/mitigation is not needed anymore. We still need to get through this winter, and on to a vaccine.

"The southern hemisphere skipped flu season in 2020, Efforts to stop covid-19 have had at least one welcome side-effect"

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/09/12/the-sout...

My point to jaywalk was that combined COVID-19 + severe flu w/o mitigations like a lockdown, could be catastrophic. Their post was anti-lockdown comparing COVID-19 to flu.

I am not surprised that measures to avoid COVID-19 also reduces the spread of flu.

I wonder whether skipping flu season is alike fire suppression in forests. When, not if, it eventually burns, it'll be that much more devastating.

>This doesn't pan out when children have developed severe inflammatory responses, young adults have died, and not all people with comorbidities have had severe reactions

How many millions has covid infected thus far? It would be concerning if it hadn't killed a couple healthy kids and not killed a couple obese old people.

It's not "a couple", there's been about 105 child deaths, and 4600 child hospitalizations. It's not as bad as adults, but you can't say little Johnny is magically immune, nor can you say that Brad the football star at the local college is either. I don't think it's currently clear why some apparently healthy people develop severe reactions.

Do you feel we should restrict billions from gathering with and hugging their family so that we can save 105 children?

Can you help us understand the thinking you use to make that tradeoff?

The point of the 105 dead children was to show children can be severely affected and don't have magic immunity. 500K children have been diagnosed with COVID, with varying symptom levels. We have 200,000 dead overall in the USA, so it's not just a matter of 105 dead children justifying lockdown, it's all those other dead people you seem to have forgotten about.

Also FYI, you can't hug your family member anymore once they're dead.

What’s the median age of those that have sadly passed and the percentage with comorbidities?

Do you really mean "sadly" when trying to make the point that old people or people with pre-existing conditions are acceptable deaths?

He is Just Asking Questions

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions

Am I. Which part of the question is leading? Which part is not Socratic?

Well that would be an extremely unpleasant attempt at putting words in somebody's mouth that makes me wonder whether you are actually engaging honestly here.

Did you honestly not know the answer? What was your point?

They don't, but they are far more susceptible to Measles. In 2018 140,000 children died from measles -- a disease we actually have a well known vaccine that's been proven safe!

Well we've yet to develop a COVID-19 vaccine that ditzy parents can ignore/avoid. Stupidity isn't an excuse for more stupidity.

This is emotional manipulation that we can all engage in. The 105 children are not the only victims.

I have bad asthma and my wife is ill I don't appreciate you gathering and hugging your family and killing mine.

Did that advance the discussion? Was it manipulation? No and you bet!

It's small enough that it's not a concern and not something we should spend much effort worrying about. 105 is absolutely nothing compared to nearly 200k deaths in the US.

It's also a HUGE distraction to the real concern: We don't fully understand how contagious children are.

Go here: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

Filter by 'Weekly Number of Deaths by Age' and you will see that it is literally the safest time ever for children and young adults because they are not allowed to go outside and do dumb stuff. Yes, some of them have died because of COVID, but the number is staggeringly small.

Maybe fewer have died of covid because of lockdown?

Sweden didn't close schools, 1 person under 20 has died out of about 2 million.

How many people do people under 20 infect?

How many of those secondary infections die? How many of them stay sick for months?

There was a case right before schools opened in Georgia, I believe, of a kid who caught COVID at football practice. He's fine, but both of his parents died in a week.

Fortunately, he now no longer needs to worry about COVID. Unfortunately, he's now an orphan.

And he's still proof that "few children get sick" from this.

Children get sick, few have got sick enough to have died from it.

I did not realize that the sole metric that our society should optimize for, to the exclusion of all else is 'how many children get sick and die from COVID'.

(It's a very convenient optimization metric, though, because it requires us to do quite literally nothing.)

Lots of people argue that children aren't dying because they were more locked down. For example the person I responded to. That is wrong, children aren't dying since covid doesn't hit them very hard. Children being vectors infecting others wasn't a part of this discussion.

It mostly does. Those cases you mention are quite rare.

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