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Comment by mikewarot | Hacker News Reader

Consider that most efforts are on slowing spread, not eradication. This is a bigger problem than most people realize.

Yes, our Politicians and physicians failed us here. Epidemiologists have been correct in their pandemic physics.

>Harsh violent lockdown for 2 or 3 years can eradicate coronavirus.

>Soft lockdowns "flatten the curve". From the NYT study, this reduces death by 12% due to availability of ventilators, and find potentially other helpful drugs.

>No government lockdown, where people must be personally responsible for their own health. This sacrifices the old and obese that refuse to comply with voluntary lockdown.

And all of this effort is focused around a few percentage of the population, which is disproportionately unhealthy.

Not necessarily. A 50-something person that rides centuries on their bike and runs half marathons, is very much at risk simply because of their age. Blame-throwing is not helpful nor correct.

Even at 80 it only about doubles the chance they die. An 80 year old has a 5% chance of death, adding another 5% chance of death is striking no doubt, and would consider that very much at risk. 50 however...

50 year old is only about a 0.14% IFR: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02483-2

The IFR was close to zero for people between the ages of 15 and 44, increasing to 3.1% for 65–74-year-olds and to 11.6% for anyone older. The results of the study have been posted to the medRxiv preprint server1.

"Only" doubles? Compared to what reasonable baseline?

A standard 80 year old, which is striking as stated above.

It's bad odds for sure and if 80 you wouldn't want to contract it. Only implies it's not a death sentence, roughly as dangerous as space flight.

It's not throwing blame to say that comorbidities increase risk of long-term or fatal effects.

Very much at risk, but the risk is very small.

1% chance of death and 2% chance of extended illness is not "very small". I would put those risks as "very high", since that is essentially your risk budget for the entire year.

I used to play a tabletop RPG that used percentile dice. For every action, there was a 1% chance of a miserable failure. Turns out, those cropped up quite a bit.

So, if 50, you are willing to play Russian-Roulette and pick an M&M from a jar of 100 (or even 200) when, perhaps, 1-4 of them will kill you?

I'd love to imagine (actually watching would be sadistic) a lineup of folks claiming they would, step up to the M&Ms, one after another, be told of the chances, and watch them pluck one, or step away.

https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid#case-fatalit...

Nope. The risk is climbing rapidly at that age.

Plenty of perfectly healthy people are also dying of COVID-19, even with the efforts to slow its spread. If we didn’t work to slow its spread, our healthcare system would rapidly collapse.

> our healthcare system would rapidly collapse

This was the entire "15 days to slow the spread" narrative. It's been 8 months. None of our hospitals collapses or were overwhelmed, except in states like Michigan and NYC where governors send the infected back to elder care facilities.

Most hospitals in the US never even got close to peak usages. Many people died because they were afraid to go to the hospitals or couldn't get surgeries they were scheduled for.

> Most hospitals in the US never even got close to peak usages.

Texas ICUs came very close to peak usage, and Florida was also running near capacity in many ICUs. Hospitals like TMC managed by making "surge" ICU beds and bringing in resources from out of state. We don't know the impact of these surges on quality of care, but Texas was losing a 7-day average of 325 lives per day at its peak in August. These happen to be the states with a combination of high population density cities and some of the fewest COVID countermeasures; more rural states and states with stronger countermeasures didn't approach capacity.

https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...

The article you link doesn't say anything about ICU capacity surging in a manner that compares with COVID this year. It talks mostly about tents outside of emergency rooms. COVID deaths this year are already 173% of the deaths from the 2017-18 flu season, and most sources indicate that these numbers actually underestimate the real toll.

Citation needed.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02483-2

Although fatality estimates are important for understanding the risk of viral spread to people in different age groups, they don’t tell the full story of the toll COVID-19 takes, says Kilpatrick. “There is a fascination with death, but COVID-19 appears to cause a substantial amount of long-term illness,” he adds.

Ehh, the statistics show it is far less likely the younger you are. This is simply what the numbers show, and cannot be argued otherwise.

Yes, but there are at least 100 million people (probably a lot more) still at risk in the US alone. An optimistic scenario of 0.1% of 100 million over six months requiring hospital care is 17,000 people per month being admitted to hospital for covid-19 alone. The level of care many of these people require is very high. We don't have the capacity to do it with our current healthcare system, even with these generous assumptions.

Individual risk is low, but collective risk is unacceptably high.

Nonsense, the number of deaths without co-morbidities in the UK was 300 and something. That hardly counts as plenty.

Citation needed.

"Plenty" is not statistics.

And "healthy" is difficult at best. Is an overweight person healthy? Is a normal weight person that doesn't exercise healthy?

And "healthcare system would rapidly collapse." Makes no sense. You mean our hospitals would be full for a few months. It's not like the healthcare industry would be destroyed.

> And "healthcare system would rapidly collapse." Makes no sense. You mean our hospitals would be full for a few months. It's not like the healthcare industry would be destroyed.

I would like to remind you of the situation in northern Italy in february. People suffocating in hospitals on chairs in the corridor, because there was no one to look after them and no beds for them to lay down. And that was not because the doctors were absent, it was because they were overwhelmed by the amount of sick people.

Perhaps you prefer an US example, I'd say it is sign of a collapsing health care system, if they have so many deaths, that they don't know were to put the bodies. That happened in New York City, not some rural place with too few hospitals.

That region gets overwhelmed at flu season every year apparently.

And just for some perspective the flu season was filling hospitals in the US a couple of years ago. But it barely made the news.

https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...

But did it also fill the morgues?

And the linked article isn't about north Italy. From where do you have the information that north Italian are regularly collapsing, because of the seasonal flu? Full hospitals are not the same as hospitals out of space to keep patients and bodies. Have a look at this impression https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-they-call-it-the-apoc...

Quick better move the goalposts.

What do you mean? Do you think I moved the goal posts?

> Plenty of perfectly healthy people are also dying of COVID-19, even with the efforts to slow its spread. If we didn’t work to slow its spread, our healthcare system would rapidly collapse.

Reference please

> If we didn’t work to slow its spread, our healthcare system would rapidly collapse.

Is that really the case though? We keep hearing of a lot more infected, but at the same time the hospitals have a lot of capacity now (across several countries) so what is the risk for the healthcare system right now?

I'm not sure you appreciate what "no government lockdown" vs. a soft lockdown means.

You can consider some of the ways it could go:

(1) people/businesses do voluntarily substantially the same things as soft lockdowns codify. In that case, the impact on the economy, deaths, hospitalizations, etc, are about the same.

(2) people/businesses do substantially less. Deaths/hospitalizations increase. I think the economy probably does worse -- many people get scared and avoid many kinds of economic activity, take their kids out of school, etc. Other businesses are disrupted as employees and owners get ill. In the US, the large number of seriously ill uninsured/underinsured throw an anchor on to the economy for years to come.

You suggest to "sacrifice the old and obese", but it's not clear there's a payoff for that sacrifice. We may end up with 2x-5x dead and a worse, longer-lasting economic situation.

> Yes, our Politicians and physicians failed us here.

Politicians indeed, but a large part of the blame lies on the general public - especially those parts who believe and spread beliefs that mask wearing is unmanly/dictatorship, that vaccines cause autism and the likes.

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