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Comment by gnusty_gnurc | Hacker News Reader

True. Cuomo is imo as close as you can get to a typical Democrat politician and we’re told that it’s obvious a Democrat president would have handled the pandemic better.

The stats of hardest hit states are coincidentally blue states.

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By what metric? The top states by total cases per 100k are all red and purple.

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_casesper100k

Arbitrary stat but ok. Deaths are kinda the most important otherwise we wouldn't be shutdown

Arbitrary!?

This is nonsense. Are you suggesting that if this illness had all the same characteristics -- long hospital stays, long-lasting damage to the body, highly transmissible -- but didn't kill, then we would not be "shutdown"?

Yes Arbitrary. Why 100k? Why not 10, 100, 1000, 10,000, 1,000,000? Oh because 100k makes the stats look the best for your argument.

It's per 100k people in the state. It makes no difference if it's 100 or 100k. The comparison was state-to-state. The absolute numbers don't matter.

Wrong hill to die on, bud. 60M people got infected with Swine Flu, and nobody even thought of shutting anything down. Why? Because it was about as deadly as regular flu. So yes, deaths are the right metric to track.

Completely irrelevant. There were an estimated 274k hospitalizations from swine flu, over the course of that year. So swine flu did not have the characteristics I specified.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/2009-h1n1-pandemi...

"estimated 274k hospitalizations" - remind me again how widespread the swine flu tests were in comparison to COVID?

Measure by lives lost?

A case only really matters to clinical medicine if there’s some type of symptom.

Of course it benefits the “concerned” side to couch their argument in the idea of some murky, unobservable effects.

Are deaths the only thing that matters to you? Shouldn't we be just as concerned about hospitalizations? Is there any reason that you're aware of for cases to not be a good proxy for hospitalizations?

My point is that: hospitalizations != cases

It would make sense that an observed drop in deaths would correspond to a drop in hospitalizations if the case number is rising significantly.

That's good imo.

edit: CDC graph shows hospitalization rate steadily dropping.

When you say "observed drop in deaths" are you referring back to the original article? Because the first sentence is "Two new peer-reviewed studies are showing a sharp drop in mortality among hospitalized COVID-19 patients." so I'm having trouble making sense of what you're saying.

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