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Comment by _Understated_ | Hacker News Reader

I meant "underlying conditions", not underlying symptoms... that's my fault.

So, basically, if you are healthy, your chances are absolutely tiny that you will die if you catch it.

So, yeah, it matters a whole lot actually.

But most people are unhealthy, with one condition or another. It's misleading to throw out most of the population and then say "but look how small the numbers are for the sliver that's left!"

That's not an argument...

Healthy is subjective but when you say it like that then, yes, everyone has something.

However, there are a bunch of things that will greatly increase your chances of dying from COVID: diabetes, obesity, cancer, immune-related illnesses so this is what I am referring to. It's fair to say that people with one or more of those (not an exhaustive list) are "unhealthy".

So, it's not misleading: it's people who are vulnerable either due to age or health reasons that are at risk of dying, no one else.

It was even raised by an MP recently and he asked Boris Johnston why we're getting locked down when only 400 or so people with no underlying conditions have died... everyone else had underlying conditions related to poor health that made them susceptible so they should have been locked down and the rest of us left to get on with things.

> everyone else had underlying conditions related to poor health that made them susceptible so they should have been locked down and the rest of us left to get on with things.

This seems wildly expensive and impractical. Who's going to take care of all those people? Where are you going to house them (many of them live with people without those conditions)? Do you know how many people have diabetes, just to grab the first item off your list?

Do you think it's more expensive than the way we do it now?

I'd bet so. If it's even possible.

34.2 million people in the US are estimated have diabetes and you're proposing housing all of them (and a bunch of other people) in isolation for a year or two while everyone else goes about their business.

That's a lot of housing to find somewhere, food to provide, etc. Now try to do it in, say, six months.

At it's peak, unemployment from COVID shutdowns in the US looks like they were around 20-30M last summer. So in terms of making sure those people still have income, the number of people isn't too dissimilar, but that number has declined and we also didn't have to find new, isolated, housing, food, and other services for that group.

It's also a lot of people suddenly pulled out of their existing jobs and out of the regular in-person retail market, which means you're still not going to avoid some of the shocks we're seeing anyway.

You are assuming that the 34 million with diabetes are in the workforce. Based on the age distributions of people with diabetes, most are probably retired or disabled.

A fairly large slice of under-70s have diabetes, obesity or cancer.

Given that high blood pressure, and being overweight are concidered underlying conditions, people with "no underlying conditions" might be < 20% of the total population.

We're talking about serious stuff: cancer, immune disorders, diabetes, obesity etc.

High blood pressure is a serious underlying condition (and counted as an underlying condition in Covid death). Obesity is counted as an underlying condition at stage 1 (between 30 and 35 BMI).

Exactly. Obesity alone means ~40% of the population of the US, and ~30% of the UK have an underlying condition as far as COVID risk goes.

>Obesity alone means ~40% of the population of the US

And that is in large part thanks to the government and its public health experts, who we are now, I guess, supposed to believe have our interests in mind, even though, by letting 40% of the population become obese, when there are plain and simple steps they could have taken to prevent it, they have irrefutably demonstrated they do not actually care about the health of the population.

> letting 40% of the population become obese

"letting" seems like a strong verb. I'm all for empathy for those who struggle with maintaining a healthy weight—imagine being addicted to something that you must consume about 3 times a day to stay alive—but it seems a stretch to lay the blame of obesity on the feet of public health experts. Are they also responsible for alcoholics? Other drug addicts?

They could set one simple achievable goal which would drastically reduce obesity: every single high schooler graduates as an athletic machine. The government could do it easily. Schools already require students to participate in gym class, the problem is that it's an absolute joke. They could change that if they wanted. The health benefits are obvious. It's not like they don't know it's an option. They just make excuses for why they can't make any progress fighting obesity, probably because they don't want a healthy population.

Of course some in shape people will become fat as adults, but almost all fat adolescents stay fat until they die.

> obesity

That's >40% of US adults[1] and ~30% of UK adults[2] covered already.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html

[2] https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/sta...

It is not a short list. Here is the list of high risk conditions for age 16-64 from my health department.

Cancer, Chronic kidney disease, COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), Heart conditions, such as heart failure, coronary artery disease, or cardiomyopathies, Immunocompromised state (weakened immune system) from solid organ transplant, Overweight (BMI > 25 kg/m2, but < 30 kg/m2), Obesity (body mass index [BMI] of 30 kg/m2 or higher but < 40 kg/m2), Severe Obesity (BMI ≥ 40 kg/m2), Pregnancy, Sickle cell disease, Down Syndrome, Smoking/Vaping (more than 20 days a month), Type 2 diabetes mellitus, Asthma (moderate-to-severe), Cerebrovascular disease (affects blood vessels and blood supply to the brain), Cystic fibrosis, Hypertension or high blood pressure, Immunocompromised state (weakened immune system) from blood or bone marrow transplant, immune deficiencies, HIV, use of corticosteroids, or use of other immune weakening medicines, Neurologic conditions, such as dementia, Liver disease, Pulmonary fibrosis (having damaged or scarred lung tissues), Thalassemia (a type of blood disorder), Type 1 diabetes mellitus, Down Syndrome

Now, include the people who live with anyone with those conditions or the people who care or regularly interact with people with these conditions. We end up with a large percentage of the population. The proposal to lockdown/isolate only people with higher risk conditions is completely impractical.

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