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Comment by mynegation | Hacker News Reader

I know it may all look like small potatoes, but this is HN and you are two orders of magnitude off.

0.01% is pretty close to annual death rate from flu in pre-COVID years [1] so the situation that "one hundred times worse than the current situation" will make it 100 hundred times worse (i.e. significantly worse) than seasonal influenza.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html

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Okay, fair enough. But a major difference is that flu deaths are much more heavily burdened on the the young, whereas Covid is on the very elderly. The death of a 6 month old from flu results in approximately 20 times more QALY loss than an 85 year old.

Let me approach it from another angle. Pre-vaccine, it appears that Covid roughly doubled everyone's all-cause mortality.[1] Like it killed 30 year olds at a much lower rate than 90 year olds, but 30 year olds have a much lower baseline mortality to begin with. This isn't an exact relationship, but approximately about double mortality across the board. (Even interestingly enough men's excess Covid death rate is about in line with their general mortality vis-a-vis women.)

The vaccine appears to reduce the mortality risk of circulating Covid by about a factor of 100X. There's very little reason to believe that it substantially shifts the relative mortality burden between groups. So, post-vaccine Covid increases all-cause mortality broadly by about 1%. That translates into less than 1 month of lost life expectancy.[2]

[1]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33412438/ [2]https://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/2012/11/10/mortality-...

I seriously hope it is true, i.e. COVID-19 with vaccination settles into roughly flu territory. With all-cause mortality percentages - it is important to remember that doubling all cause mortality happened during the introduction of public health measures. Has it not happened it would be much worse.

No idea where you are getting the idea that the flu predominantly kills the young? It is one of the major causes of death for the old. You generally seem to just be wrong with almost all of your points?

He didn't say it predominantly kills the young. He said the young bare a larger burden with flu than with Covid.

>Let me approach it from another angle. Pre-vaccine, it appears that Covid roughly doubled everyone's all-cause mortality.[1] Like it killed 30 year olds at a much lower rate than 90 year olds, but 30 year olds have a much lower baseline mortality to begin with. This isn't an exact relationship, but approximately about double mortality across the board. (Even interestingly enough men's excess Covid death rate is about in line with their general mortality vis-a-vis women.)

I don't get why almost everyone compares death and disease rates of something with basically unrestricted spread(flu) with something that has had heavy precautions taken around it, i.e lockdowns, isolation, social distancing masking (Covid).

Covid would have way higher stats if it was allowed to spread unrestricted.

>Covid would have way higher stats if it was allowed to spread unrestricted.

This is scientifically false; there's no correlation between lockdown severity and covid fatality rates. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...: " Lastly, government actions such as border closures, full lockdowns, and a high rate of COVID-19 testing were not associated with statistically significant reductions in the number of critical cases or overall mortality"

Uh, from your own article:

> The government policy of full lockdowns (vs. partial or curfews only) was strongly associated with recovery rates (RR=2.47; 95%CI: 1.08–5.64). Similarly, the number of days to any border closure was associated with the number of cases per million (RR=1.04; 95%CI: 1.01–1.08). This suggests that full lockdowns and early border closures may lessen the peak of transmission, and thus prevent health system overcapacity, which would facilitate increased recovery rates.

In Western Australia it's worked really well for us. Meanwhile NSW is suffering dearly.

Relying on QALY results in some very strange decisions, unless you allow for negative QALY. E.g., to maximize total QALY you'd want a very large population.

IFR for flu is 0.1% [0] - catch it and you’ve got a 1 in 1,000 chance of dying. That’s far higher than the IFR for covid if you’ve been vaccinated.

If you’re in a country where everyone has had the opportunity to be vaccinated, then it’s time to move on.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-compared-seasona...

What about people who can't be vaccinated? My sister in law is chronically ill and, according to her doctors, not well enough to be vaccinated. It means she is still having to isolate as much as possible.

Are you saying we should give up on protecting people like her (sacrifice her?) for the convenience of others?

People with peanut allergies stay out of Five Guys, and people with compromised immune systems will have to take their own precautions as they always have before COVID. You can still elect to wear an N95 and whatever else as long as you want, but you can't expect the whole world around you to stop for you.

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