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Comment by dnautics | Hacker News Reader

While true, it's not by much; mortality for covid-19 is less than a percent of all hospitalizations, iirc.

Right. The point of the vaccines is to not have to find out if you are in the 99% who survive Covid or the 1% who don’t.

and if virus keeps mutating... twice-annual booster shots all over the earth?

I really hope we don't end up with a Marek's disease, but in humans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek%27s_disease#Prevention

It seems more likely that after we've all developed some immunity to it and some variants, we'll have some level of resistance to what most strains bring to bear, and so milder and less lethal, like existing colds (also a coronavirus...) and flus.

You make it sound as if that's good news.

If this was missed in the design of the study, why would it be good news?

That seems wildly optimistic.

In the UK, 2% of people who tested positive have died. In the US, 1.7% of people who tested positive have died.

The mortality rate among hospitalized people even higher.

[1] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

That's about right for those who tested positive, but current CDC estimate is that for each one that tests positive, 3.3 others got it and never got tested. That makes the actual rate something like 0.38%. Which is a lot more than 0, and is even a lot more than a normal flu, but it's not 1.7%.

Sure, but the CDC is mostly talking about the United States and the world is a lot larger than that. People are still dying all over the globe from this in fairly high numbers. And in the developing part of the world we don't even really know the numbers at all, we only do for those places that have a reasonable infrastructure and where healthcare did not completely collapse.

Developing countries will probably have a larger undercount so estimates derived from the US may already be projecting a more conservative figure.

I do not think you remember it correctly. Cumulatively mortality is around 2% and sometimes higher of all known cases.

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