Comment by nuerow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nuerow | Hacker News Reader

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> see, there's the hyperbole that makes you lose credibility.

It is not a hyperbole, and it saddens me to hear this level of ignorance in this forum.

The COVID-19 mortality rate for the age >65 is over 20%. That's over 1 death per 5 infections.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics_of_the_COVID-19_pan...

> ~95% of those 65 and older in the US are vaccinated.

No, not quite. It is estimated that 95% of the total US population of >65 received at least one shot, but the percentage of fully vaccinated people in that age group is around 84%.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/covid-19-vaccine...

However, these numbers are averages. Willingness to get the shot varies widely across the US. There are regions within the US where barely half the population took a single shot. For instance, in Idaho, West Virginia, Wyoming, and Mississippi less than half the population took even a single shot, so the majority is still totally unvaccinated.

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/these-state...

The CDC says that the covid IFR for the 65+ cohort is 9%, not 20%.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

> it saddens me to hear this level of ignorance in this forum

Ahem.

> The CDC says that the covid IFR for the 65+ cohort is 9%, not 20%.

It seems you did not noticed that the data I presented was provided by the CDC.

https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-by-Sex...

Your misconception is that you've tried to compare apples to oranges, as you tried to compare IFR estimates with death/infection ratio, which aren't the same thing at all.

Nevertheless, I'm sure no one would make the mistake of interpreting a 10% IFR as being negligible, thus even with that contrarian nitpicking the point still stands.

"Death / infection" is a meaningless number unless you accurately measure the number of infections. Which is what the Infection Fatality Rate attempts to estimate. Which is why the CDC posts that estimate that I linked to, which is 90,000 deaths / 1M infections, or 9%. Straight from the horse's mouth, as they say.

If you're going to be this arrogant then you need to get your facts straight. Yes, 9% is nothing to sneeze at, the difference between 9% and 20% is quite material.

You're displaying signs of Dunning-Kruger - by saying things like "1 death per 5 infections" I'm not wholly convinced that you understand what an IFR is. Tone it down.

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