Hacker News Reader

Comment by angelzen | Hacker News Reader

It is called a "covid wave". Cases go up, then go down. Some people, mostly with frail systems, will sadly falter, not dissimilar to how flu operates. It's pretty clear that we are going to have at least one of these waves every year, no matter what the authorities do or not do. What it is not clear yet is whether it's going to be one wave, or several. I hope one. We'll know by May.

View on HN

Scientific advisors have been sounding the alarms on the incoming wave here for months and have strongly demanded preventative measures be taken, in particular vaccination (calls which have mostly been ignored by the government).

So the scientific majority opinion seems to be that you are not at all helpless against those waves.

> cases go up then go down

Yes, the wave will end eventually, probably around easter if going by the previous waves. Question is how much death and damage it will cause until then. That's something that can very much be influenced.

Vaccines definitely have a positive effect. However, at this point most of it has been already accounted for by vaccinating the elderly populations at risk. Most Western world has elderly vaccination rates over 90-95%, including supposedly anti-vax regions, e.g. Florida [1]. The marginal effect of vaccinating young healthy populations with marginal covid risk is likely to be marginal. Realistically speaking, there aren't that many effective levers the authorities can wield. My hope is that the pattern we've seen in US southern states and BG/RO, i.e. steep short delta waves, will replicate elsewhere.

To keep things in perspective, covid mortality in Germany was 1.2/k since the beginning of the pandemic, compared to 10/k annual death rate from all causes. Hopefully the vaccines will help keeping this number even lower. Further confounding the issue, the death certificate cause of death for infectious diseases often times masks other systemic issues, for instance people with cancer are more susceptible to die of influenza or pneumonia [2]. What I suspect is happening is that covid replaced influenza and pneumonia as the Grim Reaper of choice. Remember that flu "paused" last year [3].

[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/coronavirus-covid-19/vaccine-trac...

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33107375

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/10/08/flu-season-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com