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Comment by mro_name | Hacker News Reader

I found it quite striking, that while infections here are balanced through age groups, fatalities are only 60+ and mostly 80+.

e.g. seen on the "Dashboard" on rki.de, chart "COVID-19 cases by age group and sex".

Stats indicate old people die. Duh. A tragedy in each case, but that's what will happen eventually, right?

And a mutated virus mostly is more contagious but less fatal, isn't it? A virus optimises for spreading, not killing it's taxi. Was like that with delta.

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> And a mutated virus mostly is more contagious but less fatal, isn't it? A virus optimises for spreading, not killing it's taxi.

Not necessarily. In fact the better the virus gets at infecting our cells and evading immunity, the more likely it is to also spread to dangerous / lethal levels before our immune systems are able to stop it.

> Was like that with delta

No it wasn't.

>In fact the better the virus gets at infecting our cells and evading immunity, the more likely it is to also spread to dangerous / lethal levels before our immune systems are able to stop it.

Can I ask for some related literature on this topic? This contradicts my understanding.

I think delta is also considered to be more deadly and has a much higher viral load than the original strain.

There is no reliable evidence that Delta has a higher infection fatality rate than other common variants.

I have seen no evidence to support this yet but I do not mind being proved wrong.

> more deadly

than what? If age < 60, e.g. car accidents are orders of magnitude more deadly in my county here. There are just no (= 0) fatalities < 40 years here. So even swallowing hammers is equally or more deadly in that group.

> than what?

Than preceding variants. You're shifting the goalposts by comparing to other causes of death in young people now.

Alpha was more lethal than delta from the sequencing reports posted by my State in the U.S.

.4% lethal compared to .3% lethal when I last checked.

So thats one goalpost. Another litmus test is that if delta was more lethal it would have been a very popular media talking point. Fear is unfortunately a successful motivator for clicks.

Are you looking at a small enough time span? Because vaccination drives IFR down, and vaccination rates were higher during the main Delta outbreak than during the main Alpha outbreak.

Alpha variant was already deadlier than the original strain, and delta variant at least caused higher hospitalization rates than alpha:

https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n579.long

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03426-1

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

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