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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Over 700,000 (edit it’s now 800,000) dead Americans is about 20x as bad as the flu even with all of these measures, that’s huge. But even that understates the difference when you measure years of life lost.

The flu typically kills the extreme elderly or people with extremely compromised immune systems. Aka they might die at 94 vs 95. COVID on the other kills people who are relatively much healthier, someone that dies at 75 vs 95 lost 20 years not 1.

This is also why people 70+ are almost fully vaccinated in the US. For that age range it’s an extremely serious disease with a high chance of killing them after infection.

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COVID-19 is a serious public health problem but let's not exaggerate. In terms of years of life lost it's about 2-9x worse than the flu, not 20x.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-83040-3

The average age of COVID-19 deaths in developed countries is about 80. Fortunately the vaccines and other treatments have greatly reduced the risk of death.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-covid-age-penalty-115920032...

From 2010-2020 the flu killed ~30,000 Americans per year. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html

Edit COVID has actually killed 800,000 Americans.

20x of 30k < 800k. You can cut argue it should cover multiple years of flu, except the first US COVID case was less than 2 years ago and it really only got started in March 2020. Per month COVID has killed more people than the flu does per year on average and it’s not exactly stopping this winter.

Years lost are then on top of that deaths multiplier.

But in the long run Covid could actually kill less as younger people get it and grow old.

COVID is referring to a specific coronavirus, I hope it will go extinct relatively quickly.

That said coronavirus have long been one of the causes of the common cold and occasionally cause diseases of significant concern like SARS, COVID, etc. That’s likely around for the long haul unless some massive medical breakthroughs show up.

>This is also why people 70+ are almost fully vaccinated in the US. For that age range it’s an extremely serious disease with a high chance of killing them after infection.

Older people certainly dominate the vulnerable groups, but there are many other people living with various forms of immune system dysfunction. This is why the rest of us need to mask, vaccinate, and get boosters to minimize our chance of propagating the disease to the more vulnerable parts of our population. Not doing so is basically saying you don't care about other people.

Very honest and good faith question. Until when? What are the specific metrics for when we don't need masks or non-tweaked vaccines tailored to yearly variants like normal flu shots? At some point we need to say "if you are immunocompromised you need to take special precautions like you always did before covid". Just wondering out loud when that should be because for some of us it's sooner rather than later.

Reasonable question. I don't think we can answer that until most of the population has been vaccinated and we see how "quiet" the disease becomes. I think we are likely to be getting annual vaccinations for years to come. Don't forget that over 200,000 people in the US below age 70 have died. Most of those would not have been considered immunocompromised prior to COVID.

That's actually a good point because the "until most of the population has been vaccinated" is tricky. We don't really know how effective the vaccines are against new variants. Probably better than nothing I'd guess but it also doesn't completely stop transmission. An overly optimistic timeline is 100 days to get a tweaked vaccine for a new variant but we saw that's about how long it took for Delta to move completely through Florida. That plus the possibility of animal reservoirs and many high-compliance mask and lockdown areas getting large spikes anyway leaves me skeptical we can necessarily solve this through the public health policies that have been tried. I just want answers like everyone else and am trying to just learn to be healthy and live with this virus for the rest of my life. Happy to get an annual shot like the flu when/if this becomes endemic and seasonal.

Where I live, precautions are specifically targeting hospital capacity. So I would expect that once hospitals are no longer under threat of being overwhelmed, requirements will be removed.

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