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Comment by mwint | Hacker News Reader

You don’t have to be concerned. Another commenter brought up that the death rate per 100k is in the range of 1.1 (vaccinated) to ~5 (unvaccinated). Car accidents are >10/100k/yr.

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I don't think an average is very useful here. For example, that figure is going to be much higher amongst elderly people. And many people are in contact with people who are vulnerable for other reasons (e.g. I have a relative going through chemotherapy). Incidence of long covid is also much higher than that of death. Some people may not be able to afford time off work if they catch covid, etc, etc.

5/100k deaths among unvaccinated can’t possibly be right, can it? There have been 790k Covid deaths so far in the US out of a population of 330 million, which is over 200/100k.

Rates will change as the weakest die off. We may already be though the worst of it.

And that’s not including the recent studies of high death rates for those with severe covid within a year.

Link? My initial impression is that this would be confounded by people who have severe covid also tending to be old or otherwise sickly, unless they found a way to control for that.

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/12/severe-c...

A big chunk of US deaths were elderly in nursing homes when officials made uninformed decisions to put infected individuals back into the homes (when we knew a lot less about the virus) and it ripped through. Very sad, but that's where we get a big portion of that 790k.

Given that we've learned a lot, tactics and strategies have evolved, and therapeutics are getting better, death rate should continue to go down.

That's why many places in the US feel somewhat back to normal.

How can you look at rate and range of mutation and make blithe comments on how many will die based on original covid rates?

It’s the best we have, and history shows that this stuff gets more infectious but less fatal.

History shows that this stuff usually gets more infectious but less fatal, but there are examples of it working otherwise. The early 20th century "Spanish Flu" being one example where it got considerably more fatal (esp. for younger people).

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