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Comment by lores | Hacker News Reader

You're posting on Hacker News, shouldn't you know basics of statistics or at the very least about anecdote vs data? I don't know anyone who voted Trump, does that mean no one did?

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If you can show me any data that shows that Covid was even remotely and possibly dangerous to healthy people under 40, I’ll listen.

And by remotely and possibly dangerous, I mean more of a risk of death than any other possible event or disease that can happen to healthy people in that age group.

But you can’t, because that data does not exist. Covid was simply not dangerous for healthy people under 40.

I can't do that because you literally excluded any evidence that did not make it the number one cause of death. You're not arguing in good faith, so I'll leave you to it.

I think the proper argument to be made here is comparing its mortality for this age group to that of the flu and other causes. Car accidents or homicide are other interesting ones.

Liver disease kills more 35-44 year olds according to the amac.us source.

https://freopp.org/comparing-the-risk-of-death-from-covid-19...

https://amac.us/estimating-the-risk-of-death-from-covid-19-v...

I’m arguing that this premise is false:

>> Covid has affected and killed enough "younger" people - by which I mean folks younger than 40

Which as a editorial on this comment from the commenter above them:

>>> A properly functioning society does not sacrifice the future of its young to protect the old.

If you don’t like how I framed the question, perhaps do this instead—provide the statistics that tell us where Covid sits on the danger and mortality scale for healthy people under 40. Then tell us why you think that rate of danger warrant those “protective” measures that adversely affected the young.

I don’t think Covid was a threat that warranted the sacrifice of the young to protect the old and I think the stats prove that out.

As another commenter said, you put the bar arbitrarily high by requiring it to be "more of a risk of death than any other possible event or disease that can happen to healthy people in that age group", because of course, once one is "unhealthy" (whatever that means, as healthy and unhealthy is not binary but a spectrum), then their death doesn't count for data. But here is an article with sources saying it was the number four cause of death for those aged 25-34 in 2021 [0].

[0] "And for those ages 15 to 24 and 25 to 34, COVID-19 wasn't in the top five in 2020 but ranked as the fourth leading cause of death in both age groups in 2021." - https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/07/covid-was-the-leadin...

The number one cause of death in that same age group was (and remains) accidents, and yet driving has not been curtailed. Young families could not attend school, go to work, or gather with loved ones because of the #4 killer, but the #1 killer inspired no such restrictions.

I don't know what qualifies technically as a hysteria, but locking people in their homes for months for fear of something less dangerous than a typical daily activity sounds like a promising candidate.

Interesting that you make this comment when it was the #4 killer in spite of what you call the "hysterical" lock downs. Also consider that many people are advocates of public transportation precisely because driving cars is so dangerous.

The number you didn’t provide was the most important one to your argument. Using these hypotheticals just to illustrate my point: Say there were of 1000 deaths in the <40 age group. If 900 were caused by accidents, 90 were caused by illness other than Covid, 6 were caused by shark attacks, and 4 were caused by Covid-19. Just being the fourth leading cause of death in that age group doesn’t truly convey it’s real significance does it?

The important number is what percentage of all deaths in the <40 age group was Covid 19. Just saying it was fourth, well, that’s just trying to ascribe significance over what might be an insignificant number…just for the purpose of creating alarm to justify an unpopular and frankly damaging mitigation strategy.

In the article I linked, it says "The study found COVID-19 caused roughly 700,000 deaths between March 2020 and October 2021. The pandemic disease trailed only heart disease and cancer, which caused roughly 2.15 million collectively in that time frame." Clicking into the cited study, it links to this table with the raw numbers for each age group... no one's trying to hide something or mislead you.

[0] Study https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...

[1] Table (long link!) https://cdn.jamanetwork.com/ama/content_public/journal/intem...

Man… I wish I lived where you live… wherever that is. That would be extremely hard to do here.

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