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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm being generous to the parent, but I also would like a comparison to the flu. Not because I don't believe covid is significantly worse (when I got it, it was way worse than the flu), but because I don't have a medical background and it is difficult to contextualize the actual risks here without some baseline where I have a decent intuition already built around. But where I disagree with the parent is the need for this paper to specify those distinctions as I'm not the target audience.

I can read data and understand it, but any good data scientist knows that you need real expertise in a domain to contextualize that data. It would be naive to think that my understanding of data directly translates to a strong understanding of this work. I'm not the domain expert.

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But have you actually had the flu? I ask, because most people say “oh, I had the flu” when in actuality they just had a common cold.

The flu, the real flu, knocks you on the ass so hard that you actively start considering that death is a possibility and that heading over to the hospital would be a good idea.

I’ve had the flu perhaps twice. Once as a child, once in my early 50s. The latter completely recalibrated my understanding of illness.

It is bad. I had a few of them during my life. When I was eleven the flu triggered a reaction in my body, destroying the insulin producing cells from my pancreas. I've had a type 1 diabetes since then.

Nowadays in Finland (where I am from), they recommend flu vaccinations for kids who have type 1 diabetes in the family to reduce the risk of catching it.

Not all flus are bad to all of us, but if you catch the right strain, it can really knock you out.

Yea, that's been my experience. Incredibly frustrating. Pre Covid, people at work would put on Slack they "had the flu they can't work today". Or "I had the flu this weekend". What they don't know is if you have the flu you literally can't move from bed and the thought of typing into Slack would be a task too great.

Note that like COVID the flu has varying severity

You can catch the flu and have not much more than a cold or even be asymptomatic, then your grandma catches it off you and died from it

Many influenza infections are asymptomatic (just like COVID-19).

Yeah, my experience with swine flu was at least as bad as COVID...

It would be nice if someone explained the specific biological reason for why they are different. Like, because they target different types of cells, or reproduce in different ways.

The lay explanation of a virus is that it invades your cells and hijacks their machinery to make more of itself. That makes them all sound the same. For bacteria we at least can understand that they have different types of metabolism, come in different shapes, produce different defensive compounds, etc.

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