Hacker News Reader

Comment by dgfitz | Hacker News Reader

How many people over 65 fit this description? [1]

I’m really tired of this narrative. Older people died by orders of magnitude more than younger or working class people. Orders of magnitude. Don’t try and say “hindsight is 20/20” because this was known from the start. Ask any nursing home.

This comment is NOT meant to at ALL be political. Fuck Covid. Fuck making masks a political issue. Fuck all the Covid deniers. Fuck the anti-vax people.

Covid killed old people and those with co-morbidity. If we took all the money given out and gave it ONLY to those people such that they were mandated stay home and survive, however that needed to happen to ensure they avoided infection, imagine how different the would world be right now. /rant

Unpopular opinion on this site and I expect I’ll see that reflected here.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7218a4.htm#T1_down

Edit: typo

View on HN

A complication is that the employees who work in the nursing homes are likely to bring covid in if it is spreading in the community and the community is acting normally (eg parties are happening). Not to say that your plan wouldn't be overall better (I'm not sure), but just saying it would likely result in more death.

That is a fair point, absolutely.

I don’t think the would should have shut down instead of tackling that problem.

More death for the old, more life for the young?

> If we took all the money given out and gave it ONLY to those people such that they were mandated stay home and survive, however that needed to happen to ensure they avoided infection, imagine how different the would world be right now.

I'm similarly angry that we don't put substantial sums of money toward teaching people to use GPG encryption for confidential emails, however that needs to happen to ensure privacy. :)

>Older people died by orders of magnitude more than younger or working class people.

You don't just stop being working class when you grow old.

Agreed. I was suggesting (albeit poorly) to pay those people to stay home instead of going to work.

Old people work in low wage in person jobs too.

Agreed. My suggestion was to pay them to stay home instead of going to work.

You are comparing the dirty real world with an idealized “only pay those at risk” scenario. Anyone over 35 had a pretty high death rate - as you said due to comorbities but how many of those were clearly identifiable?

Additionally, imagine the optics of “anyone fat can stay home while the rest of you have to go in to work.” How would that work in practice?

And finally, populations did not fully isolate. How much more quickly would things have soread (and overwhelmed the healthcare system) if folks just went about their business? How likely is it that the “not at risk” population (now with higher likelihood of having covid do to freer movement) would stay away from those at risk?

I’m not disagreeing with some of the ideas you put forth, but your comment comes across as absolutely certain. The world doesn’t work with that kind of certainty - we can’t all even agree on what did happen/work. Heck - lots of people don’t think the vaccine itself is necessary!

I can tell this subject frustrates you. One way to help yourself be less frustrated (and more correct!) would be to think more probabilistically and accept that all of the options are bad ones, and your preferred intervention might have been better but it also might have been worse. The world is dynamic and we don’t have any counterfactuals that we can use as comps.

I agree. I do feel strongly about this, and my stance is absolutely not completely thought out. I appreciate your comment and I agree with the thrust of it. I shouldn’t make comments when I’m anxious or irritated.

Thank you for your rational response to my not-so-rational post.

Since it was my comment you originally took great umbrage at, I would also like to point out that the order of magnitude difference between COVID deaths for over and under 65 looks to be about 1.3 (log(over 65 deaths)-log(under 65 deaths)):

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Se...

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=log%28868831%29+-+log%2...

The risk obviously trends upward as you get closer to 65, but quite a lot of people under that aged died with what you might think of as people having taken excess precaution. This also excludes other forms of harm short of death, such as the increased risk of heart attack, stroke, and developing of diabetes that have been shown to occur post COVID. As the parent pointed out, we have no idea how this would’ve have played out with even less caution, but I think it’s difficult to argue that things would’ve necessarily been better given these statistics.

I do not agree with your last sentence, at all. I also don’t think it is worth my time or yours to debate it. I’ve stated that I need to and am willing to keep an open mind about all of this. You doubled down.

Take care.

Insisting that words like “orders of magnitude” have meaning that aren’t consistent with what you stated is not “doubling down.” But I agree that someone incapable of acknowledging this is not worth engaging with.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com