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It's good that doctors and scientists are learning more about the virus, which will help them improve the standard of treatment, so I welcome this discovery. O

It's good that doctors and scientists are learning more about the virus, which will help them improve the standard of treatment, so I welcome this discovery. On the other hand, I find that the style of reporting contributes to the irrational panic and fear around COVID-19. Only a tiny fraction of those with COVID-19 are admitted to the hospital, a third of those develop blood clots (assuming the reporting is accurate), and, presumably, in some unknown fraction of those cases, the blood clots cause death or permanent injury. However, people will focus on this "1/3 of people get blood clots!" number, and their intuition about the risk of themselves or people they care about being maimed or killed by COVID-19 will increase irrationally.

redis_mlc 6y ago
Even HNers have been falling for that, implying that everybody will have a shorter lifespan.
talonx 6y ago
In general, I think journalists have a responsibility to choose their words carefully and avoid sensationalism without downplaying any aspects of the news they are reporting. This is something that is sorely absent from most news reporting. A cursory comparison of headlines and the news content below them, in most newspapers, reveals that if one were to read just the headline, the impression would be something far different from what the actual news is as reported in the article below it.
flatline 6y ago
It is currently the leasing cause of death in the US, I feel like there is legitimate reason for concern, if not alarm. No, it’s not going to kill 5% of the population, especially not if hospitals remain at or below capacity. But give it time and people will become less cautious Regardless of government orders, especially months from now when cold and flu season start back up. So things are mostly still “fine”, despite 80k+ deaths, but that is not guaranteed to hold.
- umanwizard 6y ago
  I never said COVID-19 is not serious, so I’m not sure what this has to do with my comment. I think it’s a cause for concern, yes — and the current reaction is miles beyond what can reasonably be described as “concern”. I think heart disease — the #2 cause of death in the US — is serious too, but I still don’t think sensationalism and panic about it is helpful.
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    What’s the R0 value for heart disease? They’re entirely different beasts.
    - umanwizard 6y ago
      Heart disease isn’t contagious, so the R_0 is zero. Can you explain what this has to do with my comment?
      - danharaj 6y ago
        One risk is self limiting whereas the other is self propagating with unknown long term consequences.
        arcticbull 6y ago
        This is quintessentially the human propensity to fear the new/unknown more than the known. Over your life 3,500,000 people will die in car accidents in the US, 6,000,000 will die of the flu. 7,000,000 will die of opioid overdoses. Each of these has serious, long-term consequences. We shouldn't panic, we should make decisive decisions based on the best information we have, and we should seek to reject fear-driven reactions just because something's new and scary. R_0 really isn't relevant, we're all in all of these together.
        danharaj 6y ago
        As I have mentioned in another thread, when you're dealing with an extreme process with exponential growth and a large absence of information, """"fear"""", also known as respecting your fucking ignorance, is most rational. Even if after the fact it looks like the pandemic didn't have catastrophic long term effects, it was still rational to be extremely cautious. Car accidents don't have the potential to collapse society. A car crash has a chance to cause other crashes but that correlation dies off exponentially fast over relatively small time and distance scales. A pandemic in our modern connected world is basically scale invariant without mitigations. With exponential phenomena, if you wait for evidence of extreme downside it'll already be too late. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. You can't wait, you have to act on your ignorance. This is not "panic". Rationality is not just about reasoning about what you know, it's about reasoning about what you don't know as well. In typical, mundane processes you can act on ignorance by collecting evidence. In extreme, self-propagating processes, one needs to apply the rationality of ignorance: extreme value theory and the statistics of extreme distributions.
kaoD 6y ago
> Only a tiny fraction of those with COVID-19 are admitted to the hospital What is your definition of tiny? My country is running an antibody study. Preliminary results are around 1-2% fatality rate. I wouldn't call that tiny, and the hospital admission rate is obviously higher.
- irq11 6y ago
  The infection fatality rate for this virus is somewhere between 0.5% and 1%, heavily skewed to the oldest members of the population. This is most reflective of the chance that an infected person will actually die, if you don’t take age into account. For younger people, the risk of death is quite low. In NYC, for example, IFR from ages 0-17 is 0, and for 18-44 is 0.019%. The hospitalization rates for those two age brackets are 0.02% and 0.2%, respectively. https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page
  - kaoD 6y ago
    > The infection fatality rate for this virus is somewhere between 0.5% and 1% Source? Your link only has CFR (and >10%). In my country's (CFR ~15%) antibody study (reminder: preliminary data) the IFR is ~1.5%. Both pretty close to initial estimates. > heavily skewed to the oldest members of the population And? Either way: the huge influx of patients completely collapsed the healthcare system, which made it harder to treat everyone else.
    - taeric 6y ago
      I don't think the argument is to not care about the older group. But it is possible more than just deaths are skewed to them. Is also possible age is just a proxy to what the real risk factor is. (My money is still on exposure to lung weakening environments.) That said, I think the natural next step for this argument is targeted testing at younger populations to see what their IFR is. With stronger (read: expensive) measures to isolate long term care facilities. Occupants, care givers, cooks, cleaners, all. (If the immunity antibody story plays out, work on ways to get antibody positive people in those positions.) And I will again point out. I'm a random internet poster. No, nobody should do something just because I think it makes sense. :)
stickfigure 6y ago
"More than half of patients with fatal coronavirus infections die!"
Alex3917 6y ago
There are people who are dying from blood clots without getting admitted to the hospital, and people who are getting released from the hospital and then dying from blood clots later. And we don’t know how many months or years after exposure you remain at risk.
- jansan 6y ago
  This. And many (maybe most) of those deaths could be prevented with the right prophylactic treatment.
  - lbeltrame 6y ago
    To be honest a study was posted here on HN (I can't find the link at the moment) where retrospectively (lots of confounding factors etc., but 2000-ish people studied) the mortality was about halved when anticoagulants were used. At the same time the risk of hemorraging events was the same as the non-anticoagulant group.

redis_mlc 6y ago

Even HNers have been falling for that, implying that everybody will have a shorter lifespan.

talonx 6y ago

In general, I think journalists have a responsibility to choose their words carefully and avoid sensationalism without downplaying any aspects of the news they are reporting. This is something that is sorely absent from most news reporting. A cursory comparison of headlines and the news content below them, in most newspapers, reveals that if one were to read just the headline, the impression would be something far different from what the actual news is as reported in the article below it.

flatline 6y ago

It is currently the leasing cause of death in the US, I feel like there is legitimate reason for concern, if not alarm. No, it’s not going to kill 5% of the population, especially not if hospitals remain at or below capacity. But give it time and people will become less cautious Regardless of government orders, especially months from now when cold and flu season start back up. So things are mostly still “fine”, despite 80k+ deaths, but that is not guaranteed to hold.

umanwizard 6y ago
I never said COVID-19 is not serious, so I’m not sure what this has to do with my comment. I think it’s a cause for concern, yes — and the current reaction is miles beyond what can reasonably be described as “concern”. I think heart disease — the #2 cause of death in the US — is serious too, but I still don’t think sensationalism and panic about it is helpful.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  What’s the R0 value for heart disease? They’re entirely different beasts.
  - umanwizard 6y ago
    Heart disease isn’t contagious, so the R_0 is zero. Can you explain what this has to do with my comment?
    - danharaj 6y ago
      One risk is self limiting whereas the other is self propagating with unknown long term consequences.
      - arcticbull 6y ago
        This is quintessentially the human propensity to fear the new/unknown more than the known. Over your life 3,500,000 people will die in car accidents in the US, 6,000,000 will die of the flu. 7,000,000 will die of opioid overdoses. Each of these has serious, long-term consequences. We shouldn't panic, we should make decisive decisions based on the best information we have, and we should seek to reject fear-driven reactions just because something's new and scary. R_0 really isn't relevant, we're all in all of these together.
        danharaj 6y ago
        As I have mentioned in another thread, when you're dealing with an extreme process with exponential growth and a large absence of information, """"fear"""", also known as respecting your fucking ignorance, is most rational. Even if after the fact it looks like the pandemic didn't have catastrophic long term effects, it was still rational to be extremely cautious. Car accidents don't have the potential to collapse society. A car crash has a chance to cause other crashes but that correlation dies off exponentially fast over relatively small time and distance scales. A pandemic in our modern connected world is basically scale invariant without mitigations. With exponential phenomena, if you wait for evidence of extreme downside it'll already be too late. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. You can't wait, you have to act on your ignorance. This is not "panic". Rationality is not just about reasoning about what you know, it's about reasoning about what you don't know as well. In typical, mundane processes you can act on ignorance by collecting evidence. In extreme, self-propagating processes, one needs to apply the rationality of ignorance: extreme value theory and the statistics of extreme distributions.

kaoD 6y ago

> Only a tiny fraction of those with COVID-19 are admitted to the hospital What is your definition of tiny? My country is running an antibody study. Preliminary results are around 1-2% fatality rate. I wouldn't call that tiny, and the hospital admission rate is obviously higher.

irq11 6y ago
The infection fatality rate for this virus is somewhere between 0.5% and 1%, heavily skewed to the oldest members of the population. This is most reflective of the chance that an infected person will actually die, if you don’t take age into account. For younger people, the risk of death is quite low. In NYC, for example, IFR from ages 0-17 is 0, and for 18-44 is 0.019%. The hospitalization rates for those two age brackets are 0.02% and 0.2%, respectively. https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page
- kaoD 6y ago
  > The infection fatality rate for this virus is somewhere between 0.5% and 1% Source? Your link only has CFR (and >10%). In my country's (CFR ~15%) antibody study (reminder: preliminary data) the IFR is ~1.5%. Both pretty close to initial estimates. > heavily skewed to the oldest members of the population And? Either way: the huge influx of patients completely collapsed the healthcare system, which made it harder to treat everyone else.
  - taeric 6y ago
    I don't think the argument is to not care about the older group. But it is possible more than just deaths are skewed to them. Is also possible age is just a proxy to what the real risk factor is. (My money is still on exposure to lung weakening environments.) That said, I think the natural next step for this argument is targeted testing at younger populations to see what their IFR is. With stronger (read: expensive) measures to isolate long term care facilities. Occupants, care givers, cooks, cleaners, all. (If the immunity antibody story plays out, work on ways to get antibody positive people in those positions.) And I will again point out. I'm a random internet poster. No, nobody should do something just because I think it makes sense. :)

stickfigure 6y ago

"More than half of patients with fatal coronavirus infections die!"

Alex3917 6y ago

There are people who are dying from blood clots without getting admitted to the hospital, and people who are getting released from the hospital and then dying from blood clots later. And we don’t know how many months or years after exposure you remain at risk.

jansan 6y ago
This. And many (maybe most) of those deaths could be prevented with the right prophylactic treatment.
- lbeltrame 6y ago
  To be honest a study was posted here on HN (I can't find the link at the moment) where retrospectively (lots of confounding factors etc., but 2000-ish people studied) the mortality was about halved when anticoagulants were used. At the same time the risk of hemorraging events was the same as the non-anticoagulant group.