6 ms·

People want this thing to be over, so there's a desire to find reasons to believe that we are further along than we thought. Combined with this being a novel di

People want this thing to be over, so there's a desire to find reasons to believe that we are further along than we thought. Combined with this being a novel disease that no one fully understands, there's a lot of room for those theories to develop. The current best science answer to how many people remain susceptible to infection is "nobody really knows but our best guess is not to assume the best case without better evidence so act like the worst case". But one thing that is easy to explain is your point about not knowing anyone who was infected: - At the peak of this epidemic in hard-hit places like the UK, something like only 1 in 400 people are known to have been infected at a time. - Many younger people (as much as 70%) show absolutely no symptoms when they are infected. - The disease is astronomically worse for elderly people. One study said that for young person, getting COVID was as risky as going for a ~200 mile car drive but as a 90 year old it was as risky as flying a WWII bomber mission. Nearly everyone who is dying is 70+ and mostly 80+. Obviously some younger people do die, but the numbers are much, much lower. We are talking 10s of people total under 40 in most countries. So unless you are hanging out with a social circle of 80-90 year olds, you actually aren't very likely know anyone directly affected! But that doesn't mean tons of people weren't dying. They just aren't the people you would know. It's a different social circle.

chosenbreed37 6y ago
> - The disease is astronomically worse for elderly people. One study said that for young person, getting COVID was as risky as going for a ~200 mile car drive but as a 90 year old it was as risky as flying a WWII bomber mission Interesting comparison. So here we're talking about the risk of dying from Covid-19. What about the risk of becoming seriously ill? What I'm curious is about is the percentage of people (younger or otherwise) who either develop no symptoms or develop symptoms so mild as to not be attributed to the virus. Do such people exist?
- lol768 6y ago
  There's also not enough discussion about what happens after recovery. I was pretty ill in March (and, to a lesser extent, in April), which necessitated some time off work. Testing availability in my country was useless at the time, so I have no formal confirmation as to what it actually was. The govt also intervened, preventing my order of a private sector antibody test being fulfilled, so who knows. The experience after recovery for me, though, was anything but straightforward and I really struggled with lasting fatigue, breathlessness and just general exhaustion. I was only able to work half-days for a decent chunk of time. I still don't feel 100% now. My GP thinks it was likely Covid-19 and offered a diagnosis of post-viral fatigue after some tests. I'm 23. Statistically, this should have barely affected folks in my age group. It's not an isolated case: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-53056785 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-she...
  - mercer 6y ago
    It's been exactly the same story for someone I know. They had a mild-but-less-mild-than-usual flu in March that was 'strange' in all the ways covid-19 is said to be. They had 'issues' like yours well into April and still don't feel 100%. No official diagnosis though.
  - _bxg1 6y ago
    I've been reading lots of reports like this from young people. One person in their 20s ended up with lasting asthma when they'd never had it before. A couple have needed lung transplants. This category of outcomes is honestly much scarier for me.
  - charwalker 6y ago
    Right. I have some pre-existing breathing issues that, even though I'm an otherwise healthy adult under 30, would probably lead to my death if I catch this. Not wearing a mask seems disrespectful to the hundred thousand + dead in the US alone. If you don't wear a mask, and I get sick, I might die. That's such an easy thing to do to prevent passing the disease on by 70%. Good luck with your recovery.
- ageitgey 6y ago
  > What I'm curious is about is the percentage of people (younger or otherwise) who either develop no symptoms or develop symptoms so mild as to not be attributed to the virus. Do such people exist? Yes, absolutely. Many countries such as England do community infection studies. Essentially they pick a random sample of people and test them every week to see many people have the disease, even if they don't know it. In the England study, they report that ~70% of positive tests involve people who didn't report any symptoms ever. That implies there are lots of people who had it who didn't know they had it. > Out of those people that tested positive for COVID-19 over the study period, only 23% (95% confidence interval: 15% to 32%) reported experiencing one or more of the various symptoms at the time of their test. Out of those who reported testing positive, 33% (95% confidence interval: 23% to 44%) reported experiencing symptoms at any point in the period around testing positive. This was at the time of the visit, or at either the preceding or following visits. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/bulletins/coronaviruscovid19infectionsurveypilot/12june2020 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan... Of course, the question is do these people get counted later in other ways - i.e. what percentage of them would show up in antibody surveys? That is currently a difficult question to answer with a high level of certainty for several reasons. Right now, we don't know for sure what level of infection causes you to develop detectable immunoglobulins, we don't know how long those stick around, and we don't know how much our immune system leans on T cells instead to fight COVID which don't show up in the existing antibody tests at all and are much more difficult to test for. And it's also worth pointing out that it's not clear that asymptomatic infections are as infectious as symptomatic infections. So don't assume they are equal. A recent study showed that asymptomatic people could shed the virus for 3 weeks, but it's really hard to know if that's active virus that could infect someone or not. There's a lot more research to be done. See https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/06/22/thoughts-on-antibody-persistence-and-the-pandemic https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/06/22/th...
  - gizmo 6y ago
    > it's not clear that asymptomatic infections are as infectious as symptomatic infections Yes it is clear (they're not)! Superspreading events are caused by people who are clearly symptomatic but don't act responsibly. Most spreading in total happens via nonsymptomatic or presymptomatic people, because covid19 is a coronavirus and that's how coronaviruses work. No point in pretending this is some kind of big unknown. If you don't believe me, let's look at this story of army recruits. Those who tested positive were isolated, those who remained tested negative and trained together with masks and social distancing. Result, 8 days later 142 out of 640 tested positive. https://outline.com/dK2TWd https://outline.com/dK2TWd
- RaceWon 6y ago
  >> What I'm curious is about is the percentage of people (younger or otherwise) who either develop no symptoms or develop symptoms so mild as to not be attributed to the virus. Do such people exist? My spouse and I both work in a hospital. She got covid and so did one of our two siblings. Neither of them had any symptoms (spouse is in her 50's, our sibling is twenty plus.) I never got it nor did our other sibling. I also don't have antibodies. Go figure... it makes no sense to me. As a side note: we are not in patient care, however when this was at it's early peak here in the States--I don't know how the nurses, aides, and doctors were able to do their jobs everyday. It was fricken scary walking through the halls and passing workers dressed in plastic; what with all the unknowns at that time, and the news reports of death throughout the world. Those workers deserve respect if not outright awe and a Huge Cash Bonus... Huge.
  - chosenbreed37 6y ago
    > My spouse and I both work in a hospital. She got covid and so did one of our two siblings. Neither of them had any symptoms (spouse is in her 50's, our sibling is twenty plus.) I never got it nor did our other sibling. I also don't have antibodies. Go figure... it makes no sense to me. I know it's anecdotal but it's interesting that your spouse contracted the virus but you did not. I'm assuming you live together. But then again I imagine it is quite common for one person in a household to catch a cold whilst everybody remains unaffected...I'm not equating covid-19 to the common cold. It came to mind as something that appears to spread in the same way.
    - SAI_Peregrinus 6y ago
      Also not everyone who gets it will notice and they may not even generate antibodies. If the innate immune response (as opposed to the adaptive response) is strong enough the patient can get infected and recover without ever generating antibodies.
  - valarauko 6y ago
    >My spouse and I both work in a hospital. She got covid and so did one of our two siblings. Neither of them had any symptoms (spouse is in her 50's, our sibling is twenty plus.) I never got it nor did our other sibling. Apologies, but the text makes it seem like your spouse is also your sibling.
- ericd 6y ago
  Anecdotally, I know at least one person in their early 30s who was seriously ill for a month. He got turned away from hospitals and testing, but he couldn’t sleep well for about a month because he had to consciously think about breathing. Saying “it‘s as dangerous as a 200 mile car ride” obviously doesn’t really capture the full picture.
mcv 6y ago
From what I heard, about half the deaths are people under 55 (edit: I can't find that source anymore and all figures suggest it's wrong). The individual risk is still higher the older you are, but plenty of young people have died from this (610 in the US, for example). But even if you don't know anyone who died from it, you can still know people who are ill. My ex-brother-in-law has been in and out of the hospital 4 times for COVID-19. In many countries, old people are less likely to get infected, because those countries take special effort to protect old people. Some countries didn't or messed up, which has lead to massacres in elderly care homes. Though the real big risk here is: it's possible to carry the virus without having any symptoms. So you can transmit it to other people without ever realising.
- lmilcin 6y ago
  That's not true. All believable statistics I have seen show only very small number of deaths in age group 55 and lower. Outrageous claims require outrageous proofs, you need to volunteer your sources if you want to convince anybody that 55 and younger are large share of deaths. "From what I have heard" is not an outrageous proof on HN. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-sex-demographics/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...
  - mcv 6y ago
    There's different ways of looking at statistics. Most statistics are about the death rates for infected cases per age group, which doesn't account for situations where elderly people are kept from coming into contact with the virus in the first place. Unfortunately, I'm unable to find good global statistics on absolute number of deaths broken down per age group. I have come across the claim I mentioned in response to a claim that young people almost never die from this. That is simply not true: young people do die, but it looks like half is indeed an exaggeration. Even so, the claim that it's in the double digits is also false; in the US, 610 people under 44 have died[0]. Claims that young people are perfectly safe are dangerous, even if the danger is a lot higher for older people. [0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-sex-demographics/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...
gizmo 6y ago
> The current best science answer to how many people remain susceptible to infection is "nobody really knows but our best guess is not to assume the best case without better evidence so act like the worst case". Absolutely not. The scientific approach is to look at the new disease and see how it compares to other similar RTIs. For instance, covid19 was discovered around October at the start of the seasonal flu season in the northern hemisphere and it was a coronavirus, which makes it 95% likely to be strongly seasonal, highly infectious, and mild. It also should lead us to assume that exposure to prior viruses gives (some) protection, and that the elderly and immunocompromised are the most at risk. In addition, we know that diseases like this spread highly unevenly (powerlaw distribution) with a small number of big hotspots and many places that are left largely unaffected. This is the BASELINE SCENARIO, based on the knowledge we have of hundreds of similar respiratory infections. Covid19 could be a different animal, but for that we'd have to carefully look at the data. But what did we do? We took seriously the doom-saying of scientists that extrapolated from comically unrepresentative cruise ship data and other hot spots. This is junk science, because data from a hot spot doesn't say --anything-- about how infectious a hotspot disease is or how deadly, except that it's possible for people to die from it, but that's also entirely unsurprising for a RTI. > At the peak of this epidemic in hard-hit places like the UK, something like only 1 in 400 people are known to have been infected at a time. Impossible. Covid reached Europe by December, and has spread like wildfire since. > Many younger people (as much as 70%) show absolutely no symptoms when they are infected. Oh no, way more than 70%. How many kids got visible symptoms? Close to zero. And many got infected because the virus is absolutely everywhere. At least 70% of people in the 50-65 age group have no visible symptoms, so for young people the number must be drastically higher. > The disease is astronomically worse for elderly people. All cause mortality isn't high worldwide. We had two mild flu seasons in a row and that left us with many elderly with a negative life expectancy.
- ageitgey 6y ago
  > Absolutely not. The scientific approach is to look at the new disease and see how it compares to other similar RTIs. I think the the scientific approach is to use the best data you have at a given time and update your understanding as you get new data. You make a lot of big claims that contradict multiple specific studies with published results. It's clear you hope that the epidemic is over (as we all do). But hope isn't enough. To quote Derek Lowe [1], a scientist working in drug discovery: "Everyone will have seen the various population surveys with antibody testing that have suggested, in most cases, that a rather small percentage of people have been exposed. Think of the various ways you could get such a result: (1) it’s just what it looks like, and most people are unprotected because they have so far been unexposed. (2) the antibody results are what they look like – low exposure – but people’s T-cell responses mean that there are actually more people protected than we realize. (3) the antibody results are deceiving, because the antibody response fades over time, meaning that more people have been exposed than it looks like. (3a) the antibody response fades, but the T-cell response is still protective (3b) the antibody response fades and so does the T-cell response. That last one is not a happy possibility." So we essentially have 4 plausible scenarios that explain our best study results. We all hope it's (2) or (3a). But I wouldn't say that we have a lot of actual evidence to prove that yet. [1] https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/06/22/thoughts-on-antibody-persistence-and-the-pandemic https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/06/22/th...
LandR 6y ago
I don't think for most people dying is the scary outcome, like you say it's very very unlikely for a healthy young person. But what is the odds that you survive but then require kidney transplant or lung transplant or have leave ICU only to face weeks or months of recovery. This latter bit is a unknown to me, so I don't know what my actual risk is.
- gizmo 6y ago
  Close to 0, if you're reasonably healthy.
- lbeltrame 6y ago
  > only to face weeks or months of recovery. FTR, this also happens with other respiratory diseases. You can also take quite a bit of time (months) to fully recover from "regular" pneumonia.
  - charwalker 6y ago
    Which is still really bad! Especially when wearing a mask may prevent spread by 70%. Just because other diseases are also bad is not reason to shirk personal safety and protection. I don't want the flu same as I don't want COVID.
    - lbeltrame 6y ago
      I didn't want to downplay the fact that it can be bad. What I meant to say is that this is a respiratory disease virus, and a lot of the stuff it is supposed to cause (according to the press) is actually due to that, not because it is novel. Even the reported brain infections (neural invasion) aren't a unique feature of this virus, but are recorded as happening with other coronaviruses (the most common ones, not SARS or MERS).
  - rurban 6y ago
    It's called flu. Which are basically two diseases, first the bacterial infection in all the dead cells the T-cells killed. In the lung this is pneumonia. Pretty serious stuff. Second the rampage the T-cells are doing elsewhere to fight suspected virus cells. They might attack way too many healthy cells everywhere. This is called the cykotine storm, treated with standard cykotine storm suppressors. The virus itself is doing nothing, it just causes the immunosystem to overreact.
Simon_says 6y ago
How many deaths in terms of Libraries of Congress?
op00to 6y ago
> something something car drive risk wwii bomber This line of defense completely ignores the long term damage that we know occurs in some Covid cases, even those in young people. Pneumonia can cause long term damage too. Saying the risk (I assume of death) is less ignores the incalculable risk of life long lung damage.

chosenbreed37 6y ago

> - The disease is astronomically worse for elderly people. One study said that for young person, getting COVID was as risky as going for a ~200 mile car drive but as a 90 year old it was as risky as flying a WWII bomber mission Interesting comparison. So here we're talking about the risk of dying from Covid-19. What about the risk of becoming seriously ill? What I'm curious is about is the percentage of people (younger or otherwise) who either develop no symptoms or develop symptoms so mild as to not be attributed to the virus. Do such people exist?

lol768 6y ago
There's also not enough discussion about what happens after recovery. I was pretty ill in March (and, to a lesser extent, in April), which necessitated some time off work. Testing availability in my country was useless at the time, so I have no formal confirmation as to what it actually was. The govt also intervened, preventing my order of a private sector antibody test being fulfilled, so who knows. The experience after recovery for me, though, was anything but straightforward and I really struggled with lasting fatigue, breathlessness and just general exhaustion. I was only able to work half-days for a decent chunk of time. I still don't feel 100% now. My GP thinks it was likely Covid-19 and offered a diagnosis of post-viral fatigue after some tests. I'm 23. Statistically, this should have barely affected folks in my age group. It's not an isolated case: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-53056785 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-she...
- mercer 6y ago
  It's been exactly the same story for someone I know. They had a mild-but-less-mild-than-usual flu in March that was 'strange' in all the ways covid-19 is said to be. They had 'issues' like yours well into April and still don't feel 100%. No official diagnosis though.
- _bxg1 6y ago
  I've been reading lots of reports like this from young people. One person in their 20s ended up with lasting asthma when they'd never had it before. A couple have needed lung transplants. This category of outcomes is honestly much scarier for me.
- charwalker 6y ago
  Right. I have some pre-existing breathing issues that, even though I'm an otherwise healthy adult under 30, would probably lead to my death if I catch this. Not wearing a mask seems disrespectful to the hundred thousand + dead in the US alone. If you don't wear a mask, and I get sick, I might die. That's such an easy thing to do to prevent passing the disease on by 70%. Good luck with your recovery.
ageitgey 6y ago
> What I'm curious is about is the percentage of people (younger or otherwise) who either develop no symptoms or develop symptoms so mild as to not be attributed to the virus. Do such people exist? Yes, absolutely. Many countries such as England do community infection studies. Essentially they pick a random sample of people and test them every week to see many people have the disease, even if they don't know it. In the England study, they report that ~70% of positive tests involve people who didn't report any symptoms ever. That implies there are lots of people who had it who didn't know they had it. > Out of those people that tested positive for COVID-19 over the study period, only 23% (95% confidence interval: 15% to 32%) reported experiencing one or more of the various symptoms at the time of their test. Out of those who reported testing positive, 33% (95% confidence interval: 23% to 44%) reported experiencing symptoms at any point in the period around testing positive. This was at the time of the visit, or at either the preceding or following visits. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/bulletins/coronaviruscovid19infectionsurveypilot/12june2020 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan... Of course, the question is do these people get counted later in other ways - i.e. what percentage of them would show up in antibody surveys? That is currently a difficult question to answer with a high level of certainty for several reasons. Right now, we don't know for sure what level of infection causes you to develop detectable immunoglobulins, we don't know how long those stick around, and we don't know how much our immune system leans on T cells instead to fight COVID which don't show up in the existing antibody tests at all and are much more difficult to test for. And it's also worth pointing out that it's not clear that asymptomatic infections are as infectious as symptomatic infections. So don't assume they are equal. A recent study showed that asymptomatic people could shed the virus for 3 weeks, but it's really hard to know if that's active virus that could infect someone or not. There's a lot more research to be done. See https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/06/22/thoughts-on-antibody-persistence-and-the-pandemic https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/06/22/th...
- gizmo 6y ago
  > it's not clear that asymptomatic infections are as infectious as symptomatic infections Yes it is clear (they're not)! Superspreading events are caused by people who are clearly symptomatic but don't act responsibly. Most spreading in total happens via nonsymptomatic or presymptomatic people, because covid19 is a coronavirus and that's how coronaviruses work. No point in pretending this is some kind of big unknown. If you don't believe me, let's look at this story of army recruits. Those who tested positive were isolated, those who remained tested negative and trained together with masks and social distancing. Result, 8 days later 142 out of 640 tested positive. https://outline.com/dK2TWd https://outline.com/dK2TWd
RaceWon 6y ago
>> What I'm curious is about is the percentage of people (younger or otherwise) who either develop no symptoms or develop symptoms so mild as to not be attributed to the virus. Do such people exist? My spouse and I both work in a hospital. She got covid and so did one of our two siblings. Neither of them had any symptoms (spouse is in her 50's, our sibling is twenty plus.) I never got it nor did our other sibling. I also don't have antibodies. Go figure... it makes no sense to me. As a side note: we are not in patient care, however when this was at it's early peak here in the States--I don't know how the nurses, aides, and doctors were able to do their jobs everyday. It was fricken scary walking through the halls and passing workers dressed in plastic; what with all the unknowns at that time, and the news reports of death throughout the world. Those workers deserve respect if not outright awe and a Huge Cash Bonus... Huge.
- chosenbreed37 6y ago
  > My spouse and I both work in a hospital. She got covid and so did one of our two siblings. Neither of them had any symptoms (spouse is in her 50's, our sibling is twenty plus.) I never got it nor did our other sibling. I also don't have antibodies. Go figure... it makes no sense to me. I know it's anecdotal but it's interesting that your spouse contracted the virus but you did not. I'm assuming you live together. But then again I imagine it is quite common for one person in a household to catch a cold whilst everybody remains unaffected...I'm not equating covid-19 to the common cold. It came to mind as something that appears to spread in the same way.
  - SAI_Peregrinus 6y ago
    Also not everyone who gets it will notice and they may not even generate antibodies. If the innate immune response (as opposed to the adaptive response) is strong enough the patient can get infected and recover without ever generating antibodies.
- valarauko 6y ago
  >My spouse and I both work in a hospital. She got covid and so did one of our two siblings. Neither of them had any symptoms (spouse is in her 50's, our sibling is twenty plus.) I never got it nor did our other sibling. Apologies, but the text makes it seem like your spouse is also your sibling.
ericd 6y ago
Anecdotally, I know at least one person in their early 30s who was seriously ill for a month. He got turned away from hospitals and testing, but he couldn’t sleep well for about a month because he had to consciously think about breathing. Saying “it‘s as dangerous as a 200 mile car ride” obviously doesn’t really capture the full picture.

mcv 6y ago

From what I heard, about half the deaths are people under 55 (edit: I can't find that source anymore and all figures suggest it's wrong). The individual risk is still higher the older you are, but plenty of young people have died from this (610 in the US, for example). But even if you don't know anyone who died from it, you can still know people who are ill. My ex-brother-in-law has been in and out of the hospital 4 times for COVID-19. In many countries, old people are less likely to get infected, because those countries take special effort to protect old people. Some countries didn't or messed up, which has lead to massacres in elderly care homes. Though the real big risk here is: it's possible to carry the virus without having any symptoms. So you can transmit it to other people without ever realising.

lmilcin 6y ago
That's not true. All believable statistics I have seen show only very small number of deaths in age group 55 and lower. Outrageous claims require outrageous proofs, you need to volunteer your sources if you want to convince anybody that 55 and younger are large share of deaths. "From what I have heard" is not an outrageous proof on HN. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-sex-demographics/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...
- mcv 6y ago
  There's different ways of looking at statistics. Most statistics are about the death rates for infected cases per age group, which doesn't account for situations where elderly people are kept from coming into contact with the virus in the first place. Unfortunately, I'm unable to find good global statistics on absolute number of deaths broken down per age group. I have come across the claim I mentioned in response to a claim that young people almost never die from this. That is simply not true: young people do die, but it looks like half is indeed an exaggeration. Even so, the claim that it's in the double digits is also false; in the US, 610 people under 44 have died[0]. Claims that young people are perfectly safe are dangerous, even if the danger is a lot higher for older people. [0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-sex-demographics/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...

gizmo 6y ago

> The current best science answer to how many people remain susceptible to infection is "nobody really knows but our best guess is not to assume the best case without better evidence so act like the worst case". Absolutely not. The scientific approach is to look at the new disease and see how it compares to other similar RTIs. For instance, covid19 was discovered around October at the start of the seasonal flu season in the northern hemisphere and it was a coronavirus, which makes it 95% likely to be strongly seasonal, highly infectious, and mild. It also should lead us to assume that exposure to prior viruses gives (some) protection, and that the elderly and immunocompromised are the most at risk. In addition, we know that diseases like this spread highly unevenly (powerlaw distribution) with a small number of big hotspots and many places that are left largely unaffected. This is the BASELINE SCENARIO, based on the knowledge we have of hundreds of similar respiratory infections. Covid19 could be a different animal, but for that we'd have to carefully look at the data. But what did we do? We took seriously the doom-saying of scientists that extrapolated from comically unrepresentative cruise ship data and other hot spots. This is junk science, because data from a hot spot doesn't say --anything-- about how infectious a hotspot disease is or how deadly, except that it's possible for people to die from it, but that's also entirely unsurprising for a RTI. > At the peak of this epidemic in hard-hit places like the UK, something like only 1 in 400 people are known to have been infected at a time. Impossible. Covid reached Europe by December, and has spread like wildfire since. > Many younger people (as much as 70%) show absolutely no symptoms when they are infected. Oh no, way more than 70%. How many kids got visible symptoms? Close to zero. And many got infected because the virus is absolutely everywhere. At least 70% of people in the 50-65 age group have no visible symptoms, so for young people the number must be drastically higher. > The disease is astronomically worse for elderly people. All cause mortality isn't high worldwide. We had two mild flu seasons in a row and that left us with many elderly with a negative life expectancy.

ageitgey 6y ago
> Absolutely not. The scientific approach is to look at the new disease and see how it compares to other similar RTIs. I think the the scientific approach is to use the best data you have at a given time and update your understanding as you get new data. You make a lot of big claims that contradict multiple specific studies with published results. It's clear you hope that the epidemic is over (as we all do). But hope isn't enough. To quote Derek Lowe [1], a scientist working in drug discovery: "Everyone will have seen the various population surveys with antibody testing that have suggested, in most cases, that a rather small percentage of people have been exposed. Think of the various ways you could get such a result: (1) it’s just what it looks like, and most people are unprotected because they have so far been unexposed. (2) the antibody results are what they look like – low exposure – but people’s T-cell responses mean that there are actually more people protected than we realize. (3) the antibody results are deceiving, because the antibody response fades over time, meaning that more people have been exposed than it looks like. (3a) the antibody response fades, but the T-cell response is still protective (3b) the antibody response fades and so does the T-cell response. That last one is not a happy possibility." So we essentially have 4 plausible scenarios that explain our best study results. We all hope it's (2) or (3a). But I wouldn't say that we have a lot of actual evidence to prove that yet. [1] https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/06/22/thoughts-on-antibody-persistence-and-the-pandemic https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/06/22/th...

LandR 6y ago

I don't think for most people dying is the scary outcome, like you say it's very very unlikely for a healthy young person. But what is the odds that you survive but then require kidney transplant or lung transplant or have leave ICU only to face weeks or months of recovery. This latter bit is a unknown to me, so I don't know what my actual risk is.

gizmo 6y ago
Close to 0, if you're reasonably healthy.
lbeltrame 6y ago
> only to face weeks or months of recovery. FTR, this also happens with other respiratory diseases. You can also take quite a bit of time (months) to fully recover from "regular" pneumonia.
- charwalker 6y ago
  Which is still really bad! Especially when wearing a mask may prevent spread by 70%. Just because other diseases are also bad is not reason to shirk personal safety and protection. I don't want the flu same as I don't want COVID.
  - lbeltrame 6y ago
    I didn't want to downplay the fact that it can be bad. What I meant to say is that this is a respiratory disease virus, and a lot of the stuff it is supposed to cause (according to the press) is actually due to that, not because it is novel. Even the reported brain infections (neural invasion) aren't a unique feature of this virus, but are recorded as happening with other coronaviruses (the most common ones, not SARS or MERS).
- rurban 6y ago
  It's called flu. Which are basically two diseases, first the bacterial infection in all the dead cells the T-cells killed. In the lung this is pneumonia. Pretty serious stuff. Second the rampage the T-cells are doing elsewhere to fight suspected virus cells. They might attack way too many healthy cells everywhere. This is called the cykotine storm, treated with standard cykotine storm suppressors. The virus itself is doing nothing, it just causes the immunosystem to overreact.

Simon_says 6y ago

How many deaths in terms of Libraries of Congress?

op00to 6y ago

> something something car drive risk wwii bomber This line of defense completely ignores the long term damage that we know occurs in some Covid cases, even those in young people. Pneumonia can cause long term damage too. Saying the risk (I assume of death) is less ignores the incalculable risk of life long lung damage.