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I think a lot of people in this discussion are pitting the argument at people prioritizing their individual choices over the collective health of the community.

I think a lot of people in this discussion are pitting the argument at people prioritizing their individual choices over the collective health of the community. I think that is a very singular framing from one side. A lot of people I know just believe that the virus itself is not as deadly as the reaction warrants. The infectious mortality rate of Covid is at best twice that of the normal flu, which isn't nothing and warrants action but probably not 40M people unemployed and possible national depression. The fact is if your under 30 you have a better chance of being hit by lightning then dying of Covid. It's pretty rational for someone to understand that and make personal choices without feeling like they're causing real danger to the community.

jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
Not "possible depression". Depression. The economy crashed. It's over. The government's been buying the stock market to prop everything up. All the numbers you see are fabricated. The market never recovered from the initial crash. Last I checked a 3rd of Americans aren't paying rent now? It's going to explode dude.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  Much of the fall in activity is independent of announced quarantine measures. People simply stopped engaging in commercial activity. This appears across multiple states in the US and in multiple countries. Restaurant, cinema, theatre, and travel bookings most especially.
- e12e 6y ago
  AFAIK global capitalism has been in an over production crisis since at least 2008. So it's not a depression due to covid-19, but a worsening of the existing depression due to covid-19. Still, those on top are still raking in profit - arguably the crisis isn't that we suddenly are running out of energy, food or housing - just that we're distributing it so badly that we've created poor living conditions for a lot of people.
- nightski 6y ago
  The stock market recovery is not due to the government "buying the stock market" because they never did that. If you look at winners and losers in the stock market, followed the Q2 earnings season and saw what companies were facing, it seems clear to me that our economy faced a transition rather than a crash. There are huge winners in this market. Home Depot, Target, and other major retailers all announced record breaking income this past quarter. People are still shopping. Tech has lead the charge due to WFH and the shift to online. There are many more factors in this economic shift than could be explained by the Fed's money printing.
  - jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
    Whatever helps you sleep at night. Just don't be surprised when you wake up tomorrow and can't afford to buy a loaf of bread with your american monopoly money.
  - arkadiytehgraet 6y ago
    Dude (or dudess or whatever), Fed literally has positions in all sorts of stocks, including bankrupt HTZ. How is that not "buying the stock market"?
    - kbenson 6y ago
      How much actual buying and selling have they done? How does that compare to a year ago? How does that compare to the market as a whole? Those are actually relevant, while the government just having some stock is not, so those are what we should be looking at.
    - throwawaygh 6y ago
      Wrong. Fed did not purchase a single share of HTZ. They hold two ETFs that include Hertz corporate bonds. Not stocks. Bonds. And not new issues.
      - divbzero 6y ago
        Yeah GP has the facts wrong. There has actually been interesting speculation that the Fed will eventually buy stocks similar to the Bank of Japan over the past few decades [1] but the Fed hasn’t done it yet. [1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevincoldiron/2020/07/18/the-fed-is-going-to-buy-stocks/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevincoldiron/2020/07/18/the-fe... (Edit: Maybe GP was thinking that bankruptcy could lead to debt converting into equity? But even then the Fed’s holding would be indirect and the bond ETF probably wouldn’t hold onto the equity.)
- amiga_500 6y ago
  The Fed are buying corporate ETF bonds, not stocks.
- spenczar5 6y ago
  Do you have evidence that the government has been buying the stock market to prop everything up? I haven't heard that before.
wiradikusuma 6y ago
But you know that you can be a carrier and infect less healthy people right?
- nradov 6y ago
  Asymptomatic transmission, while possible, is rare. https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-2671 https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-2671
  - raverbashing 6y ago
    If it was, we wouldn't be in this situation (and the article doesn't say anything about asymptomatic transmission, only that 8% of secondary infected people were asymptomatic)
  - mkolodny 6y ago
    "Of these 127 [COVID-19 cases], 8 (6.3% [CI, 2.1% to 10.5%]) were asymptomatic. Of the 119 symptomatic cases, 20 (16.8%) were defined as mild, 87 (73.1%) as moderate, and 12 (10.1%) as severe or critical." 6.3% of transmissions being asymptomatic doesn't sound rare to me. Also, the 89.9% of people with mild or moderate cases may still not realize they have covid, and spread it.
    - Rapzid 6y ago
      It's also worth noting that there is confusion between "asymptomatic" and "pre-symptomatic". In the health industry apparently "asymptomatic" means you never present symptoms, however you can be "pre-symptomatic"(meaning you will present symptoms) and spread the disease as well. The media had been using "asymptomatic" to mean both, but then a study came out saying it was rare and blah blah blah. Should I be surprised how many people on HN have resorted to conspiracy theories, accusations of malice, and discreditation over changing and mixed information? We live in a world of changing requirements but somehow changing recommendations based on new and changing information is all the evidence we need to indulge ourselves in confirmation bias?
- 6y ago
lazide 6y ago
Best data I've seen is 6x (.63% IFR). And due to lack of existing immunity from the Flu which keeps the flu at less than 10% of the population/yr, we're looking at a dramatic death toll. That people don't want to believe it, without evidence to the contrary, just makes them solidly into the wishful thinking category - and likely spreaders that will inevitably get someone killed.
- rootusrootus 6y ago
  Even at 6x, it still very much comes up for debate. Most reasonable people can agree that a .01% IFR is not worth shutting everything down for, and that a 50% IFR is definitely worth shutting everything down for. Where you fall on this spectrum determines whether someone will call you a wishful thinker or not. Everyone believes their own opinion is the best.
  - bluntfang 6y ago
    >Most reasonable people can agree Is this just a way of saying that people who don't agree with you aren't reasonable? What do we do with those people's opinions if they are the majority?
    - rootusrootus 6y ago
      No, it is setting a wide range and excluding the extremes -- that is, people who aren't even within spitting distance of a good faith debate. 0.01% IFR would be 1/10th of the seasonal flu. And 50% would be up there with bubonic plague. I feel pretty comfortable with my definition of 'reasonable people.'
      - bluntfang 6y ago
        so what happens when all the people you think are unreasonable think you're the one being unreasonable? How do you deal with that?
- squidlogic 6y ago
e12e 6y ago
In regards to how dangerous it is, there are two other important factors - the number of people that don't get terribly ill, but suffer long term effects - and the fact that if any local/regional health system is overwhelmed - all those survivors who needed intubation would have been casualties. I'm not sure how that would affect the effective mortality rate.
jdhn 6y ago
I'm tired of hearing about "the new normal". This is NOT normal, and the weak attempts to make it normal is just disgusting. Like you said, this isn't as deadly as people first thought it was, but it seems that those in charge don't want to admit that they're wrong, and as a result everybody is suffering from this even if they really wouldn't suffer from COVID.
- briffle 6y ago
  When the virus hit China, it had around a 4% death rate. Now, in the US, we have 5.6M confirmed cases, and 175k deaths. That is 3% death rate. (although, deaths lag behind diagnosis) You're right, its less than they first feared, but not much. And still 30 times the death rate of the flu. There have been some groups that keep looking at the number of deaths, and compare it to the population as a whole, to make the numbers look much smaller. But those are purposefully deceptive.
  - ghufran_syed 6y ago
    and how many unconfirmed cases? I personally know 10 people who have had symptoms that are likely covid, but not serious enough to go get tested. The fact that the least symptomatic patients are also least likely to get tested means that the calculation you presented gives us, at best, an upper bound. A better way to get the true measure would be based on population-based antibody testing. More info available at the WHO website: https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/estimating-mortality-from-covid-19 https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/estimating...
  - nradov 6y ago
    The actual best estimate of death rate in the US is 0.65%, not 3%. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
    - jashmatthews 6y ago
      Sadly 3% is the right number to use for that comparison between observed fatality in the US and earlier estimates https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality The estimated IFR is quite different and can’t be just swapped.
showdeadtest 6y ago
To amplify this, while I appreciate the passion some people have for community health, there has been a pattern of bald-faced lying that is unsustainable and potentially counterproductive. I can see somebody going to the gym and not feeling bad about it for that reason alone.
- cloakandswagger 6y ago
  As most authoritarian-collectivist movements go, the "Stay the fuck home" crowd took no time at all in destroying all goodwill towards their worldview. Had its tone been more educational and pleading instead of arrogant, shaming and outright threatening they could have avoided polarizing the conversation and creating a contrarian counter-movement that resists even sensible compromise.
  - duderific 6y ago
    Lives are at stake here, so the "Stay the fuck home" crowd, as you put it, has a right to express feelings that may be stronger than "educational and pleading."
    - drevil-v2 6y ago
      I guess the over 1000 health professionals who said BLM protests are OK but everyone else "stay the fuck home" did not help make the case.
    - _fat_santa 6y ago
      But that's precisely the problem. While you may think this way, someone else may not. So when you try to convince that person from an assumption that they agree with you on the importance of the premise, you fall flat.
    - showdeadtest 6y ago
      People aren’t staying home, so it seems like that didn’t work.
    - cloakandswagger 6y ago
cowpig 6y ago
> It's pretty rational for someone to understand that and make personal choices... No, it's not; it's arrogant. All of the epidemiologists and experts seem to think otherwise. What do you know that they don't? So far 172,000 people have died in the US due to Coronavirus, directly[1]. The actual number of people who have died, if you factor in the effect of the virus on infrastructure and missed diagnoses is about double that[2]. We're approaching the total death toll of World War II[3]. Your claim that it's comparable to lightning, which kills about 50 people per year in the USA, is completely inaccurate and displays a grandiose arrogance. An arrogance that, nationwide, has resulted in a staggering number of tragedies this year. [1] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html [2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronavirus-missing-deaths.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#Total_deaths_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#Total_...
- bazzert 6y ago
  >> We're approaching the total death toll of World War II[3]. assuming you mean the US death toll also bear in mind the median age of WW II casualties was something like 26; while the median age for covid victims is 75+. Not to diminish the latter but they are very different.
  - dijit 6y ago
    > while the median age for covid victims is 75+. You mean 48. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/pdfs/mm6924e2-H.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/pdfs/mm6924e2-H.pdf
    - motbob 6y ago
      No, that's the median cases age.
    - karagenit 6y ago
      I think the link you cited states that 48 is the median age of infections, whereas the person you're replying to is talking about deaths. I don't have national data, but in my state (Indiana) 51.4% of deaths are 80+ years old according to coronavirus.in.gov
dragonwriter 6y ago
> It's pretty rational for someone to understand that and make personal choices without feeling like they're causing real danger to the community. Discounting externalized costs to zero is rational, true; that's the source of the tragedy of commons (in the economics/game theory sense, not necessarily the somewhat disputed original example for which the effect is named.) But that's a manner in which individual rationality is insufficient to address issues whose effects aren't limited to the individuals engaging in transactions.
- showdeadtest 6y ago
  While you raise a good point, I question the wisdom of relying solely on hastily devised rules and accompanying sloganeering to solve such issues. I understand the pandemic is an emergency, but it was predictable. If we got caught with our pants down, we got caught with our pants down. Personally I think it’s time to put the hysteria aside and start discussing the longer-term view.
dependenttypes 6y ago
You have to also account for the people who will survive but end up with some sort of permanent health damage due to it.
mdparker89 6y ago
Assuming that the probability of being hit by lightning is higher than the probability of dying from COVID under 30, it does not follow that one should take the similar levels of precaution for both. Lightning does not present systemic risk. Me getting struck by lightning doesn't change your odds of being struck.
- austhrow743 6y ago
  A relevant factor for countries that have largely controlled covid, or back in March when it was uncertain what direction which countries were going in. For ones that have just let it rip though, the people who were going to get it from you are just going to get it from someone else if you isolate. If I as an Australian have covid and go to a gym and infect a bunch of people, I've given covid to people who otherwise wouldn't have caught it. If an American does the same, they've given covid to people who would have just caught it next week or next month. They've also given it to less people because a lot more people in that gym have already had it than in my Australian one.
ben7799 6y ago
It's maybe rational if you're an Ayn Rand Objectivist and you think the older people you infect who die are not worth your time and energy to keep safe. It's very much a selfish prioritization of the individual above everyone else to think you're under 30 so no precautions need to be taken even though someone under 30 is perfectly capable of passing it on to a whole bunch more people who might be older & vulnerable.
smohare 6y ago
Focusing on the death rate as a singular statistic is highly flawed. It’s akin to not taking into account health externalities when discussing the coast of energy sources. COVID-19 has pretty severe morbidity that make it absolutely nothing like the flu. Some afflicted with severe cases will require months of rehabilitation (never mind working as usual) and probably suffer lifelong complications. Moreover, it’s the hubris and ignorance of people like the speakeasy gym goers that will prolong the pandemic and arguably case more economic harm than any original lockdowns.
callmeal 6y ago
>The infectious mortality rate of Covid is at best twice that of the normal flu, which isn't nothing and warrants action but probably not 40M people unemployed and possible national depression. This sounds like Y2K all over again. No one is disputing the mortality rate. But it's starting to look like all the people who are pulling out that strawman are ignoring the "infectious" part of that equation.[1] Do we have enough healthcare capacity to support the people who get sick enough to need care until herd immunity is achieved? And the same people like to bring up Sweden, all the while conveniently forgetting the social mores and jokes. The headline image from this[0] story makes it very clear that what worked in Sweden would not work anywhere else in the world. [0] https://europost.eu/en/a/view/sweden-goes-it-alone-28030 https://europost.eu/en/a/view/sweden-goes-it-alone-28030 [1] https://www.healthline.com/health/r-nought-reproduction-number https://www.healthline.com/health/r-nought-reproduction-numb... According to a review article published in BMC Medicine, the R0 value of the 1918 pandemic was estimated to be between 1.4 and 2.8. But when the swine flu, or H1N1 virus, came back in 2009, its R0 value was between 1.4 and 1.6, report researchers in the journal Science. The R0 for COVID-19 is a median of 5.7, according to a study published online in Emerging Infectious Diseases. That’s about double an earlier R0 estimate of 2.2 to 2.7 ... The researchers estimated a doubling time of 2 to 3 days, which is much faster than earlier estimates of 6 to 7 days. The doubling time is how long it takes for the number of coronavirus cases, hospitalizations, and deaths to double. With an R0 of 5.7, at least 82 percent of the population needs to be immune to COVID-19 to stop its transmission through vaccination and herd immunity.
footnotemotion 6y ago
It's ignorant to simply look at the mortality rate of the disease. You have to also consider how transmissible the disease is. If you infected the entire US population with the flu over the course of a few months it would be complete devastation even though it's just "the normal flu" in terms of how an individual's immune system deals with it. By this logic COVID19 is nothing compared to SARS or EBOLA because those have higher mortality rates, but obviously COVID spreads much faster and farther so it has had a huge international impact.
monadic2 6y ago
Fuck you.
- dang 6y ago
  Yikes, posting like this will get you banned on HN, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. We've had to ask you about this kind of thing before. Could you please take the spirit of the site more to heart? HN is a community of millions of people in many countries. It is inevitably divided on any issue where society (societies) are deeply divided. We can't get anywhere by pretending otherwise. We can't get anywhere by trying to impose one view on everybody. We can't get anywhere by "fuck you". If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
  - qotgalaxy 6y ago
    His response is perfectly reasonable.
  - monadic2 6y ago
    While I emphatically reject the idea that the above poster has any role in any community anyone would wish to join, I do sincerely appreciate your efforts to moderate and I will avoid personal attacks in the future. Excepting Walter Bright, that dude's a complete asshole.
    - dang 6y ago
      I'll take it. :)
LorenPechtel 6y ago
You're falling for the right wing deception here. This is a lot more deadly than the flu and the flu usually only kills those who would have died soon anyway. And even under 30 your odds of dying of Covid are worse than your odds of dying of a traffic accident. And even if you survive you might be damaged for life. It is not rational to fall for a scam.
saghm 6y ago
> I think a lot of people in this discussion are pitting the argument at people prioritizing their individual choices over the collective health of the community. I think that is a very singular framing from one side > The fact is if your under 30 you have a better chance of being hit by lightning then dying of Covid Yes, but what about the other members of the community who aren't below 30 who you might infect? Thinking "I'm under 30, so I'll be fine" and not worrying about the fact that you could still spread the disease to others is pretty much a textbook example of "prioritizing individual choices over the collective health of the community".

jacobwilliamroy 6y ago

Not "possible depression". Depression. The economy crashed. It's over. The government's been buying the stock market to prop everything up. All the numbers you see are fabricated. The market never recovered from the initial crash. Last I checked a 3rd of Americans aren't paying rent now? It's going to explode dude.

dredmorbius 6y ago
Much of the fall in activity is independent of announced quarantine measures. People simply stopped engaging in commercial activity. This appears across multiple states in the US and in multiple countries. Restaurant, cinema, theatre, and travel bookings most especially.
e12e 6y ago
AFAIK global capitalism has been in an over production crisis since at least 2008. So it's not a depression due to covid-19, but a worsening of the existing depression due to covid-19. Still, those on top are still raking in profit - arguably the crisis isn't that we suddenly are running out of energy, food or housing - just that we're distributing it so badly that we've created poor living conditions for a lot of people.
nightski 6y ago
The stock market recovery is not due to the government "buying the stock market" because they never did that. If you look at winners and losers in the stock market, followed the Q2 earnings season and saw what companies were facing, it seems clear to me that our economy faced a transition rather than a crash. There are huge winners in this market. Home Depot, Target, and other major retailers all announced record breaking income this past quarter. People are still shopping. Tech has lead the charge due to WFH and the shift to online. There are many more factors in this economic shift than could be explained by the Fed's money printing.
- jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
  Whatever helps you sleep at night. Just don't be surprised when you wake up tomorrow and can't afford to buy a loaf of bread with your american monopoly money.
- arkadiytehgraet 6y ago
  Dude (or dudess or whatever), Fed literally has positions in all sorts of stocks, including bankrupt HTZ. How is that not "buying the stock market"?
  - kbenson 6y ago
    How much actual buying and selling have they done? How does that compare to a year ago? How does that compare to the market as a whole? Those are actually relevant, while the government just having some stock is not, so those are what we should be looking at.
  - throwawaygh 6y ago
    Wrong. Fed did not purchase a single share of HTZ. They hold two ETFs that include Hertz corporate bonds. Not stocks. Bonds. And not new issues.
    - divbzero 6y ago
      Yeah GP has the facts wrong. There has actually been interesting speculation that the Fed will eventually buy stocks similar to the Bank of Japan over the past few decades [1] but the Fed hasn’t done it yet. [1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevincoldiron/2020/07/18/the-fed-is-going-to-buy-stocks/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevincoldiron/2020/07/18/the-fe... (Edit: Maybe GP was thinking that bankruptcy could lead to debt converting into equity? But even then the Fed’s holding would be indirect and the bond ETF probably wouldn’t hold onto the equity.)
amiga_500 6y ago
The Fed are buying corporate ETF bonds, not stocks.
spenczar5 6y ago
Do you have evidence that the government has been buying the stock market to prop everything up? I haven't heard that before.

wiradikusuma 6y ago

But you know that you can be a carrier and infect less healthy people right?

nradov 6y ago
Asymptomatic transmission, while possible, is rare. https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-2671 https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-2671
- raverbashing 6y ago
  If it was, we wouldn't be in this situation (and the article doesn't say anything about asymptomatic transmission, only that 8% of secondary infected people were asymptomatic)
- mkolodny 6y ago
  "Of these 127 [COVID-19 cases], 8 (6.3% [CI, 2.1% to 10.5%]) were asymptomatic. Of the 119 symptomatic cases, 20 (16.8%) were defined as mild, 87 (73.1%) as moderate, and 12 (10.1%) as severe or critical." 6.3% of transmissions being asymptomatic doesn't sound rare to me. Also, the 89.9% of people with mild or moderate cases may still not realize they have covid, and spread it.
  - Rapzid 6y ago
    It's also worth noting that there is confusion between "asymptomatic" and "pre-symptomatic". In the health industry apparently "asymptomatic" means you never present symptoms, however you can be "pre-symptomatic"(meaning you will present symptoms) and spread the disease as well. The media had been using "asymptomatic" to mean both, but then a study came out saying it was rare and blah blah blah. Should I be surprised how many people on HN have resorted to conspiracy theories, accusations of malice, and discreditation over changing and mixed information? We live in a world of changing requirements but somehow changing recommendations based on new and changing information is all the evidence we need to indulge ourselves in confirmation bias?
6y ago

lazide 6y ago

Best data I've seen is 6x (.63% IFR). And due to lack of existing immunity from the Flu which keeps the flu at less than 10% of the population/yr, we're looking at a dramatic death toll. That people don't want to believe it, without evidence to the contrary, just makes them solidly into the wishful thinking category - and likely spreaders that will inevitably get someone killed.

rootusrootus 6y ago
Even at 6x, it still very much comes up for debate. Most reasonable people can agree that a .01% IFR is not worth shutting everything down for, and that a 50% IFR is definitely worth shutting everything down for. Where you fall on this spectrum determines whether someone will call you a wishful thinker or not. Everyone believes their own opinion is the best.
- bluntfang 6y ago
  >Most reasonable people can agree Is this just a way of saying that people who don't agree with you aren't reasonable? What do we do with those people's opinions if they are the majority?
  - rootusrootus 6y ago
    No, it is setting a wide range and excluding the extremes -- that is, people who aren't even within spitting distance of a good faith debate. 0.01% IFR would be 1/10th of the seasonal flu. And 50% would be up there with bubonic plague. I feel pretty comfortable with my definition of 'reasonable people.'
    - bluntfang 6y ago
      so what happens when all the people you think are unreasonable think you're the one being unreasonable? How do you deal with that?
squidlogic 6y ago

e12e 6y ago

In regards to how dangerous it is, there are two other important factors - the number of people that don't get terribly ill, but suffer long term effects - and the fact that if any local/regional health system is overwhelmed - all those survivors who needed intubation would have been casualties. I'm not sure how that would affect the effective mortality rate.

jdhn 6y ago

I'm tired of hearing about "the new normal". This is NOT normal, and the weak attempts to make it normal is just disgusting. Like you said, this isn't as deadly as people first thought it was, but it seems that those in charge don't want to admit that they're wrong, and as a result everybody is suffering from this even if they really wouldn't suffer from COVID.

briffle 6y ago
When the virus hit China, it had around a 4% death rate. Now, in the US, we have 5.6M confirmed cases, and 175k deaths. That is 3% death rate. (although, deaths lag behind diagnosis) You're right, its less than they first feared, but not much. And still 30 times the death rate of the flu. There have been some groups that keep looking at the number of deaths, and compare it to the population as a whole, to make the numbers look much smaller. But those are purposefully deceptive.
- ghufran_syed 6y ago
  and how many unconfirmed cases? I personally know 10 people who have had symptoms that are likely covid, but not serious enough to go get tested. The fact that the least symptomatic patients are also least likely to get tested means that the calculation you presented gives us, at best, an upper bound. A better way to get the true measure would be based on population-based antibody testing. More info available at the WHO website: https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/estimating-mortality-from-covid-19 https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/estimating...
- nradov 6y ago
  The actual best estimate of death rate in the US is 0.65%, not 3%. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
  - jashmatthews 6y ago
    Sadly 3% is the right number to use for that comparison between observed fatality in the US and earlier estimates https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality The estimated IFR is quite different and can’t be just swapped.

showdeadtest 6y ago

To amplify this, while I appreciate the passion some people have for community health, there has been a pattern of bald-faced lying that is unsustainable and potentially counterproductive. I can see somebody going to the gym and not feeling bad about it for that reason alone.

cloakandswagger 6y ago
As most authoritarian-collectivist movements go, the "Stay the fuck home" crowd took no time at all in destroying all goodwill towards their worldview. Had its tone been more educational and pleading instead of arrogant, shaming and outright threatening they could have avoided polarizing the conversation and creating a contrarian counter-movement that resists even sensible compromise.
- duderific 6y ago
  Lives are at stake here, so the "Stay the fuck home" crowd, as you put it, has a right to express feelings that may be stronger than "educational and pleading."
  - drevil-v2 6y ago
    I guess the over 1000 health professionals who said BLM protests are OK but everyone else "stay the fuck home" did not help make the case.
  - _fat_santa 6y ago
    But that's precisely the problem. While you may think this way, someone else may not. So when you try to convince that person from an assumption that they agree with you on the importance of the premise, you fall flat.
  - showdeadtest 6y ago
    People aren’t staying home, so it seems like that didn’t work.
  - cloakandswagger 6y ago

cowpig 6y ago

> It's pretty rational for someone to understand that and make personal choices... No, it's not; it's arrogant. All of the epidemiologists and experts seem to think otherwise. What do you know that they don't? So far 172,000 people have died in the US due to Coronavirus, directly[1]. The actual number of people who have died, if you factor in the effect of the virus on infrastructure and missed diagnoses is about double that[2]. We're approaching the total death toll of World War II[3]. Your claim that it's comparable to lightning, which kills about 50 people per year in the USA, is completely inaccurate and displays a grandiose arrogance. An arrogance that, nationwide, has resulted in a staggering number of tragedies this year. [1] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html [2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronavirus-missing-deaths.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#Total_deaths_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#Total_...

bazzert 6y ago
>> We're approaching the total death toll of World War II[3]. assuming you mean the US death toll also bear in mind the median age of WW II casualties was something like 26; while the median age for covid victims is 75+. Not to diminish the latter but they are very different.
- dijit 6y ago
  > while the median age for covid victims is 75+. You mean 48. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/pdfs/mm6924e2-H.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/pdfs/mm6924e2-H.pdf
  - motbob 6y ago
    No, that's the median cases age.
  - karagenit 6y ago
    I think the link you cited states that 48 is the median age of infections, whereas the person you're replying to is talking about deaths. I don't have national data, but in my state (Indiana) 51.4% of deaths are 80+ years old according to coronavirus.in.gov

dragonwriter 6y ago

> It's pretty rational for someone to understand that and make personal choices without feeling like they're causing real danger to the community. Discounting externalized costs to zero is rational, true; that's the source of the tragedy of commons (in the economics/game theory sense, not necessarily the somewhat disputed original example for which the effect is named.) But that's a manner in which individual rationality is insufficient to address issues whose effects aren't limited to the individuals engaging in transactions.

showdeadtest 6y ago
While you raise a good point, I question the wisdom of relying solely on hastily devised rules and accompanying sloganeering to solve such issues. I understand the pandemic is an emergency, but it was predictable. If we got caught with our pants down, we got caught with our pants down. Personally I think it’s time to put the hysteria aside and start discussing the longer-term view.

dependenttypes 6y ago

You have to also account for the people who will survive but end up with some sort of permanent health damage due to it.

mdparker89 6y ago

Assuming that the probability of being hit by lightning is higher than the probability of dying from COVID under 30, it does not follow that one should take the similar levels of precaution for both. Lightning does not present systemic risk. Me getting struck by lightning doesn't change your odds of being struck.

austhrow743 6y ago
A relevant factor for countries that have largely controlled covid, or back in March when it was uncertain what direction which countries were going in. For ones that have just let it rip though, the people who were going to get it from you are just going to get it from someone else if you isolate. If I as an Australian have covid and go to a gym and infect a bunch of people, I've given covid to people who otherwise wouldn't have caught it. If an American does the same, they've given covid to people who would have just caught it next week or next month. They've also given it to less people because a lot more people in that gym have already had it than in my Australian one.

ben7799 6y ago

It's maybe rational if you're an Ayn Rand Objectivist and you think the older people you infect who die are not worth your time and energy to keep safe. It's very much a selfish prioritization of the individual above everyone else to think you're under 30 so no precautions need to be taken even though someone under 30 is perfectly capable of passing it on to a whole bunch more people who might be older & vulnerable.

smohare 6y ago

Focusing on the death rate as a singular statistic is highly flawed. It’s akin to not taking into account health externalities when discussing the coast of energy sources. COVID-19 has pretty severe morbidity that make it absolutely nothing like the flu. Some afflicted with severe cases will require months of rehabilitation (never mind working as usual) and probably suffer lifelong complications. Moreover, it’s the hubris and ignorance of people like the speakeasy gym goers that will prolong the pandemic and arguably case more economic harm than any original lockdowns.

callmeal 6y ago

>The infectious mortality rate of Covid is at best twice that of the normal flu, which isn't nothing and warrants action but probably not 40M people unemployed and possible national depression. This sounds like Y2K all over again. No one is disputing the mortality rate. But it's starting to look like all the people who are pulling out that strawman are ignoring the "infectious" part of that equation.[1] Do we have enough healthcare capacity to support the people who get sick enough to need care until herd immunity is achieved? And the same people like to bring up Sweden, all the while conveniently forgetting the social mores and jokes. The headline image from this[0] story makes it very clear that what worked in Sweden would not work anywhere else in the world. [0] https://europost.eu/en/a/view/sweden-goes-it-alone-28030 https://europost.eu/en/a/view/sweden-goes-it-alone-28030 [1] https://www.healthline.com/health/r-nought-reproduction-number https://www.healthline.com/health/r-nought-reproduction-numb... According to a review article published in BMC Medicine, the R0 value of the 1918 pandemic was estimated to be between 1.4 and 2.8. But when the swine flu, or H1N1 virus, came back in 2009, its R0 value was between 1.4 and 1.6, report researchers in the journal Science. The R0 for COVID-19 is a median of 5.7, according to a study published online in Emerging Infectious Diseases. That’s about double an earlier R0 estimate of 2.2 to 2.7 ... The researchers estimated a doubling time of 2 to 3 days, which is much faster than earlier estimates of 6 to 7 days. The doubling time is how long it takes for the number of coronavirus cases, hospitalizations, and deaths to double. With an R0 of 5.7, at least 82 percent of the population needs to be immune to COVID-19 to stop its transmission through vaccination and herd immunity.

footnotemotion 6y ago

It's ignorant to simply look at the mortality rate of the disease. You have to also consider how transmissible the disease is. If you infected the entire US population with the flu over the course of a few months it would be complete devastation even though it's just "the normal flu" in terms of how an individual's immune system deals with it. By this logic COVID19 is nothing compared to SARS or EBOLA because those have higher mortality rates, but obviously COVID spreads much faster and farther so it has had a huge international impact.

monadic2 6y ago

Fuck you.

dang 6y ago
Yikes, posting like this will get you banned on HN, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. We've had to ask you about this kind of thing before. Could you please take the spirit of the site more to heart? HN is a community of millions of people in many countries. It is inevitably divided on any issue where society (societies) are deeply divided. We can't get anywhere by pretending otherwise. We can't get anywhere by trying to impose one view on everybody. We can't get anywhere by "fuck you". If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
- qotgalaxy 6y ago
  His response is perfectly reasonable.
- monadic2 6y ago
  While I emphatically reject the idea that the above poster has any role in any community anyone would wish to join, I do sincerely appreciate your efforts to moderate and I will avoid personal attacks in the future. Excepting Walter Bright, that dude's a complete asshole.
  - dang 6y ago
    I'll take it. :)

LorenPechtel 6y ago

You're falling for the right wing deception here. This is a lot more deadly than the flu and the flu usually only kills those who would have died soon anyway. And even under 30 your odds of dying of Covid are worse than your odds of dying of a traffic accident. And even if you survive you might be damaged for life. It is not rational to fall for a scam.

saghm 6y ago

> I think a lot of people in this discussion are pitting the argument at people prioritizing their individual choices over the collective health of the community. I think that is a very singular framing from one side > The fact is if your under 30 you have a better chance of being hit by lightning then dying of Covid Yes, but what about the other members of the community who aren't below 30 who you might infect? Thinking "I'm under 30, so I'll be fine" and not worrying about the fact that you could still spread the disease to others is pretty much a textbook example of "prioritizing individual choices over the collective health of the community".