21 ms·

> congratulations for not caring about a 1 in 200 chance of death (pretty high by the way) because you're healthy and passing on the risk to some vulnerable per

> congratulations for not caring about a 1 in 200 chance of death (pretty high by the way) because you're healthy and passing on the risk to some vulnerable person (probably your parents or a school teacher) with a 1 in 10 chance of death. This is wrong and misleading. You're quoting the average fatality rate for "healthy" people, but the distribution doesn't look like that at all. Then, you cherrypick 10% out of nowhere for "parents and school teachers". 10% is the rate for people in their 80s. Real data: "[t]he estimated IFR is close to zero for younger adults but rises exponentially with age, reaching about 0.3% for ages 50-59, 1.3% for ages 60-69, 4% for ages 70-79, 10% for ages 80-89."[1] [1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160895v3 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160895v...

dangc 6y ago
thank you! I really appreciate the effort you put in to clear up the misinformation
WD-42 6y ago
That’s still whole numbers for anyone over 60, and significant numbers still for anyone below it. Have you ever seriously contemplated death? If you have, those numbers don’t seem very good, not at all. Not to mention these are stats for DEATH. Meaning these are the worst case scenario. Dead. The chances of getting seriously ill, like major suffering, are much higher. Would you want to experience that? Would you wish that on others in your community? Suck it up and do some pushups for gods sake.
- seizethecheese 6y ago
  Yes, I've contemplated death. Have you? Here are the chances of dying in a year, for a given age, from actuarial tables: 25 year olds: 0.16% chance of dying 35 year olds: 0.2% chance of dying 45 year olds: 0.3% chance of dying 55 year olds: 0.7% chance of dying 65 year olds: 2% chance of dying 75 year olds: 3.5% 85 year olds: 10% 95 year olds: 26% https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
  - WD-42 6y ago
    This is abhorrently flawed logic. These mortality rates are a sum of your chances of dying from literally everything that can kill you, including cancer and heart disease. We're talking about a disease right here right now that has similar rates of mortality, that is currently active and being spread in our communities, could have even larger long term mortality rates and yet people are making excuses of why it's ok to possible expose other people so that they can avoid working out in their living room.
- eanzenberg 6y ago
  I guess you’re really careful about the flu and driving, and wear a helmet when crossing the street too? How about, if you’re worried, stay home, stay in. If you’re not worried, go out. Let’s not impinge on freedoms of any groups. Not just little freedoms. Pretty basic ones like, freedoms of assembly.
  - majormajor 6y ago
    For the vulnerable people, in some ways it would be better if everyone else went on as normal. Let the virus burn through the population as fast as possible, then you can go out again! But there's a few big problems here: a) As we've seen, some of the most vulnerable people are in situations where "staying in" without letting the virus in is very difficult. This will be worse the more widespread in the wider community? b) Even if the vulnerable can perfectly protect themselves, this assumes a very selfish calculus of unconcern for everyone else. If your hospitals fall past the tipping point in a "get it over with ASAP" yolo policy, people not only die faster than in a world where there's never a vaccine or effictive treatment, more of them die too due to reduced ability to treat. c) Who's gonna pay for all the non-wealthy vulnerable people to stay home? Especially in cases where they need to be more isolated, such as those with healthy roommates who will be acting normally, so they need to relocate too? I haven't seen anyone proposing answers to this in the states like TX or GA.
- Khaine 6y ago
  Sure, but how many of those people would have died from the normal flu? I know this is a morbid topic, but it gets to a fundamental truth. How valuable is a human life? Is it worth significantly damaging the future of the young through economic depression and increased social isolation and mental illness to extend the life old old people by a year, 5 years? There is no easy solution. We can hibernate as much of the non-essential economy with lock-downs and mandate the wearing of masks. But this, will extend the economic hardship we are under, which will put further economic strain on young people, who now have had to contend with the great recession and now likely a depression. We can do like sweeden and try and isolate and protect the vulnerable, and keep the economy open, or we can do nothing. Each of these choices has trade-offs in terms of economic hardship and lives. Not just the lives of people who get COVID, but those who commit suicide due to social isolation, economic hardship, and other factors related to COVID. American's can't have this discussion in a mature manner because it has been poisoned by politics.
  - p1necone 6y ago
    Why are you so certain that hundreds of thousands of deaths are not going to seriously affect the economy either?
    - showdeadtest 6y ago
      That’s about a month’s worth of deaths. The economic impact would be roughly that of everybody taking a really long vacation. We are past that. And it’s completely besides the point—-it does not seem like that is the calculus going into our policy decisions here in August.
      - kbenson 6y ago
        > That’s about a month’s worth of deaths. Looking at current number of deaths as the outcome for the decision to open stuff up only makes sense if you think we would have seen the same infection rate. If the infection rate is high enough and fast enough, we surpass the healthcare system's capacity to help with hospitalization, and then we see a large increase in the mortality rate for those infected, as some of those with bad, but not fatal infections that recovered in the hospital don't recover out of the hospital. The faster the spread, the worse (higher) that number is. > The economic impact would be roughly that of everybody taking a really long vacation. People come back from vacations. The economic impact would be more like those people all quit at the same time. > it does not seem like that is the calculus going into our policy decisions here in August. It is. They're looking at worst case scenarios for COVID-19, and how likely they are, compared to worst case scenarios for the economy, and how likely they are. Worst case for the economy is a depression, which may take years or decades to recover from, but the workers are still there, still trained, and we can hopefully get them back to work with stimulus, even if it takes a long time. Worst case for COVID-19 is that instead of hundreds of thousands of dead, we see millions of dead. What's the economic impact of one of every 50 or 100 families loses a parent, and how that affects they flexibility and ability to recover from financial bumps? What's the impact to Apple or Google if a high level exec that's spears a division dies (what's happened at Apple since Job died, and he had plenty of time to groom a successor)? What about the 20 employees of small business that was struggling but surviving when the owner dies? The economic impact of people actually disappearing forever is sometimes equivalent of the cost and time to train a replacement (which is generally multiple months of salary for any non-trivial position), and that's when it can actually be replaced adequately. Even if you want to completely ignore the humanitarian aspect of it, there's good economic reason to not want people to die, and why locking things down, while economically disastrous, maybe still be less economically disastrous than NOT doing so.
- centimeter 6y ago
  > Have you ever seriously contemplated death? Probably deeper and in a more structured way than you, based on the way you're writing. If your "contemplation" in the context of disease management didn't involve risk analysis (that means multiplying probabilities by utilities), you were probably just mentally masturbating rather than coming up with useful insights. > Suck it up and do some pushups for gods sake. Thinking that "some pushups" is the same as a real gym routine also says a lot about you and your qualifications to speak about health management.
dasudasu 6y ago
True, but that's not as if death was the only bad outcome. Not that we can even pretend to know the long-term effects yet, but anecdotally it seems that some people are already experiencing them, which include lung scarring and neurological symptoms.
- seizethecheese 6y ago
  The top level comment is likely to also be wrong with regard to complication incidence of "healthy" people and "teachers and parents" vs average population. Granted, nobody really knows, and it's all anecdotal.
- eanzenberg 6y ago
  When 10% of the country has gotten this, you will see some weird edge cases. Day 1, tested positive with covid. Day 2, started having seizures. Where is proof of causality between coronavirus and these afflictions?
- mrslave 6y ago
  Heart scarring too https://www.smh.com.au/national/seizures-and-battered-heart-how-covid-19-scarred-a-healthy-sydney-doctor-20200802-p55hqj.html https://www.smh.com.au/national/seizures-and-battered-heart-...
  - refurb 6y ago
    Just like the flu. Here is a nice paper that goes through all the cardiac, neurological, renal and other organ complications of influenza.[1] [1]https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/irv.12470 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/irv.12470
    - conception 6y ago
      Just like the flu... which we vaccinate for and doesn’t sweep through the population. So... not like the flu in scale or scope.
majormajor 6y ago
So something like a million+ people dying if we let this run without intervention - because our ability to control transmission is pretty limited even with dramatic measures - out of the US population only matters if they distribution is balanced age-wise? Economic-cost-wise, why is this cost the one that gets people so riled up? Is it because it also comes with personal inconvenience, and so much of the other ways we spend money fighting death - or trying to extract revenge for death like after 9/11 - doesn't? Driving, for instance - the government makes us spend a lot more to have safer cars, but other than styles and types of car available as a result, we don't really get impacted by it. It just makes the cars more expensive, and few people care. Or maybe we're just bad at dealing with adversity without having someone to blame? So we go reaching for "bad guys"?
- pdonis 6y ago
  > our ability to control transmission is pretty limited even with dramatic measures The ability of politicians to control transmission by making decrees, even dramatic ones, is limited, yes. The ability of ordinary people to control transmission by taking obvious common sense precautions is not. And those obvious common sense precautions should include, yes, not engaging in activities that have a high risk of transmission.
ayyyolo 6y ago
"Real data" Kinda like how the rough %s are the same? What argument were you trying to make again? oh right, the one that is silly af: not to worry about it.
johnwalkr 6y ago
This is a general reply, not only to the parent comment. I’m indeed cherry-picking though I didn’t carefully check the numbers. My point is we need to sacrifice some of the more trivial things and make minimal efforts to ride this out, and by not changing our lifestyles, we are passing the risk on to others, some of whom may be vulnerable and some of whom don’t have any option to not go to work (for example) to reduce their risk. You are making their risk higher by going to the gym and potentially contracting the virus, infecting your kids, and sending them to school where one of the teachers maybe has an underlying condition (for example). I’m not arguing for total lockdown. I’m arguing for avoiding the more risky activities that involve heavy breathing in close quarters so total lockdown can be avoided. Local governments mostly know this, and have set policies accordingly. In general they should do a better job of compensating businesses in the short term since it’s not the gym owner’s fault (for example) that his business happens to have been risky right now. I don’t think it’s good behavior to go out of your way to circumvent a public health policy based on a personal risk tolerance.
- centimeter 6y ago
  > we need to sacrifice some of the more trivial things The "more trivial things" like normal social interaction, employment, and healthy exercise? I've never seen a more pointed example of most people's abject inability to perform utilitarian reasoning than this pandemic. If you think causing at least tens of thousands of suicides since the start of the lockdowns, impoverishing millions of people for years to come, and drastically reducing almost everyone's quality of life is a reasonable tradeoff for buying (on expectation) an extra few months of life for geriatrics, you are not rational.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - throwout_covid 6y ago
    Wow. I think you're political leanings have beaten out utilitarian reasoning. 10k suicides < 200k covid deaths We certainly have the money to support millions of people losing payroll, but stimulus payments to give people room to properly isolate are a bargaining chip. Quality of life in a crisis??? Are you kidding me? How far from the "Greatest Generation" can you get when you can't ask people to wear a mask and skip the gym for a while to save lives? An extra few months for geriatrics??? Again, wow. I'm sorry you hate your gramma. But, we still don't understand the long term consequences to people to have been sick, or the lasting effects it will have on children that contract it. You're the one that's not rational, and I expected the HN crowd to be better at digesting statistics.
jameshart 6y ago
Age is not the only thing that could raise an individual's risk factor to 10%. There is no reason why individuals not in their 80s might, for some other reason, be in a category with higher mortality risk. Honestly, we don't know that much about this disease yet - but we do know that the outcomes for different people can be very diverse. One problem with age-based stats like this is that it gives the impression that the way to think about risk is along the lines of russian roulette: when someone gets infected, the great actuary in the sky rolls a D100, consults the tables, and if their roll is good, they don't die. But what if the die was already rolled for some individuals? What if, say, one in 100 people carry a genetic risk factor that means that if they get COVID, they have a much higher risk of dying - regardless of their age? That hypothesis is also compatible with the statistical data we are looking at. You could also consider, what if some people have particular predisposition to become a superspreader and infect many more people? If the population contains individuals for whom their individual outcome risk, or their potential impact on other people, is significantly above the average, then by reducing the spread of the disease we reduce the number of such people who ever get infected. You can prevent the D100 having to be rolled for as many people, including people who need to roll much higher to survive.
- neolog 6y ago
  > But what if the die was already rolled for some individuals? Why does the timing of the roll matter?
  - jameshart 6y ago
    Well precisely, it doesn’t actually matter. I’ll let you into a secret: there isn’t even really a dice. The point is more to get people to think about the difference between aggregate average mortality, vs the individual prognosis of one unlucky COVID patient. This winds up being a trolley-problem kind of reframing of a moral argument. Philosophically, should you change your behavior between the following two scenarios: - a group of 100 people all have a 1 in 100 chance of dying of a disease - a group of 100 people contain one person who will definitely die if they get the disease ? Does your answer change if you are the one person?

dangc 6y ago

thank you! I really appreciate the effort you put in to clear up the misinformation

WD-42 6y ago

That’s still whole numbers for anyone over 60, and significant numbers still for anyone below it. Have you ever seriously contemplated death? If you have, those numbers don’t seem very good, not at all. Not to mention these are stats for DEATH. Meaning these are the worst case scenario. Dead. The chances of getting seriously ill, like major suffering, are much higher. Would you want to experience that? Would you wish that on others in your community? Suck it up and do some pushups for gods sake.

seizethecheese 6y ago
Yes, I've contemplated death. Have you? Here are the chances of dying in a year, for a given age, from actuarial tables: 25 year olds: 0.16% chance of dying 35 year olds: 0.2% chance of dying 45 year olds: 0.3% chance of dying 55 year olds: 0.7% chance of dying 65 year olds: 2% chance of dying 75 year olds: 3.5% 85 year olds: 10% 95 year olds: 26% https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
- WD-42 6y ago
  This is abhorrently flawed logic. These mortality rates are a sum of your chances of dying from literally everything that can kill you, including cancer and heart disease. We're talking about a disease right here right now that has similar rates of mortality, that is currently active and being spread in our communities, could have even larger long term mortality rates and yet people are making excuses of why it's ok to possible expose other people so that they can avoid working out in their living room.
eanzenberg 6y ago
I guess you’re really careful about the flu and driving, and wear a helmet when crossing the street too? How about, if you’re worried, stay home, stay in. If you’re not worried, go out. Let’s not impinge on freedoms of any groups. Not just little freedoms. Pretty basic ones like, freedoms of assembly.
- majormajor 6y ago
  For the vulnerable people, in some ways it would be better if everyone else went on as normal. Let the virus burn through the population as fast as possible, then you can go out again! But there's a few big problems here: a) As we've seen, some of the most vulnerable people are in situations where "staying in" without letting the virus in is very difficult. This will be worse the more widespread in the wider community? b) Even if the vulnerable can perfectly protect themselves, this assumes a very selfish calculus of unconcern for everyone else. If your hospitals fall past the tipping point in a "get it over with ASAP" yolo policy, people not only die faster than in a world where there's never a vaccine or effictive treatment, more of them die too due to reduced ability to treat. c) Who's gonna pay for all the non-wealthy vulnerable people to stay home? Especially in cases where they need to be more isolated, such as those with healthy roommates who will be acting normally, so they need to relocate too? I haven't seen anyone proposing answers to this in the states like TX or GA.
Khaine 6y ago
Sure, but how many of those people would have died from the normal flu? I know this is a morbid topic, but it gets to a fundamental truth. How valuable is a human life? Is it worth significantly damaging the future of the young through economic depression and increased social isolation and mental illness to extend the life old old people by a year, 5 years? There is no easy solution. We can hibernate as much of the non-essential economy with lock-downs and mandate the wearing of masks. But this, will extend the economic hardship we are under, which will put further economic strain on young people, who now have had to contend with the great recession and now likely a depression. We can do like sweeden and try and isolate and protect the vulnerable, and keep the economy open, or we can do nothing. Each of these choices has trade-offs in terms of economic hardship and lives. Not just the lives of people who get COVID, but those who commit suicide due to social isolation, economic hardship, and other factors related to COVID. American's can't have this discussion in a mature manner because it has been poisoned by politics.
- p1necone 6y ago
  Why are you so certain that hundreds of thousands of deaths are not going to seriously affect the economy either?
  - showdeadtest 6y ago
    That’s about a month’s worth of deaths. The economic impact would be roughly that of everybody taking a really long vacation. We are past that. And it’s completely besides the point—-it does not seem like that is the calculus going into our policy decisions here in August.
    - kbenson 6y ago
      > That’s about a month’s worth of deaths. Looking at current number of deaths as the outcome for the decision to open stuff up only makes sense if you think we would have seen the same infection rate. If the infection rate is high enough and fast enough, we surpass the healthcare system's capacity to help with hospitalization, and then we see a large increase in the mortality rate for those infected, as some of those with bad, but not fatal infections that recovered in the hospital don't recover out of the hospital. The faster the spread, the worse (higher) that number is. > The economic impact would be roughly that of everybody taking a really long vacation. People come back from vacations. The economic impact would be more like those people all quit at the same time. > it does not seem like that is the calculus going into our policy decisions here in August. It is. They're looking at worst case scenarios for COVID-19, and how likely they are, compared to worst case scenarios for the economy, and how likely they are. Worst case for the economy is a depression, which may take years or decades to recover from, but the workers are still there, still trained, and we can hopefully get them back to work with stimulus, even if it takes a long time. Worst case for COVID-19 is that instead of hundreds of thousands of dead, we see millions of dead. What's the economic impact of one of every 50 or 100 families loses a parent, and how that affects they flexibility and ability to recover from financial bumps? What's the impact to Apple or Google if a high level exec that's spears a division dies (what's happened at Apple since Job died, and he had plenty of time to groom a successor)? What about the 20 employees of small business that was struggling but surviving when the owner dies? The economic impact of people actually disappearing forever is sometimes equivalent of the cost and time to train a replacement (which is generally multiple months of salary for any non-trivial position), and that's when it can actually be replaced adequately. Even if you want to completely ignore the humanitarian aspect of it, there's good economic reason to not want people to die, and why locking things down, while economically disastrous, maybe still be less economically disastrous than NOT doing so.
centimeter 6y ago
> Have you ever seriously contemplated death? Probably deeper and in a more structured way than you, based on the way you're writing. If your "contemplation" in the context of disease management didn't involve risk analysis (that means multiplying probabilities by utilities), you were probably just mentally masturbating rather than coming up with useful insights. > Suck it up and do some pushups for gods sake. Thinking that "some pushups" is the same as a real gym routine also says a lot about you and your qualifications to speak about health management.

dasudasu 6y ago

True, but that's not as if death was the only bad outcome. Not that we can even pretend to know the long-term effects yet, but anecdotally it seems that some people are already experiencing them, which include lung scarring and neurological symptoms.

seizethecheese 6y ago
The top level comment is likely to also be wrong with regard to complication incidence of "healthy" people and "teachers and parents" vs average population. Granted, nobody really knows, and it's all anecdotal.
eanzenberg 6y ago
When 10% of the country has gotten this, you will see some weird edge cases. Day 1, tested positive with covid. Day 2, started having seizures. Where is proof of causality between coronavirus and these afflictions?
mrslave 6y ago
Heart scarring too https://www.smh.com.au/national/seizures-and-battered-heart-how-covid-19-scarred-a-healthy-sydney-doctor-20200802-p55hqj.html https://www.smh.com.au/national/seizures-and-battered-heart-...
- refurb 6y ago
  Just like the flu. Here is a nice paper that goes through all the cardiac, neurological, renal and other organ complications of influenza.[1] [1]https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/irv.12470 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/irv.12470
  - conception 6y ago
    Just like the flu... which we vaccinate for and doesn’t sweep through the population. So... not like the flu in scale or scope.

majormajor 6y ago

So something like a million+ people dying if we let this run without intervention - because our ability to control transmission is pretty limited even with dramatic measures - out of the US population only matters if they distribution is balanced age-wise? Economic-cost-wise, why is this cost the one that gets people so riled up? Is it because it also comes with personal inconvenience, and so much of the other ways we spend money fighting death - or trying to extract revenge for death like after 9/11 - doesn't? Driving, for instance - the government makes us spend a lot more to have safer cars, but other than styles and types of car available as a result, we don't really get impacted by it. It just makes the cars more expensive, and few people care. Or maybe we're just bad at dealing with adversity without having someone to blame? So we go reaching for "bad guys"?

pdonis 6y ago
> our ability to control transmission is pretty limited even with dramatic measures The ability of politicians to control transmission by making decrees, even dramatic ones, is limited, yes. The ability of ordinary people to control transmission by taking obvious common sense precautions is not. And those obvious common sense precautions should include, yes, not engaging in activities that have a high risk of transmission.

ayyyolo 6y ago

"Real data" Kinda like how the rough %s are the same? What argument were you trying to make again? oh right, the one that is silly af: not to worry about it.

johnwalkr 6y ago

This is a general reply, not only to the parent comment. I’m indeed cherry-picking though I didn’t carefully check the numbers. My point is we need to sacrifice some of the more trivial things and make minimal efforts to ride this out, and by not changing our lifestyles, we are passing the risk on to others, some of whom may be vulnerable and some of whom don’t have any option to not go to work (for example) to reduce their risk. You are making their risk higher by going to the gym and potentially contracting the virus, infecting your kids, and sending them to school where one of the teachers maybe has an underlying condition (for example). I’m not arguing for total lockdown. I’m arguing for avoiding the more risky activities that involve heavy breathing in close quarters so total lockdown can be avoided. Local governments mostly know this, and have set policies accordingly. In general they should do a better job of compensating businesses in the short term since it’s not the gym owner’s fault (for example) that his business happens to have been risky right now. I don’t think it’s good behavior to go out of your way to circumvent a public health policy based on a personal risk tolerance.

centimeter 6y ago
> we need to sacrifice some of the more trivial things The "more trivial things" like normal social interaction, employment, and healthy exercise? I've never seen a more pointed example of most people's abject inability to perform utilitarian reasoning than this pandemic. If you think causing at least tens of thousands of suicides since the start of the lockdowns, impoverishing millions of people for years to come, and drastically reducing almost everyone's quality of life is a reasonable tradeoff for buying (on expectation) an extra few months of life for geriatrics, you are not rational.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- throwout_covid 6y ago
  Wow. I think you're political leanings have beaten out utilitarian reasoning. 10k suicides < 200k covid deaths We certainly have the money to support millions of people losing payroll, but stimulus payments to give people room to properly isolate are a bargaining chip. Quality of life in a crisis??? Are you kidding me? How far from the "Greatest Generation" can you get when you can't ask people to wear a mask and skip the gym for a while to save lives? An extra few months for geriatrics??? Again, wow. I'm sorry you hate your gramma. But, we still don't understand the long term consequences to people to have been sick, or the lasting effects it will have on children that contract it. You're the one that's not rational, and I expected the HN crowd to be better at digesting statistics.

jameshart 6y ago

Age is not the only thing that could raise an individual's risk factor to 10%. There is no reason why individuals not in their 80s might, for some other reason, be in a category with higher mortality risk. Honestly, we don't know that much about this disease yet - but we do know that the outcomes for different people can be very diverse. One problem with age-based stats like this is that it gives the impression that the way to think about risk is along the lines of russian roulette: when someone gets infected, the great actuary in the sky rolls a D100, consults the tables, and if their roll is good, they don't die. But what if the die was already rolled for some individuals? What if, say, one in 100 people carry a genetic risk factor that means that if they get COVID, they have a much higher risk of dying - regardless of their age? That hypothesis is also compatible with the statistical data we are looking at. You could also consider, what if some people have particular predisposition to become a superspreader and infect many more people? If the population contains individuals for whom their individual outcome risk, or their potential impact on other people, is significantly above the average, then by reducing the spread of the disease we reduce the number of such people who ever get infected. You can prevent the D100 having to be rolled for as many people, including people who need to roll much higher to survive.

neolog 6y ago
> But what if the die was already rolled for some individuals? Why does the timing of the roll matter?
- jameshart 6y ago
  Well precisely, it doesn’t actually matter. I’ll let you into a secret: there isn’t even really a dice. The point is more to get people to think about the difference between aggregate average mortality, vs the individual prognosis of one unlucky COVID patient. This winds up being a trolley-problem kind of reframing of a moral argument. Philosophically, should you change your behavior between the following two scenarios: - a group of 100 people all have a 1 in 100 chance of dying of a disease - a group of 100 people contain one person who will definitely die if they get the disease ? Does your answer change if you are the one person?