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Because even those who are vehement supporters of lockdowns/wide spread health measures understand that this only affects a small percentage of those who contra

Because even those who are vehement supporters of lockdowns/wide spread health measures understand that this only affects a small percentage of those who contract it. We don't need examples of people who had no issues, 99%+ of people won't have issues. Everyone knows its not going to kill most people, that's not what they're trying to prevent. They're trying to prevent it getting into long term care homes, or into at risk communities (indigenous, low income, obese, etc). They're trying to give you good reasons to want to wear a mask, want to cut down on your social interactions, and want to help stop the spread.

rwcarlsen 6y ago
Yes - but when we only hear about, think about, and look at the extremes, it becomes too easy to let our thought-processes about the situation become (even subconsciously) skewed. It's too easy to forget that the constant barrage of stories and information is actually about the extremes. It takes deliberate effort to keep the balanced view.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- wobblyasp 6y ago
  For sure; that's why people reiterate the 99%+ metric. This isn't a cataclysmic virus that will wipe out life on earth, but it will tax health care systems far beyond what they're capable of handling. It will devastate economies, lock downs or not, globally. It's far to easy to dismiss the effects if we see it "only" hurts <1% of people; which is why people feel the need to constantly reinforce the negative impacts.
  - soulbow 6y ago
    Serious question, I don't have a political agenda by asking this: How will a virus that hurts <1% of people devastate economies, lockdowns or not? Economic devastation from lockdowns is clear. Economic devastation from a virus that primarily hurts the elderly is not clear to me. Again, I'm not making any points about the value determination of lives saved vs GDP saved, only asking how you quantify the economic impact of a virus.
    - smnrchrds 6y ago
      > How will a virus that hurts <1% of people devastate economies, lockdowns or not? Imagine 1% (or 0.5% or 0.2% or whatever) of planes crashed. How well do you think the airlines would fare? How many people would still fly? 1% is an insanely high number of deaths.
      - pjc50 6y ago
        0.1% of London bus drivers died: https://www.ioshmagazine.com/2020/08/11/london-bus-driver-covid-19-mortality-report-published https://www.ioshmagazine.com/2020/08/11/london-bus-driver-co... If they were dying in bus crashes, people would notice.
      - anoncake 6y ago
        1% is not insanely high, it's roughly how many people die each year.
        joshuamorton 6y ago
        Then indeed, doubling the number of people who die would be significant.
        anoncake 6y ago
        Of course, but so is the damage caused by lockdowns.
        joshuamorton 6y ago
        Are you suggesting that lockdowns are doubling the number of animal deaths?
        CRConrad 6y ago
        anoncake writes: > 1% is not insanely high, it's roughly how many people die each year. So another percent on top of that is a doubling. As many people again dying from Covid-19 as die from all other causes. How is that NOT “insanely” high?
  - clint 6y ago
    Also many of those people who didn't die will have anywhere from mild effects to serious impairments for the rest of their lives. A huge amount of people who survive will deal with increased depression, anxiety, etc. Even though its easy and callous to write off the lives of millions of (easily preventable) deaths with a hand-wave, there are going to be serious and long-term effects for those who didn't die and for their families, jobs, etc...
    - blix 6y ago
      I personally know many people who are suffering from severe pandemic-related anxiety and depression who have not contracted the disease. The current discourse and societal response to the disease seems likely to have as big or larger of a mental health effect than the immediate consequences of the disease itself.
      - chachachoney 6y ago
        The lack of a proper societal response to the disease, and what that reveals about the fragile state of our civilization is what's responsible for severe pandemic-related anxiety.
        blix 6y ago
        There's truth to this, but I don't think it's the whole picture. It's certainly possible to be concerned about the state of civilization without "doomscrolling" or checking covid death numbers each morning. These behaviors are consequences of the media landscape more than of the disease itself.
    - mns 6y ago
      That is simply not true and just speculation - especially for a disease that has been around for less than a year. Most of the studies that reported things like heart damage and other kind of side effects were retracted, but the retraction never made it in the press and social media, just the initial poorly ran studies that got hundreds of thousands of shares. One of the so called long COVID studies was done through people recruited through Facebook groups and Reddit communities, all of them having self reported symptoms, but none having actual positive tests.
  - rwcarlsen 6y ago
    I don't agree that it would necessarily tax health care systems "beyond what they're capable of handling" (for my definitions of those words). I also disagree that economies would be devastated if we had avoided all lockdown and economy-affecting mitigations. But I understand that reasonable people could disagree with me on both those issues and that is fine.
    - akiselev 6y ago
      Durinng their peak earlier this year, Italian doctors were choosing who lives and who dies in the normal course of triage. That's the definition that matters to public health policy.
      - rwcarlsen 6y ago
        To me, beyond what it is capable of handling - means that the system gets damaged - not the people that it is treating. What you described is what I would call "beyond it's peaking capacity for treating patients". Not a general "beyond capacity to handle". Imagine driving a car. Not being able to fit all your friends in the car is different than the car frame being crushed because too many people climbed onto it. I'm saying that the former is what we have/will experience - not the latter.
        akiselev 6y ago
        Tbh that sounds like a ridiculous standard. Our hospitals are fine as long as they haven't been hit in a nuclear first strike and are still standing?
        HelloMcFly 6y ago
        This feels a bit tortured. COVID has, is, or is threatening to overload our healthcare system as evidenced by: 1) Severely reduced in-take of new patients of patients due to lack of beds available (and longer COVID recovery time) 2) Reduced ability to effectively care for other patients due to limited beds and transmissibility of the disease, and workforce reductions as healthcare workers get sick (this is not a hypothetical, this is happening in the hospital my wife and brother work at). 3) Forcing healthcare works to perform their jobs without subsequent PPE for their own protection, increasing their own health risks and creating serious issues for mental well-being when working in this environment day-in and day-out. The healthcare system is designed to treat patients. Believing the system is not exceeding what it can handle because somehow "the system itself" is not damaged (which I'm not even sure what you mean by that) but dismissing patient care and outcomes is like evaluating a vehicle's crash rating, but not evaluating the damage to the vehicle occupants.
  - data_spy 6y ago
    I think the 99%+ metric is reassuring. However the 1% will have a massive cost to our healthcare system, we are in extremistan as Nassim Taleb likes to say. For example, in normal times 10% of the US population represent 64-66% of the health care costs (https://youtu.be/2qhrPa7paAU https://youtu.be/2qhrPa7paAU).
- jczhang 6y ago
  The thing is, it's more likely to be skewed in the wrong direction, the direction that it is safer than you think. So actually its important to understand how bad it is for those who get it. We have consistently had >1k deaths per day in the US and then many others with longterm issues.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
3minus1 6y ago
> [everyone] understands that this only affects a small percentage of those who contract it This is highly questionable. There are many articles (whether factual or not) suggesting widespread lasting effects, e.g. just last week on HN one suggested 1 in 5 patients develop mental illness: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25046157 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25046157. With all these articles floating around, I just wouldn't agree that there's some sort of consensus that 99%+ of people won't have issues.
- seibelj 6y ago
  1 in 5 get a virus and contract a mental illness? This seems highly suspect.
  - orhmeh09 6y ago
    Please heed this warning from the linked thread: > Comments like this are gonna quickly turn this place into just another /r/science, where people of no particular qualification chime in and try to make themselves feel smart by contradicting a peer reviewed study without taking the actual effort needed to properly question a peer reviewed study, especially one in as prestigious a journal as the Lancet. Thank you. Nobody’s interested in your level of incredulity, however you italicize it.
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      >especially one in as prestigious a journal as the Lancet While I agree in principle, the Lancet aren't immune to crummy papers (indeed, no-one is). Even just this year, they published that super-dodgy Surgisphere paper that turned out to be completely irreproducible (to put it kindly). Scientific papers are written by people, and the peers of people who (for example) don't really understand statistics are likely to also not understand statistics, so while peer review is definitely helpful, one should always read scientific papers sceptically. That being said, low-effort dismissals based on anecdotes are much, much worse than the average scientific paper.
  - elhudy 6y ago
Retric 6y ago
Your numbers are wildly off. Assuming 99% of people had zero issues then you would see 52 million people completely fine and 520,000 hospitalizations except many people get severely ill without going to a hospital so we would easily be approaching herd immunity. Instead it’s likely closer to ~3-6% hospitalizations with nearly half of those people dying. With 70,000 people currently in the hospital, expect the death toll to keep increasing. The numbers do look better for young people, but if your thinking of 55+ as old, a huge hunk of the population is old. PS: The recent bump hit 1,000 deaths per day, but daily peak is still increasing rapidly so expect that to rise significantly.
OscarTheGrinch 6y ago
Yes, exactly. I'm the father of an at risk child, there is absolutely no way we can totally isolate ourselves from society at large. I could go into depth about our situation, but what I came here to say is: don't believe any hand waving politician who says we can set up some sort of parallel society, where all the venerable are sheltered, whilst the rest go about our lives. It's just the latest incarnation of survival of the fittest. If New Zealand, with probably the world's best geographic / technological isolation, can't prevent infection, how can we expect that from a family of 4, an old man living alone, a recuperating heart patient?
nverno 6y ago
These arguments about whether the virus is 'bad' or not are entirely subjective. Not having to hear them anymore will be one of the biggest upsides of this vaccine.
abstractbarista 6y ago
Then we need to heavily isolate those specific high-risk communities, while simultaneously maximizing the freedom of everyone else.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
gdilla 6y ago
And it makes enough people sick enough to require hospitalization to the extent that lockdowns can keep our healthcare infrastructure from being overwhelmed (and driving up deaths because people still get sick, need surgery and treatment for all the non covid reasons and they need access to healthcare too).

rwcarlsen 6y ago

Yes - but when we only hear about, think about, and look at the extremes, it becomes too easy to let our thought-processes about the situation become (even subconsciously) skewed. It's too easy to forget that the constant barrage of stories and information is actually about the extremes. It takes deliberate effort to keep the balanced view.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
wobblyasp 6y ago
For sure; that's why people reiterate the 99%+ metric. This isn't a cataclysmic virus that will wipe out life on earth, but it will tax health care systems far beyond what they're capable of handling. It will devastate economies, lock downs or not, globally. It's far to easy to dismiss the effects if we see it "only" hurts <1% of people; which is why people feel the need to constantly reinforce the negative impacts.
- soulbow 6y ago
  Serious question, I don't have a political agenda by asking this: How will a virus that hurts <1% of people devastate economies, lockdowns or not? Economic devastation from lockdowns is clear. Economic devastation from a virus that primarily hurts the elderly is not clear to me. Again, I'm not making any points about the value determination of lives saved vs GDP saved, only asking how you quantify the economic impact of a virus.
  - smnrchrds 6y ago
    > How will a virus that hurts <1% of people devastate economies, lockdowns or not? Imagine 1% (or 0.5% or 0.2% or whatever) of planes crashed. How well do you think the airlines would fare? How many people would still fly? 1% is an insanely high number of deaths.
    - pjc50 6y ago
      0.1% of London bus drivers died: https://www.ioshmagazine.com/2020/08/11/london-bus-driver-covid-19-mortality-report-published https://www.ioshmagazine.com/2020/08/11/london-bus-driver-co... If they were dying in bus crashes, people would notice.
    - anoncake 6y ago
      1% is not insanely high, it's roughly how many people die each year.
      - joshuamorton 6y ago
        Then indeed, doubling the number of people who die would be significant.
        anoncake 6y ago
        Of course, but so is the damage caused by lockdowns.
        joshuamorton 6y ago
        Are you suggesting that lockdowns are doubling the number of animal deaths?
      - CRConrad 6y ago
        anoncake writes: > 1% is not insanely high, it's roughly how many people die each year. So another percent on top of that is a doubling. As many people again dying from Covid-19 as die from all other causes. How is that NOT “insanely” high?
- clint 6y ago
  Also many of those people who didn't die will have anywhere from mild effects to serious impairments for the rest of their lives. A huge amount of people who survive will deal with increased depression, anxiety, etc. Even though its easy and callous to write off the lives of millions of (easily preventable) deaths with a hand-wave, there are going to be serious and long-term effects for those who didn't die and for their families, jobs, etc...
  - blix 6y ago
    I personally know many people who are suffering from severe pandemic-related anxiety and depression who have not contracted the disease. The current discourse and societal response to the disease seems likely to have as big or larger of a mental health effect than the immediate consequences of the disease itself.
    - chachachoney 6y ago
      The lack of a proper societal response to the disease, and what that reveals about the fragile state of our civilization is what's responsible for severe pandemic-related anxiety.
      - blix 6y ago
        There's truth to this, but I don't think it's the whole picture. It's certainly possible to be concerned about the state of civilization without "doomscrolling" or checking covid death numbers each morning. These behaviors are consequences of the media landscape more than of the disease itself.
  - mns 6y ago
    That is simply not true and just speculation - especially for a disease that has been around for less than a year. Most of the studies that reported things like heart damage and other kind of side effects were retracted, but the retraction never made it in the press and social media, just the initial poorly ran studies that got hundreds of thousands of shares. One of the so called long COVID studies was done through people recruited through Facebook groups and Reddit communities, all of them having self reported symptoms, but none having actual positive tests.
- rwcarlsen 6y ago
  I don't agree that it would necessarily tax health care systems "beyond what they're capable of handling" (for my definitions of those words). I also disagree that economies would be devastated if we had avoided all lockdown and economy-affecting mitigations. But I understand that reasonable people could disagree with me on both those issues and that is fine.
  - akiselev 6y ago
    Durinng their peak earlier this year, Italian doctors were choosing who lives and who dies in the normal course of triage. That's the definition that matters to public health policy.
    - rwcarlsen 6y ago
      To me, beyond what it is capable of handling - means that the system gets damaged - not the people that it is treating. What you described is what I would call "beyond it's peaking capacity for treating patients". Not a general "beyond capacity to handle". Imagine driving a car. Not being able to fit all your friends in the car is different than the car frame being crushed because too many people climbed onto it. I'm saying that the former is what we have/will experience - not the latter.
      - akiselev 6y ago
        Tbh that sounds like a ridiculous standard. Our hospitals are fine as long as they haven't been hit in a nuclear first strike and are still standing?
      - HelloMcFly 6y ago
        This feels a bit tortured. COVID has, is, or is threatening to overload our healthcare system as evidenced by: 1) Severely reduced in-take of new patients of patients due to lack of beds available (and longer COVID recovery time) 2) Reduced ability to effectively care for other patients due to limited beds and transmissibility of the disease, and workforce reductions as healthcare workers get sick (this is not a hypothetical, this is happening in the hospital my wife and brother work at). 3) Forcing healthcare works to perform their jobs without subsequent PPE for their own protection, increasing their own health risks and creating serious issues for mental well-being when working in this environment day-in and day-out. The healthcare system is designed to treat patients. Believing the system is not exceeding what it can handle because somehow "the system itself" is not damaged (which I'm not even sure what you mean by that) but dismissing patient care and outcomes is like evaluating a vehicle's crash rating, but not evaluating the damage to the vehicle occupants.
- data_spy 6y ago
  I think the 99%+ metric is reassuring. However the 1% will have a massive cost to our healthcare system, we are in extremistan as Nassim Taleb likes to say. For example, in normal times 10% of the US population represent 64-66% of the health care costs (https://youtu.be/2qhrPa7paAU https://youtu.be/2qhrPa7paAU).
jczhang 6y ago
The thing is, it's more likely to be skewed in the wrong direction, the direction that it is safer than you think. So actually its important to understand how bad it is for those who get it. We have consistently had >1k deaths per day in the US and then many others with longterm issues.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

3minus1 6y ago

> [everyone] understands that this only affects a small percentage of those who contract it This is highly questionable. There are many articles (whether factual or not) suggesting widespread lasting effects, e.g. just last week on HN one suggested 1 in 5 patients develop mental illness: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25046157 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25046157. With all these articles floating around, I just wouldn't agree that there's some sort of consensus that 99%+ of people won't have issues.

seibelj 6y ago
1 in 5 get a virus and contract a mental illness? This seems highly suspect.
- orhmeh09 6y ago
  Please heed this warning from the linked thread: > Comments like this are gonna quickly turn this place into just another /r/science, where people of no particular qualification chime in and try to make themselves feel smart by contradicting a peer reviewed study without taking the actual effort needed to properly question a peer reviewed study, especially one in as prestigious a journal as the Lancet. Thank you. Nobody’s interested in your level of incredulity, however you italicize it.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    >especially one in as prestigious a journal as the Lancet While I agree in principle, the Lancet aren't immune to crummy papers (indeed, no-one is). Even just this year, they published that super-dodgy Surgisphere paper that turned out to be completely irreproducible (to put it kindly). Scientific papers are written by people, and the peers of people who (for example) don't really understand statistics are likely to also not understand statistics, so while peer review is definitely helpful, one should always read scientific papers sceptically. That being said, low-effort dismissals based on anecdotes are much, much worse than the average scientific paper.
- elhudy 6y ago

Retric 6y ago

Your numbers are wildly off. Assuming 99% of people had zero issues then you would see 52 million people completely fine and 520,000 hospitalizations except many people get severely ill without going to a hospital so we would easily be approaching herd immunity. Instead it’s likely closer to ~3-6% hospitalizations with nearly half of those people dying. With 70,000 people currently in the hospital, expect the death toll to keep increasing. The numbers do look better for young people, but if your thinking of 55+ as old, a huge hunk of the population is old. PS: The recent bump hit 1,000 deaths per day, but daily peak is still increasing rapidly so expect that to rise significantly.

OscarTheGrinch 6y ago

Yes, exactly. I'm the father of an at risk child, there is absolutely no way we can totally isolate ourselves from society at large. I could go into depth about our situation, but what I came here to say is: don't believe any hand waving politician who says we can set up some sort of parallel society, where all the venerable are sheltered, whilst the rest go about our lives. It's just the latest incarnation of survival of the fittest. If New Zealand, with probably the world's best geographic / technological isolation, can't prevent infection, how can we expect that from a family of 4, an old man living alone, a recuperating heart patient?

nverno 6y ago

These arguments about whether the virus is 'bad' or not are entirely subjective. Not having to hear them anymore will be one of the biggest upsides of this vaccine.

abstractbarista 6y ago

Then we need to heavily isolate those specific high-risk communities, while simultaneously maximizing the freedom of everyone else.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

gdilla 6y ago

And it makes enough people sick enough to require hospitalization to the extent that lockdowns can keep our healthcare infrastructure from being overwhelmed (and driving up deaths because people still get sick, need surgery and treatment for all the non covid reasons and they need access to healthcare too).