> Some people are looking at antibody studies that show that large parts of the population are somehow affected and then doing back of the napkin math and deciding that this is really not worse than the flu in terms of death rate.
i feel like a lot of people are ignoring that a ton of people have relocated outside of NYC. i don't think the 25% antibody positive study in nyc is accounting for that
Already 0.2% of NYC has died of COVID19. That's completely consistent with the very initial, very dire infection fatality rates of 0.6%-1.0%. (Which is different than the case fatality rate.)
When you combine this 10x increase of the IFR along with the 5x-8x increase in suspected attack rate of flu, one would have to quite ignorant of reality, and perhaps an unknowing tool of others, to somehow look at the NYC study and think that it supports the silly "flu" conflation.
(And for that matter, flu kills a ton of people every year, are we going to add another flu to the world without fighting back at all? What sort of wimpy, defeatist person looks at the world that way?)
It's such a breath of fresh air coming on HN where most people are numerate and capable of understanding data.
I actually agree that most parts of the US should carefully open up - the lockdowns have a significant portion of the population in dire straights. Our society can't survive a long-term lockdown intact, I'm convinced.
But that doesn't mean the virus isn't extremely dangerous. It's far worse than the flu. It's irresponsible for folks on social media to insinuate that it's "not even has bad as the flu" based on a few memes they've read.
We have to take great care, or more areas will end up like the Tri-state area. As the GP pointed out, the viral load is extremely important in determining mortality among the younger ages. If there is tons of the virus everywhere, the < 60 mortality rate will increase, possibly dramatically.
Glad to be on HN where most people understand things like CFR vs IFR (as opposed to a vague "death rate" most of social media talks about) along with issues of bias, etc that can affect any of these studies.
There are some interesting stories on this. A lot of deaths are occurring that are outside of the 'normal' and not accounted for by deaths attributed to covid alone:
> And for that matter, flu kills a ton of people every year, are we going to add another flu to the world without fighting back
I feel like they're realistic limits. People are not gears and you cannot turn humanity off like batteries. There is unrest in Ecuador when cities began running out of morgue space. There's unrest in parts of the world where people haven't seen paychecks for two months. Most high income countries have been overproducing food for years, but we're still losing a lot of food quickly. We're depending on that overproduction slack to hold.
Combined with the difficultly of creating coronavirus vaccines. I've read people attribute the lack of a good SARS1 vaccine due to the economics/capitalism, but there seems there more to it. Animal and human trials have produced vaccines that may not provide long lasting immunity and have dangerous side-effects:
A vaccine in less that 5 years feels very unrealistic, not for a safe one. I have a feeling humanity may need to come to the realization that our life expectancy may have been significantly lowered for the next several years, if not decades.
> Combined with the difficultly of creating coronavirus vaccines. I've read people attribute the lack of a good SARS1 vaccine due to the economics/capitalism, but there seems there more to it.
Yes. The reason there is no SARS1 vaccine is because SARS1 burned out after a year:
"The SARS global outbreak was contained in July 2003. Since 2004, there have not been any known cases of SARS reported anywhere in the world." [0]
i feel like a lot of people are ignoring that a ton of people have relocated outside of NYC. i don't think the 25% antibody positive study in nyc is accounting for that