Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Even in a worst case scenario with no vaccination, COVID-19 would kill less than 1% of the world population. So it's a serious public health problem but not an existential risk to human civilization. I certainly encourage everyone to get vaccinated if they can so as to get us to herd immunity faster, but as a practical matter the disease isn't much of an eminent danger to most people who are otherwise in good health.

The potential long term effects of anthropogenic global climate change are more severe. We may see large regions of the world become essentially uninhabitable. That's a far more serious concern than any infectious disease.



[flagged]


That's just completely wrong. Please stop spreading misinformation about a serious subject. You can find the CDC's best estimates of fatality rates here.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

Doctors have mostly stopped using ventilators to treat COVID-19 patients. Those often do more harm than good.


https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7316113/

> COVID-19 is a highly contagious infection with no proven treatment. Approximately 2.5% of patients need mechanical ventilation while their body fights the infection

So I'm a bit off with my estimate. But I still stand by my logic.


That is 2.5% of patients, not 2.5% of the population if it spreads everywhere.

Not everyone who is exposed to coronavirus gets sick enough to be counted as a patient in those statistics


Correct. The CDC estimated that only about a quarter of US infections were officially counted as cases.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...


I'm also not sure that "case" and "patient" are being used as synonyms here?


That's _just_ the ventilator. The people who would die because they are suffocating on their own mucus in their lungs.

There's other ways to die from COVID19, such as heart attacks due to the disease, liver damage, etc. etc.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: