The deal is that we are dealing with the power of large numbers. You can cherry-pick whatever case you want to fit your narrative. It does not mean its relevant information.
I spoke with my mother recently and we were lamenting how people were completely ignoring the "JUST STAY HOME" guidance. As the call was ending she mentioned how she was about to have her sisters and friends over for wine the next day. To which I replied that she was doing exactly what she was lamenting others doing.
I think most people just assume they are the exception and can be trusted to do this correctly, when in fact the guidance is the way it is explicitly because that is not the case.
Yes, it’s exceedingly rare to see a case like this, but what’s not rare is seeing the examples of people not taking this disease seriously, even some public officials.
Getting people to cooperate with drastic disease mitigation efforts won’t happen if there’s a probability embedded in that headline. People are doing that in their heads already when they think “this can’t happen to me, so let’s all go to the beach today.”
so let's keep this in mind before we get in our high horse about people not listening to the media and the government because of this crap. The R0 of the disease is much lower in countries where everyone is wearing face masks of any kind.
Everyone on reading this should Google the fact that that homemade face mask made out of cloth are actually highly effective in reducing the spread of this illness.
Do you have any evidence to show it’s worse than it ever was?
I know some who are of the opinion that they could die at any point anyways so they would rather just live life. Some also worry that prolonged quarantines could damage the country and decimate small businesses along with the middle class. For them they would rather take the risk and sacrifice for a better future for their kids. Of course there are others who are self centered jerks, but the point is that there are good arguments on both sides.
Also, with post truth... A lot of people who were, up until this pandemic started, denying basic biological facts. Some of that ideology had even begun to makes its way into the major research and medical schools. That doesn't help with credibility when the same individuals start saying that everyone needs to quarantine.
The same people who were censoring people based on ideology, at times over facts, are now claiming that they are censoring "mis-information". Once again, many people are naturally skeptical. In many ways this is one of the natural result of "post truth" fiction and ideology being favored over facts. We reap what we sew.
With proper treatment nearly all of those critical cases will survive. But if the health care system becomes overwhelmed that may no longer be true.
It is trying to sink in the idea that young people are not invincible to COVID-19 and that they need to practice social distancing, if not for the benefit of society as a whole, then for their own self benefit.
Not a per-capita number. Not a percentage of young people - a percentage of sick people. Folks in that wide age bracket are around 30% of the US total population. The old - 15%?
To add some weight to your argument, the official stats from italy offer clear data [1]:
- 1.1% of deaths in Italy < 50 years old
- No deaths < 30
- 99% with comorbidities, 75% with at least 2 comorbidities.
[1] https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Report-C...
What this indicates to me is that Italy was testing only the worst patients. This whole scare to me reeks of sampling bias. We only test the worst patients for covid 19 which ups the mortality rate.
The truth is -- people who are at risk should social distance themselves rather than the general population. We want herd immunity to develop for this disease -- that means having young healthy people be exposed to it.
And exactly as you say: if there is a large population of infected people, the absolute number of people who fit in these small percentage tragedies is actually large.
This was proven by the response to the polls (especially the FiveThirtyEight one) in the 2016 presidential election, surely?
Fear will only subside long time after fatigue creeps in, but before that no of cases should plateau.
I mean, there are even cases of young people just randomly dying without any visible cause. Yes, not only the elderly can die just like that. No one really pays this any mind either.
Sure an individual story of a horrific crash, the pain and suffering is heart wrenching. News outlets love to play that up. Yes, it could also be you, but when you put it into a larger picture it tells a different story.
Then there are the stories of airplane crashes. They get massive coverage yet, statistically, planes are safer than being in a car.
BTW, this isn’t “anecdotal evidence”. This is an actual, verifiable data point.
While this narrative may fit what is perceived as a good cause, do we want it at the expense of truth? Do we want every story to first be questioned, "what are they trying to get us to do by telling us this?"
You’ve moved the goalposts to say that if it kills even one young person then young people generally are at risk. The claim was never that zero young people have died. Just vanishingly few.
DR. BIRX (March 23, 2020):
"In the mortality data that has been provided to us, there has been no child under 15 that has succumbed to the virus in Europe. There was the one 14-year-old in China. So we still see that there is less severity in children, and so that should be reassuring to the moms and dads out there.
To Generation Z and to my millennial colleagues who have been really at the forefront of many of these responses: Less than 1 percent of all the mortality is less than 50. And so this is, I think, also a very important point.
That doesn’t mean that individuals won’t have severe disease. So still 99 percent of all the mortality coming out of Europe, in general, is over 50, and preexisting conditions. The preexisting condition piece still holds in Italy, with the majority of the mortality having three or more preexisting conditions."
One of the things that terrifies me now is, as this is spread in the west is, there’s this sense of invulnerability among millennials. And absolutely not. Ten percent of the people who are in [intensive care units] in Italy are in their 20s, 30s or 40s. These are young, healthy people with no co-morbidities, no other diseases. We don’t understand why some young healthy people progress to severe disease and even die and others don’t. We don’t have clear predictors.
[1] https://time.com/5805368/will-coronavirus-go-away-world-heal...
But this is the first time we know of that anyone young and healthy has died of the disease, and we're over a hundred thousand confirmed cases in. Even assuming the current understanding is accurate, and this person didn't have some undiagnosed comorbidity, that's on the order of a .001% chance of dying.
For a pandemic disease, those are very good odds.
Yes, it's frightening, and in frightening times. But it's important to keep a sense of perspective. After all, stressing out over this can only weaken your defenses.
It may be the first one that’s been in the news here, but what about in China? I’m wondering if there have been any cases there, that haven't been officially reported in the news.
The whistleblower doctor who died was only 34. I don't know if he had any prexisting conditions. https://nypost.com/2020/02/09/coronavirus-doctor-li-wenliang...
We can wonder all day about any number of things. Does it help, though? Does it make you less likely to contract COVID-19, or more likely to have a mild case if you do get it?
Your odds of that are pretty good, by the way; based on what apparently reputable information I've found, assuming no risk factors like advanced age or comorbidity, it's about 85% likely you have an uncomplicated disease course, with no serious symptoms and requiring no medical support to resolve.
What beneficial influence on those already good chances do you expect to see by worrying yourself halfway into a panic, about something over which you have no control in any case?
Or maybe you’re diligent and you haven’t left the home in weeks and one day you slip and fall in the bathtub and break a bone. How long until an ambulance shows up, if at all? How long until you have surgery, if at all? And then you catch covid anyway.
Not exactly, there's factors pushing that way down, and some up.
We shouldn't look at [mortality /infected numbers], but rather at [mortality / resolved cases]. Given the exponential growth, most infected occurred very recently, and their death may still be pending, bound to occur in the coming weeks. For example, suppose an infection takes 1 month to resolve. If in January 100 get infected, in February 1000, and in February all the 100 infected from January have died, the mortality rate isn't 100/1100, it's 100/100.
Instead, looking at just the resolved numbers: either death, or recovery, are more accurate. This is still not fully reliable given the cases resolving in death or recovery may have different timing, but it's better than just looking at gross infected rates. This pushes up the 0.001% figure.
More importantly though, our infected numbers are way, way off. Probably 10 times higher. Most countries only test people who are hospitalised. The rest must stay home. There's no country that I know of that is going to people's homes to test people at scale. And there's only a few countries with a drive-through testing kind of model. Given there is evidence that substantial percentages (perhaps 50%) are asymptomatic, and that weak and mild cases aren't being tested either, the true infected numbers are way worse. (which pushes down your 0.001% figure).
Even if you like those "very good odds", do you really think it is smart to risk playing Russian Roulette at 1/1000 odds for a pizza party?
More critically, even if you like those odds, all the people you meet when you fail to maintain distance, wear PPE, etc. did NOT knowingly decide that those odds are OK for them.
The hospital resources consumed by you or those you unwittingly expose will also prevent treatment of many completely unrelated accidents & health issues, e.g., we now have examples like neurologists staffing ERs, which means their neuro patients get punted.
The sense of perspective to maintain is not "this isn't a big deal", but that this is an exponentially growing deadly threat to a significant portion of the population, and every person even those at minimal personal risk to themselves need to take on the larger responsibility of helping the society survive.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/03/panama-13-year-girl-c...
I'm sure there will be more such cases. As other folks here are pointing out, sometimes that's just how it goes, even for somebody who "should" be in no danger. Sometimes 20-year-olds die of the flu.
But you still don't help yourself by getting into a tailspin over it. If you're sick, that just depletes your energy and makes it harder to take care of yourself so you can get better. If you're not, the same stress weakens your immune system and makes it harder to stay well.
Just because the virus doesn't kill doesn't mean you aren't being used.
Like the CCR5-Delta32 mutation makes 10% of Europeans resistant to HIV (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/03/050325234239.h...).
There are other mutations that appears to combat virus more effectively, but who's to say that there are not mutations that are beneficial for some disease, but catastrophic for others ?
but you can easily have regular checkups and still have an undiscovered (unknown) pre-existing condition. so what is the difference?
I think most people are immediately thinking severe asthma, COPD, recent or current cancer treatment; and while all of those elevate your risk, they aren't the most common comorbidities.
The key co-morbidities are high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes.
Only heart disease seems obvious - high blood pressure is almost standard, and diabetes is often managed well to the point of invisibility.
The cardiac link appears interesting. Patients who are given ECMO, a complete lung bypass alternative to ventilators, have still died after their lungs recovered.
By blaming the person for succumbing to the virus they can fall in to the US-centric mindset of blaming people for their own disfortune, poverty, illness, accident, lack of whiteness, etc.
It's really stupid, unless you are a physician treating cases, to focus this way. It keeps us from dealing with the reality of the pandemic.
Edit: for those objecting to my observation, see the responses linked below, which were the only ones present when I replied. I've seen this pattern often enough over the last few days to realize that it's not simply people seeking information about the nature of the disease, it is something else, more reactionary and emotional.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22684440
While lots of people 'know old people' or with pre-existing conditions, many people have youngish parent with already passed grandparents, who have trouble understanding why this is a fuss for them, since they imagine that it'll just be a cold (for them). Cases like this one are 'scary' because it shows that they might still be at risk. Which, in some sense, is good if it makes 'normal people' scared enough to actually stay home/self-quarantine.
I really don't think this has anything to do with the "US-centric mindset of blaming people for their own [snipped]".
I'm 25, and at 23 I had my lung collapse (spontaneous pneumothorax) twice, due to nothing but random chance (according to my doctors). Does that mean it doesn't matter if I die from the coronavirus? Should we stop lockdowns and resume economic activity despite the dangers this virus presents to people like me?
Except then the comments all point out that the man had PKU, and that Diet Coke won't will you unless you have PKU. And that virtually everybody who has PKU already knows they have it. That the typical person has nothing to worry about from Diet Coke.
Would you object to the comments pointing this out? Would you say they're blaming the person who died? Or would you just say that they're contextualizing a very important piece of information that the news is overlooking to sensationalize its story.
However, should the virus mutate, or otherwise start posing a larger problem to the general public, the calculus of just how under-prepared are we radically changes.
It has nothing to do with blame and everything to do with dealing with the reality of the pandemic. Are we facing an extremely contagious flu, or are we facing an extremely contagious 1918 / Spanish flu? There is a pretty serious difference between the two in terms of preparedness needed.
My daughter is 26, and winds up in the ER once a year or so for asthma. What are her odds? My mother is 78, has had open heart surgery, and is overweight and gets almost no exercise. I'm more or less assuming I will never see her again.
"Mortality rates haven't been very high at all" is easy to say when you're not in any way vulnerable.
Yes, but look at the comments from when I made mine: they were all of the nature of "I bet they had some other problem". Once you've seen this reaction enough it begins to look less like information-seeking and more like denial.
Human brains have to justify things to try to disassociate the bad events with their reality. It is difficult to accept that calamity is very close to them.
If they already have something like a compromised immune system and die from the coronavirus, then it's not really surprising. if they were perfectly healthy, it's a bit more interesting.
It's probably not wise, but it's very understandable.
* Some young people believe they're immune and don't care if they spread the disease. Spring break in Florida.
* Some old people are envious of this and looking for reasons it isn't true.
* Other old people are scared for their offspring and ready for their fears to be confirmed.
* Health officials are selling the story that young people are in more danger than we thought to try to convince them to stay home. Again, spring break in Florida.
* Media outlets focus on the rare youth deaths because the above factors drive clicks.
The data from China is pretty clear. Young people rarely notice having COVID, and that even among symptomatic cases the level of death is incredibly low. I know we're all skeptical of Chinese government numbers but their total lockdown and testing regime gives them the unequaled opportunity to say "everybody in this town was exposed, absolutely every person, and here's how things came out." They're the only country in a position to definitively comment on asymptomatic cases.
It's hard to see why they'd fake a risk curve that increases very slowly through young years and then swoops upward in middle age. Something about the Chinese respect for elders? I can't see it.
Here in the West, you get a half-dozen articles about one 21-year-old who died and appears to have had no pre-existing conditions, a similar number about some doctor who died or priest who refused a ventilator, and no articles detailing each of the thousands of older people who are dying.
Our culture is trying to believe that young people are vulnerable. We "want" a more even risk curve.
So... is this ok? We have a weird circumstance where the usual bad science is serving a public health purpose by propagating a probable untruth. Meanwhile, the "everything's fine, it's just the flu" side is working as hard as possible to spread a different untruth that is very dangerous to public health.
Is it morally defensible to tell people on the internet that young people are almost all going to be fine? Not immune, but probably fine?
This is where many of you who are convinced that young people are in significantly more danger start speaking up. "Some young people do, this young person did, no pre-existing conditions, this article says half the deaths are under 50..."
If the population in general had the death rate that we've seen among young people this virus wouldn't be a big deal. That's what matters. Some young people will get sick and die but not in sufficient quantities to overwhelm the hospital and mortuary systems. The deaths of the middle-aged and old are what will paralyze our countries.
You probably won't know a young person who dies. You probably will know an old person who does.
Intelligent people just want to know how severe the corona virus is, and what the risk factors are.
I can't speak for other people. :)
I was reading about the 1918 Spanish Flu (H1N1) today, and it sounds a lot like severe corona virus - blood frothing from lungs.
It is a virus, isn't it?
The pragmatic side of me says "Yeah, what the heck. It's clearly known"
Edit: Rereading it, the quote is directed at people who are skeptical of it's existence. So it makes sense in context.
However even without pre-existing conditions there is still a non-zero chance of complications that could result in a fatality regardless of how low the chances are.
This both means that people shouldn’t be careless but it also doesn’t mean that the news should abuse this to spread irrational fear.
Comments like this:
> "Clinicians who care for adults should be aware that COVID-19 can result in severe disease among persons of all ages," said the report, published on 18 March.
Serve little to no clinical value, clinicians understand very well that there is always a chance; however it is quite clear that currently the likelihood of younger patients to die is still extremely slim compared to the current high risk groups which includes pretty much anyone over 60.
The number of deaths in the 18-24 group specifically is still a rounding error.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/24/los-angeles-health-officials...
Looking for something else to blame when you agree that it's "highly unlikely but not impossible" simply shows how unintuitive statistics are.
How many people are known to have COVID in the US? 55,000 officially, probably 3-10x that, let's say 100k for a nice round number.
Is 1 out of 100k a "highly unlikely but not impossible" chance? Sure. So you don't need to assume that there must be other causes in the absence of other evidence.
The body is a large and extremely marvelous yet complex piece of machinery, even with self-repairing mechanisms.
Everyone is at risk even if they're healthy, it's just that the risk rates vary and for some groups are incredibly low based on the data. Knowing your risk rate is nearly impossible, but you can try to estimate based on how it effects larger subgroups of the population. That doesn't mean you're not at risk, it just means you're less likely at risk or were not measuring a risk factor you happen to be highly susceptible to.
Even run of the mill drugs have rare reactions that can lead to death. Across a large enough population and enough time, those rare reactions will occur. New unknown and unpredicted issues may even manifest.
People like to think in absolutes: I will die from this or I'm immune to this. Most of life isnt discrete (at least at our scale) and falls in some continuum between extremes.
Haha, isn't this the perfect razor to validate our own tightly-held beliefs and reject all evidence to the contrary.
If it takes abusing the properties of huge numbers to get younger people to wake up then do it. Because pretty soon this isn't going to be rare.
