Ask HN: Are we overreacting to coronavirus?

I mean, some people are overreacting about some aspects of this, but the main thing is:

- the fatality rate for covid is high. People make a valid point about how we don’t know the “actual” (unbiased) fatality rate, that may be hard to estimate, but at this point it’s more or less irrelevant —- we already know for a fact that it is high enough to overwhelm the healthcare system, as is already happening elsewhere. We’re not going to wake up one day and say “oh oops, the fatality rate is only 0.03%, oopsies sorry everyone go back to work”, it’s already past that point.

- because it will overwhelm our healthcare system, countries have no choice but to impose extreme measures to slow the spread, which will have huge economic effects depending on how long we can stand doing this. Ideally until there is a solution to the problem of inundated hospitals, whatever that looks like, and however long that takes.

- people hoarding resources or thinking this is the apocalypse are likely overreacting. People are panicking, which will slowly stop once people adjust to their new temporary reality, but whether people are “overreacting” has a different answer for every person.

- the impact on the economy is going to be severe, even with trillions of dollars in stimulus. The restaurant/entertainment industries are trillions of dollars in size, so this will hurt (it is already hurting) and it will put many people out of business.

So....it depends on exactly what you mean by overreacting. If people who are really ok are filling hospital beds, then once things get bad they will be sidelined in favor of serious cases. So for now I don’t see how that’s an issue but maybe it is?

In summary: panic is usually the wrong response to anything but this is incredibly serious...

No. In the US alone more people may die from covid19 than from any other single event ever. Global deaths may exceed world war 2. For young healthy people, yes, things will be fine, but we are looking at millions dying well before their time.

In Italy death rates are 5x beyond normal. They are not even able to bury all the bodies at this time the mortality rate is so high.

Angela Merkel, who rarely gives speeches, has said this is the greatest challenge to Germany since the second world war. And Germany has been through a lot.

Look, even Donald Trump, who has every economic and political incentive to downplay this is calling this a catastrophe.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1239975682643357696.html

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/angela-merkel-nails-...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/19/generation-has...

Overall I would have to say absolutely, yes. The number of infections doesn't justify this level of panic, let alone the number of deaths. I realise there is an element of "prevention" here, but far, far more people die of very common things (flu, traffic accidents, smoking-related conditions, being overweight, etc.) in the US alone every year, some of which are also 100% preventable, than have died worldwide of coronavirus. Do we shut down borders because of a flu outbreak? No, it's just expected. The same can be said for any of the dozens of leading causes of death that exist in poverty-stricken countries where things like water contamination causing diarrhea kill more people than we could possibly imagine dying in the US.

I'm not saying that there haven't been some good things to come out of this situation - people working from home and thereby saving gas, limiting pollution, etc.; increased awareness of basic cleanliness practices, particularly in some countries that are quite noticeably less fastidious than the US generally is; actual tests of some of our response mechanisms (I mean, you don't trust your backups unless you've used them...) - but the extraordinary response of basically shutting down Europe is so far and away over the top...

I don't pretend to understand _why_ people have freaked out like this, but I suspect it's pretty much in line with why they freak out about anything: they've been programmed to wait for the "next big thing" that is going to kill us all by news, TV, movies; the news has, as usual, plastered everything across the "front page" on a constant basis, essentially "hyping" it up; and probably that on some deep psychological level we've all gotten a little overwhelmed with technological advances and how quickly the world has become a global market that is "always on", so we were unintentionally waiting for some way to pull back and deal with ourselves for a while.

That study is actually quite myopic, and focuses entirely on non-pharmapseutical treatment. It specifucally ignores most of the findings we have now:

  - 25-50% infected show no symptoms
  - herd immunity is ignored
  - Non-vaccine treatments are ignored
  - Reinfection is assumed, yet we have no data yet because there havent been any reinfections yet
  - It flatly assumes full quarantine is possible at home

Definitely read the study and weigh your own data and conclusions with these points in mind rather than using his summary.

This guy just got scared from it, but he's just a social science historian, not a doctor or microbiologist.

There is no black or white answer to this. It depends mostly on the number of deaths a given government is OK to tolerate. It seems China, South Korea & European countries decided to have the least possible deaths.

Now what would be the number of fatalities if we'd let things go? For the reasons you mentioned the fatality rate is very hard to even estimate.

Italy had 4000 deaths due to Covid-19 in 4 weeks which is bad enough. As a comparison France had 8100 death due to flu during the 2018-19 winter, and 30000 deaths in 2 weeks due to a heat wave in 2003. Would the Covid-19 overrun those figures with no containment measures. My estimation is that it would.

For Germany: it turns out the virus has currently spread between younger people, explaining the low number of fatality for now. Maybe there are more cautious as well.