For healthy young people, covid19 is a mild-ish flu. The ones in danger are their parents and grandparents, which is why Italy has been hit so hard - many young people still live with their families in cramped conditions because they cannot afford renting or much less owning their own places.
Probably it will become a huge problem in the US too, with the added difficulty that even seniors often have to work to survive and there not being a properly funded healthcare and sick leave system.
You need to add a critical “some” before “healthy young people”. For some people, it is possible to go through a whole course of coronavirus without ever showing any noticeable symptoms at all, or nothing distinguishable from a typical cold, and come out the other end immune. For example here are 2 exceptionally mild cases https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/6/20-0452_article
But for some others, it is a hellishly bad experience which causes weeks of awful symptoms (e.g. only breathing via a mechanical ventilator), and for some healthy young people it even results in severe pneumonia leading to speedy death.
> The 32-year-old physician’s assistant, a non-smoker with no underlying health conditions, believes he contracted it while attending a medical conference in Times Square last weekend, saying the coronavirus spread quickly to both his lungs.
> “The virus is everything. Dirarrhea, watery eyes, shortness of breath, chest pain, you name it. High fever,” he said. “Every day is getting worse.”
As i said, the majority of people will experience mild symptoms. This poor chap clearly had a pneumonia complication. Do you have interviews with people, the majority, who presented mild symptoms or indeed none?
I had a virus and very high fever and was bedridden in early Jan. I don't recall being interviewed by the global press.
No matter how mild, the majority of cases need to be locked in a room for 2-4 weeks (because they're too flippant to be trusted to do it themselves) to prevent spreading to the other 20%+ who face permanent organ damage or worse. This isn't something that will simply kill a few hundred thousand at a cost of a couple hundred billion dollars like the flu if it's allowed to run its course through the population.
Yeah, you are so right. What realy bothers me in the way people, on HN, TV wherever, is treating numbers. You try that at one famous FAANG company and once to often, meaning a third time, and you can consider yourself lucky to just end up on a PIP.
Everbody is using the selection bias of both, testing and reporting, to confirm their own biases. Experts are not heard or ignored.
Reading this doesn't really induce panic. I've had worse infections where I did not seek medical help either. I particularily remember an illness roughly two years ago which took 3 weeks to get cured. It was so strong that it fucked with my consciousness for at least a week, time distortions and similar effects.
I feel like I am prepared by life.
I never tried to imply that I feel like I have magical powers.
I just think that overcareful people wouldn't have needed to see a doctor in about 95% of the cases in their life. Granted, there are times when the medical system is really useful to safe your life, but in most cases people just get the reassurance they need, but would have been fine if they just stayed at home without seeing a dctor.
That is my personal opinion, and I have had this opinion since many years. i.e., it is independent of this coronavirus incident.
You think voluntarily trying to ride it out at home instead of using up a hospital bed which could well be used by someone who needs it more urgently is bad behaviour for the herd?
People, you need to stop fighting amongst each other. The panic is killing your sense of logical thinking already.
First, it's about an order of magnitude worse in terms of effects than the flu on average. The "mild" category for Covid-19 includes walking pneunomia which is very much no fun and much more unpleasant than a normal flu, though you can stay at home and ride it out unlike the "severe" or "critical" covid-19 symptoms which require a hospital and oxygen for the severe cases or serious ICU measures for the "critical" cases.
Second, it's a lot more transmissable than the flu and nobody is vaccinated against it. So while flu hospitalizations are going to be spread out across months if we just let Covid-19 run it's course half the population will end up being infected at some particular week. And 10% of people will need hopsitalization. And our hospitals can't cope with anything like that number of people and you'll be seeing a lot more than the default 1% of those infected die.
We really need to take this seriously.
EDIT: I misremembered mild/severe/critical as mild/moderate/severe then corrected it.
Probably it will become a huge problem in the US too, with the added difficulty that even seniors often have to work to survive and there not being a properly funded healthcare and sick leave system.