[teambayleaf]

The mortality rate of COVID-19 is estimated to be around ~0.1% for young people, which is five times higher than seasonal flu.

> the risk of death among young adults would be smaller than that of older adults, e.g., at most 0.1%–0.2%. Whether to perceive this estimate as severe or moderate is a matter for discussion, but we consider 0.1%–0.2% among young adults to be unusually high.

> https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/9/2/580

So although it is not as deadly as SARS (which had 20% fatality rate), you definitely don't want to catch it.

[lixtra]

> we consider 0.1-0.2% ... high

To put that into perspective that’s the mortality rate of measles [1] and our grandparents were still going to measls parties.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/meas.html

[ajross]

But measles wasn't a pandemic! Everyone keeps thinking this is about individual risk and trying to downplay things, and it's not like that.

Our grandparents went to measles parties because they knew that they'd eventually be exposed and wanted to do it under controlled conditions where they knew treatment was available and had a plan for early detection of symptoms.

The situation with COVID-19 is that people who get sick are going to do so in an environment where they and their government are surprised as "how fast it grew" and where all the hospital beds (and oxygen masks, and ventilators, and intubation kits, and doctors, and nurses, and...) are going to be filled by other sick people.

And a lot of them are going to die, who didn't need to if we had just taken this seriously and not told people "it's just like measles".

[lixtra]

My reading of melling was to actually infect young and healthy people under controlled circumstances such that herd immunity builds.

To that teambayleaf pointed out that it comes at high individual risk.

But in the past this was done for measles at similar risk.