Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by toyg 2290 days ago
> symptoms and mortality rate have been exaggerated by the media

Dude, believe what you will, but in the most affected areas, they can't even bury bodies fast enough, they are literally filling up churches with coffins. This does not happen with influenza, because we have vaccines and mitigation techniques that we do not have with Covid19. We don't even know for sure if or when reinfection can occur.

In a regular year, influenza in Italy kills 400-500 people, and simple pneumonia kills another 6,000 to 8,000. We've had 2,000 deaths from covid19 in 2 weeks, and concentrated in 20% of the country. Do we really want to "let it run its course" for a full year over the whole of Europe? At this rate, in two months we'll have broken all records.

You underestimate this at your peril.

1 comments

>In a regular year, influenza in Italy kills 400-500 people

Data is literally one query away.

>We estimated excess deaths of 7,027, 20,259, 15,801 and 24,981 attributable to influenza epidemics in the 2013/14, 2014/15, 2015/16 and 2016/17, respectively, using the Goldstein index.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197121...

My data does not agree with your data: http://www.assis.it/dati-istat-sui-decessi-da-influenza/