Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by eloff 2255 days ago
I disagree. I'm unable to find any source with numbers. At best I've seen the statement "it's rarely fatal except in very rare circumstances".

Like the flu, you don't die from the flu, but really it's the last straw on top of other issues that pushes people over the edge.

But the flu is far more deadly than the common cold, it's misleading to talk about them together like that.

1 comments

There are no numbers. Nobody has ever bothered to measure it separately from pneumonia. It’s hardly ever tested for or listed under cause of death, even when it’s obviously a factor. Once things change in the aftermath of all of this, we will see if your instinct is correct.
Well it turns out I'm wrong about this, there are some studies with numbers but they're pretty rare:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3655081/

> Twenty-two percent of all subjects with isolated coronavirus were hospitalized, but in the population aged ≥60 years this increased to 73%. While our study design precludes the determination of exact hospitalization rates as a result of coronavirus infections, the hospitalization rates were similar to those for influenza.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4181476/

> The high proportion of non-influenza infection in this study (72%) underscores the importance of non-influenza viral infection in contributing to severe illness necessitating hospital and ICU admission in adults, as has been found by others.