Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by inyourtenement 2060 days ago
Arbitrary!?

This is nonsense. Are you suggesting that if this illness had all the same characteristics -- long hospital stays, long-lasting damage to the body, highly transmissible -- but didn't kill, then we would not be "shutdown"?

2 comments

Wrong hill to die on, bud. 60M people got infected with Swine Flu, and nobody even thought of shutting anything down. Why? Because it was about as deadly as regular flu. So yes, deaths are the right metric to track.
Completely irrelevant. There were an estimated 274k hospitalizations from swine flu, over the course of that year. So swine flu did not have the characteristics I specified.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/2009-h1n1-pandemi...

"estimated 274k hospitalizations" - remind me again how widespread the swine flu tests were in comparison to COVID?
Yes Arbitrary. Why 100k? Why not 10, 100, 1000, 10,000, 1,000,000? Oh because 100k makes the stats look the best for your argument.
It's per 100k people in the state. It makes no difference if it's 100 or 100k. The comparison was state-to-state. The absolute numbers don't matter.