Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cryptophreak 1436 days ago
The number one cause of death in that same age group was (and remains) accidents, and yet driving has not been curtailed. Young families could not attend school, go to work, or gather with loved ones because of the #4 killer, but the #1 killer inspired no such restrictions.

I don't know what qualifies technically as a hysteria, but locking people in their homes for months for fear of something less dangerous than a typical daily activity sounds like a promising candidate.
1 comments
whoisthemachine 1436 days ago
Interesting that you make this comment when it was the #4 killer in spite of what you call the "hysterical" lock downs. Also consider that many people are advocates of public transportation precisely because driving cars is so dangerous.
link
kcplate 1436 days ago
The number you didn’t provide was the most important one to your argument. Using these hypotheticals just to illustrate my point: Say there were of 1000 deaths in the <40 age group. If 900 were caused by accidents, 90 were caused by illness other than Covid, 6 were caused by shark attacks, and 4 were caused by Covid-19. Just being the fourth leading cause of death in that age group doesn’t truly convey it’s real significance does it?

The important number is what percentage of all deaths in the <40 age group was Covid 19. Just saying it was fourth, well, that’s just trying to ascribe significance over what might be an insignificant number…just for the purpose of creating alarm to justify an unpopular and frankly damaging mitigation strategy.

link
whoisthemachine 1433 days ago
In the article I linked, it says "The study found COVID-19 caused roughly 700,000 deaths between March 2020 and October 2021. The pandemic disease trailed only heart disease and cancer, which caused roughly 2.15 million collectively in that time frame." Clicking into the cited study, it links to this table with the raw numbers for each age group... no one's trying to hide something or mislead you.

[0] Study https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...

[1] Table (long link!) https://cdn.jamanetwork.com/ama/content_public/journal/intem...

link