Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lazide 1437 days ago
Measles is fatal in about .1% of infections (less than Covid), with hospitalization rates of about 25% and causes hearing loss and long term immune system damage in a decent number of infections.

Mumps can occasionally cause fertility issues in males, among other issues, and is quite painful but rarely fatal (approx. .03-.05%).

Shingles is terrible for adults, and you can’t avoid the risk of you got the live virus. If you’re vaccinated before being exposed, I believe the risk is much much lower but I don’t have the numbers handy.

1 comments

One should never trivialize disease, but the numbers cited here is almost a magnitude too large, both for measles and covid.

The most trustworthy data sources I could find points at about .02% for measles and .03% for covid. Then of course, infection fatality rate is notoriously hard to quantify.

Every single case hides a personal tragedy.

Nope? If anything too small.

Different numbers of course, but not that far off -

Measles case fatality rate of 1.2% in unvaccinated population (and they tested everyone nearby, so CFR should be very near IFR here) [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8483622/]. The .02% is way too low except in perhaps already vaccinated population.

US deaths by COVID-19 are now just over 1 million. I’ve heard plenty of anecdotal stories of over and under counting, but given current US population of 329 million, and widespread vaccination, the early stage 1%ish fatality rate is about right. It couldn’t be .03% except perhaps in already vaccinated folks, otherwise we’d literally not have had a pandemic. Total fatalities with a 100% infection rate and no vaccination would be less than 100k. More than that die from normal flus and colds every year, and the excess fatality numbers make it clear that isn’t what happened.