Re:Mysterious heart damage, not just lung troubles, befallin...
by scott_s on Monday April 06, 2020 @02:36PM
(#22796468)
All good points. But paulsutter's message remains: young people are at significant risk. Yes, the risk for older people and those with pre-existing conditions in higher. But the parent poster's characterization of the risk for young people as "very little" is dangerous.
Re:Mysterious heart damage, not just lung troubles, befallin...
by m4rtink on Monday April 06, 2020 @04:17PM
(#22797358)
This is also why I don't really like that some propose various "herd immunity" schemes - we simply don't know what the virus actually does to people in practice, even if it does not outright kill them. So it seems very irresponsible to propose schemes like that at this point in time.
However we mostly don't try to confirm cases if it won't affect the care we give. We just tell them to self-isolate. We therefore will not have good statistics on what percentage of cases are confirmed until after the immediate crisis is over and we test to see how many have antibodies.
So your figure is, "Of young people who have it severely enough to get tested, 15-20% get hospitalized." This says nothing about what fraction of cases are severe enough to get tested.
Also note that we undercount deaths. If a person dies and was never confirmed to have COVID-19, they are also not counted as a COVID-19 death. Nobody knows how big this undercount factor is.