This index won't tell you wether it's safe to move around or not, just what people are doing and what authorities are allowing.
BTW, this is a very well done indicator dashboard for the Netherlands. https://coronadashboard.government.nl/landelijk
Case numbers are massively skewed by testing capacity.
Personal anecdote, but I generally avoid doctors at pretty well all costs.
I have one, and I go for my yearly physical when they call me to schedule it. Other than that, I've found the doctor to be a great way to waste a lot of money and get an ambiguous result. Usually, "Take pain killers for a week and see if it gets better"
Since I am relatively well off, I have to imagine there is an enormous portion of the population who feels similarly to me about going to the doctor, and who also don't actually have the money to pay those bills.
It seems likely to me that coronavirus cases are probably just going undetected among the less well off in (American) society, especially for the portion where the illness is mild (which is literally every case I have heard about in my area for people under 40).
The experience of the pandemic is pretty clearly split along class lines.
We don't know what the long term effects might be. There are some reports that they are pretty bad, but nothing is confirmed.
It's been a while since I left virology so I can't comment on the veracity of the article. It does look pretty comprehensive though, and a bunch of the articles I remember to have read a decade ago are referenced.
Which disease is being cured by your body entirely and then comes back 2 years later with long term effects?
> We don't know what the long term effects might be
Isn't this true for everything though? How do you know if there are any long term effects for a new developed vaccine? Does it mean out of fear that theoretically anything in life can suddenly unexpectedly cause long term effects that you are not going to do anything which hasn't been done by other humans for at least 10-20 years? People don't know about long term effects of cellular data, yet we are using it every day.
Given that nobody has any long term effects from COVID which are different from other post viral issues seen with the flu and normal colds I think it's more pragmatic to assume that COVID will also behave very similar to other coronaviruses like the common cold.
She would be the last person you would think would get seriously ill - she eats only healthy food, is(was) a Crossfit rat, vitamins, meditation. She checks all the boxes for a healthy lifestyle and some).
We would go on 30 miles bike rides often and now she can't go up a hill mounted on the bike anymore. She was still going to a Crossfit gym that was (illegally) open during the pandemic but just for sanity. She couldn't do much of the workouts.
That was up to three weeks ago. One day she woke up with a swollen leg and has gone to three doctors already and is going to another to try to find why her leg is that way.
My suspicion is that COVID affected her circulatory system and is caused the problem that she is having on her leg. I hope that it's not the case, but this worry is enough to lose some sleep.
The general view now seems to be "it only affects over 55s", and that's mostly true -- there's lots of data to show that kids particularly are far more at risk of dying from other every day activities.
We have a rough idea of the IFR of 40 year old fit men, or 20 year old obese women, or of 7 year olds and 70 year olds. There's little long term studies for a disease that was identified less than a year ago - at least that I'm aware of.