https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/global-covid-19-case-fatality-...
Our current pandemic response is mostly a faith-based policy based on irrational fears rather than a science-based policy based on objective reality.
And the NYE party I host is also made up of billionaires on average if Bezos shows up.
Also, 0.35% means that if everyone in the US contracts it that's a million dead people. And that's only from the disease.
Millions more will die because of the medical resources tied up with taking care of the sick and those who don't die. Arguably, more people will die because of the one person who takes up 20 days of ER resources and survives COVID than the person who shows up and dies of COVID on the first day.
Which is exactly what happened in the hotspots which were hit first and hard in Europe and North America.
The single worst aspect to America's Covid response was that what should have been a medical or scientific debate became politicized.
The politicization of anything to do with public health is inevitable. Science can provide useful inputs, but ultimately the decisions have to be made by elected politicians. We live in a republic, not a technocracy.
Second, why not learn from the Far East and adopt a mask wearing, social distancing culture and prepare and lockdown?
Pandemic control measures such as mask wearing and social distancing can be helpful to "flatten the curve" on a temporary basis but are obviously not sustainable and won't be sufficient to eradicate the virus. SARS-CoV-2 is now endemic and will be with us essentially forever, even after a vaccine is developed. People need to think about what can work over longer time frames while objectively weighing both costs and benefits.
However, if folks are willing to wear seat belts (although in the vast majority of trips they are useless) for a less likely cause of death, many will put on masks, avoided crowded indoor spaces and practice better hygiene for the 3rd leading cause of death. This will occur whether legally mandated or not.
So far there have been about 218,000 American deaths. There is no scientific basis for your 1,148,700 number. The only way we could have prevented all of the American deaths would have been by completely sealing our borders back in December, but at the time no one realized how serious it was. We now know there was already widespread community transmission by January and at that point a high death toll became inevitable.
https://www.wsj.com/graphics/when-did-covid-hit-earliest-dea...
It's amusing for someone arguing "science" to be unable to multiple two fucking numbers.
You are saying 1,148,700 deaths is okay, that people are "panicking" for no reason. A 40% increase in death rate (the CDC says there were 2,813,503 deaths in 2019) seems like a pretty reasonable reason to "panic".
Trying to save a sixth of a Holocaust seems like decent public policy.
I never claimed that any number of deaths is "okay" so stop arguing in bad faith and putting words in my mouth. Panicking is irrational and never helpful. We need rational, science-based policies now more than ever.
Certainly we should save as many lives as possible, but we can't get tunnel vision and focus on COVID-19 to the exclusion of all else. The lockdowns also kill people. They die slowly from lack of medical care, depression, substance abuse, and suicide but in the end they're dead all the same. It's like trying to run a business by focusing entirely on revenue and ignoring costs.
The panic makes more sense if you consider the overwhelming majority of people are looking not just at their own age and pre existing condition but also realizing the people who enrich their lives are also at risk.
I happen to share the social- and political-views of the first part of people I talked about, but I've started to very largely diverge when it came to how the virus should be handled. In late January - early February this year I certainly thought that the fatality rate would be around 3-4% (especially after the first images coming out of Wuhan), but as the disaster in Northern Italy and then Spain was unfolding and we were starting to learn more about it I started to think that that number would be more close to 1-2%.
Most of the summer I thought that the fatality rate would be 1%, and then in early August I saw a recent study carried out in Sweden bringing that number down to 0.4%-0.6%. In the last couple of weeks I've started seeing even lower numbers (between 0.3% - 0.4%), which, if I'm not mistaken, would make this virus 3 or 4 times more deadly compared to the normal flu (which afaik has a 0.1% death rate) which is not great, but which is also not catastrophic.
Now, I've tried having this exact conversation with a couple of my friends just yesterday and it did not go well at all, they were accusing me of being anti-mask and of not taking the virus seriously enough. Apparently the bare numbers don't work even on educated people.
However, in the face of incomplete information, isn't erring on the side of caution the right way to proceed? If they had underplayed this, and had the mortality rate really been 3-4%, then you would have both millions dead AND economic devastation.
The scientific consensus is by definition a dynamic thing, ever changing in the face of increasing evidence. And thankfully so.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking...
Personally, I am refraining from adopting a position as it make take years to have a better idea of what the fatality rate is.
If a strain of influenza suddenly spiked to higher fatality rates, less drastic measures could contain it because it's usually obvious when you are contagious with influenza.
Also, as someone who had SARS-COV-2 and didn't die, it was fucking awful and I fully blame the complete failure of US leadership for the current fiasco.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4586318/
You could have already killed someone without even knowing it by transmitting the flu to them. There's no way to know for sure.
US federal and state handling of the pandemic has been mostly terrible. But even if we had competent, honest leaders I doubt the long-term death toll would be much different. Community transmission was already widespread by the time anyone realized there was a serious problem, and by that point it was too late to contain the pandemic.
https://www.wsj.com/graphics/when-did-covid-hit-earliest-dea...
I sometime forget to not bother commenting on overly politicized things on HN. Your own links show 20% potential asymptomatic influenza infections, which is only a tiny bit different from the estimated 80-95% on SARS-COV-2.
Downvote away though.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7315794/
So where are you coming up with that 80-95% number?