Any of us could have inadvertently killed someone by giving them the flu without even realizing it.
You are being reflexively down voted because people view any comparison to Influenza as illegitimate, not realizing that you are making a broader point about risk management and attribution of blame for infection as opposed to saying that SARS-2 and Influenza are literally the same viruses.
Personally I find it fascinating that I was never told it was my fault if I gave someone the flu in the course of both of us living our normal lives, but if I go to a grocery store and an elderly person does too and they get COVID-19 from me (imagine in this hypothetical there is no doubt that I gave them the virus) then somehow it’s my fault and I’m guilty of any harm that befalls then.
Incredibly dangerous precedent. I hope people see where it leads. And I hope they learn from the history of public health, such as when “public health officials” used to shut down gay bars “for the greater good”.
In that sense, I think comparing COVID-19 to the flu is helpful.
In fact, cities that didn't socially distance had things much worse and took longer to recover.
Humans are resilient creatures. We're not going to lose our social capabilities just because we're also evolved enough to be smart to stay safe for survival.
If kinship isn’t your thing but sober analytical thinking appeals to you, wearing a mask is a no-brainer: positive benefit with effectively zero cost (the only negative thing that can happen to you is that someone might think you’re a terrified dweeb, but they’d be wrong).
But the logic some people use to support these things veers into territory where it sounds like they would be willing to make (or demand) any sacrifice for literally any increase in safety. I worry about how that will play out long term.
But that’s just my fear. Hopefully it’s overblown (and it probably is).
Seems like you're strawmanning/shifting the goalposts, considering your initial comment says "I would just go back to living like I lived before", which would suggest you would take zero protective measures.
I probably would mostly go back though. Overall, I’d rather accept a more dangerous world with normal human contact than continue the kind of things we’re doing now indefinitely. But I’m sure I’d be more cautious about visiting a nursing home than I was pre-Covid. I’d be a lot more likely to isolate at the first sign of a fever than I used to be. I’d wear a mask when I’m sick. But I’d probably stop avoiding gatherings, masking when I’m well etc.
After COVID ends, I won't wear a mask if I'm healthy but I sure as hell will if I have a cough or fever.
If everybody comes out of this more careful about handwashing, I can’t argue that that’s bad. But I worry it’s going to go way past that.
I’m probably wrong though, judging by the number of people who already can’t be bothered with the one way aisles at the grocery store.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/27/health/how-to-sneeze.html
The point is if I don’t know I have COVID and spread it to Grandma at the grocery store, in your eyes I’ve killed Grandma. I wonder why we don’t apply that logic everywhere.
The spreadability of the flu is also much lower than that of COVID-19 (largely thanks to the vaccines), which is really why people never regarded masks as necessary for the flu.
For COVID we throw this out the window.
When you take the approach to its logical conclusion you end up in a very scary place.
I would if he wasn't sufficiently careful about it.
You ignore an important factor. Those who are vulnerable to serious complications/death from influenza can and should be inoculated with the latest influenza vaccine. That significantly mitigates the risk for the vulnerable.
There is no corresponding vaccine for Sars-Cov2. As such, the similar group who are vulnerable can't mitigate the risk.
That's why I (and many others) are trying to be much more careful. I'd also add that while the IFR for those under 55 are quite low, they aren't zero.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/past-seasons-estimates...
In terms of overall IFR Influenza and COVID-19 appear to be comparable. Influenza kills at least an order of magnitude more children, and for those in between roughly 35-55 they both kill about the same, and for the very elderly COVID-19 is multiple times more deadly.
The overall IFRs are very comprable except COVID-19 preferentially kills the very old. This also means when you calculate YLL (years of life lost) Influenza takes more life-years away.
I’d say at most if you take a .1% IFR of Influenza then COVID-19 is about 3x as deadly. Note however that we fundamentally classify Influenza deaths differently than with COVID-19. Almost any country considers any PCR-positive person who dies to be a COVID-19 death regardless of whether it’s a baby born with intestines outside of its body, or a young man in Orange County who died in a motorcycle accident, or George Floyd. All 3 of those examples I gave are real individuals who were PCR-positive at time of death. I know for a fact that the first two were initially labelled COVID-19 deaths, not sure about Floyd.
There’s a concept I call the pathological vs physiologixal distinction that is crucial to understand and has been totally violated with COVID—19. The short of it is that it is a mistake to confuse a virus with a disease. (This is also why the phrase “asymptomatic COVID-19” is an oxymoron; if you have no symptoms you have a virus but not a disease)
I have acne; if you culture my skin you will find the bacteria C. Acnes, which is naively believed to “cause” acne. Yet if you culture the skin of a healthy individual without acne, they also have C. Acnes. The question then is what combination of factors leads C Acnes to be pathogenic in one case (me) and not for another. The answer like most things is complicated, some combination of lipid peroxidation compromising the skin barrier, genetic skin turnover rates, etc, but most pop-sci articles will simplify it to “bacteria cause acne”.
Similarly, it is a mistake to assume that if someone dies and has a positive SARS-2 PCR test that they died of COVID. First of all due to egregiously absurd cycle thresholds, you stay PCR-positive months after infection (again, see George Floyd’s hennepin county autopsy, he “had COVID” despite having recovered from it over a month prior to his death). But more importantly even if you truly have active, replicating SARS-2 in you at time of death, you didn’t necessarily die from COVID.
I really got off on a tangent there but to wrap up, even if you take the official COVID-19 numbers - which I believe are grossly inflated - at most COVID-19 is 3x as lethal. To say it is an order of magnitude more deadly means you’re still stuck in April. It’s October now, please follow the new developments in the field. There was actually a paper released recently that traces the origins of the 10x deadly meme, debunked it and attributed its genesis to conflating CFR vs IFR. I’m on mobile travelling now without my laptop so I don’t have my megalist of research articles at my fingertips but if you search around maybe you can find it.
By the start of the Summer the UK had around 60,000 excess deaths above the five year median - which included at least one fairly severe flu season.
Later in the Summer when lockdown was still in place and/or infection rates were still very controlled, the number of excess deaths dipped slightly below the median - as you would expect it to, given that people weren't commuting and there were far fewer road accidents.
The figures also disprove the usual talking point that other deaths had increased dramatically because hospital care and chronic medical attention were hard to access. There were certainly some extra deaths, but not on the scale of COVID itself.
Unless you're going to claim that some other lethal illness was stalking the land and no one had noticed, COVID is the only remotely plausible explanation for those excess deaths.
I personally know someone whose father likely died due to being unable to access health care in a timely fashion, as well as someone else who died of cancer after their chemotherapy was postponed. And I also know of two suicides in my extended social group in the past few months. It's tough to pin specific blame on lockdown for things like that. But it's certainly plausible that deaths like that would lead to excess deaths.
In the UK specifically the health authorities were estimating in late July that around 21,000 people had died due to lack of access to health care during lockdown: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/07/29/lockdown-has-kil...
In the US there are a lot of concerns that dementia patients in particular are dying due to the isolation caused by lockdown measures: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/09/16/coronavirus...
Sure, but we can look at when the excess deaths happened. Instead of being evenly distributed across the lockdown period, or peaking towards the end when people had longer without access to support, they came exactly when you'd expect deaths from an epidemic wave to peak before plummeting to normal levels towards the end of the lockdown period. Undoubtedly, individual deaths have resulted from lockdown, but the pattern of excess deaths matches COVID rather than lockdown being behind the aggregate increase.
Again, this isn't idle speculation: genuine mainstream health authorities believe lockdown has killed significant numbers of people. This is not a controversial position.
No, the question is why does the excess deaths distribution perfectly align with the expected and recorded COVID death spike and drop so sharply afterwards when lockdown was still in place.
It's uncontroversial that lockdown has killed and saved significant numbers of people for reasons other than COVID, but similarly it is entirely uncontroversial that the aggregate increase in excess deaths was caused by COVID. The idea that the inflection point COVID-time-to-death days after the start of lockdown is better explained by unannounced changes in policy or your personal advice to friends and family, on the other hand is about as scientifically credible as blaming 5G.
For example, around 40% of Wellington ICU patients are typically from elective procedures and around 10% of all Wellington ICU patients die.
Without lockdowns these people would probably not have been able to access health care either, because of, well, the pandemic.
Lockdowns have certainly created a death toll, that is by now mainstream consensus. The debate is about whether it's most of the excess death or only a large chunk of it.
But it's worth remembering that even then excess death numbers are low in absolute terms. A lot of people can't see that because for some reason it's standard for statistical agencies to only give a few years of data in convenient graphs on their websites, but older data is there, and it puts things in proportion. In the UK for example, which has one of the worst excess death rates in Europe, 2020 is so far a bit less deadly than 1999/2000 and the gap is widening [1]. But nothing remarkable happened in the UK in 1999/2000, nobody talks with sadness about those who were lost at the millennium. Nobody noticed anything at all. The idea that we've had some sort of terribly high or remarkable levels of excess death isn't the case: it's being noticed because people were told to expect enormous levels so started tracking the data with a microscope, and then it went up partly due to lockdowns.
In many other countries excess death is even less remarkable than that. Germany and Switzerland have seen years no different to the previous years for example. Cumulative death in Switzerland for 2020 is by now completely average, for example. There was no plague in Switzerland at any point.
They did ration healthcare. This was the object of multiple news articles last week: https://time.com/5899432/sweden-coronovirus-disaster/ «the country’s hospitals were implementing a triage system» The triaging was so severe that «Only 13% of the elderly residents who died with COVID-19 during the spring received hospital care» Get your facts right.
«Lockdowns have certainly created a death toll, that is by now mainstream consensus. The debate is about whether it's most of the excess death or only a large chunk of it.»
This is laughably inaccurate. On the contrary, lockdowns are largely credited for overall having averted cases and deaths. I maintain a list of peer-reviewed studies (and some preprints) on the subject, and the vast majority agree: https://twitter.com/zorinaq/status/1307723024523616257 There isn't a single peer-reviewed study that suggests lockdowns are responsible for a "large chunk" of excess deaths. You are victim of misinformation.
Your comparison to 1999/2000 flu death is invalid: there were delays in reporting deaths that caused many deaths to be reported on the week after Xmas, hence the artificially high peak of that week of 2000. If you compare monthly excess deaths (to smooth artificial peaks) you will see covid excess deaths in April 2020 surpass flu excess deaths of January 2000.
And yet, this comparison would still miss the point: covid is such a serious disease that despite (effective) lockdowns, it still managed to kill more than he most severe flu seasons of the last 20+ years. That alone should make you stop and think...
There is in fact a government report that found «in comparison with the deaths due to influenza and pneumonia occurring in the year to 31 August 2020, deaths due to COVID-19 have been higher than every year monthly data are available (1959 to 2020).» https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
Germany and Switzerland have implemented particularly effective lockdowns, hence little to no excess deaths.
You're seeing what you want to see. It is normal for elderly patients in nursing homes to die without being in a hospital. You're claiming that Swedish hospitals were so overloaded they turned away patients they would normally have seen, but there is no evidence of that and the paper TIME cited as support actually doesn't give any. Rather, it says:
"Swedish ICU use rates remained lower than predicted, but a large fraction of deaths occurred in non-ICU patients. This suggests that patient prognosis was considered in ICU admission, reducing healthcare load at a cost of decreased survival in patients not admitted."
The latter sentence doesn't follow logically from the first in any way. They are assuming that all COVID patients should have ended up in ICU and if they didn't, that can only be due to evil doctors turning them away at the door despite having spare beds (which Sweden always did have). That is an absurd assumption, unsupported by any direct evidence, which is why they have to rely on invalid statistical inferencing.
What happened is that PCR testing labelled a whole lot of people who were about to die anyway as "COVID deaths". COVID symptoms are so mild in virtually all cases that many patients will have simply got a little bit sick but not enough to rush them to hospital, which can at any rate be quite dangerous for the very elderly and frail, and then they died. Was it COVID that pushed them over the edge? Was it just old age? Who can really say when it gets right to the edge of a life - something has to give.
lockdowns are largely credited for overall having averted cases and deaths
By the people who recommended them in the first place. Many other people without obvious conflicts of interest have looked at this and concluded the opposite.
There isn't a single peer-reviewed study that suggests lockdowns are responsible for a "large chunk" of excess deaths. You are victim of misinformation.
The UK Government's own reports say otherwise. In fact here's an article on the BBC today: "Between March and September 2020, there were 24,387 more deaths in England than expected in private homes, and 1,644 in Wales. The large majority did not involve COVID-19."
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-54598728
Lockdowns have obviously killed people in the UK. Hospital admissions halved at the start, do you really think that would have had no impact on mortality? There is now a massive cancer backlog. The death toll of COVID is a handful of people per day in the UK, but the death toll from telling people to avoid hospitals during 2020 is going to be racking up for years, perhaps decades.
Why do lockdown supporters so often believe other people are the victims of misinformation? I've read a lot of papers coming out of epidemiology and the academic research establishments this year, many of them are atrocious. They mis-use logic and statistics every third paragraph, scientists mis-represent their own papers in press releases, their code sometimes just doesn't work. The standards in academia are incredibly low and they pump out "misinformation" at a shocking rate. If you simply believe peer reviewed studies without double checking them, you're the one being misled, not me.
Germany and Switzerland have implemented particularly effective lockdowns, hence little to no excess deaths.
I live in Switzerland. It had a rather mild lockdown, quite incomparable to many other countries thank god. It's astonishing you believe these were "particularly effective". But if you get your information from TIME, well, it's less of a surprise.
As an extreme example, for some poorer countries without much healthcare infrastructure, you can definitely make the case that given the inevitability of the virus spreading, in some situations the right thing to do is give up early, accept that you'll have a wave of deaths, and move on. The alternative is a slow motion disaster with about as many direct COVID deaths, and additional deaths due to lockdown. If you don't have healthcare infrastructure to begin with, overloading it doesn't change much.
This new virus spread far and fast, while seasonal flu is significantly more blocked off by how many people have immunity or vaccines. Number of deaths is lower for seasonal flu because the number who get infected by those known viruses is also much lower. That's why the IFR is close yet for this year more people are dying.
Observing that mortality is above median doesn’t prove that the virus is the cause of those excess deaths (e.g. we know that there were a lot of unreported heart attacks during a the same period), and it doesn‘t prove the specific claim that the IFR is 10x higher than the flu.
If you look at regions that were ineffective in handling the spread and had their hospital capacity overwhelmed, mortality jumps through the roof - I think it was higher than 10% in Lombardia before the lockdowns. And remember that hospitals can't work at anywhere close to 100% ICU occupancy for extended periods of time, so if the high inflow persists, mortality is likely to increase much more.
The vast difference between Covid19 and influenza is anyway plain to see if you look at ICU rates, even with all the lockdowns.
So even though your analysis sounds convincing at first read, it is a very bad interpretation of the data. The reality is that Covid19 is a much worse disease than Influenza, and that drastic measures are required to keep it under control (barely).
You debunked nothing. All the per age IFR comparisons of flu vs covid I had seen has covid killing more people for 30 years old too.