Most people in the right don't disbelieve the coronavirus exists, they just think it's not going to kill them, its going to kill someone else.
FTFY
FTFY
0-19 years: 0.003%
20-49 years: 0.02%
50-69 years: 0.5%
70+ years: 5.4%
Source: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
For younger ages, that's comparable to influenza: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm#table1
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2019-2020.html
38 Million infected, 18 Million visits and 22k death due to influence.
Corona now has 10 Million cases 240k death.
I mean, don't get me wrong, even if its 0.02% for 20-49 year old in USA: 1. Thats still a lot of people if we hit Millions of infections 2. you can also see that the death rate was much higher at the beginning: https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid 3. we are still not trying to get everyone from the street so they are not dying, we are getting them from the street that if they are dying, they are not dying because of full hospitals.
And of course doctors are getting better every day fighting it and learning more about it.
I personally absolutly don't mind sitting around for a year to wait this out. I only have one live and i don't want to have covid right now nor any long term issues from it.
Covid showed something quite interesting to me: You are better of in dooms day scenarios if you can sit it out a little bit.
Are you disagreeing with the CDC's numbers? I gave sources for a reason.
It's obvious why COVID-19 would have killed more people this year than a typical flu season: more people can get infected, because it's a novel disease which we have no prior immunity for. Additionally, infections are likely to be more serious, as immunity isn't a binary. Meanwhile the various viruses and virus strains that we call "the flu" has been around our whole lives.
But the fact is, if you do get infected with the flu, and you're young (particularly children), you're roughly as likely to die as if you get infected by COVID-19.
> I personally absolutly don't mind sitting around for a year to wait this out. I only have one live and i don't want to have covid right now nor any long term issues from it.
You are welcome to make that decision for yourself. But remember, others' will have different priorities. My job is mostly unaffected, so far. Other people I know have lost their businesses and careers. I personally know some people involved in food aid in poorer countries: people are literally starving to death due to lockdown.
The COVID-19 infection fatality rate by age is approximately the same as overall mortality by age. It shouldn't surprise people that many people would decide that they're willing to take that risk, especially when we have examples like Sweden, New York City, large parts of India, etc. to show that even uncontrolled spread is not an existential threat to society, and herd immunity kicks in and things go back to normal. (antibody testing has found about 20-30% of Stockholm, 30-50% of NYC, etc. has been infected, most without realizing it)
> Covid showed something quite interesting to me: You are better of in dooms day scenarios if you can sit it out a little bit.
You are lucky to be in a position where you can do that. A significant chunk of society can not. And the fact is, very few places in the world have been able to control COVID-19 without indefinite lockdown. It's just too contagious in most societies.
Yeah this is actually really interesting because in a non-pandemic world taking the more conservative (lowercase c) approach to safety is less useful, but in our current world with a lot of genuine uncertainty and numerous catastrophes it actually nets better.
> I personally absolutly don't mind sitting around for a year to wait this out. I only have one live and i don't want to have covid right now nor any long term issues from it.
Yes, Please continue to have discipline and hold out against peer pressure to lower your guard. As someone who got covid, early 20s, exercise daily, low-processed food diet, no history of health issues, I got a mild case of Covid and the post-covid stage for me is much worse than the actual illness period and this phenomenon is very underrated in people’s discourse about risk assessment. Most people on this forum feel great arguing the pandemic on paper but have no lived experience of what this does to your body. 70, 80 days out where you feel super fucked up, new symptoms arise, random shit like pressure in your heart and chest, body aches day after day, extreme sensitivity to the cold.[0]
Imagine if covid were named HIV instead and people said, “look! After 10 months all these young people haven’t died. It must not be a big deal. Probably the flu”. Which is to say we still don’t know much about the virus. Most people in this forum are used to a world where every major disease of humanity has been studied for 20+ years,[1] so it’s sort of a confusion they have that they think the science is figured out. If you aren’t a biologist or studied biology heavily, science all seems like magic to you so it must be hard to tell the difference between something that is understood and not understood yet
[0] PS and still recovering
[1] source: my ass
FTFY
The worst flu killed 80k people in a year, and normally kills about 20k a year. It hasn't even been a year and three times as many people have died compared to the worst flu season, and 1,600+ Americans die every day from COVID. This epidemic so far has been more than twelve times worse than the average flu season.
> So do car accidents - lets just ban driving
About 38k people die in car accidents in the US, and the average person drives 1 million miles before getting in an accident. And that's with practically every person in the country driving that can. In contrast, only 3% of Americans have had COVID, yet 237k of them have died in less than a year. If the majority of Americans get COVID, millions of people will die.
I think you're about 3 orders of magnitude off. COVID is pretty bad, but the 1918 flu was horrifyingly awful. Flus can get pretty bad.
Or maybe let's infringe on your freedoms by: requiring a license to drive, requiring use of a seatbelt, setting safety standards for car manufacturers...
Let’s say we use the governments force to close business down, in order to hinder the virus from spreading there.
When the government later stops applying this force and business can reopen with persecution, will the virus not just continue from where it left off?
In March they said “flatten the curve to not temporarily overload hospitals”, which I get, but the reasoning for keeping the forced lockdown only seems logical if you never reopen.
For this reason I’m glad my country is one of very few that never locked down. More have died here than in the neighbour countries, but I fail to see why they won’t catch up when they reopen.
If it turns out there were a few infections left, or one slipped through quarantine for arriving travellers, the health system has enough capacity to perform testing for anyone with even mild symptoms, and comprehensively contact trace.
This has worked for several countries.
If every member of our species is convinced to quarantine for a month, the disease could maybe be eradicated, but this is clearly not realistic. Herding cats is easier.
This is the strategy New Zealand followed, and now their lives are back to normal. Here's a pic of one of their sports stadiums[1]. Notice how nobody needs to distance or wear masks because they got control over COVID spread.
[1] https://images.indianexpress.com/2020/06/New-Zealand-rugby-1...
Treatments get better. As we learn how the disease works, we know how to treat it better. This means that if you get sick now rather than at the beginning, you are much less likely to die.
Secondly: people are working on vaccines. If you can hold it until one is available, you might not have to get sick at all.
I work in vaccines and I don't believe any vaccine is even close to coming out. The products our company is working take about 10 years from start to final sale.
Its quite likely that the FDA will have to lower their standards to fast-track coronavirus vaccines. I am going to be very skeptical of their safety given that we don't have long-term data, especially with the newer unproven vaccine tech.
The vaccine is also still vapourware
Yes.
Or, to be less hyperbolic about it: do a lot more things that change us towards being a society where travel via single-occupant vehicle is not the default, or the highest-prioritized use of a space when many other options are cleaner, safer, more efficient space uses, encourage better health, and are not as environmentally and socially damaging.
So, to link it back to coronavirus: taking steps to mitigate a harm that we know exists, that we can predict coming, and that absolutely involves making changes to how we conduct our daily lives but if a lot of us make a little change, we make a dramatic effect.
Let's not forget it Trump suggested to slaughter Muslims using bullets dipped in pigs blood, so he is definetly not a antiwar as some here suggest.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-have-bombed-yemen-more...
It shouldn't be hard for a sharp upstanding human being not to throw out 'flippant' comment.
That actually surprised me the most. That exactly what you said, stopped to matter.
It shouldn't and we shouldn't allow it.
Getting upset about what he actually said and in what context seems like faux-outrage or someone with motivated reasoning to try and find something to get upset about.
You do like it doesn't matter.
Does it?
Knowing that there is a virus, not doing anything about it and then spreading it onto me, should also have consequences.
As it is not possible to do so, might be a good idea to mandate mask wearing and cautions someone might think.
COVID-19 has killed more Americans this year than all accidents. It's the third leading cause of death. That's much more significant than influenza.
To still try to downplay COVID and act like it's no worse than a regular flu is, quite frankly, willful ignorance.
I've found that it isn't ignorance, it's that they just don't care.
I know highly educated people who are more than capable of understanding the statistics underlying COVID infections, and they still say "it's just the flu".
These were people who knew about COVID in January, and were talking about what a threat it could be. Yet months later they're repeating the President's talking points.
They simply don't care.