And yet I don’t know a single person who has been infected yet. It’s crazy how skewed the infections are towards communities.
We should be expecting to experience this as members of a large, functionally diverse population (and within HN, a technically literate sub group) in a civilization that is blindly groping its way towards post-scarcity but the future is still Gibsonian unevenly distributed. In a less-powerful civilization, this would have been a much more disruptive pandemic. Many people are still navigating with sentience ("monkey brains") that are conditioned to expect physical calamity before taking significant action, instead of navigating with intelligence which takes abundantly more energy to engage.
This is a real-time, mass experiment in operating trust and science at scale.
See Peter Watts' Blindsight for more on this sentience/intelligence divide [1].
That said, I know a few people online who have had it, one of whom has died - but I guess that’s the cross-community nature of things.
I know two dead people, one more struggling in the hospital. (They have been there long enough it looks grim too.)
I do not currently know anyone else that has it!
The whole thing is weird. Some places seem like war zones, others tranquil, as if the whole thing is made up psyops.
The shear between experiences is particularly acute when I speak with people from both extremes in the same day!
People being confused is no real surprise now though it was earlier on.
but the last month, I am hearing of more and more getting infected. It's getting worse, anecdotally.
> As the COVID-19 epidemic continues to ravage the American public, an unsurprising story emerges: Poor communities are hot spots for COVID transmission. The death rate from COVID-19 appears to be staggeringly high among African Americans compared to whites. The Washington Post reports, for example, that while 14% of the Michigan population is black, 40% of COVID-19 deaths are among blacks.
> The link between poverty and infectious disease is well-documented. Influenza-related hospitalizations in low-income neighborhoods are nearly twice that of high-income neighborhoods. Pediatric hospitalizations from bacterial pneumonia are significantly higher in low-income neighborhoods compared to high-income neighborhoods. The same is largely true of tuberculosis in the U.S. where active transmission of TB is ongoing in poor neighborhoods – patterns that are not simply due to more people living in these areas.
Reference: https://theconversation.com/covid-19-is-hitting-black-and-po...
I live in NYC and know about 25 people who had covid, myself included, from pretty much every community.
It isn't the most impressive of plagues.
It really is though. If it were more deadly like Ebola, people would be taking it far more seriously and it would burn itself out quicker. If it were less deadly, akin to the flu, we wouldn't have too many deaths regardless. It seems to sit right in the sweet spot of just deadly enough to cause mass casualties while being benign enough that a large portion of people don't take it seriously, and thus contribute to it's uncontrollable spread. This will easily end up killing more Americans than the 1918 flu by the end of next year.
also:
"Previous studies reported that viral shedding can begin before the appearance of COVID-19 symptoms (8,9), and evidence of transmission from presymptomatic and asymptomatic persons has been reported in epidemiologic studies of SARS-CoV-2 (5,10,11). Because KCDC performed strong infection control procedures during boarding; the medical staff and crew members were trained in infection control; all passengers, medical staff, and crew members were tested twice for SARS-CoV-2; and a precise epidemiologic investigation was conducted, the most plausible explanation for the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 to a passenger on the aircraft is that she became infected by an asymptomatic but infected passenger while using an onboard toilet. Other, less likely, explanations for the transmission are previous SARS-CoV-2 exposure, longer incubation period, and other unevaluated situations. "
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/11/20-3353_article#r1
asymptomatic transmission is not FUD it is very real. what has not been expounded clearly enough is that the virus is inducing second order effects that are latent to incubation and transmission. the reproductive process of the virus is minimally damaging, with respect to the immuno sequelae
when it comes to the chase this is not about asymptomatic transmission, this is about presymptomatic transmission.
Actually it really does matter. Just like the anecdotes of people becoming re-infected. These things often get presented in the media as if they are common but turn out to be rare. I don't know if that's the case regarding asymptomatic transmission or not but there is an ongoing debate about it.
you seem to be hung up on the idea that some people go through the entire disease and recovery process with no reported symptoms. that is the uncommon occurance. I am not talking about media anecdotes, i am talking about the reality that has been observed by numerous independent instance of professional observation and documentation.
to wit: 3 to 7 days incubation symptom free while being contagious during that time, and onward through the course of the disease. it dosnt matter how uncommon or common asyptomatic transmission is, the progression of transmission, is exponential when no mitigations are made.
* Normalized by population though, you would be looking at today's equivalent of ~2.15 million deaths in the US from the 1918 flu.
I'm not downplaying this, I'm not saying it's not a real thing, or that my experience is universal or any other implication that this isn't a real and pressing crisis. I'm simply saying that for a variety of reasons, it's entirely possible to not be in the middle of nowhere and still not have COVID invade your usual social sphere, though such experiences will quickly become extremely rare at the current rate of infection.