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Comment by angelzen | Hacker News Reader

Covid is dangerous. Media hyperbole is also dangerous. Western Europe countries are experiencing a covid wave, hopefully it will peter out in a couple of months. Though we will never hear "cases falling through the floor" in the media, they'll just shift the attention to the next hotspot. Austria, which is a bit ahead of the curve, is seeing deaths plateauing at 5/day/M. Hopefully they already crested the peak.

Be wary of "skyrocketing" claims from questionable sources.

Precedents:

* Florida, which was hypermediatized in late summer, then silently recovered.

* Balkan countries, which had an early wave, and are on a recovery course. Note how their case numbers didn't go that high, most likely because they are poor and testing penetration is not that high.

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/region/us/florida

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

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We will keep seeing graphs that go up and down until this pandemic somehow ends. Looking at a graph where the cases keep oscillating every few months is really demoralizing.

> * Florida, which was hypermediatized in late summer, then silently recovered.

> * Balkan countries, which had an early wave, and are on a recovery course. Note how their case numbers didn't go that high, most likely because they are poor and testing penetration is not that high.

And...if the graph keeps looking like it has, we will have spikes followed by drops followed by spikes again, wash, rinse, and repeat. Florida has a different cycle (maybe AC related as people get cold inside during the hot summer, and the fall comes along and weather is nice, and then a cold snap might happen in January).

Questionable sources such as the German CDC?

Article in arstechnica.com

RKI status report for last week[1], translated via Google:

> The rising trend of 7-day incidences observed since the end of September 2021 has in the last weeks significantly accelerated. The current number of cases is already higher than all so far at the peaks of the previous waves of disease. This high Infection pressure in the population increasingly affects vulnerable groups as well as especially vulnerable people in the older age groups. This also leads to a significant increase in Severe disease courses and deaths and the occurrence of vaccination are more likely to rupture.

Sounds a lot like "skyrocketing" to me.

[1] https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...

It is called a "covid wave". Cases go up, then go down. Some people, mostly with frail systems, will sadly falter, not dissimilar to how flu operates. It's pretty clear that we are going to have at least one of these waves every year, no matter what the authorities do or not do. What it is not clear yet is whether it's going to be one wave, or several. I hope one. We'll know by May.

Scientific advisors have been sounding the alarms on the incoming wave here for months and have strongly demanded preventative measures be taken, in particular vaccination (calls which have mostly been ignored by the government).

So the scientific majority opinion seems to be that you are not at all helpless against those waves.

> cases go up then go down

Yes, the wave will end eventually, probably around easter if going by the previous waves. Question is how much death and damage it will cause until then. That's something that can very much be influenced.

Vaccines definitely have a positive effect. However, at this point most of it has been already accounted for by vaccinating the elderly populations at risk. Most Western world has elderly vaccination rates over 90-95%, including supposedly anti-vax regions, e.g. Florida [1]. The marginal effect of vaccinating young healthy populations with marginal covid risk is likely to be marginal. Realistically speaking, there aren't that many effective levers the authorities can wield. My hope is that the pattern we've seen in US southern states and BG/RO, i.e. steep short delta waves, will replicate elsewhere.

To keep things in perspective, covid mortality in Germany was 1.2/k since the beginning of the pandemic, compared to 10/k annual death rate from all causes. Hopefully the vaccines will help keeping this number even lower. Further confounding the issue, the death certificate cause of death for infectious diseases often times masks other systemic issues, for instance people with cancer are more susceptible to die of influenza or pneumonia [2]. What I suspect is happening is that covid replaced influenza and pneumonia as the Grim Reaper of choice. Remember that flu "paused" last year [3].

[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/coronavirus-covid-19/vaccine-trac...

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33107375

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/10/08/flu-season-...

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