On Covid
avc.com
avc.com
Of course, a lot more people are still working remotely, something I consider to be a plus but that I suspect venture capitalists like the author do not. So when I see someone like that advocating “unlearning many of the behaviors we’ve learned in the last two years” I'm immediately suspicious.
> We’ve got other pressing matters to deal with. [...] We have other health care challenges to tackle.
One of the most pressing issues with healthcare today is the sheer number of COVID patients overwhelming the ability for a hospital to do anything other than treat COVID. Yes, even with the milder Omicron variant. Again: if anything this suggests that this lack of obsession has come too early, not too late.
And has any call to "stop politicizing" something ever worked? That's simply not the world we're living in (these days, at least). The vaccine is politicized. Masks are politicized. You can’t just wish that away.
You are lucky if you have not been exposed to this propaganda very much yet.
You might notice that the editorial reads as if the word "Covid" refers to "that time when the government told us to wear masks and get vaccines and all that stuff." I'm not sure if people actually hold this view or just pretend to, but it's not uncommon.
It's trying to give off the aura of "Oh, remember when all those silly people told us to wear masks, it was just a silly thing that happened one time, why are we still talking about it, we should just forget it ever happened."
People with attitudes similar to the author are the reason there is still a COVID-19 pandemic, in the developed world at least. I'm surprised you don't have experience with them by now.
This line of thinking is crazy: variants are getting every 3-6 months more contagious, sure less harmful, but at the same time more evaise of vaccine. I have some friends who had 3 doses and still had hard time with omiron. At some point all the population will have had some sort of covid in the future, probably multiple time if you think on a decade length of time.
Saying "the pandemic is still there because because of the crazy ones who don't want to confine for a year" is just nonsense. look at australia who had the strictest rules ? They are taking the current wave right in the face.
While it's important to protect old and fragile people, i'm really convinced most young people who were not in contact with old people should have not confined. The risk was super low, upside was to get natural immunity and not kill the economy. Half of the world (the < 40) bowed to fear for exactly 0 positive consequence imo.
Your statement makes it sound like hospitals are devoting 50%+ to Covid, that is just not even close to reality frankly anywhere in the world.
Bitter lesson from last 2 years: no one cares about other’s misfortune at cost of self’s convenience.
Is it?
I mean, I’d like that to be true too.
…but are things not still a bit too screwed up to be pretending everything is fine quite yet?
> The current 7-day moving average of new deaths (1,749) has decreased 0.3% compared with the previous 7-day moving average (1,754). As of January 19, 2022, a total of 856,288 COVID-19 deaths have been reported in the United States.
(https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidvi...)
EDIT: all parts of each country are not equal. In the Bay Area, the hospitals are doing (mostly) fine.
Similar logic: shutting down nuclear power plants and then complaining that there isn’t enough power.
More similar logic: allowing decades of fuel to build up on the bottom of forests and then expressing befuddlement when wild fires burn out of control.
What’s the common thread here?
Your consumption of only hard-right 'news' sources.
What exactly do we unlearn when he quotes, "unlearn many of the behaviors we’ve learned in the last two years"? What hardships are we going to go through if we continue to wear masks a little longer than necessary? Do I really need to shake your hand when we greet? Believe it or not people don't want to stay at home, not be able to work and they definitely don't like being sick and dying. Know when we'll go back to normal? When people stop dying so much.
This is going to have massive long term effects and I'm not talking about anything from having worn a mask. I'm talking about the long term effects of the virus. I'm positive you'll be seeing advertisements for the next 40 years for "Covid treatment centers of America".
If this person really wants to get back to normal maybe we should start by passing legislation now to deny Mediare benefits to anyone suffering from Covid complications who refused to be vaccinated. I'd be happy to support conservatives in saying, "Why should I be taxed to pay for the results of your decision?" or allow covid complications be be considered a preexisting condition for unvaccinated. Why should I have to pay through my insurance premiums for your ER visit?
I'm sorry, but it isn't over yet. I wish it was. However wishing it or asserting it doesn't make it true. This was a sensible argument to make in July 2021 when vaccines were more effective and cases were literally 1/10th as prevalent.
I encourage the "over it" crowd to talk to the parents of young children, a cancer patient, or literally anyone who works at a hospital.
Deaths/severity is not rising even though there are a lot of new cases.
Deaths ( = going down): https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/worldwide-graphs/#...
Severe cases ( small increase): https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/worldwide-graphs/#...
While new cases > x 7 https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/worldwide-graphs/#...
Additionally, it should be noted that the severe cases with Omicron are almost all unvaccinated ( not even boostered). If you want to check stats, please try to find a source that seperates delta ( which is not gone!) from Omicron.
Edit: And since it's January. An honest comparison would be Januari 2021 with Delta because of family / friend gatherings. It's a pretty busy social time ;)
And deaths are in fact rising. According to your chart they were around 6000/day (7 day average) on Jan 1 and are 7600/day in the most recent data two weeks later.
And as mentioned in my above comment.
Can you show me how many are dying because of Omicron specific and how many are related to previous Delta infection that were already admitted in the hospital?
I'm not saying people aren't dying. Lockdowns aren't in place for the flu and that has also 52 k. deaths per year ( = 145 per year) and is much less contagious as Omicron. Also, Delta is not gone yet.
You have to compare numbers with reality. Otherwise I can ask you at how many deaths per year you would reduce restrictions or at what death/severity rate.
0 is definitely impossible as some people will remain unvaccinated. You could have the same argument that 10 people are dying per year...
PS. Compare it with December 2020/January 2021 which would be comparable with visiting family/friends multiple times. We aren't anywhere near that peak with *7 infections.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/worldwide-graphs/#...
Lots of more new cases, less severe ones.
It works both ways to have a fair comparison.
We are just out of the busiest social time of the year.
We didn’t keep kids from school, we didn’t panic when hospitals were overwhelmed, we didn’t shut down businesses.
Where are you getting that number? CDC estimates 27k:
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html
which puts it below current COVID numbers by a big chunk.
> We didn’t keep kids from school
At this point schools are largely closed because there are too many teachers out sick to teach effectively. There isn't a particularly simple answer here.
The lower bound itself is higher than the 27k estimate.
Hospitals hit capacity during flu seasons - did you wear a mask everyone, keep your kids home, work from home and cancel all travel plans? I’ll bet you didn’t even know they were at capacity.
I’m vaccined, I’m moving on with life.
Did you stay at home, keep your kids from school and cancel all travel plans last flu season when hospitals got overwhelmed?
You probably didn’t even know they were overwhelmed, did you?
My coworker from 5 years back died yesterday. He is 2 years younger than me. I am not even 40.
Not sure what your point is?
That’s an order of magnitude difference.
That’s why the response was an order of magnitude more substantial.
I’m baffled you think this is somehow surprising.
We have tens of thousands of thousands of deaths every year. In the past decade 300,000 died of the flu and nobody notices.
In pre-pandemic years if there was a flu as contagious as omicron people would be in a panic.
I'm sorry you don't like reality, I've never been a huge fan myself, but what's happening is happening.
That’s ridiculous right?
We were triple-vaccinated. Our kid had his first shot in early December. We spent basically all of December in lockdown. All of the little one's playdates were cancelled because everyone was freaking out about Omicron. And we still got sick. What was the point?
I'm absolutely done with the lockdowns, the masks, the strict controls, etc. The older people in my life are sick of it as well; they don't know how many years they have to live, and they don't want to spend the rest of their lives holed up inside a building. We have lives to live.
Hopefully, we as a race start taking into account quality of life in addition to length of life. We have a looming mental health crisis on our hands and it's exactly because of the fear-mongering; who knows how many years we're going to have to spend cleaning up this mess (it will probably be decades).
If you haven't gotten sick from COVID yet, you probably will. At this point it really is just a virus. The time for pulling out all the stops to prevent ICU overflows is over. This might be a permanant fixture in our lives and I'm more sick of the constant fear-setting than I am from the virus itself.
If ICU overflows are when we pull out all of the stops, can we pull out just some of the stops before it gets that dire?
It's already not great. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/overwhelmed-by-omicron-surg...
According to the data you linked:
COVID ICU Beds Occupied:
January 17-23, 2022 : 26,236
January 4-10, 2021 : 29,175
In any event, would you agree that hospitals cancelling elective surgeries is indicative of an overworked system?
I was completely on board with the first year or so of all these restrictions. But I am done sacrificing my child’s well being to spare the elderly. If the vaccines work, then why are people still afraid? I believe they work, so I am not afraid. I don’t understand why even the most ardent vaccine evangelists are still cowering in fear if they truly believe in their effectiveness.
The case count has exploded so what? Just think how many people actually have it but never bothered getting tested because it was so mild. The death rate is the same/similar to when we had a fraction of the cases we currently have.
> kids are at statistically zero risk of covid unless they have cancer or something
At risk of what? Dying? What about passing covid on to others? Or covid symptoms that do not go away? What about merely needing to be hospitalized? That still seems pretty bad. My local Children's Hospital has more pediatric covid patients than at any time during the pandemic and the city has re-authorized crisis standards of care.
> the vaccines have been available for over a year now so you have had ample time to get one
Kids 5-12 have only had a few months and kids under 5 still have no vaccine.
> But I am done sacrificing my child’s well being to spare the elderly
That strikes me as rather cruel. What exactly are you sacrificing? Isn't every school in the country back to in-person? Is it having to wear a mask?
Look, I'm also tired of covid and don't want to have to think about it ever again. But the problems with the actual virus still far outweigh problems caused by our response to the virus.
2,000+ (and increasing) Americans are dying every day from this disease—as bad as the bad old days of Spring 2020. Why is this attitude so pervasive? It doesn't seem to be backed by anything aside from boredom of dealing with living in a pandemic.
> We have vaccines if you want them. We will have anti-virals if you need them.
> And you can wear masks if you are uncomfortable on the plane or the subway.
This is the individualistic thinking that's caused us so much friction. It's no different than "if you want to be a safe driver, don't drink and drive!". The drunk-driver and the unvacced/unmasked put all of us at risk. It's selfish behavior, and should be treated as such, instead of described as "personal freedom".
> We’ve normalized mask-wearing in the US now and that is a good thing.
Have we, though? Across the country, people will harass and threaten you, for no reason other than they've seen you wearing a face mask. I've been mocked in NYC—the bastion of progressivism in the US. What do you think it's like wearing a mask in Kansas?
Like any intellectual, they push to grow their knowledge and sometimes venture outside their area of competence. They don’t realize they’re living in a relatively healthy area of society surrounded by people with easy access to medical care and without comorbidities.
omnicron is less lethal than the other variants but it still threatens significant lives, takes icu beds and takes an enormous toll on the nurses working with a still steady stream of dying patients.
We all want to move on, and Omnicron looks to be peaking soon— the nature of the beast is omnicron has only affected half the people it will.
I guess I agree there’s reason to be optimistic. But I don’t think now is the time we stop talking about it.
We really need another warp speed project to produce these antivirals
Things look good now because omicron is mild, but no guarantee that all of the next variants will be mild . If one of them is severe we will really wish we had warp speeded the antivirals
(sarcasm, obviously, but unfortunately a common undertone with a lot of conversations in general but specifically on covid.
I keep up to date with the latest studies on Covid. Sars-Cov-2 is not a respiratory virus; it's a circulatory virus. And its long term effects on the body are not widely understood.
Everyone is acting like because Omicron doesn't make you cough that Covid is over. But scientists are finding deeply concerning long term effects - neurological effects, telomere and biological aging effects, autoimmune activation, long Covid, micro blood clotting - in a non-trivial percentage of Covid cases. Even asymptomatic and vaccinated individuals.
It's becoming increasingly apparent that having Covid will result in a lifelong disability for at least some percentage of survivors.
But we just ignore that so we can go back to normal? Because Covid is "endemic?" Endemicity was the failure state - it means we gave up. Covid should have never gotten to that point.
Please don't assume that future variants will be less and less severe. It's what we all want to hear, but this "covid is over" mentality is what will help produce the next, possibly really nasty, variant.
Lets retry:
Please stop with the anti-intellectualism and fear-baiting based on personal feelings!
Of course, more severe variants can always develop. Holds same for flu, HIV, ... not just COVID.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/dec/08/facebook-p...
I personally credit the prediction attributed to Luc Montagnier back in 2020 that because COVID exhibited unnatural characteristics that exacerbated the severity of illness, he predicted that over time the characteristics would evolve out of the virus and result in a more benign illness. This is a reason why it would have been useful to have a scientific debate over the lab leak theory, because the origin of the virus informs our best guess of the path it may take in the future, which has so far confirmed to this prediction.
HIV is an interesting case because it is "just a flu" for a few weeks, then remains contagious but isn't severe at all, until it develops into AIDS years later.
Thank you politifact.com political fact check fact check for checking that.
Often that selection pressure works towards less dangerous variants because that gives them more opportunity to infect others.
Sometimes a virus kills off everyone who is susceptible to it. So it's now less dangerous to those who remain.
In the caae of Covid, it is infectious long before it kills, and so there is no great selection pressure for it to become less dangerous.
That's probably only in the case where the disease is so severe it kills the host before it can spread very easily, not some general rule.
Let's say you have a virus that's super contagious for two weeks with no symptoms and nearly everyone who gets it dies within a month. What evolutionary pressure would it be under to change as long as it has fresh hosts to infect?
I don't understand why people are so against taking an easy W like this.
I would love to see how your children feel about that.
Have you even looked at the current situation we are in? Death's are continuing to climb and we're soon to be what is in the second most severe wave of the pandemic [0], and in a week we'll see if we start to compete for the worst wave.
I don't know how people can rationally talk about this being a "mild variant" and encouraging people to get on with their lives.
Since the beginning we've known that Omicron is both less deadly and more transmissible. I don't know how anyone with an engineering background can not see the problem here.
There is a balance where less deadly x more transmissible == more deadly x less transmissible, ie the total deaths during a wave are the same. We can't really control the death rate of omicron, but we can to an extent impact how transmissible it is. If we fight to reduce the transmission rate we have a much greater shot at lower overall deaths. But if we actively encourage people to ignore safe behavior and "live their life" we end up increasing the transmission rate therefore increasing the total number of deaths.
0. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailydeaths
Remember what this was called in the beginning? Novel coronavirus. The problem was that we were all immunologically naive to it, which resulted in bad outcomes. Vaccines (and to some extent prior infection) make us no longer naive. That's the way out.
We have vaccines. Take the damn win.
Unfortunately it's still not that simple. If you look at the death rates in very high vaccination rate states/countries you see the same pattern. For example, VT has the highest vaccination rate in the country, at >90% with at least one dose, and is experiencing this as it's worst wave [0].
There's no doubt that vaccination helps and reduces overall severity, but it is by no means an "easy W"
Additionally we are starting to see diminishing returns in Israel's 4th round of shots [1]. It is increasingly looking like, even if we're will to do a life time of booster shots, this strategy may not be effective.
0. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/vermont/
1. https://healthpolicy-watch.news/israel-fourth-covid-booster-...
Again, this is very simple. Given that the vaccines work, then this pandemic is over for those who are vaccinated. I'm quite happy to change my tune if it turns out vaccines don't work though.
Can you back this up? It's my understanding that our actions now have almost no bearing on what happens with future variants.
One of the hard things to talk about is the difference between: exposure, infection, disease, and infectivity. Headlines and news coverage of these has been almost universally terrible. There are rules of thumb thrown around like they are proven truth. The experiments to actually show at what time and how much infectious agent is produced are very difficult and as far as I know, none have been done. There are some studies on household spread, but to really know what's going on you need to do challenge trials - which means exposing people to the disease - which is highly unethical to do in humans - and challenge trials in animal models can be highly deceptive.
But generally speaking, yes, I expect to be exposed to Sars-Cov-2 many times in my life, and will probably be infected and may develop disease and infectivity. But as a vaccinated person, the period of disease and infectivity will be reduced.
The more cases the greater the chance of mutations. The more mutations the greate the chance of nasty variant.
I think this is simply about reassessing our risk calculus with the fact that the current Covid variant is mild enough that it can be gradually folded into the background noise of seasonal viruses that we deal with every year.
Future pandemic waves will be less and less severe.
It doesn't matter how virulent the variants are, they're all about the same within a factor of 2 or so.
The thing that moves the needle is the human immune system. >90% of the population everywhere has T-cells now one way or another. People who are boosted have T-cells that have gone through affinity maturation and been boosted which should be a mature immune response that will keep them out of hospitals permanently (barring compromise of their immune system of course, but that's a risk with influenza and everything else).
As the unvaccinated/antivaxxers manage to get mature boosted immune systems the hard way then the impact of each successive wave will be lower. Once we hit the point where the unvaccinated percentage in the hospitals roughly equals the unvaccinated percentage in the general population then the pandemic is probably over.
So with 90% unvaccinated in the hospitals right now with 64% fully vaccinated, then at some point another Omicron-sized wave of infections should result in only 15% of the overall hospitalizations. Of course it won't be perfect, but the trend of each successive wave should move the needle more to that level. Each successive wave should asymptotically approach that burden.
Eventually its likely that the waves become smaller as well, due to mature boosted immunity against infection and transmission.
And Omicron probably isn't significantly less severe of a virus, the studies in culture and in mice attempting to show that have large problems. The less severity of hospital burden in the Omicron wave is showing that the human immune system (and vaccination and boosting) works.
I do think it's time to start thinking about what the end of the pandemic looks like:
1. Sars-Cov-2 will be around forever. People will continue to get sick and die from it.
2. There will be more peaks on the infection and death charts. These are real people with real families. It will suck for them.
3. At some point one of the peaks will be the highest. 6 months or so after the highest peak is reached, the pandemic will be over. We'll only see this in hindsight. It may take a year to tell that the last peak was the highest. The disease won't be over, but it won't be the single most important thing in everyone's life. It will drop from the #1 or #2 cause of death down to #10 or #20, eventually. This may be different around the world. Countries that have had low numbers of infections and deaths may have huge spikes of infection and deaths.
4. There will be more variants, and they are not guaranteed to be milder, especially to individual infected people. There may be variants that affect children more. I personally don't think that is likely, but there are no guarantees.
5. Early in the pandemic, there was a lot of judgment on people who got sick. We'll have to let go of this. Speaking down to people doesn't help. Judging people doesn't help.
6. Some people will continue to wear masks for a long time. Some people won't feel comfortable in groups. Give them time. Don't force the issue. Give them space. I will probably wear a mask in crowded public places for a long time (grocery stores, airports, public transport).
7. We'll be learning about this disease for a long time. Hopefully government bodies learn how to plan and communicate better. Hopefully we step up our disease vector surveillance and tracking efforts
8. We won't get common understanding back unless people work for it. Dividing people with moralistic and righteousness-based messages is currently a winning strategy. I won't call this a "both sides" thing, I call it a "human nature" thing. I don't really understand why some people are standing on "their rights" - I guess it plays better than saying "I'm scared"
1. Sars-Cov-2 will be around forever because the population votes for it to be that way.
I wish it were otherwise, and maybe in the future it will be so.
There are currently about 700,000 cases of COVID per day in the U.S. There is an enormous difference between these two viruses that are not eradicated.
I really hope he's right and it's normalized, but I do fear that many people will go back to not staying at home and not wearing masks when they feel sick. And people who do wear masks, will do so catching lampooning gazes from others.
My understanding was that mask-wearing was mostly to protect others. Has that changed?
That doesn't seem useless.
Of course, if you're only talking about protecting yourself from others, then a KN95 mask is clearly the way forward.
[1] https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/09/surgical-mask...
I like them, they provide privacy from people and cameras, while also increasing protection from many viruses and bacteria (provided you don't take it off to scratch your nose).
Common cold and the flu has gotten way less common since 2020. Freaking amazing, since the symptoms can literally incapacitate me for a week or two. I hate the cold and flu.
C-19 is still very fresh in our minds. Let's use that to drive action to learn from it and try to ensure the next one is less catastrophic. If we turn our attention away too quickly, this won't happen.
Even as we speak, we have school districts in the US closed indefinitely* and many nations around the world without testing, vaccines, antivirals or proper healthcare. The future may be here (let's hope that this is the beginning of the end while being healthfully paranoid that it may not be), but it is definitely not evenly distributed.
* https://detroit.cbslocal.com/2022/01/21/flint-public-schools...
The unwinding of the Covid trade doesn't necessarily correlate with that, but it's a reasonable proposition.
Most of the other stuff is opinions and I agree with the sentiment of many of the other commenters: You might be right, and I certainly would like you to be right, but there's little hard evidence that you are, and June 2021 was a nice cautionary tale that you very well might not be.
It's certainly an interesting thought, but why would it be true?
Given that there are two possible scenarios for the origin of COVID; natural transmission or lab origin, I find the former to be a far more terrifying prospect. If it were a lab outbreak, that's a protocol problem that can be addressed to prevent it in the future. If it was natural transmission, why hasn't this happened before? Why isn't it happening again right now? Why isn't there 10 different viruses at once, that are much more deadly? What happens when that occurs? If this happened naturally, it will happen again. And I just pray that we are prepared.
That's for "interesting" viruses, by the way. "Boring" viruses probably get transmitted all the time. Most things are boring.
Currently 2000 people a day are dying in the U.S. from COVID. That's an annualized rate of 730,000 deaths per year. The CDC estimates that the worst flu season in the last 10 years was 2017-2018 and that Flu caused 52,000 deaths.
That puts the current death rate of COVID at 14x where a bad flu season would be.
Perhaps it is his judgment that the level of attention COVID is getting is still not warranted, but one must start with the basic facts correct in order to make this judgment.
In the UK(Eng+Wales) it has killed <13k total with no underlying conditions as reported by the ONS. https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre... This alone should worry people!
The total kill count is supposed to be 100x this which is a heck of a disparity, and shows there is something bad about the data.
Besides you need to renormalize the data based on demographic and at risk population as well as taking into account frankly several years of good fortune with regard to flu seasons and being prepared with working flu jabs ahead of time.
I'm not saying your wrong I'm just explaining how the data your using is faulty. Go away find a trusted source who can help understand the details and not just compare 2 big flat numbers that don't reflect the actual situation.
2 big numbers make for nice headlines though. Which again for agendas very well.
Ironically nobody listens to my point that we should have been innoculating at risk people as early as may 2020 when trials started, so frankly I'm not bothered with being accused of fitting an agenda. I'm not, only really to say that the politicalisation of this has distorted data and people's thinkings in a way that's needlessly cost lives. Please stop reading sensationalist numbers without understanding what it means in context.
You make a statement that X number of people die from the flu in a year. This number is where flu is put down as a primary cause of death. i.e. this does NOT tend to include someone who was in hospital with the flu who had a stroke/heart-attack. (As you so strongly point out with a 70% estimate the US is defined to be unhealthy). Taking some leanway on this we'll be optimitic and say only 67% of the people are unhealthy at time of death from flu. This means we can triple the likely number of flu deaths if every death involving the flu was counted toward this. (pre-existing cases likely not included in this metric)
This gives an estimate of 150k flu deaths for 2017-18: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm
Total covid deaths are 900k, so 450k/yr average.
Given covid is a novel (new) virus that is attacking a population with (zero) innate immunity or pre-existing mechanisms to cope with this new virus. (i.e. every 60yr old didn't encounter this in the first 30 years of their life and have some pre-existing natural way of coping with this) we expect the death toll to be even higher, even if it were just as deadly as the flu. The fact this is a novel virus also means it will spread through the population much quicker given there is by construction and definition zero host-based mechanisms to slow it's spread.
We will call this metric F as we don't have a good handle on what this number is, other than it's probabilistically >1.
An F in this case of =3 matches the 2 sets of data we have. i.e. 150k die normally, 450k died now.
The big question is this, which of the following statements are more likely to be correct:
1) Covid is 3x more deadly than the worst of the flu! (With an in-built, and wrong, assumption that this is not due to having something to do with the population not having an in-built immunity of some form.)
2) Covid is a new virus, be careful because this can be deadly! (This has an in-built assumption that covid is deadly to some people... and it is).
Now we can again use the data to answer this question, which is more correct. The data says that mostly at-risk people are dying. This confirms more of statement 2 that covid is killing people, but it raises a concern about statement 1).
Naturally things like the flu kills the young and the old at about the same sort of rate due to their immune systems. There is no real mechanism which explains why covid doesn't kill the young so much other than it doesn't. Because flu deaths in the young in developed world are so low due to treatment we don't have good statistics to compare between young deaths from covid and the flu other than to say they don't appear to be significantly worse. (This borne by the covid stats/testing of young patients)
Unless there is a mechanism discovered to say why covid doesn't impact the young so much we can assume it follows the general age profile of being a transmissible seasonally variant contagion.
Here is the 2nd problem.
If covid is more deadly, then by how much? This would be <=3.
The final amount covid is more deadly is some factor G.
The way G would/could* enter is that F+G explains the increased number of deaths in covid years compared to flu years.
i.e. F+G<=3 (covid could be, but is very unlikely to be less deadly, so we'll take F and G to be positive)
If the population had some normal natural immunity then G=3 by construction which means covid is 3x more deadly. This is bad, but frankly still not bodies piling in the streets bad.
We know F has some likely non-zero value and my bet is a lot more research is needed to explain it, but I doubt it's close to 0 as that implies that there is no such thing as herd/natural immunity which doesn't match reality.
Conservatively I think we can now say covid is likely between 1.5 and 2.5 times less likely assuming that the chance of the true value being somewhere in this range.
This obviously is different to decisions made around healthcare availability and reliability and correct approach to treat, but I'm going to pretend in both cases that the flu and covid have been optimally treated for the sake of argument. This is incredibly generous to your argument as it implies additional deaths can't be explained by bad healthcare availability or decisions. Unfortunately given some of the poor decisions in treating covid I think this alone could being 3 down to 2.5 by explaining, oops, we should have been treating them this way after 2 years experience.
Anyway, I don't regard 3x as being a huge multiplicative factor, which isn't to say 3x more people dying is a good thing. It's not, but obviously informed steps can and should have been taken to reduce this.
*(Could, enter this way, the unknown above is now linearly separated to first order into 2 unknowns, this is ignoring higher order effects for the sake of clarity and explanation here)
Even taking this at the worst case scenario for my case of you being wrong (50k was the true number of deaths with the flu), we end up with (F+G) < 9 with the same leniency, covid is likely between 6 and 8 times worse than 2017/18, but frankly given we don't tend to shut down society based on the numbers this is only really a concern in a healthcare setting and not massively at a population level. Esp given it's at the same level of people dying from heart attacks at a worst-case spin. We don't shut down mcdonalds because of that though...
apples to oranges gets you 6<G<8, apples to apples gets 1<G<3.
So it pays to decide on your priors carefully and given there has never been a count of "number of sick people who had flu at time of death" we can't get more accurate at resolving this.
Anyhow, the original claim was "The current death rate of COVID in the US is about what a bad flu season would be." This is obviously wildly false.
I don't know who has educated you in the field of mathemetics but I'd maybe go speak with them about comparing orders of magnitude and the number 8, I'm too tired...
I've presented to you good reasons for these numbers, not biases, but scientific logically consistent reasoning. You've glanced and cherry-picked. There isn't a conversation happening here so I'll leave you be.
Frankly I tire, you can proceed to profess to lecture me on my reasoning, my biases and how if infers the way I obviously vote politically all you like, I'm done.
Unfortunately our education (comparing US and UK) are both not going to be solved by increased tech imo (not in the sense of tablets for all). But as I've said for years we should be seriously looking at airflow in educational establishments, as well as improved buildings.
Having been on both sides of the lecture hall and teaching environment, a well ventilated room helps huge amounts for concentration and informed debate. Air quality can drag down the room and atmosphere as well as being unhealthy.
I think this post gets something else wrong.. The economic story. The claim in the post is "covid is over, so everything will reset to precovid levels." I think there's a much bigger correction happening potentially that will be worse than "we're right back where we started".
- Omicron is comparable to a really bad cold for most people
- The vaccines reduce the risk of death for only a very short time, then the effect wears off, and they have unknown long-term sequelae
- Living like it's 2020 is not sustainable
If there's one thing predicable about the the pandemic, it's that it is unpredictable. I, too, hope that omicron is the much-hyped final wave, just like delta was supposed to have been. But to declare that it definitely, totally, is the final wave right now seems a bit premature.
This has nothing to do with employer thinking and trying to predict covid.
This is all about some managers feeling lonely. And even as it sounds cynical, I really mean it and think it is factor in this. The other factors are also some management feeling less in control or thinking it will be more productive. But imo, them feeling lonely, especially those who have no real social life outside of work, is a factor.
People love to pretend that companies and management are all about rationality, but they are not. Their emotions influence their actions a lot (so are developers emotions etc).
1) Natural immunity is quite robust: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm?s_cid=mm...
Now, that is according the CDC whose governance has sought to give the impression that natural immunity is not so great (perhaps for generally good reasons). But now they see fit to give the impression that natural immunity is pretty substantial, clearly giving much more immunity weight than vaccine alone. So that is some clear signal just reading between the lines.
2) Seroprevelance indicating natural exposure is quite high overall in the U.S. and especially so in some regions, see for yourself what that looks like in your own region: https://covid19serohub.nih.gov/ (nucleocapsid is proxy for exposure and recovery)
Now, you might look at those numbers and see only 30% or so, but realize this is end of October statistics. Many (dare I say all?) regions in the U.S. have seen en exceptional wave since those statistics were collected. I would be confident to say 50% - 100% increase in statistics of recovered.
edit: I'm just some guy on the internet so if you think this stuff is wrong or misrepresented, call my ass out. If you are not capable of parsing the references I give you, assume I have bad intentions.
I'm not very optimistic about that one.
Every time restrictions relax, and we rush back to capital-N Normal, cases rise, deaths rise, hospitals fill up, and it’s nothing but “Surprised Pikachu” faces from politicians! We keep not learning, over and over.
I don’t know what it’s going to take to snap us out of this trance and accept lifestyle changes. A “9/11 quantity of deaths” every 3 days is apparently not enough.