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Comment by rory | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, it's roughly the same death count now with most people barely (if at all) paying attention, versus the first wave when most people were locking down and wouldn't even go to the park.

Part of the "crisis" feeling of the first wave was the unknown (and likely much higher) death count that could arrive if we didn't take action.

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We also had little idea and no direct way to bolster our immune systems against it.

Now, though, you can have had up to four shots of vaccine and years of learning various mitigation efforts (masks, distancing, etc).

The risk profiles are totally different because of greater tools and information.

This is it exactly, in the first year we had little to know information as to the severity of the illness or the methods of transmission. With time we have developed vaccinations to mitigate the worst outcomes and have a much better understanding of the transmission vectors. I still wear a mask around because it's such a small inconvenience, and I still won't go into indoor crowded event, but I am considering easing up my defensive profile.

Also the production of N95/KN95/CA-N95/P99 masks have been upscaled greatly and they are far more accessible and affordable than they were at the beginning of the pandemic.

I remember when the only N95s you could get were counterfeit masks selling for $50 a mask.

There is a factor that has changed, though - the majority of people have now been vaccinated, and medical professionals have 2 years of experience in treating severe cases. So it's possible that policies such as lockdown prevented a much higher death count 2 years ago, but now that much higher death count is prevented by medical treatments we have since developed.

Yes, it seems to me like the lessened severity must necessarily be some combination of:

1) Improved immunity (vax and/or recovery)

2) Improved treatment

3) Virus evolution

What else could it be (not rhetorical)?

Less dry kindling.

The UK's socialized medical system tracks the percentage of their population that already has Covid antibodies in their system, either via vaccination or a prior infection, or both.

As of a month ago, about 99% of their population has Covid antibodies. I doubt things are very different here.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...

Yea that is probably a very important factor. I pray its lasting in protective effect.

Is the severity lessened much though? There were more deaths during the last wave, than during any previous wave.

True. Either severity lessened, or social distancing was largely useless. I'm pretty confident it's the former, but that assumption is implicit to my comment above.

> Part of the "crisis" feeling of the first wave was the unknown (and likely much higher) death count that could arrive if we didn't take action.

Maybe. To me 800-1,000/day was in itself a crisis and pretty frightening. The fact that we didn't get to 2,000+/day is ... better? but in the moment of April 2020 there was plenty of imminent fear versus fear of worsening.

There were 2000+ COVID deaths a day for months. At its worst (January 2021) the US was seeing nearly 4000 COVID deaths a day.

I'm not sure what data I was looking at before, but my point was that we were near peak just a few months ago and yet perception about the state of the pandemic does not really match that.

In fact, per the CDC Feb 1, 2022 was the deadliest single day, but if you went out into the world that day versus Feb 1, 2021, you'd experience two vastly different things.

The initial waves were a crisis in that we were suffering from resource exhaustion in the medical system. People were dying simply because we ran out of resources to treat them, both for Covid and for non Covid medical issues. With vaccination and improved Covid care we can now handle the patient load although at great personal sacrifice to medical professionals.

See my take-away from your first paragraph is quite different from your second paragraph.

The point isn’t to argue about who’s counter-factual is right or wrong, it’s impossible to say.

At this point everyone has taken a position as to whether the “mitigations” were ethical, legal, effective, or not. There’s no point discussing it anymore unless or until people in power try to re-impose them.

I think it's clear avoiding the park, in retrospect, was unnecessary. I'm just describing the feeling at the time, which I believe was shared by the vast majority of people for at least those first few weeks. I could be wrong though.

At least in my country, I have come to understand the deaths marked to Covid are now mostly people who were already in bad condition and had other health issues. Excess deaths seem to hover at 3%.

For USA though the excess deaths number is 17% so that model doesn't make sense at all. How many young people are dying from Covid in USA?

Gravityloss says >"For USA though the excess deaths number is 17% so that model doesn't make sense at all."<

A significant proportion of people in the USA have problems with their blood sugar levels. North Americans eat too much, eat the wrong foods and don't exercise. They tend to suffer from blood-sugar disorders (which then cause cancer and, well, everything).

Blood-sugar disorders are so varied in their symptoms as to exhaust listing here. People so affected are best described metaphorically as "human shipwrecks". New York Times had an excellent series on diabetes years ago:

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/09/nyregion/nyregionspecial5...

Skip to the section "Shortages and Shipwrecks", read it and weep: this was years before Covid and we had an epidemic that nobody was paying attention to. Covid is leaving and we still have a diabetes epidemic.

Very few young people are dying from Covid in the USA. The vast majority of deaths have been in the age 65+ group. However, the USA does have an exceptionally high obesity rate and we know that greatly increases the risk.

https://reason.com/2022/01/03/cdc-covid-19-children-hospital...

According to https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html , you are incorrect on death rate. I agree with the second sentence, though.

What do you mean? That the death rate is higher or lower?

I'm not even making a claim re: death rate, I'm taking GP's word for it.

US covid deaths are down to a fraction of what they were around Jan 1.

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