Now that covid is endemic it's just another flu.
It's just not guaranteed to be monotonic (particular strains can bump lethality upwards), and it doesn't help the people who die early on to the stronger strains, especially with an overloaded medical system.
Like, we don't have hospitals overflowing into makeshift tent farms outside with freezer trucks used to handle the overload of bodies until the crematoriums can get around to them anymore, either. It's definitely trended towards reduced lethality over time.
Incorrect. This virus has already spread by the time you're dying in the hospital and it doesn't "care" if you die or not. If it could spread more effectively during the transmissible period of the disease, while more effectively murdering you on the tail end, it'll murder you more, no problem.
The Delta wave was a good example of the virus mutating to become both more transmissible and lethal, quite successfully from its perspective.
The mechanism for waning virulence is that we've got T-cells which recognize conserved T-cell epitopes so the human race has some level of relatively permanent immunity now against the novel virus, and because immunity to neutralizing antibodies causes the virus to mutate and it is always competing with the immunity to its past self and that has a cost.
So, there are different evolutionary pressures. If we find out that Covid is actually latent in all of us years later (unlikely because we would have likely seen it with SARS-1 or MERS), then all bets would be off.
But it's not. I'd rather get the flu than covid.
The first time around sucked. It was basically a very bad flu for about five days. I caught it on a trip to southern Mississippi, and it didn't help that I had to drive >10 hours back home without stopping anywhere that I might spread it. I ordered medicine, food, and supplies for contactless delivery and drove it nonstop.
The second time I only knew it was covid because I was testing every time I had an inkling that I might have gotten it. I had a very mild fever and a runny nose for two days and nothing else. I isolated myself in my home office and managed to keep anyone else in my family from getting it, too.
Everything I've experienced, heard, or read strongly indicates that each round is significantly less bad than the last.
I look forward to people who pretend that it's the same as the flu catching it for themselves so that they can enjoy this "no big deal."
It's a sad state of affairs.
Where did you get 5%?
Last I saw you have a 20% chance of long covid, but it seems that was with older variants.
The thing that scares me is:
> up to two years after infection, at an elevated risk for many long COVID-related conditions including diabetes, lung problems, fatigue, blood clots and disorders affecting the gastrointestinal and musculoskeletal systems.
https://medicine.wustl.edu/news/long-covid-still-worrisome-2...
It was good when it came out, but based on it's effectiveness, it seems more of a stop-gap than a proper vaccine.
“Compared with hospitalization for influenza, hospitalization for COVID-19 was associated with a higher risk of death (hazard ratio, 1.61 [95% CI, 1.29-2.02]).”
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2803749
What would be interesting is to compare the numbers when flu was first happening vs covid.
So far COVID vaccines seem to confer protection for longer than flu ones, and the initial protection is generally higher.
Not sure if it's your case, but people often forget that every year there's a new flu shot per hemisphere, and its effectiveness generally hovers at around 40-60%.
OK
> whereas COVID vaccines do not prevent them, but merely lessen the symptoms and risk of hospitalization.
Is this something I can read on a peer reviewed study, or is it yet another creative definition of what "infection", "vaccine" or "symptom" really means?