If this turns out to be serious, what's the public's appetite for masks? Lockdowns? New vaccines? For many people it's quite low. For others it's quite high. And the disagreement between these groups will become another political flashpoint.
Covid turned out to be 1% fatal in the early days - which is awful. But the early numbers were ~5-10%
Vaccinated people had a significantly lower chance of death but the overall death rate was so tiny it basically doesn't move the needle.
Are you sure? Pre vaccine rollout across all ages in USA, I've seen less than .5% IFR, and an order of magnitude less than that if you constrain to ages 0-59.
With the inundation of constant bad news that we were under, you'll still find people thinking covid killed 20% of anyone who caught it, and that will probably last forever.
I don't think we should worry at all. We haven't seen any major illness spread with a fatality rate of >1% since introducing clean drinking water & having antibiotics.
You can see yourself https://www.healthline.com/health/worst-disease-outbreaks-hi...
It can happen, but the chances seem vanishingly low. Even the Hong Kong flu outbreak had only a 0.2% fatality rate.
Isn't that the exact story of the Spanish Flu? Low fatality rate at first which then mutated into a horribly fatal strain after the first wave? Isn't that why we took COVID so seriously from the get-go - the fear of mutation?
Paralytic polio, which has a fatality rate of 5-10%, is still endemic in parts of Africa and southern Asia.
Back in 2002 SARS killed 9.5% (783) of the 8000 people infected with it.
So, I call bullshit on "We haven't seen any major illness spread with a fatality rate of >1% since introducing clean drinking water & having antibiotics." (and for another thing, most of the really bad infection diseases are viral, not bacterial. Antibiotics do little to nothing).
> 100% fatality rate
Case fatality rate.
> Back in 2002 SARS killed 9.5% (783) of the 8000 people infected with it.
Of the identified cases of people infected.
> If, like COVID, it had a several day asymptomatic period, it would wipe out the planet within months.
Wrong for so many reasons
HIV is what obviously comes to mind.
https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/pdf/library/slidesets/cdc-hiv-survei...
The secondary infection thing is a technicality, the mechanism via which someone who has HIV is killed. But it’s not really a misnomer to say the disease is deadly.
You are misreading the charts you are citing btw, your chart shows close to 100% fatality rate, 16 deaths per 100,000 people (with and without HIV)
Right wing bot networks continue to harass anti-COVID activists to reinforce the hegemonic idea that it's over so that rich people can clean up.
Here's a joke: What's the difference between the right and liberals on COVID? About 6 months.
You could see the blip from covid in global mortality data. You can't see it now.
You were sold "herd immunity", which means people don't get sick because the disease is prevented by immunity. Instead, we just have total society-wide saturation with COVID. It's a sick, fucked up situation.
Admittedly the odds are stacked in my favor a bit - I'm a pretty extreme introvert in a quiet small town and have been WFH since 2012. I will never accept another position that isn't 100% remote, and avoiding getting sick is part of that for sure.
Having said all of that, in the absence of strong evidence for human-human transmission, this should not keep you up at night.
There's absolutely no evidence for this as we have no data on the infection fatality rate, only on the case fatality rate, which like with COVID initially is an order of magnitude or two higher, because the vast majority of people with respiratory infections aren't specifically tested for H1N1.