The risk of dying from covid was probably less than 1% for a healthy adult and it's around 60-70% when it comes to the bird flu. So people will naturally take this much more serious if it starts to spread among humans.
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)