I would guess, in 2024 Covid killed more than 1.2 million people. I guess many people are assuming that Covid was a temporary disturbance, and will attenuate in the coming years. But what if it doesn't but will keep at about the current levels from year to year for a long time.
[1] https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_totaldeaths...
[2] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/28235...
EDIT: I got curious and looked up the CDC guidelines https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/vsrg/vsrg03-508.pdf
> based on sound medical judgment drawn from clinical training and experience, as well as knowledge of current disease states and local trends
> the disease or injury which initiated the train of morbid events leading directly to death
It goes on to suggest that if Covid was present they strongly recommend including it. And even if you did not diagnose Covid it can be a good assumption to make.
Which honestly I can’t think of a better way for mass data collection.
But with TB it was laying waste to people who were supposed to be in their prime. That's why it was so insidious.
"Death by a thousand cuts"
Maybe, you know, there is a middle ground between "as impactful or dangerous as TB" and "negligible"? Especially when so much is unknown about the SARS-CoV-2, a virus that infects the whole body (not just the lungs)?
For reference, almost all the victims of SARS-CoV-1 are still suffering from complications almost two decades later, between permanent fatigue, pulmonary damage, osteoporosis and bone necrosis, immune system deregulation, cognition impairment... Which is, you know, less worse than death and therefore TB, but still
Answer is a bit more of 1% young adults have significant limitations caused by long COVID if I read it well. 2024 data.
But this figure also includes cases without significant activity limitation. Significant activity limitations from long COVID across all adults for younger adults is slightly above 1%. Which is not negligible I think.
Here is a chilling possibility it may be closer to 25% already: https://neurosciencenews.com/ai-long-covid-28003/
We do not yet know what the long term impacts of acquiring COVID repeatedly will be, but we're going to find out.
It's my suspicion that those healthy young people will have lungs like chain smokers, higher rates of certain cancers, and a much higher propensity for certain cardiovascular ailments in a few decades.
We are heavily undercounting until we can definitively link it. That requires families to consent to an autopsy and for biomarkers to be finalized and used to confirm.
Researchers are pretty close to that nowadays though with micro clots, viral rna persistence assays, and even pathology studies which are all showing results this year and will be for years to come.
Why? Seems extremely speculative.
1. You don't develop an immunity to infection by them, but you do become less likely to be made severely ill from subsequent infections.
2. The severity of illness from the first infection is generally less if you are very young.
With the others it is thought that they probably did cause deadly pandemics when they first crossed over to humans, but did not cause much harm to babies or very young children, and so by the next generation they were no longer a big deal.
Nowadays we don't even bother to have a name for infection by them. We just lump them in with around 200 other viruses and call what happens when we get sickened by any of them a "common cold".
Pretty much everybody alive now was exposed to those viruses as a baby, got mildly ill and got that first infection out of the way, and then it is just a routine common cold to them when they get older.
I don't think it is yet known if COVID-19 will fully follow that path of those others. It still does cause severe illness far more often than the common cold viruses even in people who have been infected multiple times.
We probably won't know for sure until we see what happens over several years with people who were very young during the pandemic or were born after it.
For people older than that is is probably going to be something that is more like a severe flu, where we'll have a vaccine each year for the strains expected to be most common that year, and while the vaccine won't stop you from getting sick it will greatly increase you chances of not getting severely sick.
We are already seeing that. COVID-19 fell from the 4th highest cause of death in the US in 2022 to the 10th highest in 2023, with 76000 deaths. Compare to 246000 deaths in 2022 and 462000 in 2021.