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Comment by timewizard | Hacker News Reader

Yea. Why would they be sick? We only discovered _antibodies_ in their blood.

This ceaseless hyperventilation over the flu is unwarranted. There are vulnerable populations that would benefit from additional care under _any_ conditions. Let's just always be prepared to have to give them the necessary care and stop with this trumped up nonsense.

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I assume you're referring to old people when you say 'vulnerable populations', but the problem is that old people are not always the only ones that get affected during flu pandemics. During the Spanish flu pandemic, for example, half the deaths were in people 20 to 40 years old.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#Patterns_of_fatali...

Yea. Why would they be sick? We only discovered _antibodies_ in their blood.

This ceaseless hyperventilation over covid-19 is unwarranted. There are vulnerable populations that would benefit from additional care under _any_ conditions. Let's just always be prepared to have to give them the necessary care and stop with this trumped up nonsense.

Non-sarcastic agreement here. It was way overblown because were were restricting the tests to people we were already pretty sure had it through contact, massively inflating the mortality rate those first few months.

It's not clear what you're saying. That COVID was overblown because of how we tested for it?

Let's pretend COVID didn't exist. Yet, let's also look at all-cause mortality (CDC data). Death rates approached twice normal. Certainly looks like "something" was happening!

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/figures/mm7150a3-F2.g...

At the start the media flat out lied about covid mortality rates to scare people into compliance, using the case fatality rate instead of the infection fatality rate (the former is much higher because only more serious cases end up in hospital, so there's a selection bias, especially when many cases are asymptomatic). It also ignored the age-stratified nature of risk, which the data showed really early on, quoting the mortality rate for 80 year olds as if it applied to everyone, when in fact the mortality rate decreased roughly 10x for every 10 years of age below 80.

The global IFR is around 0.6%. And a complex mix of persistent COVID sequelae - including cognitive decline, heart disease, severe chronic fatigue, and reduced immunity - are happening in around 10% of those infected, at all ages.

The big problem with bird flu - actually any flu - is that even if people don't die they can be off sick for a couple of weeks.

And if you have tens of millions off sick for a couple of weeks at the same time, everything stops working.

The global IFR was claimed to be around 3% and CFR around 10% in early 2020 because of how the tests were restricted, artificially reducing the denominator. I think serious side-effects were claimed around 40-50% as well, but not sure I'm remembering that one right. It was never actually that high, but most people had no idea what was actually going on and it caused all sorts of panic which led to the lockdowns.

"didn't"? "was"?

For our biologists tracking evolution:

* https://nextstrain.org/ncov/gisaid/global/6m

For our data scientists, wastewater data (note: often backfills the last 2 weeks):

* https://data.wastewaterscan.org/tracker?charts=Cp4MEAA4AUgAU...

For our "trust the science" folks, daily info about covid research:

* https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/search?keywords=covid

For the capitalists, from the Society of Actuaries:

* https://www.soa.org/4af998/globalassets/assets/files/resourc...

Can anyone offer me a evidenced based reason to be past-tense about this? Because it is not looking good.

Those elevated death rates were only for about two months. Also the better metric would be years-of-life-lost from a societal perspective. It'd be unfortunate but much less impactful on society if the excess deaths were 76 year olds with only a year or two of life left than if 20 year olds were dying at that rate.

Also there were a few surveys by the BBC and other news organizations during that time which showed that a majority of people thought the death rates were 1/10.

The age adjusted death rates show the 2021 rates were about the same as the year 2006 [1].

1: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/wr/mm7326a3.htm

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