> The most vulnerable population succumbed to it and died. Everyone who could be infected was infected.
This explanation has some extremely obvious flaws. The world is still full of people who meet all the criteria of being particularly vulnerable to coronavirus. I doubt I’d be able to leave my house without seeing somebody who’s extremely obese or old.
>What is selfish is to ignore other factors that play an even more significant role than coronavirus, which has an extremely low mortality rate
You are just flat wrong, dangerously so. The actual numbers show that Covid-19 is 10s to 100s of times more deadly than the flu. You are just wildly uninformed and your confidence in your ignorance is astonishing.
> There’s a part of me that wonders if this “crisis” has been created by news coverage. The flu kills thousands every year. The early articles seemed to say that Corona virus was no worse that the flu. https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-death-age-older-.... This businessinsider article says that 15% of people 80yrs+ die.
I was thinking like that but I don't think so anymore. There is one important difference between COVID-19 and the regular flu: COVID-19 seems to infect a lot more people than the flu. Even if COVID-19 has an overall fatality rate that is much lower than regular flu, the fact that it spreads fast means it can overwhelm health services so that those few severe cases can't get the health they need, when with regular flu they would get that help. That can make it much more dangerous in practice even if, in theory, it's not.
Now with containment having failed the only course of action is to do everything we can to slow its progression to avoid overwhelming services.
>> There is massive difference between the appropriate response to an illness with a 5% fatality rate and an illness with a 0.36% fatality rate.
Is there? What is the appropriate response to 0.36%? The flu has a mortality rate of 0.1%, which seems comparable, except we all have some immunity from having the flu multiple times in the past. Flu shots are available for vulnerable people. So while people on average have a 1 in 1000 chance of dying if they get the flu, they also only have a 1/40 to a 1/7 chance of getting the flu at all. The probability of getting corona virus appears to be much, much higher for people exposed to it, and we have no idea what the rate of infection could get to if we let it run free and behaved normally.
> This is misinformation pulling on the heartstrings of the non-logical. Most people who caught covid would have died if they caught the normal flu...like every other year.
Even if that were true, I fail to see how it is relevant.
We demonstrably have massively more people dying from COVID than die from normal flues, so either COVID is more fatal than normal flu, or we have a massive amount of people catching COVID who would not have caught normal flu.
> First of all, it’s not “just the flu”. It is something much more dangerous. Catching this virus is a bit like playing a round of Russian roulette. You’ll probably be fine, but you could end up dead
I think this is mischaracterizing it. People have to die eventually. One year of existence has a mortality rate of 1%. For a 75-84 year old individual it is nearly 5%. Above 85 it's 14%. [1]
The coronavirus infection fatality is likely around 0.5-1%, but it's heavily skewed towards older individuals. Younger people do die from it, but a very low rates. And young people die from other causes as well, the annual mortality rates for a 20-something is around 0.1%. Getting coronavirus for a 20-something or 30-something is roughly equivalent to the mortality rate of a few months of life.
Death is sad and terrible, but we don't shut down society because people die.
> because the true severity of the outbreak isn’t yet known, it’s impossible to predict what the impact of that spread would be
This seems to be a key quote.
When you're making a bet, you should know the odds. Influenza is a known thing. I'm not going to think about that facemask knowing that influenza is going around, etc.
> How exactly do you know that your interpretation is more accurate than someone elses?
I don't. However, given the severity of the outcome of contracting COVID, would you rather play it safe, or be secure in your interpretation (which is less severe than mine)?
> ... disproportionately killed young people. I know this sounds callous, but a virus that spares the lives of people with more years ahead of them seems preferable over one that kills people in their prime.
Younger people are also dropping dead from COVID, and being scarred for life by it, far more than the original numbers in March and April indicated. You don't need to just be worried about your grandparents, you need to be worried about yourself just as much.
Being elderly, and all the comorbidities that are associated with older people, just increase an already significant chance of unfavorable outcome.
> I really would like to understand what your measure is that brought you to your conclusion that COVID-19 is "worse than the Spanish Flu" because, from most measures I can tell, it's not as bad.
Lets try this another way. Do you know why the US military switched from 7.62 to 5.56? If you kill a soldier, hes dead, the body will be dealt with after the battle. If you wound a soldier, now another, healthy, soldier is trying to pull him out of the fray to save his life.
Spanish Flu is that 7.62, SARS is that 5.56. We are now going to have to spend significantly more resources than we would have otherwise to deal with the outcome of SARS, and it would be barbaric of us not to.
People will be suffering from heart, lung, even brain damage for the rest of their lives. This is happening during a time that, pre-COVID, the healthcare system in many countries, the US included, was coming off the rails.
SARS couldn't have come at a worse time. We don't have the medical system to deal with what we have now, how are we going to possibly deal with this new thing?
We couldn't even get proper insurance reform to go through with Obamacare without a full-scale partisan war happening in Congress. We're going to have to have something at least that big to tackle the eventual outcome of this.
If COVID would have killed people like the Spanish Flu did, then the worst we'd have to work with is the number of people missing from society, the brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers that aren't here anymore. But, this? We have to worry about something we don't understand and can't easily predict, something that could get much worse, and is getting worse.
We have to worry about something that may never go away. What if this becomes a SARS season, every year, like the Flu season? They are working on a vaccine, but it isn't here yet, and from the papers I have read, they have indicated that this may be very difficult given some people do not have useful immune responses, and we don't have an accurate idea of what percentage of the population has this issue; relying on herd immunity to save us doesn't seem to be working.
Any reasonable person should be absolutely terrified. However, what I see is a lot of unreasonable people that are not taking this as what may be the worst threat to society in our lifetimes, something that can only be compared to things we read about in history books.
> I do want to question the effect on the society, and the personal responsibility of everyone involved.
What does this mean?
There are many factors at play here. Aside from mortality, you also have to look at the R0. Covid 19 has a significantly higher R0 than seasonal flu (estimated 1.5 vs 2.5+).
In addition, many people have some immune resistance to seasonal flu, but there was no existing resistance to Covid 19.
You only have to look at the health situation in Italy, Portugal, UK and elsewhere to see the difference between the two. Or look at the excess death graphs.
>For now. We have no idea what kind of long term damage this is going to cause yet.
Has there ever been an influenza/coronavirus-like infection with less than 0.1% fatality rate in working-age people (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/singapore/) that caused lasting disability in a significant proportion of the population? Given how the immune system works it doesn't make sense that someone's body is good enough at fighting the virus that it only displays mild cold-like symptoms yet weak enough that it somehow lets the virus cause serious long-term damage.
>Denial that it ever happened vs denial that it was as bad as it was (ie that reported Covid deaths match reality) are two different things.
Agreed. I interpreted GP as referring to the former. The latter is a much larger group.
> I know quite a few conservatives that think some combination of: it’s just a flu, not actually a problem, we’ve gotten Covid many times and we were fine, death numbers are all made up, doctors are getting paid to mark deaths as Covid caused, and many other hysterical conspiracy theory beliefs.
Same, but I know more that then got COVID and changed their tune. Many are close family.
> I think you’re not in the same circles of folks that believe this stuff.
Do not assume you know anything about the people I'm around, you do not.
> Worst case, it seems like the virus will mostly harm those who are at risk of death, but healthy people will probably be okay.
Plenty of healthy people have died, and it seems the disease is so aggressive that it can cause significant organ damage in survivors. Most healthy people are likely to be ok, but not all.
Intelligent people just want to know how severe the corona virus is, and what the risk factors are.
I can't speak for other people. :)
I was reading about the 1918 Spanish Flu (H1N1) today, and it sounds a lot like severe corona virus - blood frothing from lungs.
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