I am not an antivaxxer, but 0.2 per cent is 2 per thousand, and 100 per cent of the population won't get covid at the same time, even if the entire population was naive to the virus.
The worst problem with covid is probably not the raw death rate, but that the ICU patients often take weeks to either improve or die.
ICUs are not designed for long stays; prior to covid, median ICU stay was fairly short (I found a figure of 2 days and mean of 3.4 days [0]). But for example, my GP, who died of covid in early 2020, stayed on life support for six weeks before his body finally gave up.
This is the only metric still left, which ma be just time delayed.
Also people in ICU with covid may not be the same thing as people in ICU because of covid. It may likely just be that very sick people in hospitals are refusing the vaccine and catching it.
Hospitals are confined spaces that aid in transmission of all kinds of diseases.
The difference is 40 people out of a population of 14.5 million.
So small it could literally be people with terminal diseases catching covid on their death beds.
To use this to advocate for any preventative effect in a healthy individual in the general population would be misleading.
Very likely the difference is just sampling bias.
No, that isn't the biggest issue. The ICU is the last resort, it's the point where we throw incredible amounts of effort and hardware at the problem to gain a chance of still saving them. And even then 50% still die, and others likely will have permanent damage from the severe course of the disease.
The biggest issue is that not enough people got vaccinated.
The average ICU occupancy is actually ~ 70 %, to have some slack in it during the annual flu season. If patients have to be turned away because everywhere is full, then there's a problem. Also, under normal circumstances, people tend to spend only a few days in ICU, then they are either better or dead, but serious Covid cases require weeks of artificial respiration, even a few cases take up a lot of hospital resources.
And what's with the focus on Covid deaths - Covid sequelae are a thing and can significantly affect quality of life. My colleague is in his mid-20's, in good health - he had a mild case last Fall and still hasn't got his sense of smell back. When you can't smell methacrylic ester you know there's a problem.
In fact the opposite is true. If everyone gets coronavirus in a two week period, ICU is less overwhelmed for the rest of the year. A lot of susceptible people die, of course.
If you attempt to spread it out and succeed, you're at 100% capacity basically all of the time, plus 99% of people get to deal with the fact that coronavirus restrictions are utterly miserable.
Omicron has probably made all of this irrelevant anyway, it's so contagious that effectively everyone who goes outside is getting it this month. 1 in 15 in London right now and that's only the confirmed cases I believe.
At least 80% of people don't even notice they have it (so the BBC has told me today).
Only 5% of cases require ICU, let alone 5% of infections (and if Imperial modelling is right that number is far lower). ICU saves at most half of the people who go in based on CDC numbers.
I have not seen any modelling by any source of even the slightest repute suggesting a 2 billion dead number is even possible. This alarmism makes people roll their eyes at all things COVID-19 and violate lockdowns, stick to the facts, they're bad enough.
Even then,it is treatable. I have a 72 yr old friend who was in ICU for 5 days, but now he is fine. Death from nothing but covid is extremely rare; maybe 1% of hospitalized cases.
About 1/3 of the covid cases in the ICU where I live [1]. No idea how that stacks up compared to total ICU capacity (I think <10% but am not sure on this).
A quick google suggests around 15% of hospital beds are ICU and covid 19 cases that end up in the hospital, only 5% end up in ICU. So that's an interesting line of thinking but it lacks supporting evidence that covid 19 is overwhelming ICU.
edit to address your edit: The mortality rate is often wildly inflated with new diseases. That's because most people don't seem to understand real mortality rate vs confirmed cases mortality rate. Obviously when a disease is new the confirmed cases will be confirmed against the people showing serious symptoms. Then when you pretend deaths/confirmed cases == mortality rate you end up with a wildly inflated mortality rate. Until we understand how many people are asymptomatic we won't have a real mortality rate that is reliable.
It is normal for ICUs to run near capacity, at least in the large city I live in. 8% of all ICU intake was Covid related at the largest 'medical city' in the world. This is increasing week over week, and will likely rise some more going into Winter.
That said, deaths are very low year over year and this is in a city where the majority of the population wears no masks, and has a very low vaccination rate. While Covid isn't 'over', it's perceived relevance is waning, despite the constant barrage of news articles.
Three years ago, 0% of ICU beds were used for COVID patients. Now it is 37%. If ICU admission correlates with risk of death, and those beds would have been empty otherwise, or used for lower risk patients, a 40% increase in deaths seems reasonable. Certainly not a rigorous analysis, but it passes the smell test.
My impression is that COVID is problematic because a lot of people spend weeks on the ICU. The death toll itself is not that big, but having ICUs overflowing is a bad thing.
ICUs were built to take care about acute problems and there is a silent expectation that most patients admitted into ICU care either die quickly or recover enough within 2-3 days to be transferred into regular care. Having people around on ventilators for weeks destroys logistics of ICU systems.
We put way more than zero research into anti-aging research. Granted, COVID attracted a lot more money and attention, but anti-aging research is gaining traction. And with the tech moguls of SV aging, you can bet on some extra investments.
I for one don't believe that people like Bezos (a notorious fitness and health fanatic) are just going to succumb to natural aging without a fight.
But to respond to your point(?) covid patients that get sick enough to go to the ICU are there for a long time, while heart patients get better (or die) significantly faster, I recently heard an ICU doctor say on TV here (the Netherlands) that a covid ICU bed could help up to 8 heart patients, which makes it extra important to reduce the amount of covid cases.
That's not really the problem though. See, no matter how many ICU beds you have, the people going to the ICU are about 40% or so likely to die from COVID and the remainder will recover but will take a very long time to do so and have a significant chance of having long term residual effects and/or complications.
You don't really wish that kind of thing on anybody. So you try to avoid people going to the ICU in the first place (assuming you have a humane government, which unfortunately isn't always the case).
That said, the pandemic has definitely taught a lot of countries that stripping your health care system is probably a bad idea.
1) 37% of ICU beds for Covid means about a 50% increase in ICU patients.
2) If you go into the ICU for Covid you're probably leaving via the morgue. The survival chance for a Covid patient in the ICU is a lot lower than the typical ICU patient.
> In other words if you slow down the rate of infection enough you could fit that 94k into the 1k of beds over time. But if all of them get sick on day one, you are fucked.
Average ICU stay is about 2 weeks, so that's 3.6 years to filter everyone through.
The worst problem with covid is probably not the raw death rate, but that the ICU patients often take weeks to either improve or die.
ICUs are not designed for long stays; prior to covid, median ICU stay was fairly short (I found a figure of 2 days and mean of 3.4 days [0]). But for example, my GP, who died of covid in early 2020, stayed on life support for six weeks before his body finally gave up.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4792682/
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