So much emphasis is placed on the fatality rate, but there’s a lot of middle ground between asymptomatic and dead.
While it was shitty and lingered a while the worst of it wasn't actually that much worse than a flu for me. Somewhere between the flu and bronchitis on the scale of how sick I've been in my life.
Somewhere between 20-50% of infections are believed to be completely asymptomatic:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
(my anecdote isn’t as valid as a severity-biased anecdote?)
I got it around the last week of February, before any travel restrictions in Canada. We get (or got) tons of tourists from both Asia and Europe.
So Covid was likely floating around here, lots of people I know said they were sick but very few got tested, but our demographics mean that only 1 person died (80+ year old man) and no one else was ever hospitalized.
Also: the Theodore Roosevelt. The captain wouldn't have risked his career for a bunch of sailors with bad flu. But apparently all of the propulsion team was affected to such an extent that they couldn't tend the reactor any longer. It's that bad.
...and this is the same middle ground that exists for every other cold and flu, every single year.
Anosmia is a common side effect of a variety of illnesses, and in the vast majority of cases, it resolves on its own. But this fact doesn’t make good headlines
Anosmia is a common side effect of a variety of illnesses, and in the vast majority of cases, it resolves on its own. But this fact doesn’t make good headlines.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-12/covid-19-...
> “These data demonstrated that the recovered SARS patients had a poor quality of life 12 years following recovery, and were susceptible to inflammation, tumors, and glucose and lipid metabolic disorders,” researchers wrote.
The idea seems to be that SARS-CoV-2 can infect both the upper and lower respiratory tract. Lower infection attack the lungs and are typically much more severe. Presumably that's what makes SARS classic so deadly. Upper infections are typically milder but spread more easily, that's what the flu and common cold do.
Loss of smell would indicate a upper respiratory tract infection, and therefore a higher chance of generally mild symptoms, more like the flu than SARS.
I don't know what the latest scientific literature has to say about that though, everything is so recent. Loss of smell wasn't even recognized as a symptom 3 months ago...
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
Yes, this virus is worse than the flu. But not nearly to the extent being portrayed by the OP. All illnesses have long-term sequelae.
(Also, since you’re right that we have ample data on this virus, it seems an odd choice to cite data for SARS, when discussing Covid-19.)
Note that CDC data on the flu is not on the IFR, they only have an estimate for the symptomatic fatality rate which doesn't include asymptomatic flu cases, while their COVID-19 IFR is including asymptomatic cases too.
(This seems to be because really caring about the true IFR of a virus is a recent development spurred on by this pandemic)
> Where are you getting the numbers for flu? As far as I'm aware the best guess for flu IFR is 0.04% compared to COVID-19s 0.4% IFR
Any number of different sources; 0.1% is the generally accepted estimate of overall IFR for influenza in an average year, based on statistical extrapolation from seroprevalence surveys. Here’s an article that tries to be as fatalistic as possible, which still cites an overall IFR for flu of 0.1%:
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/why-covid-19-isnt-the...
If you absolutely do not want to rely on CDC numbers, here’s a literature review on the subject which puts the symptomatic IFR at 0.1%, at the extreme high end. Most estimates of symptomatic IFR, according to the review, are between 5-50 / 100k:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809029/#!po=0....
There’s clearly a large variance in estimates for the flu at all levels, but no reasonable way to claim a 10x difference in severity for Covid without cherry-picking the worst estimates for it, and the best estimates for influenza.
I guess the CDC are using symptomatic case fatality to mean the IFR then? Or else it doesn't make any sense.
> Any number of different sources; 0.1% is the generally accepted estimate of overall IFR for influenza in an average year. Here’s an article that tries to be as fatalistic as possible, which still cites an overall IFR for flu of 0.1%:
That was exactly what I was talking about, they use this source from the CDC https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm which again is explicitly talking about "symptomatic cases"
> How many people get sick with flu every year?
> CDC conducts surveillance for people who see their health care provider for flu-like illness through the Outpatient Influenza-like Illness Surveillance Network (ILINet); a network of thousands of health care providers who report the proportion of patients seeking care for flu-like illness weekly to CDC. This system allows CDC to track levels of medically attended flu-like illness over the course of the flu season. CDC does not know exactly how many people get sick with seasonal flu each year. There are several reasons for this including that ILINet does not include every health care provider and monitors flu-like illness, not laboratory-confirmed influenza cases. Also, flu illness is not a reportable disease and not everyone who gets sick with flu seeks medical care or gets tested.
> CDC uses mathematical modeling in combination with data from traditional flu surveillance systems to estimate the numbers of flu illnesses in the United States. CDC estimates that flu has resulted in between 9.3 million and 49 million illnesses each year in the United States since 2010. For more information on these estimates see CDC’s Disease Burden of Influenza page. For more information on CDC surveillance systems, see CDC’s Overview of Influenza Surviellance in the United States.
The way I read that, from the CDC's POV if you aren't symptomatic you didn't get the flu. Similarly, if you are symptomatic it doesn't necessarily mean you did get the flu.