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Comment by fpgaminer | Hacker News Reader

In the U.S. at least:

> There are two states and 618 counties that require circuit breakers (i.e. short-term mitigation measures needed to preserve hospital functioning) at this point because their hospitals are at or above 100% capacity (assuming that the number of staffed beds has not increased in the past week). Medical military personnel have already been dispatched to a number of hospitals across the nation. Nebraska also joined a short list of states that have enacted its Crisis Standards of Care plan. But community-wide efforts to reduce spread desperately need to be taken, too. Fourteen additional states are at high risk of exceeding 100% hospital capacity in the next 1-10 days.

Source: https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/state-of-affa...

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Americans also have higher dates of obesity and diabetes though so it doesn't surprise me.

It’s mild. Everybody is getting it and that strains hospitals but it’s a mild illness and many infected people won’t even be tested let alone seek treatment.

How much evidence do you need of this being a mild variant?

> It’s mild. Everybody is getting it and that strains hospitals but it’s a mild illness and many infected people won’t even be tested let alone seek treatment.

It really is not. It's mild to double- and triple-vaccinated individuals living in highly vaccinated populations. They get the shot, they brush it aside

The poor souls who didn't managed to get vaccinated, or didn't wanted to, represent the bulk of the hospitalized population and deaths.

The key factor is that the world has spent the last year bulking on vaccines, precisely to allow any infection to be at most mild. And now that we're seeing highly vaccinated populations being exposed and developing mostly mild cases are we now supposed to pretend that vaccines don't exist and the disease suddenly got tame? In whose head does this even compute?

> The poor souls who didn't managed to get vaccinated, or didn't wanted to, represent the bulk of the hospitalized population and deaths.

This is only part of the picture - it's actually the people that are unvaccinated and are very old or have comorbidities that represent the majority of deaths.

But we also shouldn't exclude that a large majority of people are dying with Covid-19 at the moment rather than because of Covid (i.e. as c20% of deaths at the moment are within a month of a positive covid test, and c5% of the population likely had Covid in the last month, we can imply that 5% of deaths would have Covid anyway if it had no impact on morbidity, so about 25% (at least) of those Covid deaths are people dying with covid. This is likely an underestimate considering Covid is probably spreading in hospitals).

I believe you truly have bought the full narrative. I’m boosted I’m not anti vax but I’ll give you one data point that contradicts your claim:

South Africa vax rate is 52%. Their health officials have declared it to be mild.

It’s mild.

Please make your substantive points without personal swipes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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