Various winter viruses kill on the same order of magnitude, and they kill the same old, obese, sick population.
I'm a bit worried we will have something awful, killing healthy people or large swaths 5-20% of the population, and we will be too desensitized to care.
It def seems like it was a political tool, more than a threat.
I'm sorry, but what the hell are you talking about? In my city there were so many dead people they had to transform a skating rink into a morgue. ER rooms were completely overcrowded, COVID took so much effort to fight in hospitals that other diseases got later diagnoses and treatments, which resulted in even more dead people. Lots of elder people died in care homes because there wasn't any help available for them. There were no ambulances available at all. My mother had to go the hospital due to her infection worsening and she had to stay in the hospital gymnasium in couches, because there weren't enough beds nor space for them. They had to make an improvised hospital in a conference center to hold all the hospitalized people, thousands of them. We had a complete lockdown and it still took several weeks for cases to start decreasing.
We panicked so hard because it was fucking scary. Maybe the reason it wasn't for you is that you lived in a place where the government took precautions before it got too big, but I don't think it's ok to be so cavalier about it when so many people had such a hard time.
I think you missed the part where I said "Maybe the reason it wasn't for you is that you lived in a place where the government took precautions before it got too big".
> COVID standard of care w.r.t. intubation was uniquely terrible.
That's what happens when you're dealing with a disease that's literally three months old and that's saturating the entire health system. We also gave hydroxycloroquine, which was proven later to be useless. We literally knew almost nothing about the disease, what did you expect? Excellent standards of care from the start?
> Disrupting the daily routines of elders in nursing homes is well-known to drive mortality.
I think that an infectious respiratory disease and the lack of medical care are far more significant drivers of mortality.
Seriously, what is your point here?
Anybody who was paying attention saw the crisis in the healthcare system, and its fall-out. But there's a strong ideological bias among many now to look back in the rear view mirror and pretend nothing was there.
But in a way it's not surprising as concern for the vulnerable is clearly not a widely accepted cultural value in many of our societies.
They have to do this because their ideology is that everything about covid was wrong, the vaccine didn't work, it's all the democrats fault and they invented the problem, so any acknowledgement that it actually killed at least a million americans must be avoided, otherwise they have to admit to themselves that not only are they wrong and the people they listen to lied to them, but they were selfish assholes about it.
It really sucks. We could have had a great unifying cause to rally against. We could have genuinely improved health outcomes in the US. Fuck, even Donald Trump himself eventually realized this was a bad thing and helped get the vaccine going. But half of the republican platform right now is covid denial. They have to invent a magic reality where their ignorance doesn't kill people, and people who have studied stuff for decades don't know anything.
It's an ideological-ethical system based on might-makes-right and "I'll take whatever I want try to stop me" and at the time the pandemic hit, its chief exponent ("grab em by the pussy") was the president of the United States.
Around here in Canada half the people who were going on about "F*ck Trudeau" and anti-mask this and anti-vax that were also taking CERB ("Canada Emergency Response Benefit") payments from the government and bilking the taxpayer for money at the same time. My nextdoor neighbours for example.
Savage capitalism as an ideology, who the fuck cares about my neighbour, and screw the old people, all this shit is inconvenient, they gonna die anyways
All that said, western governments seemed to come up with marvelous ways of making the whole lockdown & etc suck for the working classes the most. Easy for folks like me who got to work from home but pretty damn vile if you were an hourly wage worker. So I get where a lot of the anger comes from.
Right. And that's if you bought into the principle of it.
If you looked around at real outcomes — rather than intentions and propaganda — then it was far worse. Government was spending a ton making their pals rich, and people like you and me a teeny bit safer. But it was also failing absolutely those that really needed it. That was not a cause to rally around.
Did government mismanage COVID? Yep. Did they do in an unjust way? Yep. You know what's worse? Savagely letting the vulnerable die, and the rather .. deplorable ... people who built a whole ideological edifice out of complaining about social duties during the pandemic and pretending it was all fake.
It's not like it wasn't possible to be critical of gov't approaches and also pitch in to help out.
Lots of suspect motivations and people.
What has a comparable death rate that nearly the entire population has been exposed to?
> Various winter viruses kill on the same order of magnitude, and they kill the same old, obese, sick population.
Name this virus please. If you're thinking the flu, it's estimated that each year worldwide about a billion people are infected and there are ~450,000 deaths[1]. That's a 0.045% death rates, and that's one of our winter biggest killers.
To bring it to America, the CDC has death rates at ~0.1-0.2% [2]
[1] https://ipac-canada.org/influenza-resources [2] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html
Regardless, that's moved the discussion a bit, but it's myopic to look at just death rates. What about the rate of hospitalization? ICU use? Death is just one facet of care, and it's assuming a medical system that could absorb the excess load across all areas. If it couldn't that would have lead to markedly increased death rates as those who required more mild care found themselves without that required assistance.
The best way to compute IFR is via serosurveys because those can pick up people who were infected but didn't get sick because their immune system fought it off without symptoms even developing.
Here's a serosurvey meta-study from 2022. It's more recent than when I last looked at this and computes an even lower value.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.11.22280963v...
"The median IFR was 0.0003% at 0-19 years, 0.003% at 20-29 years, 0.011% at 30-39 years, 0.035% at 40-49 years, 0.129% at 50-59 years, and 0.501% at 60-69 years."
It does vary heavily by country and age so it's not a very meaningful value, in some ways. It tells you more about the general state of health and healthcare in a place than the virus itself.
It's hard to compare this to the IFR of flu because flu has never had this scale of surveillance applied.
The COVID death rate and what it compares to is a very different and tricky topic. It's probably not worth getting into here. The thread is about COVID testing.
For example, even as early as June of 2020, the public health authority in Canada's most-populous city (with the fourth highest population in North America) revealed that the counting of deaths was being done using a methodology that sounds quite dubious:
"Individuals who have died with COVID-19, but not as a result of COVID-19 are included in the case counts for COVID-19 deaths in Toronto."
https://twitter.com/TOPublicHealth/status/127588839006028596...