You can count the total number of confirmed human cases of H5N1 in the US, Canada, and the EU combined on one hand. That mortality rate is so skewed as to be useless.
As I said, it’s certainly complicated by not knowing how many mild cases are out there undetected, but that doesn’t make it unconcerning.
More people are cheeseburgering themselves to death in this country.
Tell me about your family's history with the above.
I'm sure that I lost more friends due to lockdown-induced depression, drug/alcohol relapse and suicide than you lost family to COVID.
If we should have learned anything it's that modern medicine has spoiled our species in that you can now live an excessively long time with extremely unhealthy lifestyles.
Barely two generations ago dying from common colds, flus and even minor cut and scrape injuries was just everyday life. Maybe half of the children in a family might die before reaching adulthood. One particularly strong (lab-engineered) cold made the rounds and people want to bury their heads in the sand and pretend the sky is on fire.
In the context of human history and coronaviruses, COVID-19 is absolutely a nothingburger.
If somebody's so fat and unhealthy that that they're gassed out from walking off the front porch, I'm not alarmed that a cold virus finished them off. I'm also not out here screaming about COVID, I'm screaming about the importance of diet, exercise and self-control instead.
If they're of advanced age, it's (just) slightly more sad but none of us gets to live forever. Everyone will get cancer too if they live long enough. If you want to radically alter how the rest of us live our lives because you or a family member can't stop shoving McDonalds and cake into your face, I'm not fucking having it.
What I AM sympathetic to are people who have to sequester themselves from society (and did so already in the absence of COVID-19) because they have very serious and usually rare disorders. But then maybe these gain of function labs should think twice before they play with fire and break containment.
As with most things in life, garbage in, garbage out.
The absolute worst thing about ACA is that it made it illegal to charge obese people higher insurance rates. It's basically stealing money out of the rest of our pockets who have to work with you -- and thank God being an unhealthy mess isn't a protected class because I would never hire somebody to work with me who has a terrible lifestyle.
Japan does this right. Your workplace and the public health service makes you get a check up every year and will follow up with you to make sure you're on a plan to get healthier. And they will both encourage you and also nag the shit out of you until you do it. The fact that we don't follow such a practice here I find almost barbaric.
Even our own CDC said we had that the reason we had the worst impact from the disease because we have the sickest (read: fattest) people.
I'm literally talking about obesity being the main problem. We have more old AND obese people, for sure.
The part to focus on is obese, not old.
If you look at the COVID death rates, age was by far the dominating factor of death, not obesity. But obesity was probably significant in those who died at younger and older ages (though pronounced in older people, since an order of magnitude more died due to COVID than young people). I doubt we are really disagreeing much here, but obesity was a drag on mortality before the pandemic, and will continue to be a problem after.
I wouldn’t take too much stock in comparing USA COVID deaths to the rest of the world, we are really liberal in flagging COVID deaths (eg a 90 year old dies of a heart attack while having COVID is counted as a COVID death), other countries had different standards, especially developing ones without access to as much testing. What we should really focus on is excess deaths overall, and how a life expectancy changed during the pandemic.