141–150 of 400 posts
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I don't think anybody's denying it exists. What hasn't been shown is if long-term consequences are more prevalant with covid than with other viral lung infections.
Studies on long-term consequences of a virus that has been around for <1 year?
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No, IFR is the infection fatality rate. It's the number of fatalities divided by the number of infections. If you reduce the infection rate, the proportion of those infections that results in death will not change. This of course doesn't apply if healthcare systems are overwhelmed, but that's not what we're talking about here.
We don't test for who has flu.
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> less than double your chances of dying in a year. The way this is phrased makes it sound like it's not a big deal. Doubling every individual's chance of dying within an entire generation is not something we should say lightly. Imagine if the base fatality rate was 50% rather than .5%.
Double 0.5% is 1%. Where'd you get 50%?
For comparison, from what I've read the typical annual influenza fatality rate is around 0.1% (don't know what the under-70 rate would be). So, this puts covid-19 solidly in the uncanny valley of viral mortality rates; not low enough to be "just like a flu", not high enough to justify shutting down the world. No wonder opinions on it are so divided.
Daily reminder: new respitory diseases come and go, nobody usually cares. What makes Covid different and what caused the shutdowns was when Lombardy alone had 450 deaths a day. No regular influenza could do that. It's not as if we decided out of thin air the virus was dangerous.
Sure it could. The whole point of the IFR calculation is that it gives you an average perspective on how fatal a disease is, relative to other diseases. It's not an absolute maximum fatality rate, for every circumstance.
Put a strain of "normal" flu in a vulnerable population with no pre-existing immunity, and it would do a lot of damage. But if you don't count all the other people who had it without symptoms, then you get a misleading picture.
Also, of course, you have to realize that the population of "Lombardy" (~10M) is a bit larger than the population of New York City (~8M), where we see 100-300 deaths per day as a baseline mortality rate:
https://www.baruch.cuny.edu/nycdata/population-geography/pop...
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>This isn't good news, really, not for middle-aged-adults anyway. Or for anybody who knows middle aged and older people, especially if you spend time with them. I am honestly more concerned about killing my parents than dying myself of covid-19. This is why I skipped my mom's birthday for example, because I had pretty mild cold-like symptoms... or maybe mild covid-19.
That was always a risk even before COVID-19. Regular seasonal influenza can be deadly, especially to the elderly. Patients can transmit it to others when they are asymptomatic or presymptomatic. COVID-19 has a longer incubation period and a significantly higher fatality rate but the same fundamentals still apply. Any of us could have inadvertently killed someone by giving them the flu without even realizing it.
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We don't test for who has flu.
That does not affect the IFR, it just make it harder to measure.
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>This isn't good news, really, not for middle-aged-adults anyway. Or for anybody who knows middle aged and older people, especially if you spend time with them. I am honestly more concerned about killing my parents than dying myself of covid-19. This is why I skipped my mom's birthday for example, because I had pretty mild cold-like symptoms... or maybe mild covid-19.
That was always a risk even before COVID-19. Regular seasonal influenza can be deadly, especially to the elderly. Patients can transmit it to others when they are asymptomatic or presymptomatic. COVID-19 has a longer incubation period and a significantly higher fatality rate but the same fundamentals still apply. Any of us could have inadvertently killed someone by giving them the flu without even realizing it.
You are being reflexively down voted because people view any comparison to Influenza as illegitimate, not realizing that you are making a broader point about risk management and attribution of blame for infection as opposed to saying that SARS-2 and Influenza are literally the same viruses.
Personally I find it fascinating that I was never told it was my fault if I gave someone the flu in the course of both of us living our normal lives, but if I go to a grocery store and an elderly person does too and they get COVID-19 from me (imagine in this hypothetical there is no doubt that I gave them the virus) then somehow it’s my fault and I’m guilty of any harm that befalls then.
Incredibly dangerous precedent. I hope people see where it leads. And I hope they learn from the history of public health, such as when “public health officials” used to shut down gay bars “for the greater good”.
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https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.14.20212555v...
That's interesting, thanks. First study I've seen with more than a handful of participants, doing something other than self-reporting of symptoms. That said, it's notable that: * They don't have a control group (makes it impossible to know what the baseline rate of these symptoms is in the population). * They don't measure the various criteria for "organ impairment" before the participants caught covid (makes it impo…
To some of your other points, the high end leagues are quite well medically documented, and the individuals are quite healthy.
That said, it also appears for some individuals, initial “long term” damage (ongoing heart or liver problems three months after recovery) may be less or gone some six months in.
Seems answers are as yet by and large unresolved. In situations where one does not yet know the actual risk, one may prefer an abundance of caution over unknown “calculated” risk given the long tail of possible effects.
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It's generally illegal, outside of narrow circumstances, to fire guns in populated areas largely because stray bullets will kill people. Stray respiratory droplets exhaled by people infected with SARS-CoV-2 will also kill people. Presumably you're OK with rules that prevent people from firing guns in public. Why are you not OK with rules that are intended to reduce the risk of people unnecessarily spreading fatal inf…
The idea of a "causal nexus" is not accepted in any law system (natural or positive). The fact something can happen due to your actions can't be used as an ethical argument to limit your freedom of action. From the perspective of individual freedoms the ban of guns is unacceptable under the pretense they might end up harming others by chance; if that's the case, the police and the military themselves shouldn't have g…
The police in the United Kingdom DONT HAVE GUNS, because the general populace dont have them and the number of per capita gun deaths is [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...
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That was always a risk even before COVID-19. Regular seasonal influenza can be deadly, especially to the elderly. Patients can transmit it to others when they are asymptomatic or presymptomatic. COVID-19 has a longer incubation period and a significantly higher fatality rate but the same fundamentals still apply. Any of us could have inadvertently killed someone by giving them the flu without even realizing it.
This is all true, but COVID hysteria has taken hold across the entire world, and HN is no exception unfortunately. You are being reflexively down voted because people view any comparison to Influenza as illegitimate, not realizing that you are making a broader point about risk management and attribution of blame for infection as opposed to saying that SARS-2 and Influenza are literally the same viruses. Personally I…