201–210 of 821 posts
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im in your situation: didnt need to leave my house and minimally interacted with people outside of my bubble. I felt sick recently and got the covid/flu test.
Why?
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I'm not OP but no, I work from home and only see the people I live with since this started. Knowing if its covid vs the flu wouldn't really matter much to me and either way my behavior would be the same. Frankly it would be worse for public health if I left the house while sick to satisfy my curiosity. I can imagine that many others in my situation would come to a similar conclusion.
Exactly. The only result from covid testing it delaying your own civil liberties. The vast vast majority of people wont ever get covid and a tiny remainder will have symptoms, an even smaller number will need to go to bed, a smaller number will need to go to hospital and people who were going to die this year may die from it. Dont take my word for it, this is the opinion of the UKs chief medical officer: https://www.…
When you start from that position, you are already assuming your point of view is correct, and then using the correctness of that point of view in a circular manner to support your point of view.
If I caught the flu, how would the government/scientists studying this stuff even know I got it? If you're anything like me you probably just take some time off and get over the illness without ever seeing a doctor or taking a flu-test. How do they measure such things? I suspect they use some elaborate statistical model to try and generalize the results to the whole population.
There is literally an entire industrial complex setup to fight the flu on an annual basis, including massive testing & tracking. This is how we have data on annual flu infections. If anything, this year would have been an excellent year to find more flu infections as many people who got sick didn't simply stay home and get over the illness, they went & got tested.
I keep wondering how Lice will be able to hang around much after last year's social distancing, especially among children.
Are... are those still a thing in the first world?
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how do you think they measure (roughly) how many people got the flu in previous years?
By estimation: From the article: "the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated there were roughly 22,000 deaths in the prior season and 34,000 two seasons ago." -- emphasis added
Every community has a baseline mortality rate during "normal" times. During abnormal times like pandemic, famine and war, more people die than usual, but often the cause isn't known. If you subtract baseline mortality from actual mortality to get excess mortality, that's often a better estimate of the casualties from pandemic, famine and war than the death certificates for every person who died. Excess mortality in m…
Year/Cause of death 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 Total deaths 2712630 2744248 2813503 2839205 2854838 3358814 Heart disease 633842 635260 647457 655381 659041 690882 Cancer 595930 598038 599108 599274 599601 598932 COVID-19 345323 Unintentional injuries 146571 161374 169936 167127 173040 192176 Stroke 140323 142142 146383 147810 150005 159050 Chronic lower respiratory diseases 155041 154596 160201 159486 156979 151637 Alzheimer disease 110561 116103 121404 122019 121499 133382 Diabetes 79535 80058 83564 84946 87647 101106 Influenza and pneumonia 57062 51537 55672 59120 49783 53495 Kidney disease 49959 50046 50633 51386 51565 52260 Suicide 44193 44965 47173 48344 47511 44834
An alternative explanation is that of "viral interference"[1,2], i.e., the most transmissible virus boosting up viral immunity in the population, and precluding transmission of the less transmissible/fit virus [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5489283/ [2]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5...
Do you have a link to someone alleging this for covid? I'm worried this is spin that you picked up from a source that has an interest in opposition to covid mitigation practices.
If I caught the flu, how would the government/scientists studying this stuff even know I got it? If you're anything like me you probably just take some time off and get over the illness without ever seeing a doctor or taking a flu-test. How do they measure such things? I suspect they use some elaborate statistical model to try and generalize the results to the whole population.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are... are those still a thing in the first world?
I read somewhere (I think Bill Bryson's "At Home") that they were almost wiped out at one point in the 20th century, but have recently started making a comeback which seems to correlate with the rise of energy saving low temp wash cycles that aren't as effective at killing them.