WetEV said:
GRA said:
CV has the potential to be serious, but for once I agree with Trump about lack of context re flu deaths etc.
Trump no longer agrees with Trump, so which Trump are you agreeing with?
The Trump quote I agreed with, which as we all know is often just a spur of the moment point of view (for him).
WetEV said:
Covid-19 is about 10 times the death rate of flu, best case.
Many more people can be infected with corona virus than influenza. Past cases, past years and current year vaccines all provide complete or partial immunity to some. Even getting a flu shot last season reduces both the infection rate and the death rate for flu. Add this in, and covid19 is about 40 times worse than the flu. Best case.
Covid19 will overfill hospitals with a fairly low infection rate. The flu doesn't do this. Someplace between 5% and 10% of cases become critical, and require ICU type care, with things like mechanical ventilation. Once you have all the ventilators used, the next patient doesn't get one. And dies. This is why the death rate in Wuhan was higher (almost 4%) than elsewhere (near 1%). And a lot of deaths in Wuhan didn't get counted as they died at home with no testing, or died in the hospital before being tested.
So at worst case, 200 million Americans get covid19, peak infection cases are around 60 million, and there are less than 200,000 ICU beds available. Who gets one? Probably not you or me. Death rate for the peak month might exceed 6 million people. Not counting heart attacks that can't get into the hospital as it is overfilled. Total covid19 deaths over 2020 might exceed 10 million people for just America. Yet this worst case assumes that no one takes any social distancing measures to reduce spread. Even with those, we might see 1.5 million deaths.
Best case is a rapid rollout of extensive testing, rapid social distancing (meaning nearly shutting down the economy for a few months) and isolation of infected and exposed people. Might, if we are good and very lucky, be less than the seasonal flu. In a bad flu year.
The flu hasn't shutdown any baseball games. Maybe 1918-1919 Spanish flu pandemic did, but I can't find any references to it. Flu seems to be a winter disease. Hockey, the Stanley Cup has this:
1919
MONTREAL CANADIENS
SEATTLE METROPOLITANS
SERIES NOT COMPLETED
If you want to compare this with the flu, the 1918-1919 pandemic would be closer. Covid19 will kill more people, but might kill a slightly lower percentage of the world population.
Let's look at the Covid-19 fatality demographic breakdown from China, shall we?
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-sex-demographics/
For ages <=39 the death rate is 0.2%, and for those 40-49 the death rate is 0.4% ~ 2-4 x flu in the U.S., which probably has a far better health care system than China overall. It's only above those age groups that the death rate increases rapidly, and we see that for those groups who have no pre-existing contributing conditions, the fatality rate is 0.9% overall,
including the most at-risk groups. We also see that the death rate is significantly higher among men than women, which is explained by the much higher smoking rate among men in China, and the consequent increased likelihood of pre-existing repiratory issues. Then there's the fact that we simply don't know how many people have mild symptoms that they considered a cold or mild case of flu, and didn't bother to seek hospital treatment or even get tested so don't make it into the statistics - Rudy Gobert may look like an ass now, but the fact is if he hadn't gotten tested no one would know he had it, and he was ready and able to play when the game was called off. Three weeks ago I had a cold or mild flu, or at least that's what I thought. Was it really Covid-19? Probably not, but we'll never know, and I never felt any need to seek medical treatment, just stayed at home, blew my nose, took the occasional ibuprofen and drank lots of water and apple juice.
BTW, Spanish Flu is supposed to have killed 675,000 in the U.S., and the greatest mortality was among young, healthy males. We know far more about viruses and health care than we did then. Here's some discussion of the two:
Covid-19 Is Not the Spanish Flu
A widely cited stat about death rates seems to argue otherwise, but it's surely incorrect. So how'd it end up in the research literature?
https://www.wired.com/story/covid-19-is-nothing-like-the-spanish-flu/
None of this is to suggest that Covid-19 doesn't pose a serious public health threat, and major efforts need to be made to contain it, but the hysteria is way overblown, driven far more by 24/7 news and social media than reality. BTW, purely a supposition on my part, but I'd guess many of the most virulent (pun intended) anti-Vaxxers are among the people panic-buying and cleaning out stores now.
While I'm at it, let me pimp for one of my favorite sci-fi novels of all time, the 1949 "Earth Abides" by George R. Stewart. Stewart
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_R._Stewart was a well-known professor at U.C. Berkeley, whose "Ordeal by Hunger" was for many years (and may still be FAIK) the standard work on the Donner Party, and his "Fire" and "Storm" describe major ones of both of those - I've re-read them in the past few years, as reality seems to be aping them.
"Earth Abides"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Abides is about the survivors of a pandemic (99+% fatality rate), as they gradually find each other and re-establish small social groups. The majority of the novel takes place in the Bay Area, particularly in the Berkeley Hills, and I and many other kids and rock climbers can recognize one site that has a major symbolic role in the book. I recently acquired a used copy and donated it to the library at the backcountry ski hut in Yosemite where I usually spend several days each winter, as my friend the hutmaster is, like me, someone who grew up in the area and is another long-time fan of the book. I've got a library copy at home now, and may well read it while I self-isolate
