Even if it kills (which it likely will), our track record shows that didn’t care enough about that, and in a decreasing manner. So it’ll only be worse.
Pretty sure every virus has killed people, from the cold, to flu, and of course covid. It feels like now the death rate for the latest variants of covid are pretty comparable to the flu, the virus has lost a lot of its killing power over time.
Pretty sure every virus has killed people, from the cold, to flu, and of course covid.
False equivalency intensifies
What is false about that statement? Viruses kill, that’s not false at all. Just because covid has killed at higher rates doesn’t change my statement.
The point is that a virus being deadly is just a fact of all viruses.
Death rates aren’t a feeling. I want some hard numbers.
I feel like we just don’t care if we live or die anymore.
Fun fact: the CDC readjusted what the ‘normal’ rate of deaths is to include the years of the pandemic so now it’s harder than ever to find hard numbers because “excess deaths” was one of the last ways to get any information at all!
I know I’ve read reports about the latest variants being much less deadly. I did see one study recently which for patients presenting to hospital covid was a few percentage points more likely to result in death compared to hospitalized flu patients. There were a lot more covid patients though.
Found it:
death rates among people hospitalized for COVID-19 were 17% to 21% in 2020 vs 6% in this study, while death rates for those hospitalized for influenza were 3.8% in 2020 vs 3.7% in this study
So there is some data backing up the feelings I’ve gotten from everything I’ve been hearing and seeing.
That’s the same shit that businesses were pushing last time because they didn’t want to close for a few months, ended up making everything worse.
Yup. More effective action faster would have had a higher same-day-you-make-the-decision cost but would have been tremendously less harmful economically to all the entities blocking it for fear of the economic impact to them. They were digging a mass grave and then leaping into it.
I know I am a bit biased here because I didn’t get sick and didn’t really try that hard to avoid it either. I only wore a mask when I had to, I went to bars with friends, really didn’t take any extra precautions, and I washed my hands normally. If I got covid I didn’t notice it.
Personally I would hate if we went into lockdown again, but again, I didn’t get sick, the worst I felt was when I got the vaccine.
It’s important to note that every state I’m aware of has long ended their testing and reporting, literally doing the Trump thing. So we actually have no idea what the numbers are.
I’ve you’ve been vaxxed, or had a previous infection, or get some paxlovid… yes. If not, no, not really any better. It hasn’t gotten weaker.
Do you have any studies or research to suggest covid hasn’t gotten weaker?
Viruses tend to mutate to be more contagious and less lethal, it’s just how natural selection/evolution works. The strains most likely to survive will be the ones that don’t kill their hosts before they can do so.
The issue is that it happens out of sight out of mind so it’s just an abstract statistic that it’s easy to ignore or pretend away. If Covid-19 killed you by making your head spontaneously fall off we’d have eliminated it or reduced it to a few tiny isolated pockets simply by the change in the public’s attitude to it. But because it kills you “quietly” out of sight in a hospital bed or at home, people were able to just convince themselves everything is basically normal.