The thing that makes the coronavirus such an effective virus is its low lethality. Viruses don't actually "want" to kill their hosts, they just want to multiply, and killing their hosts is counterproductive to that objective. What's killing people isn't technically the virus itself, but the body's response to it. There are less "successful" viruses like ebola that never resulted in a pandemic because symptoms present themselves within a day or two and a lot of patients end up dying, both of which hamper its ability to spread. Meanwhile people will downplay COVID-19 by saying things like "it kills <1% of people" or "you can have it and feel just fine", without understanding realizing that's exactly why it's such a successful virus.
Daily reminder that 1% of the us population is 3 million 340 thousand…. and 1% of the world population is 80 million.
Even with a low lethality, corona has proven to kill people who were considered safe due to their age and health. This doesn’t even go into the fact that a shortage of ventilators increases lethality.
Focusing on lethality also ignores all the people who got it and now suffer permanent health issues from it (I only have mild asthma thank god but some of my friends have severe asthma now despite being super healthy, or have chronic fatigue)
Even if lethality is low, it is always wise to approach this virus with a measure of caution and wisdom.
And to add, when hospitals fill up because people are on ventilators then everyone gets an increased risk of dying because the fucking hospitals reach capacity
Basically, don’t try to diminish the risk of the virus. Because while yes, it’s lethality may be low, it still has the potential to royally fuck us if we just act like it can’t do anything
This past October saw such a spike in my county, that all ER and elective surgeries were referred to other hospitals. But the neighboring hospitals on either side of us were also at capacity.
I don't drive (because lots of reasons), and I dont have a car, it's the only hospital I can reach. The main other hospital they were having people go to (again, because all of the closest ones were full) is an hour drive away.
That’s weird since excess deaths were ~20% higher than reported covid deaths. Either people were dying of other things when they usually wouldn’t have or covid deaths have been underreported.
What I’m getting at is; where are these excess deaths coming from if not from overloaded hospitals being unable to treat people? Underreported covid deaths? I’m talking about the excess deaths above the reported covid ones, covid only officially accounts for 75-80% of excess deaths.
I live in a moderate sized city, but the hospital there serves a pretty vast area (lots of small towns). When my roommate was in the ICU last year they had exactly one COVID patient who was quarantined behind signs and a station with gloves, gowns and masks. It’s a little worse in the bigger cities, but now it definitely is not as bad as some news outlets are reporting. Shutdowns are less about the number of people infected, more about keeping our hospitals from getting crowded. Either the statistics are misrepresented (people in ICU have COVID but were put there for other reasons) or we have a lack of hospitals in the US.
There are several areas where the emergency hospitals that were supposed to take care of a high influx of extra covid patients were never used though, the USS mercy in New York is a good example, instead, the governor shuffled patients into nursing homes were it would cause the most deaths. Several other governors did the same thing, knowingly killing the elderly after being told not to do it by medical professionals in no unclear terms.
and because we have politicised potential treatments that seem to cure at least 30% of the people taking it, which is still substancial. Because it's somehow associated with a bad Orange Man.
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u/FnCraig Nov 27 '21
Going to be a very long wait I you're expecting corona to do that...