The biggest difference is that COVID spreads much more easily than the flu. It’s hard to really compare for a number of reasons, including the fact that there is a high rate of false positives with the tests used. Also, I’m not aware of any data that gives an idea of how many flu cases are asymptomatic, while at least 50% of COVID infections cause no symptoms at all. Plus there is a semi-effective vaccine for the flu.
True, Covid 19 does seem to spread much more easily than the flu. My issue is that it has been made out to be much more deadly than any of the science seems to show. With death rates at the level that have been observed around the world, it becomes very hard to justify the society wide lockdowns that we have seen to date. Definitely preventative measures should be employed but to completely shutdown virtually all interpersonal contact for months (years?) on end is just not borne out by the science. Much more targeted measures, such as preventing the carnage seen in nursing homes that you mentioned in another post, would most assuredly achieve much better results with much less economic disruption.
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You should go to the “It’s Just like the Flu bro!” Thread where we debunked this already.
I never said it’s “just like the flu bro”. In many important ways it is different. I’m not some dumbass redneck who thinks that the whole thing is a hoax or some political ploy to bring down Trump. I’m a dentist who wears something approximating a fucking hazmat suit to even go near a patient for the last 3 months while increasing my HVAC system to do 40 air changes per hour so that aerosolized virus isn’t hanging around in the air for my next patient to breath in. Trust me, I take it seriously.While statistically it’s highly unlikely that me or a family member of mine dies from this, many of my patients and a couple of my staff probably wouldn’t fair so well. My whole point in these posts is that it’s nowhere near as lethal as many people are making it out to be. And, therefore, shutting down society on the level that we’ve seen is very hard to justify. Straw man arguments don’t advance discussion.
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Well, one of the more challenging aspects of the pandemic is that nobody knew exactly how deadly it was (is?) or how easily it spread. Once you genetically relate it to the original SARS, then you start looking at “shit, SARS killed about 10% of people it infected and we got lucky that it wasn’t super contagious”.
So nothing else is known, except its genetic relatives (SARS and MERS, both nasty), and the fact that China seems awfully close mouthed.
Then you start seeing the numbers in Italy skyrocket, and hear the horror stories.
So frankly I think it was the right thing to do, and we should have done more sooner. More sooner means the shutdown doesn’t last anywhere near as long, and isn’t as bad.
Nobody here, and certainly not me, is arguing that we should remain shut down for months more or longer. We can’t and shouldn’t.
But consider that the seasonal flu has an IFR of around 0.05% +/- something depending on study. So taking your IFR for covid-19 at face value, you’re still looking at something ~20x more deadly than the flu. Also, it spreads more easily than the flu. That’s not something we should ignore, and I think it warranted a shutdown considering we didn’t know anything about it, and it took a historic global research effort to learn as much as we have at this point.
Again, I am not arguing that we should stay shut down for a long period. At all. But novel viruses should have rapid and ruthless responses. And we are extremely lucky to know as much as we do about it. I mean that - at no other point in history (not even 10 years ago) could we have gathered this much information this quickly.
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Excellent post, @CMdad.
This will most likely be one of the Post-Mortem points of all of this…it is a virus that has much greater infectivity and morbidity than the Flu (which is why that over the next few years, tracking it will be extremely important, especially as it gains a World-Wide hold)…but that the response (in hindsight) was most likely an over-response due mostly to relying too heavily on flawed initial models, and not adjusting appropriately. (I don’t think it was done with malice; wanting to take away our rights and control the population; hurt Trump; or whatever other crap is floating around.
Believe me; when I think I have heard it all, someone comes up with something even more ridiculous).
The Post-Mortem will, and should be, frank and honest.
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I totally agree regarding the lack of malice in the decision making. I would hate to be a political leader right now who has to make the hard decisions on how to proceed. Whatever policies were enacted in round one I believe should be given a pass in the post mortem. Politicians were acting with minimal data and had to make quick choices. I believe most did the best they could for their constituents, regardless of their political affiliation. However, almost 6 months into this thing, our understanding has definitely grown. Data from enough countries around the world are all showing basically the same thing regarding who the vulnerable groups primarily are and how lethal this tends to be for them. That’s why I think we can target measures much more effectively from both a health and economic standpoint in round 2. In many Western countries, this might look something like having extremely strict protocols for nursing homes, improving supports for low socioeconomic groups to make staying home when sick feasible and above all, massively improving the distribution and performance of rapid covid test kits. Having such kits widely available in congregate settings like large places of employment, schools etc. could really allow quick tamping down of any outbreaks.
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You said is it more lethal than the flu? Most likely. That’s what I was talking about and nothing else. That’s why I quoted that. It’s not really most likely is it? Given what we know at this point and recognizing that evidence suggests flu deaths are over reported. We did this in the other thread is all I said so refer to that. The rest of your post is you telling me stuff about you I never said. It wasn’t a personal attack by any means so sorry if it came off that way but it wasn’t my intention.
Yeah, but who wants to be the ones who die from it?
You have a fair point, and you can hang your hat on it all day, but you wouldn’t want to die from it either, would you?
Me and my bro in law had a bit of a knock down drag out over this and it ended with the fact that all of his presumptions about this were predicated upon the idea that it wouldn’t affect anybody he cares about.
So even if your point is 100% valid, it doesn’t change the fact that no one wants to die or lose a loved one.
I mean, look at cancer. Not totally deadly.
Who here wants cancer?
No, they don’t, do they?
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My bad…I guess I misinterpreted the tone of your post. Sorry about that.
That’s the problem, the horror stories were omitting certain facts, such as most deaths being in nursing homes. The media was in full-out fear mongering mode, but you would think that the experts at the WHO, CDC, etc., would have some actual data to work with and would have thought to look at which groups were at risk an what could be done about it.
It’s understandable that mistakes were made in the beginning, but once the facts started to come out more appropriate measures could have been taken that would have both reduced the number of death and minimize all the other issues caused by a full shutdown. I’m just some guy who reads stuff, not a medical professional or epidemiologist, but I figured this out myself about two months ago.
You are totally right that I wouldn’t want to die from Covid or from anything else for that matter. And obviously hundreds of thousands have died from it. My point is that with what we know about it now, we can be much more surgical with our responses and probably achieve better results with the second or third or fourth waves. As I stated before in another post, the initial responses were made with much less data and weren’t very nuanced by necessity. They were blanket measures which could be implemented quite quickly to try to stick a plug in the damn before it burst. And if there is a successful vaccine or treatment just around the corner you could even make the argument that with a second wave it may be reasonable to enact many of the same measures for round 2. However, it is very reasonable to assume that we may not be close to a vaccine if we ever get one at all. In this case repeatedly locking down the majority of the world’s population every few months from now on just isn’t feasible from either a health or economic standpoint. The only way forward is to try to put in place protections for the most vulnerable groups and accept that the virus WILL spread to a certain degree, just hopefully mostly in those who are usually not that affected by it.
I’m responding from my experience living in Canada and seeing this through the lens of the measures that our federal and provincial governments have enacted here. At least in Canada, somewhere along the way, the frame of the conversation shifted from “we have to bend the curve to prevent our health care system from being overwhelmed” to “we have to stop any and all spread of this virus or else we have failed miserably.” I’m not an epidemiologist or public health official but from everything I’ve read, this second viewpoint is virtually unattainable. Therefore, I believe we have to be realistic with our expectations and accept that even in a best case scenario, there will still likely be some transmission and some fatalities no matter what we do.
I think your point about my own personal perception of risk from this informing my opinion is very accurate. I’m lucky enough to be in a lower risk group and so are most of my family. I very likely would see things quite differently if I was say older or immunocompromised. However, luckily for our species, pretty much all of the available data from any country on Earth seems to show that, for the vast majority of people, Covid is not a death sentence. Some politicians and media types try to frame this in a very polarized way for some reason. They either imply that this is a very deadly disease for all or, conversely, that this not deadly at all and that it’s completely overblown. I don’t know why it’s so hard for some people to accept that it is reasonable and accurate to say that this is very deadly for some but not at all for most. Again, I will state that I think the only way forward for any country is to accept this as truth and move towards protecting the vulnerable as much as possible while encouraging the rest of the populace to live and work as normally as possible with reasonable precautions.
The problem is that “omitting” suggests that they had facts at hand that they CHOSE not to disclose. They didn’t.
I don’t know what information the media did or didn’t have, but when they were talking about the bodies piling up and cemeteries unable to take more bodies I didn’t see anything about nursing homes. And I read plenty of articles about this too.
This is correct, once failures to test and screen at airports and points of entry, and rapid contact tracing, were committed. Initially it may have been possible for a time IF proper measures had been put in place.
Yes, I agree. Whether policy makers are able to actually design them and implement them is another question sadly.
The problem is that you think such information was readily available.
I think it definitely should have been, and if it wasn’t then something is seriously wrong. It only makes sense to take into account the actual groups at risk for this or any other virus.
That’s all pretty relatable, except that I’m not willing to call anything a fact or truth yet.
The main things that concern me are
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People with undiagnosed conditions walking around not knowing. I found out myself how pernicious something like heart disease can be. It would be tragic for many others to find out they do too after it’s waaaaaaay too late.
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A one/two punch. This disease attacks and badly affects the respiratory system. Lots of people made it through round one.
But now due to the nature of viral infection, their tissue is changed, damaged, and their breathing is compromised. Wave two could be a knock out punch for millions.
What we know is great, and it only cost us a few (almost 4)hundred thousand lives at this point.
It’s what we don’t know that could cost us millions more lives. I wouldn’t be so cavalier to think that a vaccine is just around the corner or that we now know what we’re doing with this as a society or world population.
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The same people who are using hindsight now and saying we should have done this, this, this, are the same ones who were saying we are looking at the Great Depression 2.0 and a shutdown was going to end up with millions of Americans starving to death.
But hey it’s always easier to say yeah forget about that stuff I was saying remember when I said that other stuff somewhere in there?!
I fully expected the “I’ve been saying all along now” people to jump out early I just assumed they would wait until we were a little closer to the other side of things as if this is anywhere near over.
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That’s why I’m not engaging him on the topic very much lol
I wasn’t around during the great depression so I can’t really compare, but the economic situation really is messed up right now and it’s not about to improve in many places that are still shut down. A lot of people can’t go to work at all even if the place they work is open because there is no school, daycare, nothing. Sure the government is giving people some money, but it’s not that much and we will pay for it in the end. Plus a lot of people who don’t earn much to begin with don’t want to go back to work because the government pays them almost the same to stay home.
A lot of people can’t pay their mortgages, and even with payment deferrals still won’t be able to, businesses are closing and many that are open are making much less money than before because limited numbers of people are allowed in at once.
I’m not an economist and I can’t tell you how it’s going to end up, but most likely it will be worse than it is right now. Getting things back to normal, or close to it, as soon as possible is the only thing that can change the outcome.