Is Covid that serious of a danger?

[grip]

Every other country in the world acknowledged that the coronavirus was deadly and highly transmissible. Shouldn't we all be asking ourselves why it is that only our country is still divided, after 200k of our own people are dead? Let's get real here. The only reason we're divided over the seriousness of Covid-19 is because we are being led by a president that is telling us 'it's a hoax' and 'it will all suddenly just go away'. Those are lies. If we could have put forth a unified effort to mitigate the infection rates and deaths six months ago, there still would have been many people that died unfortunately back in March and April, but we could have aborted the raging spread of this virus by all doing a concerted effort together to stop the spread and many deaths.

The reason we're divided isn't all political. Many (>45 yrs) do not believe it's that serious. The Spanish Flu killed all ages, back when the population wasn't near as numerous and caused an estimated 50 million deaths. If people were dropping like flies and overwhelming the medical system, then you'd have a bigger reaction.

 

[grip]

I'll believe you when you do as I did and post the test results.
And if you did survive it with no long term effects, count yourself lucky but I suspect with your mindset it won't be until you wind up burying someone you knew who died from it that you will take it seriously.
That is why we have emergency public health directives, because we cannot afford to wait while incorrigibles "make up their minds" that a pandemic is dangerous.

But if you're going to post thread after thread questioning it, you should have the corresponding balls to back up your claims.
Otherwise, you're just another Typhoid Mary.

I feel like I just got the big 'screw you!'

Your awful attempt at intelligent dialogue is just awful.

 

[CaughtInThe]

It's just the old ones, they seem to be fine with that.

every time posters here throw out %s of who is dying (like it's some kind of victory) i have to shake my head. no way these people ever went to Sunday School.

 

[Checkerboard Strangler]

I feel like I just got the big 'screw you!'

Your awful attempt at intelligent dialogue is just awful.

Then you should have no difficulty dispersing what I said into thin air.

 

[LowDown]

The different states had different responses. You'd have to take it state by state.

If you look at individual states, then 40 or so of them did much better than European countries while the rest did worse, some a lot worse. There was no uniformity of the response either among those that did worse or those who did better. So those that closed down hard and long sometimes did worse and vice versa.

Some people want to make this into a morality play, but I don't see how you can honestly draw any firm conclusions about what the right thing to do was.

 

[HumblePi]

The reason we're divided isn't all political. Many (>45 yrs) do not believe it's that serious. The Spanish Flu killed all ages, back when the population wasn't near as numerous and caused an estimated 50 million deaths. If people were dropping like flies and overwhelming the medical system, then you'd have a bigger reaction.

The only reason people aren't 'dropping like flies' is because smart people are taking precautions. More people are wearing masks and social distancing than people that aren't. This is exactly why the spread has slowed, it's not because 'it's not so bad' or 'it's disappearing already'. The numbers are down because of the caution and diligence of the majority of wise people in this country. Memories are short and if you recall back in March and April, people were dropping like flies, the body count from covid-19 was vastly under-counted since many died in their homes and many died in nursing homes. There were no tests to be had, none. No masks to be found anywhere. No hand sanitizer. That's why refrigerated tractor trailer trucks had to be brought in to store bodies -- hundreds of them. That's why people had no funerals and were buried in mass graves.

WE know how it was. WE know the toll it can take. All we ask is for YOU to grasp the seriousness of it.

 

[SCrider]

every time posters here throw out %s of who is dying (like it's some kind of victory) i have to shake my head. no way these people ever went to Sunday School.

Good Christians

 

[Overitall]

What difference does it make if their actions and outcome are the same?

Perhaps they look at the numbers (last I checked it was about 1.2% of the US population have gotten the virus) and think their odds are pretty good that they won’t get it. And if they do the odds of them dying from it are lower. Yes it’s unfortunate that anyone dies from it but the same is true of the flu. (Btw I got my first flu shot ever today. I hope it doesn’t kill me. ).

 

[grip]

infection fatality rate of 0.63%

The only reason people aren't 'dropping like flies' is because smart people are taking precautions. More people are wearing masks and social distancing than people that aren't. This is exactly why the spread has slowed, it's not because 'it's not so bad' or 'it's disappearing already'. The numbers are down because of the caution and diligence of the majority of wise people in this country. Memories are short and if you recall back in March and April, people were dropping like flies, the body count from covid-19 was vastly under-counted since many died in their homes and many died in nursing homes. There were no tests to be had, none. No masks to be found anywhere. No hand sanitizer. That's why refrigerated tractor trailer trucks had to be brought in to store bodies -- hundreds of them. That's why people had no funerals and were buried in mass graves.

WE know how it was. WE know the toll it can take. All we ask is for YOU to grasp the seriousness of it.

People aren't dropping like flies because the disease just isn't that deadly with an infection fatality rate of 0.65%. You can't make something more serious than it actually is unless you hype it continuously.

 

[Luce]

The reason we're divided isn't all political. Many (>45 yrs) do not believe it's that serious. The Spanish Flu killed all ages, back when the population wasn't near as numerous and caused an estimated 50 million deaths. If people were dropping like flies and overwhelming the medical system, then you'd have a bigger reaction.

The Spanish flu killed 650,000 Americans over a two year period. So far, this has killed just over 200,000 in a 7 month period, so it is actually killing Americans slightly faster than the Spanish flu did.

How bad it would have been - if we had simply ignored - it beggars the imagination.

 

[grip]

The Spanish flu killed 650,000 Americans over a two year period. So far, this has killed just over 200,000 in a 7 month period, so it is actually killing Americans slightly faster than the Spanish flu did.

How bad it would have been - if we had simply ignored - it beggars the imagination.

The fatality rate for the Spanish flu is calculated at about 2% - 2.5%. If Covid were that high, then the reactions would be more justified.

 

[HumblePi]

infection fatality rate of 0.63%


People aren't dropping like flies because the disease just isn't that deadly with an infection fatality rate of 0.65%. You can't make something more serious than it actually is unless you hype it continuously.

It is not so much that the virus is deadly, it targets certain groups in the population and has between a 2 - 15% death rate, it is the speed that it spreads that has been the cause for concern. Now doctors are finding out that the long term effects that people who have had the virus and survived it are starting to actually kill people. I live in the NY area and was in my car, had the radio on. They were talking to families of people that passed away from Covid. One woman was the wife of a 53 year old man who got infected in March and spent 2 months in a NY hospital in a coma on a ventilator. He recovered and went home. However, the virus left his body with many blood clots hiding inside his lungs and he had a stroke and died. Another girl speaking on the radio about her parents. This teenager is without both parents today because of Covid-19. Her parents were one month from their anniversary when the wife developed symptoms, had to be hospitalized. Two days later, the husband came down with severe respiratory symptoms and had to be hospitalized also. They were on the same floor in the hospital just two rooms apart, they both died within days of each other.

You see, we know what that first shock was back in March and April. Our morning newspapers had six pages of obituaries, filling both sides of each page with little photos of those who died from this virus. Sorry, but there's nobody on earth that will try to convince me that this isn't one of the most horrendous times we've ever had to endure in this country.

Yes, people were 'dropping like flies' in this country, but nobody really gave a damn. Now that the majority of people are wearing masks and social distancing, nobody has to experience what we in the northeast had to.

 

[Jason Warfield]

I'm afraid, Benjamin Franklin's often overused quote may be meaningful in this case: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

I feel the country should've practiced "some" protective measures against spreading this disease, not this hodge-podge mess. But have we really purchased a significant amount of security to offset the misery and cost of the long term damage done by the shutdown, social distancing, and other measures?

"You know, putting a national lockdown, stay at home orders, is like house arrest. Other than slavery, which was a different kind of restraint, this is the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history," Bill Barr said.

Though this is uncomparable to slavery, in any fashion, it is becoming an incredible intrusion on our liberties. The big question is, was this disease deadly enough to warrant the reactions? Many think not and many do.

All I can offer are personal experience: after seeing how it affected a friend who had a "very mild" case of it, a co-worker who was hospitalized and now a family member who is bed-ridden at the moment (not quite bad enough for the hospital)...and seeing how it has impacted their health and their personal finances...yeah, this $h!t is serious to me and we needed to do more.

My friend thinks he go it while at the grocery store that doesn't have a mask policy (he lives in the sticks, so his options are limited). The co-worker isn't exactly sure, but it may have been from her second job where she says there is no ability to practice social distancing. And the state officials are still tracking people down who might have passed it on to my family member, so we don't know the circumstances there.

 

[Visbek]

I feel the country should've practiced "some" protective measures against spreading this disease, not this hodge-podge mess. But have we really purchased a significant amount of security to offset the misery and cost of the long term damage done by the shutdown, social distancing, and other measures?

Yes.

What you're doing is taking the positive effects of the shutdown for granted.

Even with a hodge-podge mess of inconsistent and insufficient lockdowns, at least 200,000 Americans have died, and hundreds of thousands more dealing with serious long-term health impacts, in just 7 months. China, with a population over 4 times larger than the US, has less than 50,000 deaths.

If we hadn't done anything, the US could have seen 1 to 2 million deaths in 2020 alone.

"You know, putting a national lockdown, stay at home orders, is like house arrest. Other than slavery, which was a different kind of restraint, this is the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history," Bill Barr said.

Barr is completely, utterly and irrevocably full of shit. Limiting restaurants to delivery and outdoor dining is worse than Jim Crow laws, lynchings, Japanese internment camps during WWII, McCarthyism? Shut the front door. He is an embarrassment to the entire Justice Department.

Though this is uncomparable to slavery, in any fashion, it is becoming an incredible intrusion on our liberties.

Wow. Snowflake much?

You do not have a right to spread a potentially lethal disease. Period.

You're here complaining with no fear of arrest. You can protest to your heart's content. You can shop, you can drink, you can watch sports. The list goes on.

Meanwhile, the current President is doing everything he can to burn down our democracy, including promulgating harmful conspiracy theories; delegitimizing the electoral process out of abject fear that he'll lose; trying to turn the Justice Department into his personal retaliation division; attacking science, because he doesn't like what it says; invoking racism to whip his voters into a froth at every turn... If you are worried about liberties and are crying about wearing a mask to the supermarket, you are barking up the wrong tree.

 

[Phys251]

This is a nihilist line of thought; that if you can't cure / mitigate all other causes of death before COVID, then COVID isn't a serious concern.

If you're going to be this nonchalant about vast swaths of preventable deaths, please list your age, race/ethnicity profession and income so we can determine where you're coming from. It's easy to dismiss piles and piles of dead when you're relatively safe. I suspect that if COVID targeted all posters named 'grip', you'd be more invested in a solution.

That's what pisses me off about the comparisons to less lethal causes of death.

Causes of death should not be dismissed simply because they're not the #1, or top three, or whatever. We're America. We have more than enough resources to fight multiple threats to human life at once. I've been saying for years that we need to take auto wreck deaths more seriously and not accept that tens of thousands will die every year. Even more so with a pandemic that is going to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans this year!

 

[Moot]

infection fatality rate of 0.63%


People aren't dropping like flies because the disease just isn't that deadly with an infection fatality rate of 0.65%. You can't make something more serious than it actually is unless you hype it continuously.

Maybe people aren't dropping like flies because they know more about the virus and have better treatments. I think the severity of sickness might depend on how much exposure one had to the virus . But people are still dying at an average of a 1000 a day and a lot of survivors are still suffering long term damage it did to their health.

Leaking blood vessels suggests the virus is more like ebola than the flu.

 

[Phys251]

I'm afraid, Benjamin Franklin's often overused quote may be meaningful in this case: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

People keep misusing that quote. I do not think it means what you think it means.

 

[CharloTexan]

38,000 people die in the USA per year from vehicle accidents.

200,000+ have died in 7 months from covid19.

And there's been an estimated 600,000 deaths from influenza since 2010.

My numbers from Wikipedia are different. In the last nine years - 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 - there have been 337,000 deaths due to influenza in the USA. 337,000/9 = 37,444 average per year for that period.

So far, since March and thru September, we have 200,000 deaths in the USA resulting from COVID-19. That's with March only barely getting out of the gates with less than 5,000 as COVID started to initially spread. And September still has 9 days (30%) unfinished/uncounted. On an annualized basis, the COVID can be expected to reach or likely exceed 340,000. So carry that 340,000 out over 9 years, like the influenza figures above, and you get 3.06 million deaths in the USA come Christmas Eve of 2028. So the comparable numbers are 3,060,000 deaths for COVID vs. 337,000 for influenza, over a nine year period. 3,060,000 or 337,000. Which is larger? Are either a significant concern? In know my answer, and quite a lot of people above in this thread got it wrong.

Any questions?

 

[Visbek]

Causes of death should not be dismissed simply because they're not the #1, or top three, or whatever....

While I understand that impulse, grip is distorting the reality.

- The #1 cause of death in the US in 2019 was cardiac disease -- 635,000 deaths
- The #2 cause of death was all cancers -- 600,000 (afaik 2/3 from tobacco)
- The #3 cause of death was accidents -- 161,000 deaths

Meaning that COVID will almost certainly be the 3rd leading cause of death in 2020. And obviously, if we did nothing, it would be the #1 cause.

Also, we have in fact spent, and continue to spend, tremendous sums on research and treatments for heart disease and cancer. We also know many of the causes of heart disease and cancer. I might add, I'd be 100% on board with taking more action against those diseases, especially banning cigarettes.

Oh, and obviously, social distancing doesn't significantly reduce deaths from heart disease or cancer....

 

[Phys251]

While I understand that impulse, grip is distorting the reality.

- The #1 cause of death in the US in 2019 was cardiac disease -- 635,000 deaths
- The #2 cause of death was all cancers -- 600,000 (afaik 2/3 from tobacco)
- The #3 cause of death was accidents -- 161,000 deaths

Meaning that COVID will almost certainly be the 3rd leading cause of death in 2020. And obviously, if we did nothing, it would be the #1 cause.

You make a good point that even by a relative measure, COVID-19 is a killer. All three of these that you listed are serious problems for which we need continued efforts to address.

Also, we have in fact spent, and continue to spend, tremendous sums on research and treatments for heart disease and cancer. We also know many of the causes of heart disease and cancer. I might add, I'd be 100% on board with taking more action against those diseases, especially banning cigarettes.

Oh, and obviously, social distancing doesn't significantly reduce deaths from heart disease or cancer....

Another good point. These are noninfectious diseases and require completely different strategies to prevent and cure.

 

[Checkerboard Strangler]

The different states had different responses. You'd have to take it state by state.

If you look at individual states, then 40 or so of them did much better than European countries while the rest did worse, some a lot worse. There was no uniformity of the response either among those that did worse or those who did better. So those that closed down hard and long sometimes did worse and vice versa.

Some people want to make this into a morality play, but I don't see how you can honestly draw any firm conclusions about what the right thing to do was.

Anything that doesn't earn us the distinction of being one of the worst pandemic responders on the planet, for starters.
By their fruits shall ye know them, and Trump's fruit is failure.
I swear, if I had it within my power, I'd make Trumpers eat raw gristle for the next decade and force them to refer to it as Trump Steaks. They look at his failure and call it ice cream, so why not make them call hard gristle Trump Steaks and force them to make yummy noises as they cram it down for breakfast, lunch and dinner?

 

[grip]

Maybe people aren't dropping like flies because they know more about the virus and have better treatments. I think the severity of sickness might depend on how much exposure one had to the virus . But people are still dying at an average of a 1000 a day and a lot of survivors are still suffering long term damage it did to their health.

Leaking blood vessels suggests the virus is more like ebola than the flu.

It's more like a hemorrhagic fever? That sounds like more hype.

My symptoms were more like an upper respiratory flu which turned into secondary bacterial pneumonia.

People keep misusing that quote. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Did you understand what I meant? Because that's all that's important.

 

[calamity]

I'm afraid, Benjamin Franklin's often overused quote may be meaningful in this case: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

I feel the country should've practiced "some" protective measures against spreading this disease, not this hodge-podge mess. But have we really purchased a significant amount of security to offset the misery and cost of the long term damage done by the shutdown, social distancing, and other measures?

"You know, putting a national lockdown, stay at home orders, is like house arrest. Other than slavery, which was a different kind of restraint, this is the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history," Bill Barr said.

Though this is uncomparable to slavery, in any fashion, it is becoming an incredible intrusion on our liberties. The big question is, was this disease deadly enough to warrant the reactions? Many think not and many do.

It probably is if you catch it.

 

[Luther]

probably not. only a million people have died in a little over six months.

And how many people are in the world nowadays?

 

[grip]

My numbers from Wikipedia are different. In the last nine years - 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 - there have been 337,000 deaths due to influenza in the USA. 337,000/9 = 37,444 average per year for that period.

So far, since March and thru September, we have 200,000 deaths in the USA resulting from COVID-19. That's with March only barely getting out of the gates with less than 5,000 as COVID started to initially spread. And September still has 9 days (30%) unfinished/uncounted. On an annualized basis, the COVID can be expected to reach or likely exceed 340,000. So carry that 340,000 out over 9 years, like the influenza figures above, and you get 3.06 million deaths in the USA come Christmas Eve of 2028. So the comparable numbers are 3,060,000 deaths for COVID vs. 337,000 for influenza, over a nine year period. 3,060,000 or 337,000. Which is larger? Are either a significant concern? In know my answer, and quite a lot of people above in this thread got it wrong.

Any questions?

Yeah, one. What about the covid vaccine(s) coming out soon. Kind of poopoo's your whole 2028 scenario?