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haxxiy on 19 April 2021
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Hiku said:
snyps said:

First of all, the claim that it's not going to kill you "unless you're 75+ with a weak immune system" is false.
People nowhere near that age pass away from Covid. Children die from Covid.

SARS-CoV-2–Associated Deaths Among Persons Aged 21 Years — United States, February 12–July 31, 2020 | MMWR (cdc.gov)

The first reported Covid fatality in a person below age 21 in the US was in March of 2020. This isn't news.

And aside from the fact that your 0.05% figure is already way off the mark, your post neglects the law of large numbers, and it assumes that one of two things happen: you die or you're 100% fine.
The US has a population of 328,200,000. If one percent of the population dies, that's 3,282,000 people dead.

The second bit is people keep talking about deaths.
What about the people who survive?

For every one person who dies:
• 19 more require hospitalization.
• 18 of those will have permanent heart damage for the rest of their lives.
• 10 will have permanent lung damage.
• 3 will have strokes.
• 2 will have neurological damage that leads to chronic weakness and loss of coordination.
• 2 will have neurological damage that leads to loss of cognitive function.

So now all of a sudden, that "but it's only 1% fatal!" becomes:
• 3,282,000 people dead.
• 62,358,000 hospitalized.
• 59,076,000 people with permanent heart damage.
• 32,820,000 people with permanent lung damage.
• 9,846,000 people with strokes.
• 6,564,000 people with muscle weakness.
• 6,564,000 people with loss of cognitive function.

That's the thing that the folks who keep going on about "only X% dead, what's the big deal" don't get.

And keep in mind that the case numbers and deaths is with many of us taking precautions to keep the weakest in our society safe.
If we just let this shit rock like we do with the flu with no masks, no social distancing, etc, things would be way worse than they already are.

I agree with the sentiment, but you are quoting older data from confirmed cases back in Wuhan I believe. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html">Data published by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in late April reported a symptomatic case hospitalization ratio of 3.4% overall, varying from 1.7% in 0-49-year-olds and 4.5% in 50-64-year-olds to 7.4% in those 65 and over. Analysis of cases in France and the Diamond Princess ship estimated a 2.9% hospitalization rate, adjusted by cohort age, with 18.1% resulting in deaths (0.5%), which is somewhat similar to the CDC estimate (0.6%-ish). A UK study reported a lower 0.3% infection fatality rate during winter but that pertains only to deaths in the first 28 days of infection, which is how the UK counts them.

As for the precise numbers of long Covid cases and other sequelae, we'll wait and see. None of the studies I've seen so far even had a control group, they were just doing meta-analysis of existing data or suffering from other sampling bias (studying only people who seek medical attention again, for instance). You can't have a statistically proven relationship between two phenomena without testing the null hypothesis.

TLDR, I understand people have a strong impulse to pay attention to danger and thus is easier to argue that way against denialists, but one can take these things rationally and seriously without exaggerating them.

Personally, I think SARS-CoV-2 is a trickster who punches way above its death rate but there are understandable reasons for that (such as an aging population in developed countries and the massive, prolonged burden to healthcare services that is treating pneumonia in a hospital context. Also, people are less likely in the 21st century to blindly accept massive deaths like it used to happen from tuberculosis, etc).