This is very bad news. Primarily because we have not socially recovered from the last pandemic.
If this turns out to be serious, what's the public's appetite for masks? Lockdowns? New vaccines? For many people it's quite low. For others it's quite high. And the disagreement between these groups will become another political flashpoint.
The risk of dying from covid was probably less than 1% for a healthy adult and it's around 60-70% when it comes to the bird flu. So people will naturally take this much more serious if it starts to spread among humans.
If we learned anything from covid, it should be that you cannot trust these early mortality numbers because they are biased by the fact that we definitely test people who are dying of a disease but don't test those who are just a little sick.
Covid turned out to be 1% fatal in the early days - which is awful. But the early numbers were ~5-10%
> Covid turned out to be 1% fatal in the early days
Are you sure? Pre vaccine rollout across all ages in USA, I've seen less than .5% IFR, and an order of magnitude less than that if you constrain to ages 0-59.
With the inundation of constant bad news that we were under, you'll still find people thinking covid killed 20% of anyone who caught it, and that will probably last forever.
Before, initial reporting showed much higher percents because we massively underestimated how many people got sick but were asymptomatic or had so little symptoms they barely noticed.
At the start COVID was claiming potentially 60-70%, then 5-10%, then <5%, then 1%. In all likelihood it's a sampling bias because only the very sick end up at the hospital(s) and are tested.
I don't think we should worry at all. We haven't seen any major illness spread with a fatality rate of >1% since introducing clean drinking water & having antibiotics.
We haven't seen any major illness spread with a fatality rate of >1% since introducing clean drinking water & having antibiotics.
Isn't that the exact story of the Spanish Flu? Low fatality rate at first which then mutated into a horribly fatal strain after the first wave? Isn't that why we took COVID so seriously from the get-go - the fear of mutation?
HIV doesn’t kill people, secondary infections do after either the virus or drugs administered kill the person. Regardless, in a given year, less than 1% of people with HIV cited as the underlying cause listed die, far less. Currently, it’s 2/100,000 cases. At its peak, it was 16/100,000
Right, now that we have HAART. Before treatment was developed, it killed a majority of those infected.
The secondary infection thing is a technicality, the mechanism via which someone who has HIV is killed. But it’s not really a misnomer to say the disease is deadly.
We still get regular outbreaks of Ebola, which has a near 100% fatality rate - in fact the fatality rate being so high is actually it's saving grace in a way, as it naturally limits the spread. If, like COVID, it had a several day asymptomatic period, it would wipe out the planet within months.
Paralytic polio, which has a fatality rate of 5-10%, is still endemic in parts of Africa and southern Asia.
Back in 2002 SARS killed 9.5% (783) of the 8000 people infected with it.
So, I call bullshit on "We haven't seen any major illness spread with a fatality rate of >1% since introducing clean drinking water & having antibiotics." (and for another thing, most of the really bad infection diseases are viral, not bacterial. Antibiotics do little to nothing).
Uh, one region? I named 3 continents. One of the countries most affected by SARS was Canada (151 cases, 49 deaths) which is as 1st world and modern as it gets.
COVID-19 pandemic is still ongoing. Deaths are down compared to 2020, but during the winter thousands of people a week were dying, people are getting injured, early retirements are way up, and disabled people are trapped at home (which never happened to most of us lol, lockdowns are police enforced, we could still go outside anywhere we wanted for the most part).
Right wing bot networks continue to harass anti-COVID activists to reinforce the hegemonic idea that it's over so that rich people can clean up.
Here's a joke: What's the difference between the right and liberals on COVID? About 6 months.
When did I say there were as many deaths as in the early days? Back then it was up to 4000 a day, now it's still thousands a week during the winter. These are all preventable and wholly unnecessary deaths. People are sick all the time. If you can't see it in the mortality data, that means something else is compensating in the other direction... perhaps killing off so many vulnerable people has made average mortality decline?
You were sold "herd immunity", which means people don't get sick because the disease is prevented by immunity. Instead, we just have total society-wide saturation with COVID. It's a sick, fucked up situation.
Frankly after experiencing Covid hair loss and talking with other folks who got mild covid but 3 months later experienced the same nightmare scenario I would happily isolate. Balding sucks.
I think theres mounting evidence that covid can have dramatic long term effects on people without them fully realising. More obviously, the long covid epidemic is much more significant than people really realise and more work needs to be done to bring this into the spotlight
That is the general idea. Past the 4 year mark with zero infections here (and that's with testing whenever I have the slightest case of the sniffles).
Admittedly the odds are stacked in my favor a bit - I'm a pretty extreme introvert in a quiet small town and have been WFH since 2012. I will never accept another position that isn't 100% remote, and avoiding getting sick is part of that for sure.
It's because of others who do interact with people on a day to day basis that your lifestyle is possible. So no, long-term isolating is not a broad solution for covid. It's outrageous that people still talk like this.
For better or worse, H1N1 is monumentally lethal, an order of magnitude past the worst of COVID. People who don't have a taste for masks and new vaccines will simply die, in a way we didn't see for COVID.
Having said all of that, in the absence of strong evidence for human-human transmission, this should not keep you up at night.
>For better or worse, H1N1 is monumentally lethal, an order of magnitude past the worst of COVID
There's absolutely no evidence for this as we have no data on the infection fatality rate, only on the case fatality rate, which like with COVID initially is an order of magnitude or two higher, because the vast majority of people with respiratory infections aren't specifically tested for H1N1.
If this turns out to be serious, what's the public's appetite for masks? Lockdowns? New vaccines? For many people it's quite low. For others it's quite high. And the disagreement between these groups will become another political flashpoint.