Second Waves Are Plaguing Asia's Virus Recovery (bloomberg.com) 126
An elderly woman with no travel history. An unexpected flare-up in a nightclub. A swelling cluster in towns near international borders with no discernible source. After containing their outbreaks through measures from strict lockdowns to rapid testing regimes, the Asian economies that have seen some of the most success quelling the coronavirus -- Hong Kong, South Korea and China -- are now facing resurgences that underscore how it may be nearly impossible to eradicate it. From a report: It's a painful reminder that as countries open up again and people resume normal life, untraceable flare-ups are likely -- even after an extended lull in cases. Scientists have warned that the disease may never go away, because it lurks in some people without causing any outward signs of sickness. "Given the asymptomatic population, these cases are going to emerge from unexpected sources," said Nicholas Thomas, an associate professor in public health at the City University of Hong Kong. "It is inevitable that the restarting of societies is going to lead to more cases emerging." In Hong Kong, a 66-year-old patient with no recent travel history ended the city's much-envied 23-day streak of zero local cases this week. Some of her family members have now been confirmed to be infected as well, and fears are growing that the woman may have seeded more infections as she moved around Hong Kong's dense city streets before being detected.
Always Two Months Away (Score:3)
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I think if we social distance and merely give up large concerts/conventions/religious services and limit gatherings to 250 people or less that it will grow much less explosively.
With nothing- the Re looks to be about 6 with some cases where one persion infects 30+ others quickly.
With social distancing, masks, and no large gatherings, the Re still looks over 1 rather than under 1 but it doesn't spread like wildfire.
The fact is 60% or more will get it until we have a vaccine. And if the Re is 6 then about 5
Re:Always Two Months Away (Score:5, Interesting)
The herd immunity threshold drops if you can get the basic reproduction number down -- e.g. by social distancing. The theoretical formula is 1-1/R0, so a 60% threshold implies an R0 of 2.5. If you can get R0 to 1.5 then the threshold becomes 33%.
So things, while grim, aren't quite *that* grim. We do have some control over this depending on our behavior, although we have to expect what these Asian countries are seeing -- spurts of transmission.
One of the things I've noticed is that the states that have the strongest and most sustained reductions in cases are the states where the problem got bad earlier. This, even though most states shut down almost at the same time -- on or around March 22. You'd expect everyone's cases to go down in parallel, but in fact states that didn't have much transmission before shut down continue to have consistent rises in the rate of new cases.
For some reason states which were hard hit early are having a lot more success at reducing the basic transmission number through social distancing than state where the problem was less severe.
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Perhaps the states that got hit harder are taking prevention measures more seriously.
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Perhaps the states that got hit harder are taking prevention measures more seriously.
This may be what is happening. Those hit early were mostly blue coastal states with big cities and lots of international connections: Seattle, SF, NYC, Boston.
Blue states are taking the lockdown more seriously, perhaps because the residents know people who were infected in the first wave, or perhaps because of their stronger inherent trust in government.
Of the top ten first-wave states, nine were blue. Louisiana, at #8, was the top red state.
Re: Always Two Months Away (Score:1)
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I suspect it is more a matter of simple minded people having more influence in the red states. More anti-intellectualism, more defiance towards experts, physicians, epidemiologists. I live in Texas. My Lt Governor is a retard who said so stupid things even my parents in Europe have heard of him.
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I believe the difference is how seriously people take the threat. In those states that were hit hard right out of the gate, people are more likely to know someone who got the disease or possibly even were hospitalized or died. This makes them take the threat more seriously. In those states without much transmission, people are more likely to believe the garbage about it being a hoax or being overblown because they don't know anyone personally who was affected by it. Unfortunately, many people are selfish an
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The herd immunity threshold drops if you can get the basic reproduction number down
I read that, and immediately jumped to "jeez this guy's suggesting we stop having kids?"...
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10 States with the highest Population Density:
New Jersey
Rhode Island
Massachusetts
Connecticut
Maryland
Delaware
New York
Florida
Pennsylvania
Ohio
10 States with the highest Coronavirus deaths per capita:
New York
New Jersey
Connecticut
Massachusetts
Louisiana
Michigan
Rhode Island
Pennsylvania
Maryland
Illinois
7 of the 10 states with highest Coronavirus deaths per capita are on the list of top 10 states with highest population density. These states are all handling lockdowns differently, and perhaps that makes a small diff
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I have no objection to your analysis, with the proviso you add "for now". Without restriction, the virus will spread until it reaches the herd immunity threshold in a particular population, and the more unrestricted that spread is, the higher that threshold.
Sometimes you don't have any good choices on the table.
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Fun fact I stumbled across...
Where Si = Sinfinity... (stupid slashdot doesn't support modern font tech).
"In the SIR model, p=1-1/R0 is the equation for the fraction of the population that has to be infected to reach herd immunity. But things don't stop at that point; that's just when the number of new cases each day stops growing and begins to decay back to zero. There's still quite a bit of infecting after that point. You want (1-Si) instead of p, where Sâz is the fraction of the population that remai
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That assumes hospitals and medical care can no nothing for these people, if you get 365,000 people in a day medical, and body disposal service will be overwhelmed, so the will be unable to do anything for these people, and the mass of dead bodies may cause other sicknesses. Spreed those deaths over a larger period then those and other systems, maybe lives will be saved, and if we can extend that period to the point a vaccine can be developed many lives maybe saved.
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First off, you. don't die the day you get it, it takes days before you even feel sick. Then the waves of sickness and recuperation, which most of the time don't require hospitalization, However, those that do require many times weeks of intensive care. Not just the well known care of a flu victim, but full on 'we still don't know' care of a new threat. While the ventalor crush largely didn't come to pass, it was close in NY, hospitals were overwhelmed and bodies were literally pilling up waiting for
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Not correct. The herd immunity threshold goes up with a more intense epidemic, so the ultimate number of people infected goes up with uncontrolled transmission. Even if the case fatality rate remains the same (which it won't), the number of people who die go up too.
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"If 365,000 people are gonna "die" before it is over"
Brilliant!! If I had an invisible pink unicorn, I'd be rich!!!
Re: Always Two Months Away (Score:4, Funny)
Well, I prefer to sit in my Batcave.
...oh, wait
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Yes, probably. Exponential growth is a bitch. If herd-immunity works long-term (does not really look like it now), that could help, but other than that vaccine or effective medication are the only way our. A vaccine is not assured in the short-term though, for example look at the common cold or at HIV.
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AFAIK, we don't currently have any basis to just acquired immunity. It could be good for weeks, months, years, or decades, or even just a few days. My *guess* would be a few months, but I've not real basis for that.
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AFAIK, we don't currently have any basis to just acquired immunity. It could be good for weeks, months, years, or decades, or even just a few days. My *guess* would be a few months, but I've not real basis for that.
Indeed. We have some weak statistical evidence for short-term immunity, but how good that is and how long it keeps is anybodies guess. The idea that there is immunity of any useful length is otherwise just derived from other corona-viruses, and purely speculative for this one.
Also, there is growing evidence that there are two trains going around and one does not confer immunity for the other.
Irresponsible headlines (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: Irresponsible headlines (Score:2)
Until we sort ourselves out...
In that case, it's going to be a while.
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It really *is* a second wave. If you don't jump on it and smash it down quickly, you'll find out.
Re:Irresponsible headlines (Score:5, Informative)
Nope. It would need to at least modestly comparable to the first, which peaked at 20 new/mil/day in South Korea. Like thirty times higher.
This is what a contained local outbreak looks like, not an epidemic "wave". You can look at the plot yourself. [wikimedia.org] That little blip at the end, that is being called the "second wave". It is not, and saying so deceives almost all readers.
If it wasn't contained, it could become a second wave. But there is no evidence that is happening now, and, again, saying so is being deceptive to pander to an uninformed American audience. Moderate flashing outbreaks are expected for a disease that is contained rather than eliminated.
Guess herd immunity is the way to go after all (Score:2)
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-Harsh Reality is calling.
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Well, you're still here.
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Mostly unwarranted self-confidence that they are stronger than their peers, followed by a rapid take-down from an unexpected direction.
Like revolution after a social upheaval. Where the "strong" tend to get lined up against a wall.
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Eventually everything gets wiped out by something.
Might want to have a plan on that.
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You're cute. No, you'll be long dead before you make the slightest dent in those 2.2 billion believers, even if that would affect God. Which it wouldn't.
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Stop being an idiot. The notion that you'll destroy something you say doesn't exist, is nothing more than your self-induced brain damage.
Get off being an irrational Dawkins parrot, before you like the rest of your self-identifying animals are, in actual reality, wholly scientifically, destroyed.
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Can't fight evolution. Eventually the weak get wiped out by something.
Everything gets wiped out by something. Species that can reproduce faster, even if they get killed by the billions, always win over a slow-breeding but strong species.
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Species that can reproduce faster, even if they get killed by the billions, always win over a slow-breeding but strong species.
An obvious exception to this rule: Humans.
We are one of the slowest breeding species, but also one of the most successful.
The fossil record shows that the species most likely to survive are not the fastest breeding or the slowest breeding, but those with the widest geographic distribution.
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Yes it does. Or have you not been following how several governors and many counties have made whole business sectors shutdown with no alternative way to conduct business, e.g. Tesla in California.
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Yes it does. Or have you not been following how several governors and many counties have made whole business sectors shutdown with no alternative way to conduct business, e.g. Tesla in California.
Well, except it turns out that Tesla can resume by simply implementing some safety measures [mercurynews.com], is already producing cars and will be back to full scale by early next week. So we can have working economy and be largely locked down.
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That only happened because Tesla threatened to move operations out of the state. They are a big institution of the County so they risked loosing a big chunk of their tax revenue if they didn't back off. Essentially we want the lockdown or shelter-in-place lifted and replaced by sensible safety practice at work and in public places.
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Not exactly. The county had asked for their plans for mitigation measures, and they wanted to reopen before answering. So they answered, and then they reopened.
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Either/Or is an outlook preached only by those who cannot adapt to the prevailing conditions.
Unfortunately, that appears to include quite few governors.
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When you need to act quickly, you adopt simple plans that are often far from optimum. When you've bought time, you can use it to plan less simplified plans that are more optimal.
Unfortunately, we still don't know all the ways that COVID spreads, but there are several mitigation measures that are less onerous than lockdown. But they've got a lot more details to fiddle with, and we keep learning more about what does and doesn't work to suppress COVID, so they keep needing tweaks.
Go for a simple answer and
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It isn't so this last few months should've been a dress rehearsal for our current inflection point. Pretending this was flu, while ignoring 100s of thousands of deaths with so many lockdowns in place, is ignorance.
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If by "lockdown" you mean banning international travel, wearing masks in public and washing our hands, we can totally keep that going for another year. But we don't actually have to do that. If we have roving drones kill anyone outside for the month of June, globally, that should be sufficient. It's assholes who refused to lock down in March/April that's the reasons that we have to keep going.
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No. That's *part* of the reason. Another big part of the reason is the asymptomatic carriers, some of whom have been shown to carry COVID around for months without knowing it. There may be other parts.
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You're making some assumptions. Some fraction of the people who aren't killed by COVID receive permanent injuries, and we don't know entirely which injuries or how many. My, non-expert, hypothesis is that COVID generates small blood clots that circulate and get stuck in places. If it's in the brain, that's a stroke. If it's in the toes or fingers, you get swollen toes or fingers. If it's in the kidneys, you get partial loss of kidney function (permanent damage). If it's in the heart, you get some form
Communism! (Score:3, Informative)
My rights!
Meanwhile the second wave was far more deadly than the first and third of the 1918 pandemic. I'm guessing we don't learn from history. While we do need to work, as safely as possible, this anti-science anti-fact agenda is going to kill a lot of people.
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Is that supposed to be a cogent argument? I didn't argue about keeping a lockdown, there is no society without work. Plenty of people out there think this was all just bullshit. It wasn't like the movies dammit! Without bodies everywhere it was all a lie. So 85k deaths while 90% of the population was in lockdown means nothing right?
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Re:Communism! (Score:5, Interesting)
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We should have tested and isolated, like the countries that fared much better than us. Trump and Putin were nice and smug, how many deaths do those countries account for now?
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You did. Did you fail to notice that nearly all in the majority of the hotspots it was in nursing homes, where governors were sending infected elderly back into said nursing homes. Never mind that comparing Trump and Putin is idiotic, after all. In the US governors are responsible for the state policy.
Re: Communism! (Score:2)
After all, local authorities are responsible for local action almost everywhere. But the federal government is responsible for the federal response. The chief executive told me that 16 cases was the peak. The chief executive lied willfully. Tell me how testing and isolation doesnâ(TM)t help try to keep it from spreading to at risk populations at say a nursing home?
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If everything had been sunshine the man at the top would have claimed *all* the credit. So..."the buck stops here" and all that.
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How many people has science killed?
Wuhan Ordered To Test All 11 Million Residents (Score:2)
Wuhan Ordered To Test All 11 Million Residents In 10 Days As Beijing Scrambles To Stop COVID 'Round 2' [zerohedge.com]
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Re: Wuhan Ordered To Test All 11 Million Residents (Score:2)
LOL. They wonâ(TM)t be doing 750k tests per day.
Watch the videos from China... (Score:1)
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And they have the nerve to claim only 84000 people are infected.
China is a nation of compulsive liars.
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What lie? China said no human to human transmission [nypost.com] - and the WHO repeated it - all through mid January. It was a week later [who.int] when they finally admitted the truth.
As far as concentration camps goes, even CNN [cnn.com] has covered them.
How much is President Xi paying you, tongzhi?
Nonsense (Score:1)
Trump said with or without a vaccine it's just going to go away, and he never lies! /s
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You lost slashdot caring... (Score:2)
You mean... (Score:1)
Re:Impossible to eradicate? (Score:5, Informative)
The flu vaccine is 30-70% effective. It's because they have to guess which strains of tens of thousands to inoculate against, and the strains they predict are usually 30-70% of the strains that sweep through that flu season. That's amazingly accurate. COVID-19 has few enough mutations we should be able to have one shot protect us from all of them.
COVID-19 is at least 10x deadlier than the flu (per infection) and the flu spreads far less. It's the combination that's deadly. Ebola is more deadly but spreads less (it's only about as contagious as the flu). Chickenpox is more contagious but less deadly.
For what it's worth, every disease that's as contagious as COVID-19 is (using the least-contagious estimate/best case scenario) has been vaccinated against because those were the diseases most prioritized in research. That's right, best-case COVID-19 still more contagious than common cold.
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I guess you haven't been following influenza news in the last couple of years. The flu vaccine has been getting less and less useful.
Re:Impossible to eradicate? (Score:5, Informative)
That's not true. There's been one exception to the 30-70% efficacy of the vaccine in the past decade ( 2014-2015 season). Which means I've been right 90% of the time, you've been right 10% of the time.
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Not really. As I get older the flu vaccine becomes less effective every year....of course, the first part of the sentence is the explanation. These days I take the extra strong version of the vaccine.
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That sounds dumb. There's been plenty of studies that show vaccine efficacy is not statistically different between age groups or prior vaccination status. There is a study that has shown over the past 5 years one specific strain of Influenza A (which isn't vaccinated against every year) has shown a statistically significant reduction in efficacy, but if that's your basis for getting the high dose flu vaccine I highly suggest you go back and do some research.
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Got some links? I'm following my doctor's advice. I'll probably continue to follow it, but if you've got some links that confirm your assertions and they mean what you say and I decide to trust them I might not.
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I mean, I'm not going to tell you how to live your life. But if "I'll follow information I find credible on the internet over my doctor" is a statement you ever utter, I'd urge you to:
1) Talk to your doctor about why he's advising you to do something your research shows to be wrong. He could easily be wrong or out of date, and you can help prevent spreading misinformation to others. Or you could have special circumstances that the internet didn't take into account, or that you are even aware of because the
better flu vaccine useful? (Score:1)
Go back to 2 months ago. (Score:5, Insightful)
Covid-19 has killed 88k Americans so far since it started to get going in this country in mid-march https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com] . Meanwhile the flu kills up to around 60k each year in this country, most of the time around 30k https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/... [cdc.gov] . So in summary, despite massive preventive measures, Covid-19 has shown itself to be well over 6 times as deadly as our worst flu season during normal times.
You idiots comparing gross average flu deaths to gross (brand new) Covid-19 deaths in some complete non-comprehension of how numbers work have since been shown to be wrong because in just two months. Covid-19 is beating yearly numbers for the flu. Go back to two months ago where your comparison of yearly flu deaths and a brand new virus somehow looks insightful to idiots.
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Even worse, the flu numbers are estimates that are at least 5 to 10 times the number confirmed. The CoVID numbers are raw numbers of confirmed cases. Now some of that is because of the increased awareness and testing of
Re: Go back to 2 months ago. (Score:2)
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Comparing an estimate to a literal count is not an apples to oranges comparison. The flu death estimate is not reached by some idiot pointing at a number and going "Yeeeaahhh, that seems about right", a shit ton of research and modeling by extremely well educated people on the subject go into it.
Sure, an estimate can't be as accurate as a literal count but this one is probably pretty close to the actual number. Certainly close enough for the type of comparisons we're making in this conversation.
Re: Go back to 2 months ago. (Score:2)
Do you have the estimate of total covid deaths ? Or are you saying that estimate and confirmed flu deaths are very different, yet you are confident that the estimate and confirmed covid deaths are the same ?
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Do you have the estimate of total covid deaths ?
I posted that info two posts up but it was around 88k yesterday and is around 89k today in the US https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com] .
As for the rest, an estimate is used as a place holder when an actual count is not possible so comparing a count to an estimate makes perfect sense as long as you're confident in your estimate. In the case of the flu death estimate, it comes from a government agency who is staffed by experts in their field so we can assume it has a high degree of reliability.
Sadly we can't rea
Re: Go back to 2 months ago. (Score:2)
1. Around 90k today is the confirmed death number in the US. So essentially you are claiming that the estimate is the same as the confirmed number. I haven't seen any evidence from you for this so far.
2. If we don't have accurate information due to countries like China, why are the comparisons not apples to oranges ? At best we can say that we are not sure
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1. Around 90k today is the confirmed death number in the US. So essentially you are claiming that the estimate is the same as the confirmed number. I haven't seen any evidence from you for this so far."
No and I don't know how you even get that from what I've said. What I've said is that an official estimate from a government agency should be a reliable enough figure for most things, including the comparisons we're making here.
Furthermore, my "evidence" for the flu estimate is literally the estimate I gave you. That estimate (which once again, comes from our government and is prepared by incredibly well funded experts in their field) would work as a data source in a scholarly paper let alone a conversation
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That might be true if a lot more than the current ±5% of the population get it by then. But if enough of our population came down with CoVID-19 in one season to provide immunity to society as a whole, the hospitals would be overwhelmed and consequently a lot of otherwise preventable deaths would occur.
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Most pandemics have a worst second wave. The Spanish flu for example killed more in the second wave then the first.
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There are already at least two significant strains of SARS-CoV2. And the flu is not caused by any coronaviruses. Maybe you're thinking of colds; one estimate I heard was that 25% of colds are caused by coronaviruses, but not any closely related to SARS-CoV2.
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At this point, we don't know enough about the virus or the disease to say who exactly those people might be.
The reports from hospitals are pretty consistent that the people who wind up being put on ventilators tend to have underlying health conditions. Most articles I've read don't elaborate much more than that, but obesity or diabetes have been cited as examples by a few of them. So don't start with people who fall into those categories. There will probably be a few people that don't fit that existing known risk factors that will get severely ill or perhaps even die, but we also learn more as we go.
But I'm fa
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This coronavirus is one specific strain whereas the seasonal flu is just whichever one or small handful out of hundreds of different strains of viruses (some of which are also coronaviruses)
No it isn't, you're thinking of a common cold which people colloquially refer to as flu. Actual flu is the influenza virus. Seasonal flu, the one that kills people is actual flu, not a cold.
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"At this point it may not be a bad idea to just voluntarily infect large batches of the population who aren't likely to become critically ill."
You first. Tell us how you do.
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That's a guess. The population samples I've seen are hardly unbiased. I *suspect* that there are a large number of cases that have not been detected, but that's a guess. I'm also rather certain that there are large numbers of deaths due to COVID that aren't so recorded. At this point all one can do is compare actual deaths with expected deaths, and try to figure out what it means. Since COVID fatalities can masquerade as heart attacks rather than pneumonia, and we don't know how frequently that happens
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And of course everything we project, and which has not happened yet, is guesswork. Prophesy is hard, especially about the future.
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It is actually a lot more effective. The problem is that many people at risk do not take influenza seriously. I have been vaccinated for the last 15 years or so (I am not really a risk-group, but I got it two years in a row and was down for more than two weeks each time and that was enough to convince me), none to negligible side-effects and no more flu.
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Please accompany these very nice large men while they accompany you with your arms behind your back for your new shiny re-education prize.
And later on down, there's a "Can't fight evolution" post. It's almost like Nature is informing us that "The Top of the Food Chain" is actually not a stable position.
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It's almost like Nature is informing us that "The Top of the Food Chain" is actually not a stable position.
It's almost like nature is not a cognizant entity and therefore doesn't give a shit regardless of what happens to us.