CDC: Coronavirus May Have Infected 10 Times More Americans Than Known 510
Nearly 25 million Americans may have contracted the coronavirus, a figure 10 times higher than the number of confirmed cases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said Thursday. The Hill reports: In a briefing with reporters Thursday, CDC Director Robert Redfield said surveys of blood samples taken from around the country suggest that millions of Americans may have contracted the virus either without knowing it or with only minimal symptoms. For every one confirmed case, Redfield said, the CDC estimates that 10 more people have been infected. "This virus causes so much asymptomatic infection," Redfield said. "We probably recognized about 10 percent of the outbreak."
Almost 2.4 million Americans have tested positive for the coronavirus, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University of Medicine. Redfield said the serological surveys of blood samples, collected both for coronavirus tests and for other reasons like blood donations or laboratory tests, showed that between 5 percent and 8 percent of Americans have contracted the virus. Most people who contract the SARS-CoV-2 virus show few if any symptoms, and only a small percentage require hospitalization. But while the number of potentially infected people is multitudes higher than the number of confirmed cases, Redfield also said the relatively low percentage of Americans who have been infected means hundreds of millions more remain at risk.
Almost 2.4 million Americans have tested positive for the coronavirus, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University of Medicine. Redfield said the serological surveys of blood samples, collected both for coronavirus tests and for other reasons like blood donations or laboratory tests, showed that between 5 percent and 8 percent of Americans have contracted the virus. Most people who contract the SARS-CoV-2 virus show few if any symptoms, and only a small percentage require hospitalization. But while the number of potentially infected people is multitudes higher than the number of confirmed cases, Redfield also said the relatively low percentage of Americans who have been infected means hundreds of millions more remain at risk.
So... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
The current CFR in the US is >5%. 10x less deadly (0.5% CFR) for a super-virulent respiratory is still incredibly bad.
I mean...are the deniers still doing the no biggie thing? Amazing.
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Bullshit. 5% [cdc.gov]. Take the death number, divide by the confirmed case number, multiply by 100.
With your CFR there would be only 380 deaths. So there's no way that it can possibly be true.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
We didn't have any idea of the true infection rate at the time, but we knew what hospitals looked like.
Re:So... (Score:5, Funny)
It doesn't really matter, if the hospitals are so full they are overflowing, the death rate goes way up. that's why we we did the lockdown, because hospitals were in danger of overflowing.
Looks like Texas is about to become the new New York.
Good thing this virus is an order of magnitude less deadly.
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Good thing this virus is an order of magnitude less deadly.
I was thinking that. The question is, will Texas wait until people are dying to take countermeasures, or will they do something before? Wearing masks should be enough.
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Texas don't care, they will be 'with god now'
Re:So... (Score:5, Funny)
but the funny part is they will be culling mostly Republican voters.
I don't think that's funny at all.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Dark humor is still humorous for many of us.
The only thing wrong with letting anti-science sociopaths kill themselves is that they will take people with hearts with them.
It's like drunk driving. If you were only a danger to yourself, it would be your right. But that's not the case. So I will still try to talk sense into denialists of all kinds. But when they autodarwinate I will still smirk.
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It doesn't really matter, if the hospitals are so full they are overflowing, the death rate goes way up. that's why we we did the lockdown, because hospitals were in danger of overflowing.
Looks like Texas is about to become the new New York.
Good thing this virus is an order of magnitude less deadly.
Florida: Hold my beer! ...
Arizona: Nah, I've got this!
California: I told you guys that I'm not playing this game.
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because hospitals were in danger of overflowing.
Well, no.
We shutdown because NY hospitals were in danger of overflowing. Most everywhere else in the country hospitals were so empty they were furloughing staff.
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Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
But I can do it better, because you have no source for the 0.016% number.
You can reverse the process to sanity check it. 128900 deaths divided by 0.016% results in 761,812,500 COVID infections in the U.S.
Congratulations. We've all had it twice. Apparently no immunity, since we've all had it twice and we keep seeing ever more cases anyway. Deaths continue too, so guess that's going to keep whittling away at the population forever.
You're a hack who's bad at math. Don't pretend that we're the same.
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Wrong [newslit.org]
You're referring to a mortality rate, not a case fatality rate. They're different numbers. The mortality rate is estimated to be 0.4% [wcnc.com], accounting for unreported infections, asymptomatic infections, and the like.
And that's still not by "total population" but by "total population infected." Which TFA suggests is only ~25 million ("coincidentally," 121800 US deaths / 25 million US infections = ~0.5%).
No it's not (Score:5, Insightful)
Over the last decade flu deaths per year have ranged between 12k-61k https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/... [cdc.gov] .
Meanwhile, since mid March (when covid started to become significant in our country) almost 122k people have died https://www.cdc.gov/coronaviru... [cdc.gov] . So in other words in just over 3 months. despite all of our measures, covid-19 has killed people at 8 times the rate of our very worst yearly flu season.
It's great you're excising your right to free speech but I sure hope you don't think you're even a moderately intelligent person when all of our medical experts are in consensus in regards to our current dangers and proper data is so easy to obtain.
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sorry, not "rate", gross total.
Re:No it's not (Score:5, Insightful)
And you're going to apply that same qualifier to the flu, right? Deaths from pre-existing conditions don't count? Just accelerate death a bit sooner?
Nope. You're a dishonest hack that wants to compare apples and oranges.
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And I was responding the AC who replied to you claiming "A lot of the "COVID-19" deaths are, in fact, deaths from pre-existing conditions."
So check yourself, because I'm the one that made the same damn point that "It's not as if pre existing condition don't apply to both flu patients and covid-19 patients equally," in the post that you replied to and called stupid.
Re:No it's not (Score:4, Insightful)
We're front-loading deaths. A lot of the "COVID-19" deaths are, in fact, deaths from pre-existing conditions, that may have been delayed if not for COVID-19, but instead caused the person to die sooner than they otherwise would have.
Every death is that kind of death, because we're all going to die eventually. Where do you draw the line to decide that this case counts, and that case doesn't ?
We're not really seeing any "extra" deaths - COVID-19 is terrible to very sick or very old people, but essentially harmless to the healthy.
That is plain out wrong. The elderly and sick die more often, true. But there are many, many cases of utterly healthy people now six feet under due to Corona infections. In Italy, especially, many doctors are on record stating how utterly devastatingly fast many of their young and healthy patients went from hospitalization to intensive care to dead.
The death figures are inflated.
They are also undercounted, because many people die without being tested. Depending on the local testing regime, they may or may not be checked for COVID-19 after death. In several European countries, death figures have been corrected upwards by sometimes 5 figure numbers after the governments were forced to check and include those cases.
The thing is that we will never know exact numbers, we can only estimate. Some counts will be inflated, some will be deflated. It depends mostly on how you count, and that is not only different by region, but also different over time.
All of the economic damage, all of the panic, it was all for nothing.
That's utter and total bullshit, propaganda and lies. It is clearly visible that both the economic and health damage is orders of magnitude less in the countries that acted quickly and decisively. The longer governments fucked around thinking they could avoid decisive action, the worse it eventually became.
Re:No it's not (Score:4, Interesting)
Ah, the death certificate claim. This is an argument presented by two types of people-
a) Liars and people who just want to see the world burn
b) The gullible who have been misled by a) and just don't realize it
The CDC gets death certificates often with MONTHS of delay. If you track their counts in real time, past periods will continually percolate up as death certificates from all causes eventually make their way to the CDC.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/... [cdc.gov]
The CDC gets COVID-19 data very rapidly because it's a pandemic. They get data on every other cause of death much more slowly.
It's remarkable how virtually any topic gets exploited and misdirected by people who just like trolling the world.
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That's not even remotely possible.
At that rate, even with the entire US population infect, there would only be 52k deaths.
With the current 126k death toll, you'd need roughly 800 million infections to reach that percentage, or roughly 2.5 times the current US population.
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While we're at it, ban all cars, tobacco, alcohol and non-healthy foods because they kill more people than COVID-19.
Approximately 38,000 Americans die from car accidents each year https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/ [asirt.org]. COVID has killed in the US about 4 times that at minimum, and cars have lots of advantages, letting us save a lot of lives and do things we couldn't otherwise. More to the point, no one has at any point advocated that we hide away "forever"- we have advocated steps like social distancing and mask wearing. Mask wearing is turning out to be particularly useful. But the point of full-scale lock
Re:So... (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, and the Case Fatality Rate differs from the actual fatality rate due to the fact that the case of infection has been confirmed. If there are 10 times the rate of confirmed infections in a population, the Case Fatality Rate divided by that multiplier is, tada, the actual fatality rate.
So the CDC already accounted for this in the estimated actual fatality rate, but now people are attempting to double- and triple-count the effect to say that the virus is no worse than a bad flu.
Wrong [businessinsider.com].
Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)
It's still killed 121,000 [cdc.gov] people while infecting less than 10% of the US population in the span of at most 5 months.
So tell me it's no worse than the flu. We can still hit >1,000,000 by January 2021 if we give it the old college don't give-a-crap.
Re:So... (Score:4, Informative)
It's hard to compare directly to the Flu since we have vaccines. Yes, we don't always predict the right strain to vaccinate for, but it holds down the numbers on average. People also know when they have the flu and tend to stay home.
Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, bud. Almost all of the lockdowns have been lifted. The present economy, just like the pre-lockdown economy, is in the tank because there's a pandemic going on.
People are making the individual decision to reduce contacts, spending, and activities. Nothing that you do short of making things safer is going to get many more to come back out. Braying that infection is inevitable so why do anything different isn't going to change their minds either.
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Or, you know, maybe an economy shut down for months can't just magically restart. It could take years to recover from these lockdowns.
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Wrong [businessinsider.com].
Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
Then why did the economy tank beginning in February 2020 [nytimes.com] when the very first lockdowns didn't begin until March? I'll tell you why. Because people didn't just go about their normal lives until the government told them to do otherwise, they proactively began to self-shelter to protect themselves. Sweden didn't do a lockdown, and its economy still contracted by 7%.
And it's going to continue. People aren't going to throw themselves into the grinder simply to make the economy run at the level that certain people think that it ought to be running.
If the OMBad trolls [slashdot.org] want to call it hiding in a basement, fine. That basement money isn't feeding the economy, so they'd better decide whether they want to take reasonable safety measures and have more of that money back in the economy or scream TDS and OMB (while rejecting things as simple as wearing masks) and have that money stay in the savings account.
I have a good job, cable, savings, and an abiding desire to socially distance from assholes like him. Run those businesses safely if you want me back. Or I can just continue to use delivery from business-destroying-Amazon. Me-me-me-only-me works as well for safety as it does for "free-dumb."
Re:So... (Score:4, Informative)
Everybody will be infected eventually. A percentage of them will get sick. A smaller percentage of them will die. We have always known this.
Absolutely not. At no point has the US decided to have a plan that involves everyone getting infected. And if you knew basic epidemiology you would know that even if you have an uncontrolled infection standard models like the SIR model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidemiology#The_SIR_model [wikipedia.org] don't predict there's ever a point with a disease that you get to the entire population being infected.
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"Flatten the curve" - which is our goal - doesn't say that we don't reach herd immunity (which is the equivalent of "everybody infected" for purposes of this discussion). It just means we'll slow down the infection & death rate enough that we don't overwhelm hospitals, such as what happened in Italy and likely led to unnecessary deaths.
Somehow this spiraled into "let's stay locked down until at least November so people will quit getting coronavirus". Whatever.
Normal people are all about flattening the
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As effective as masks are shown to be, if we had 95+% compliance we could kill off the virus, and still get a lot of business done.
Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
Characterising the people's response to the pandemic as "hiding under your bed awaiting a miracle cure or superhero to save the day" is silly, it's a bit of a straw-man to criticise. You can see all across the world that this is a very complicated situation with a literally endless set of strategies being put in place, revised, redrawn and then pulled back. It's not binary, it's not do nothing vs panic. Do I suppose your suggested strategy is to "let everyone go out into the world without even the slightest consideration for how many people you might infect and kill"? That real life bit is somewhere in the middle. There are things we can do that won't cripple the economy and send us into a depression. If those things keep people out of hospital then that's real life too.
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Only if we ciontinue to let people run around like idiots endangering everyone.
OTOH, if we actually take prudent measures, we will likely have a vaccine well before everyone gets infected. Those who get through the period between now and vaccine availability need never be infected.
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So, something that could kill about 1.7 million people isn't a credible threat... got it.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
So that means with 10x more cases who did not die that the virus is actually 10x less deadly than thought. Surprise, surprise. Many of us knew that.
It doesn't really mean Covid-19 is less deadly, considering the mortality rate of those infected is not the only measure of the deadliness of a virus. A virus with 90% mortality rate but a transmission rate of 0.01 is arguably far less deadly than a virus with a 0.09% mortality rate but a transmission rate of 10. Back in Feb/Mar, we knew Covid-19 was very deadly but there is still much we don't know. Either it has a high mortality rate with moderate infection rate or a relatively low mortality rate with a very high infection rate.
If this new CDC research ends up being correct, it looks like Covid-19 is the latter. But in the end 25 million infected with a 0.5% mortality rate or 2.5 million infected with a 5% mortality rate have still killed 125,000 people so far. Both scenarios demanded strict lock-downs over the past few months, and both will require slow and measured lifting of restrictions in the near future. Continuing research like this will have a large impact on what the next few years look like, but it has relatively low impact on how we should react to the virus right now.
25 million infected still means 300 million of us haven't been infected, implying without constant vigilance the last few months will seem like a picnic compared to the next few months if we pretend the worst is over.
Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
The same effect of untested == uncounted is happening for deaths too. Maybe not as extreme as 10x but there is plenty of people dying without first being tested for Covid-19. They won't be counted either.
Re: So... (Score:3)
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Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but it still killed 120,000+ people in the US alone, and in only a little over 3 months.
So yeah, nuthin' to worry about, just pretend it's no big deal, right?
Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
Another stupid GOPper.
How many of them that *didn't* die are going to be disabled for months, years, or forever? You haven't read, oh, let's see, there was a story early this week about a 30-yr-old on a respirator, who didn't think he could catch it.
But that's ok, and with all the smart cars on the road, why don't you just walk across the Interstate.
Ignorant idiot, who thinks disease is a plot.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
The statistics show that your odds of being seriously ill if you get infected are much, much lower. Does it suck if you get seriously ill? Yes, but it also sucks if you hit the statistics lottery and get a staph infection, or flesh eating bacteria or cancer.
There are plenty of bad diseases, parasites, bacteria and other illnesses that can severely impact people. We don't all go and hide because of those. The difference here is a combination of the the media hype machine, political winds wanting anything
Re:So... (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh bullshit. This virus killed more people in 3 months with the entire country shut down than the flu does in a year with everything open. Hospitals cancelled all non-essential procedures to make room and were still at the breaking point. Hospitals were overflowing patients into other hospitals. They were making plans to set up field hospitals. We had to bring the damn Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort into New York to help out. Luckily for us in the US, the results of our shutdown and people wearing masks started kicking in just about in time. Things didn't go so well in Italy though.
Don't turn this into a fucking Y2K thing...."oh gee, we spent all that money, then new years hit and nothing happened....what a waste!!!!". Don't write this off as just hype. That's stupid. This was real. This was significant. And if not for all the sacrifices we did make, it would've been an absolute disaster.
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Why not both? if COVID has the same death rate as let's say the flu, or even less, it still could kill a lot more than it by well, we not even knowing that it did spread as far as it did or having any sort of directly combating it, such as having a vaccine as we have with the flu.
"It's just a flu, except it's a ninja flu".
Case fatality rate 2-4x worse than we had thought? (Score:5, Informative)
If there are really 10 times more cases than we have recorded then the case fatality rate is currently 126,785 fatalities/ 250,467,600 cases = about 0.5% or 5 times worse that the flu. Over half those cases do not have an outcome yet (recovery or death), so I suppose it could be as high as 1% or 10x worse than the flu.
The CDC had estimated [usatoday.com] the case fatality rate at about 0.26%, so this new data means the CFR is actually 2-4x worse than we had thought.
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Luckily for us in the US, the results of our shutdown and people wearing masks started kicking in just about in time. Things didn't go so well in Italy though.
The US didn't really fare much better than Italy.
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Re:So... (Score:5, Interesting)
None of those things present a realistic risk of widespread infection.
Even at .5% mortality, a disease that's ineffective at spreading would be a big deal, and we wouldn't need to take drastic actions.
However that's not the case here. Without strong measures we could see infection numbers in the hundreds of millions in the US alone, leading to a death toll of over a million.
In roughly 3 months, Covid deaths have reached nearly 40%(~38%) of the total count of flu deaths over the last Decade.
Re:So... (Score:5, Interesting)
Best comparison is 20 years of flu hitting at once.
Re: So... (Score:2)
No, they haven't been officially detected precisely because the symptoms are non-notable to non-existent.
In fact, the virus also considerably weakened since the first cases were known, according to Italian researchers.
Re: So... (Score:3)
Uum, have you been living behind the moon?
This is common knowledge and not news pretty much everywhere on the planet AFAIK. It is a normal, reported, and generall implied fact in all European news I saw.
Re:So... (Score:4, Informative)
You did, huh, Dr.? That's pretty awesome. Where's the research you're citing?
Literally everyone who followed research as it was published knew this. The one consistency throughout this whole thing is how far out of whack with the research the news was, the WHO director was, the politicians were, etc. The figures showing a 10%-of-the-reported mortality rate were obvious back when people were cherry-picking test data by only testing those suspected of infection and at risk. So I guess now with 10x the rate of infection we're at 1% the reported mortality rate (though they've been a bit less dramatic lately from what I've seen - it didn't distract people from Epstein and the fact literally every world leader is a pedo well enough so now they're trying to start a race war.)
Re: So... (Score:4, Informative)
You misread his comment; the rate is lower than 1%. If you go by the total infections given in the article and divide the 120k deaths by it, you get 0.48%. The actual rate is probably lower than that, but either way it's nowhere near 1%.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You did, huh, Dr.? That's pretty awesome. Where's the research you're citing?
Are you seriously too stupid to draw the simple conclusion that 10x more cases means the percentage of infected dead is that much lower, since the number of dead is a relatively kneen and fixed number? Did you even study division?
God you panicky Karens are morons.
NO. They are too "stupid to "know" that the patterns for fatality rates globally suggest around 2%, and that in the US if you divide the number of dead by the total number of cases you get a MUCH HIGHER NUMBER. (somewhere closer to 5.42222222222222%)
Try to be less condescending and more educated.
Re:Wrong anyway - 120 million dead from covid in U (Score:4, Informative)
Quoting president-to-be Joe Biden:
"People don't have a job, people don't know where to go, they don't know what to do. Now we have over 120 million dead from COVID."
It's pretty obvious that he misspoke, and actually meant to say 120 thousand, which is roughly the correct figure. (At this writing, I think it's 126,000.)
Brain-farts can happen to politicians of any party. Trump passes several per day.
Re:Wrong anyway - 120 million dead from covid in U (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wrong anyway - 120 million dead from covid in U (Score:5, Insightful)
They are both old white guys.
They are both old, but both have been public figures for decades and both have a long track record of saying stupid stuff.
It is better to look at what people do rather than what they say.
Re:Wrong anyway - 120 million dead from covid in U (Score:5, Funny)
It is better to look at what people do rather than what they say.
I'm looking at what Trump does, and... Oh, shit! Who the fuck voted for that?
Re:Wrong anyway - 120 million dead from covid in U (Score:5, Funny)
What are you talking about. He's perfectly fine. I had my doubts, but the other day I saw him drink water with one hand and now I'm sold. This is the man I want running the country. Has Biden gotten up in front of everyone and demonstrated he has the fine motor skills of a 3 year old? No. We just assume he can drink with one hand because of his age, but do we REALLY know? I think he should spend 10min addressing this at his next rally.
Re: Wrong anyway - 120 million dead from covid in (Score:3, Insightful)
Trump is a textbook narcissist. Go look up NPD. It's him.
I have been following Biden for decades. He has *always* been a gaffe machine. I was very much looking forward to him winning the Dem nomination so the gaffes could continue. I've always loved Joe's gaffing. Big fun! I didn't think he was suffering dementia, however, until recently. Watch his speeches and Zoom calls and interviews and whatever with an objective eye. No excuses.
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You are witness elder abuse and also abuse of a mentally disabled person. It is sickening. He shouldn't be running. Since dementia sets in pretty fast and hard once you get to Joe's stage he literally may not have sufficient mental functionality left to take the oath of office should we win the election.
I am 95% sure that the plan never was that he takes the oath. It was always to boot out Sanders and exchange Biden for Hillary or someone else hand-picked by the DNC.
Given the track record, I'm reasonably sure the selection will be made based on who rocks the boat the least, not on who has the best chance to win against Trump.
Without Corona and BLM I would have predicted that Trump wins. Now I'm not sure anymore. These two things may yet break his political neck.
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"I'm concerned about the welfare of this person. Go kill yourself."
That's some real solid ground your sincerity is standing on.
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I'm thinking there's some onset of dementia with Trump, it's just harder to see given all the idiotic things he said when he was much younger, and the current free rein given a very rich, narcissistic, egotistical personality that doesn't know how to stop talking. He may have a lapse of memory about what's in the constitution, or alternatively he may never have bothered to learn about it in the first place.
Re:Wrong anyway - 120 million dead from covid in U (Score:4, Insightful)
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Stats were out by February, show most cases asymptomatic, an order of magnitude higher than symptomatic case
Where did you get that? [cebm.net]
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There is no (in recorded history) outbreak of a sarbecovirus apart from SARS (COVID-19 is caused by a different strain of the same species that caused SARS), in the genus sarbecovirus, subfamily orthocoronavirinae, family coronaviridae (the coronaviruses). Even MERS wasn't caused by a sarbecovirus.
It was not a a ludicrous notion in the beginning that this disease would be this deadly. SARS and especially MERS were much more deadly, and suddenly we had this new disease overwhelming hospitals. But in reality
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The scary thing is that this has outlined how truly vulnerable we are to a designed bio-weapon. Imagine if a SARS3 had only a 20% fatality rate but the same incubation time and virulence, the world's medical systems would be quickly overwhelmed and the economies would follow shortly after. We've gotten lucky so far, but I'm not confident that it will last.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand the heuristic of "seeing who benefits" to find out who is behind something. But sometimes, the event is caused by chance and the people who benefit or suffer are simply matters of luck.
Take the Spanish Armada going to finally destroy the English once and for all. They set sail in all their armored, savage glory and... were destroyed by storms [nationalarchives.gov.uk], leaving England to dominate the planet. It was not the English who caused the storms [britannica.com], but they did benefit.
Calling the global pandemic the "plandemic" (it may have been a virus escaped from the lab though this is generally reported as a less-likely scenario); or calling 9/11 an inside job - it really damages one's credibility. The shutdowns were done to save lives, though to some extreme libertarians, who see every problem as being some flavor of excessive government authority, it seems to them to be an exercise in satisfying the power-lust. In democratic societies though, the government is supposed to be more responsive to the populace due to the ballot box so trying to keep registered voters alive will benefit them at election time.
Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
The only things that fit are the bullshit bailout all the money going to the richest and a US election, crush the US economy on purpose because Biden is a drooling idiot
I know right! I for one can't understand why we destroyed the economy in Germany just to sway the US election. It seems the only country that is really is trying to help Trump is Sweden. But really why is Putin on team Biden? It doesn't make any sense. Germany doesn't make any sense.
Actually I just realise absolutely none of this makes sense because what you wrote is just plain moronic.
More deadly than WWI (Score:4, Informative)
As of now, more people in the U.S. have died from covid-19 in the past four months than U.S. soldiers died in the seventeen months of World War I. If covid-19 were a war, it would be the third deadliest in our country's history.
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Would you care to explain what you mean? What I see looking at that data is that week 12 is where we started the lockdowns, and about 3-4 weeks after that deaths peaked and then began falling. Small surprise that an infection with a roughly 2 week onset time + 1 to 2 week until death period would peak around 3 to 4 weeks after taking drastic measures to stop new infections. Other than that unsurprising stat, I'm not sure what you are getting at in that link.
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It declined because policy makers started forcing doctors to not record pneumonia deaths as covid even when the patient had covid and pneumonia is the leading cause of death for covid patients.Its like saying nobody dies of AIDS because technically its usually sarcoma or pneumonia that kills AIDS patients. Its just.... not a useful way of reasoning about it.
And yes, many of those died from influensa. But heres the kicker; Normally Influensa has a very lo
Re:More deadly than WWI (Score:4, Insightful)
The 2017-18 flu season was particularly severe, and killed 60,000 - 90,000 Americans.
It killed up to 90k Americans without any extraordinary efforts to stop its spread. Covid-19 has killed 125k Americans even though we enacted lock-downs nation wide. Total deaths were doubling every few days back in late March, and would have continued until millions had died. Along with a large number of people dying of preventable deaths because of overloaded hospitals.
The lengths people take to try and pretend this wasn't a serious pandemic that required a much stronger response than we actually did is astounding. We knew by late March that the danger wasn't overblown as the death rate was doubling rapidly, and it didn't start to slow down until a few weeks after the lock downs had started. Just as predicted.
Re: (Score:3)
The 2017-18 flu season was particularly severe, and killed 60,000 - 90,000 Americans.
It killed up to 90k Americans without any extraordinary efforts to stop its spread.
What exactly do you call a vaccine?
Re:More deadly than WWI (Score:4, Insightful)
Why not compare it to U.S. auto accident deaths while you're at it? Or cancer deaths? Or heart disease deaths? Or lung cancer from cigarette smoking deaths?
Hell, compare it to the number of 'Tide pod challenge' deaths, too, just for laughs. That'll make it sound like literally the end of the world -- to someone who only hears the numbers and not the actual content.
Re:More deadly than WWI (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:More deadly than WWI (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not a fan of war-death comparisons, because they're really not equivalent. Wars and COVID-19 are not killing the same segments of the population. Most soldiers who die in war are young, so you're not just wiping them out. You're also wiping out all of their potential contribution to society and their decedents. Furthermore, for every soldier who dies, there tend to be plenty more with permanent physical and/or psychological damage. Meanwhile, most of the deaths from COVID-19 are older people who have already made most of their contributions. So yes, I said it, deaths from war are worse.
If you try to make a rebuttal that all deaths are equivalent and you can't compare, just stop for a second and think about how we treat the death of a child as a significantly greater tragedy than the death of an adult.
Re: (Score:3)
But you're also not including any long term damage to the body from the virus or secondary infections either, many of which aren't fully understood yet since it has been a relatively short time frame.
Re:More deadly than WWI (Score:4, Informative)
Im with you bro, but:
All deaths are equivalent, under the rule of law, and it would take a defense attorney with some chutzpah to successfully argue that your murdering twenty people at a retirement home is less of a crime than killing one baby.
In criminal courts, this is true. In civil courts it absolutely is not. Ask any lawyer and they'll tell you there's no point whatsoever in filing a wrongful death suit for a retiree. Though in civil courts it's not babies' lives that are valued the highest, it's successful young professionals.
Re:More deadly than WWI (Score:5, Informative)
To be fair, you guys took a rather minor role in WW1. For most european nations, the loss of life in a single bad week of WW1 far outranks the death toll of Corona.
Re: More deadly than WWI (Score:4, Informative)
10X? Try 80 times! (Score:3)
What about that is surprising? (Score:3)
We know this. It is the case everywhere.
But it is always conveniently not menioned, to inflate the feeling od it being dangerous.
And be happy it's that way too, since otherwise we wouldn't reach the whole country in 20 years, if there will be no true vaccine. Nobody wants 20 years of lockdown.
These threads really bring out the crazies... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
No. I'm afraid there are too many important narratives at stake. Sorry.
Re:These threads really bring out the crazies... (Score:4, Insightful)
I will gladly smash what's left of the economy if it prevents 500k people from dying.
I really shouldn't do this but I can't restrain myself.
I don't know what you mean by "smash the economy" but consider this. If you destroy agribusiness, petrochemicals, food processing, transportation, and all the industries which support them, a few billion people will starve to death. What kind of monster would kill that many to save 500,000 Americans?
"Oh, be serious" you say, "that's not the part of the economy I mean." No doubt. Choose your words more carefully.
BTW, I'm not exaggerating. Remember The Population Bomb? Ever wonder why we didn't have mass starvation in the 80s and 90s? Because seeds got so much better and fertilizers got so much better and herbicides got so much better and transportation got so much better, farmers started producing way, way more food per acre than they used to. So much so that we went from wondering how to feed 3 billion to feeding 7 better than at any time in human history. Go back to 1970 agricultural practices and at least 2 billion people will starve, probably more. Ever wonder how that improvement happened? Oh yeah, it was farmers and companies in cooperating and competing with each other, buying, trading, improving. And what do we call that? Oh, right, The Economy.
Re:These threads really bring out the crazies... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
While you are factually right, I think you make one very important miscalculation:
While short, tough lives, especially when going hungry, sounds really bad and we all agree that you do not want this... It may actually be worse these days for one simple psychological reason...
They had a purpose. Survival was their purpose.
These days, the poor are fat... and often devoid of any purpose, hence their overeating as a coping mechanism.
But it gets worse... the not so poor often have the same problem, too.
It is qui
Still nowhere close to reaching herd immunity... (Score:3)
Assuming, that is, that getting the virus actually confers any sort of lasting or even temporary immunity to it -- we are not sure at this point, although it is not unreasonable to at least expect that it would, and if it did not, this would be considered somewhat surprising.
Roughly 10 times more people than even this will still need to be infected for herd immunity to actually be reached, and unfortunately that also means 10 that times as many people will die. If this happens too quickly, health care facilities will be completely overwhelmed. Ideally, we will have a vaccine before then. Until then, we just have to do whatever we can to slow the spread.
Masks ... (Score:5, Interesting)
In a debate about masks, I was horrified to hear the following:
"Masks are killing people" ... throw God's wonderful breathing system out the door" ... keep them from breathing oxygen ... get people to become sickly"
By trying to impose masks, officials "are obeying the devil"
Masks "
Masks "... muffle people
Masks are "pseudoscience"
Watch for yourself [bbc.com] and be dismayed ...
Re: (Score:3)
In a debate about masks, I was horrified to hear the following:
"Masks are killing people"...
People believe Elvis is still alive, fer cryin' out loud. I'm firmly convinced (and I believe research backs me up) that people mostly come to conclusions first, then cherry pick facts to support that belief. We're no where near as rational as we like to tell ourselves.
My favorite way to put it these days is "what I want to believe is X, and so I hope supporting fact Y is true."
Of course Elvis is alive (Score:3)
He faked his death to avoid the FBI.
Re: (Score:2)
The US performs 400k tests per day
Actually, it's been quite a bit more than that [covidtracking.com]
over the past three weeks.
Re: (Score:3)
And yet the rate at which the tests are coming back positive continues to rise. One thing Republicans never got was math.