We’ve known that since the start. I was very alarmed by the spread of the new disease. But when they started publishing death rates by age, and i saw that it killed very few children and only a modest number of adults of child-rearing age, i told my mom i was less worried about it. “Less worried for yourself, or for humanity?”, She asked me. “For humanity. It’s still pretty personally scary” i replied.
This sad and very strange… 
About a week before Christmas, an 82-year-old Hispanic man sickened with the coronavirus leaned on his Catholic faith and began to pray in his Southern California hospital room.
For reasons that remain unclear to authorities, this act angered his 37-year-old roommate, Jesse Martinez, who was also being treated for covid-19 at Antelope Valley Hospital in Lancaster, Calif. Moments later on the morning of Dec. 17, Martinez allegedly grabbed an oxygen tank and bludgeoned the elderly man, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
The man died the next day, not from a virus that’s killed more than 325,000 Americans but from a fellow covid patient in his own hospital room.
Police said Wednesday that Martinez was arrested and charged with murder, elder abuse and a hate crime enhancement. The victim has yet to be publicly identified.
…
This is why COVID’s “low fatality rate” doesn’t matter.
When you have a highly infectious disease that spreads out of control, a relatively low fatality rate can still very easily overwhelm the healthcare system. That is why all talk of “Let’s keep this in perspective” is bullshit. Perspective is fine if you want to talk about mathematical ratios and not a damn thing else, but in the real world, it has the impact of contributing to minimization of the pandemic’s impact on real people, in real world terms.
I say “good on them” to the nurses who’ve had enough of this fake “You’re a hero” bullshit. Yeah, if they’re our heroes, if we really respected them, we’d wear fucking masks and stay indoors like we’re supposed to. Talk is cheap.
You know the naysayers will use this as proof that not all COVID deaths are real. It will be all “I bet they counted that as a COVID death. Plandemic!”.
Not so strange to me. As a child I once became very ill 200 miles from home and had to ride for 3 hours in a car with a man who repeatedly sang ‘Jesus Loves Me’ throughout the trip. Had I had an oxygen tank available and the strength to lift it…
Yes, the death rate is a small part of the picture. I don’t think I’ve seen any numbers on the number of people who remain hospitalized for weeks/months, which may be a bigger part of the strain on medical personnel.
Nurses & doctors would be perfectly entitled to decline to treat those who refuse to make any effort to prevent infection. If we have to pick and choose who gets treatment because of a shortage of beds/staff/equipment it seems only reasonable to make prevention efforts a key selector.
The medical ethics involved in the COVID pandemic will be discussed and debated for many years. Books are probably already in the works. So many impossible situations that nevertheless must be dealt with.
Well, the murderer may just be a crazy murderer. But there are also neurological issues with some covid cases, and he may have gone nuts from that.
There may have been neurological issues on either or both sides. The story conjures a picture of the victim kneeling at his bed and praying quietly to himself, but who knows what was going on.
Fascinating. I’m curious about the 31% for whom it made no difference. How many already took it very seriously, and how many are continuing to minimize it? That could tip the scales on the overall results. I wouldn’t draw any conclusions about an individual’s attitude based on their infection status, but I would guess that over a large enough sample size, virus deniers/minimizers are overrepresented among the infected.
This survey is pretty much useless, it does not show what it purports to show. It has massive ascertainment bias.
The sample in that survey is heavily biased toward the minority of people who were infected and got serious symptoms. Because even with increased testing, the great majority of people who have been infected asymptomatically don’t know they were infected, therefore were not part of this survey.
So this survey really doesn’t give you any meaningful assessment of whether post-infection attitudes reflect a more rational assessment of the risk. It’s heavily biased toward people who experienced more severe symptoms than the average infected person.
(I’m not disputing the fact that we’re up against a big problem with denial. I’m just saying that this survey is statistically meaningless, and does not prove that.)
Agree about the surveying concerns as a matter of statistics.
But if barely half of people who got it bad became more concerned as a result, and a hefty fraction who got it bad are not more concerned from their experience, imagine how much smaller the “more concerned” percentage is once diluted by all the people who had it and didn’t even notice.
The punchline IMO is that nobody who wasn’t taking it seriously from the git-go will take it seriously until after they or an immediate family member who wasn’t already at death’s door is crippled or killed. Only then will they believe this is a) real and b) a big deal.
It’s going to take al lot of death before this gets real enough to enough people in enough places for the rest of us to start getting the benefits of the public as a whole behaving like public health matters.
I don’t follow your line of reasoning here at all. If people are not getting more concerned after infection, that implies that their level of concern was too high prior to infection. In other words, that when uninfected they were taking it too seriously.
[ This is a hypothetical, a discussion of statistical meaning. I’m not suggesting that the actual data show that about most people. I don’t think that survey tells us anything useful. ]
I agree that as a survey it’s useless. That’s not the point or the takeaway. What is interesting to me is that anybody who got COVID would still not take it seriously. Okay, maybe they had a mild case, but 300,000+ people got a fatal case. So because I didn’t die of it, it’s not a serious thing?
This story goes in the column with the people reported a while ago (was it in South Dakota?) who still thought it was a hoax even as they were dying of it.
Yeah, it does. In the “a little too perfect of a story” column.
As in my reply to @LSLGuy above, I think you have this backwards. The survey is not asking people if they take it seriously, it’s asking if they take it more seriously after infection. In a hypothetical world where everyone was already taking it sufficiently seriously prior to infection, there would be nobody in the “I now take it more seriously” category.
I also don’t see why it’s useless, because it only includes people who know they had covid, and not those who didn’t notice. Of course it doesn’t change your opinion if something happens that you don’t notice.
It’s called ascertainment bias.
Suppose a virus comes along, and if you get infected you might go blind. The true risk is that 10% of people go blind, whereas 90% of people have no symptoms.
Due to exaggerated news stories, everyone thinks there is a 50% chance of going blind, so everyone is overestimating the danger of the virus five-fold.
After a while, you do a survey of people who caught the virus, but you only survey people from among the 10% who actually went blind. From their perspective, they thought they only had a 50% chance of going blind, but they actually did go blind. Many of them will probably tell you that they underestimated the risk, that after getting infected they are now more concerned.
Is it correct to conclude that people in general are underestimating the risk from this hypothetical virus?
uh… I didn’t think the point was to tell whether people are underestimating the risk. Yeah, I agree it’s useless for that. I assumed the point was what was stated, to determine whether people who know they have had the virus think it was more or less bad than they did before they had it.
Of course it is. It’s asking people post-infection if they are now more or less concerned than they were before. The assumption is that people who have been infected are in a better position to judge the true risk, so the difference in how concerned they are post-infection is supposed to tell you whether they were assessing the risk correctly before they were infected.