I wouldn’t have a problem wearing a mask for the flu if I was symptomatic. I was more talking about every October through March or whenever for flu season, if I was not symptomatic.
Covid is more contagious and spread faster than any virus.
No. Many viral diseases, perhaps most notably the measles, are much more contagious.
This is particularly repugnant. What it means that the people who are most likely to die of COVID are people who don’t matter to whoever says this, so why should anyone take precautions, or suffer inconvenience, or economic hardship?
After all, it’s just old people, or poor people, or some other group the speaker thinks are unworthy of life, who get sick and die.
With respect to education, the argument may have some merit. The seasonal flu is probably as deadly to children under ten as COVID-19. Yet, we don’t close schools from November to March every year, because we accept that the value of in-person education is worth the health cost.
According to the CDC, in the 2017-2018 flu season, the mortality rate due to influenza was as follows:
- 0-4 years: 0.6 per 100,000
- 5-17 years: 1.0 per 100,000
- 18-49 years: 2.0 per 100,000
- 50-64 years: 10.6 per 100,000
- 65+ years: 100.1 per 100,000
We likely won’t know the true mortality rate for COVID-19 for a while (i.e. total number of deaths per capita due to the disease). We’re still trying to figure out what the infection fatality rate (IFR) and case fatality rate (CFR) are. The best estimates right now indicate that the IFR and CFR for young children are close to zero, but that is true of influenza, too.
With that said, this chart of raw numbers from the CDC indicate that you may be right for children up to the age of 14 years old. The number of deaths that are Covid-related are comparable to those related to influenza.
However, this is not the case for those over the age of 14. People in their 20s have a mortality rate due to Covid that is 10 times greater than flu, and people in their 40s have a mortality rate nearly 20 times greater than flu.
It goes without saying that children in school are not there all by themselves. The real danger is to the teachers and administrators, as well as to the parents and families of the students.
Finally, this analysis only considers fatalities due to disease. We’re only now finding out about some of the long term health effects of Covid.
That would be a cynical way of looking at it. A more reasoned observation would be that people are in nursing homes because they are already medically distressed. They’re simply going to die at a greater rate. That’s the reality of a pandemic.
There’s evidence that people sheltering in place were more likely to spread the virus internally so it lost a lot of it’s purpose at the expense of jobs. I don’t know if you can make the argument that we got our money’s worth for the effort. It’s very possible that we could have done better by using a strong economy to fund a greater effort at nursing homes.
Put another way, throttling the economy was a poor use of resources. A great deal of money was lost while people sheltered in place. Instead of worrying about the number of people who get infected we should have focused resources on protecting those who were most vulnerable. By throttling the economy we were forced to relocate financial resources back on the healthy in the form of economic repair.