Well, it’s not good but that’s about how many people die of pneumonia every year. I mean you’re saying these numbers are only not shocking by some “weird psychological quirk” but it’s context. Every year about 3 million people die. Covid is on track to represent 10% of all US fatalities. 50k would be an emergency but we wouldn’t have shut down the world for it.
Hell, the completely man made and sustained “Opiod crisis” kills 50k per year. This year will likely be extra bad. But don’t worry, top men are working on it.
You’re focused on fatalities. People who are super concerned about this thing (and who are thus in support of lockdown measures) aren’t just focused on fatalities. They are worried about the tangible and intangible costs of millions of people who are disabled by this thing for a really long time, if not permanently.
I’m not worried about dying. I’m worried about being so sick that I can’t work, resulting in me being a drain on society.
According to this source, 10% of COVID-infected folks ages 18-49 will develop the suite of symptoms known as “long COVID”. For folks 70+, the percentage jumps up to 22%. We don’t have a safety net ample enough to support all those sick people. So a lot of folks will be at the mercy of their overstretched families. This sucks for all of us, even those of us who don’t personally know a single person who has died from COVID.
Not to mention all those ancillary impacts of COVID-swamped hospitals. How many people are going to suffer from complications of their more mundane health issues (broken limbs, inflamed appendixes, heart attacks, strokes, asthma attacks, cancer, and pneumonia) that could have been avoided but for all the COVID folks clogging the ER and taking up all the hospital beds? These people may not die, but they will still be a casualty of COVID.
In short, folks aren’t pushing for lockdown measures just to save a few hundred thousand lives. They are also fighting to preserve the quality of life for millions of people.
It’s ridiculous that we’re this far into this pandemic and people still can’t comprehend basic fact.
So, we’ll just pretend that people aren’t disabled, perhaps permanently, by pneumonia and opioid addiction?
If you want to pretend that pneumonia and opioid addiction are the same as COVID then you can pretty much pretend anything you want.
If either of those doubled in a year, it would be a big deal. It would have a cause, and we’d address that cause.
What we have now is this weird things where we have half-way shut down, so we can get the worst of all possible worlds. Economic activity is suppressed because rational actors don’t want to go out while COVID is so bad, but enough people continue to engage that it continues to rage. So we have severely depressed economic activity indefinitely, with rational actors getting more and more scared as community spread grows.
I’m not pretending anything like that. But since you picked up that baton, please feel free to tell me: if a 45 obese man with asthma has a bout of pneumonia, what are the chances he’ll still feel symptoms 4 weeks later?
Yes, of course. I was just speaking to your “even if it was only 50k that’d be shocking”.
So, we’ll just pretend that people aren’t disabled, perhaps permanently, by pneumonia and opioid addiction?
So because we have disabled people already, it’s not a big deal to add millions of other disabled people to the heap? Is that seriously what you’re saying?
No. You chided me for only comparing fatalities but didn’t compare anything different in response. That’s what I’m seriously saying.
Eta: this thread is about the impression we’re getting of the disease. Can we not start an argument about whether we should have lockdowns?
I don’t know. That’s your argument, you bring the evidence if you have any.
Then I will demonstrate how much more contagious COVID is, and that we don’t have pneumonia patients jamming hospitals and causing staff to pull 100-hour weeks and expose themselves to also catching pneumonia from a pneumonia patient.
Then we’ll talk about people who are negative for COVID having symptoms for months and months, of unexplained correlated symptoms like peripheral circulation, lack of full lung capacity, neural damage, even loss of teeth, that pneumonia can’t cause.
Then we’ll talk about how pneumonia doesn’t rip through the population as an airborne pathogen like COVID.
So anyway, what about that 45-year-old with pneumonia? Did you have a figure on that, or was it more of a busywork errand?
It was a rhetorical point. I don’t have a number handy but it sure as heck isn’t zero. People talk about these long haulers like it’s some unique scary thing for covid.
And again, this was started by me addressing the hypothetical of what if the covid death count was “only” 50k.
I’ve been wondering about something… let me see if I can articulate it clearly.
In normal times, we see the results of something like a particularly virulent strain of flu, because we see our friends and co-workers absent from work, and we hear news stories and water cooler/grapevine stories about all the other people getting it, and the death toll.
But now, with a lot of us staying home as much as possible, and another contingent doing things much like they used to, only with masks, a lot of that feedback is kind of broken. For the home contingent, we’re more or less at the mercy of the news sources we choose to consume, and for the out-and-about contingent, their feedback is broken, in that there’s a huge contingent of people already missing from activities, and depending on the activity, some people may or may not attend without it necessarily meaning anything. So they don’t see all the people who have got COVID, because that gets lost in the noise of so many people not attending for other reasons.
So from both perspectives, we don’t get a picture of what’s going on in a way we can interpret. Some of us tend toward the paranoid because of the slant of the news coverage, and some of us are over-confident because the usual mechanisms to gauge the severity of things is broken as well.
The typical viruses we’re exposed to are not as contagious as COVID. They are better studied, which means there are effective treatments for them. And we can vaccinate ourselves against them.
So yes, there is something special about COVID.
I call bull on this. It may be early days but no disease has been studied like this. How much study has been done on asymptomatic anything compared to covid?
Eta: it will end up being something of a boon to mankind, probably. All this study of asymptomatic covid will probably help us look for hidden damage from a variety of respiratory diseases.
True, but what we’re still likely lacking is a good understanding of the long-term effects of the virus – what percentage of people suffer them, and for how long? How many people are permanently disabled by it? It simply hasn’t been around long enough for researchers to have that understanding of it.
Well, if you want to claim that covid causes loss of teeth, then I guess you can claim pretty much anything you want.
Did I do that right?
Yeah, I think this is absolutely true. I feel almost like I don’t know what are normal-people opinions and what are weird extreme Internet-bubble opinions any more. And that’s with more in-person interaction than a lot of people seem to be getting (I was teaching an in-person class up until our semester ended two weeks ago, and I live in a small town where I see a fair number of people I know just walking around the neighborhood and doing the shopping, have had a few outdoor get-togethers with friends, etc.)
My job actually gives me a fair bit of one on one time with people in person. The radically different perspectives can be kinda jarring. Both people not knowing local trends, probably more worried than they should and those rather oblivious to the scale of the pandemic. This basically without a Trumpist in the bunch.
I’m not making it up. People may be losing teeth due to COVID.
As with everything about this disease, anecdotes aren’t data, but we’ve also barely had a year to study it.