Considering that the more data we get with regards to fatality rate, it's looking more and more along the lines of the seasonal flu (which has a vaccine, generally). The drastic measures taken to protect a tiny minority of people are looking to be more and more pointless. We would not tolerate shutting down the world economy to protect people from the seasonal flu, and we should not tolerate it for this.
I would love to bound the death rate, both lower and upper, ideally by age group. Right now I'm torn between 'it's a nasty flu, soldier up' vs. 'it's a supernasty disease that's going to severely upend life once it becomes endemic'. With the caveat that, given how easy it spreads, we might not be able to realistically do anything to prevent it becoming endemic.
Would you please be able to expand on the 'seasonal flu' point you made?
The fatality rate of the seasonal flu is around 0.1%. We originally thought that COVID-19 had a fatality rate fo 2-3%, but now that antibody testing is more and more widespread we are finding more and more cases of people testing positive for antibodies - indicating they had and recovered from the virus - without ever having any symptoms.
A study from Santa Clara just recently found that there are probably 50 to 85 times MORE infections than originally thought, just that the vast majority of them were asymptomatic.
Should we be focusing our energy on protecting our elderly and immunocompromised? Yes, absolutely.
Should we be mandating that people stay home, putting millions of perfectly healthy people out of work? It's absolutely insane to me that this was even considered, let alone implemented.
I agree, the fatality rates reported in the media smells of overhype. A lot. Over here in WA, the testing policy is along the lines of "Test patients hospitalized with severe lower respiratory illness or people working in critical sectors, and then maybe consider people with 100.4+ fevers and/or shortness of breath" [0]. That population selection has an elevated death risk, and also muddles the positive/negative ratio: symptomatic people test positive, whereas health workers test negative. We get high negative test ratios, falsely indicating we're early in the outbreak, and also high mortality ratios among positives, falsely indicating a high fatality rate. Extrapolating to the entire population is wrong and irresponsible.
The flu and vaccine point is also well taken. For the entirety of human history the flu was a health risk for the elderly and life expectancy [excluding under 5s] was 60-70 [1]. The contemporary expectation that everyone should make it into their 80s and 90s is a strong outlier.
OTOH, people counter by pointing out that NYC is already at 0.16 [14000 / 8400000] fatality rate [2], and it's unclear how many more until this wave recedes. Then anecdotes about dead healthcare workers, reinfections, mutation rates, etc.
I don't. Do you? We are 3 months into this mess and have wildly divergent facts that can't be reasonably reconciled.
Some attempts:
* The regular flu season uses 75% capacity of the system. A disease that's 3x worse will lead to 225% capacity needs.
* Maybe this disease is remarkably more contagious than the flu. In a tightly packed place like NYC, you might get all the cases that you're ever going to get flowing through the system within x weeks, whereas a less infectious flu season might trickle the same caseload within 2x weeks.
* This is out of the ballpark deadly, 10x-100x worse than the flu.
Those aren't reconciliations, they are contradicting the assertion that this is just another seasonal flu by identifying a way in which it is worse. I don't know what you mean about having "wildly divergent facts"?
Not all hospitals and morgues are overrun, a lot of them are actually massively under capacity. The media hysterics about this is complete nonsense for the majority of hospitals. NYC is not the US. Hell, NYC is not New York STATE.
How many hospitals or morgues should be overrun before it becomes evidence that we are not dealing with the same kind of problem as we do every flu season?
Ok, NY counted some that they shouldn't have. There's a vast majority of the country other than NYC that is affected by the virus and vast rest of the world too. You decided to nitpick one example and made it sound like a pattern.
Paraphrasing Dr. Birx: "There are other countries that if you had a pre-existing condition, and let's say the virus caused you to go to the ICU and then have a heart or kidney problem, some countries are recording that as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a COVID-19 death. The intent is ... if someone dies with COVID-19 we are counting that."
Paraphrasing mostly, but this is Dr. Birx admitting that the government is overreporting by default. So even if you exclude NYC, it doesn't change my point.
That's how that works. Take for example, HIV. Nobody dies of HIV, but because HIV causes immunodeficiency, you can die because of common cold or flu. That doesn't mean the person died because of common cold, they died because of HIV/AIDS.
Similarly if you have type 1 diabetes and you get infected with corona, you probably died with diabetic complications, but without corona you would have been totally fine.
Not sure how that doesn't change your point. In fact you are conflating two different things. On one hand you are arguing about overreporting and on the other hand don't even want to take into consideration common practices in disease statistics. Almost makes me think you are not arguing in good faith.
People aren't catching type 1 diabetes because they are sick by coronavirus - they already had it. Comparing it to an immunodeficiency disease is not the same. It makes zero sense to generalize the fatality rate across a healthy population and include those with pre-existing conditions when trying to gauge the response for an entire state/country when the vast majority are healthy and those who are dying are not. When I want to know the risk to me or my family, I don't care that an 81 year old with stage 4 lung cancer died when he got COVID-19 - I want to know what my chances are among healthy people - but the media hysterics cling to the vulnerable people when it has no bearing on healthy ones.
We need detailed demographics of infections and deaths. We need to break down the risks, because a blanket totalitarian response of "SHUT DOWN LITERALLY EVERYTHING" is absolutely ridiculous when the general population is going to be fine. We didn't shut down the world economy for SARS, H1N1, MERS or any particularly bad flu season and we shouldn't shut down for this. We should focus our limited resources on protecting the vulnerable and let everyone else get back to work. More lives will be destroyed from an extended shutdown than this virus ever could.
