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New Covid wave has begun and masks should be worn again, scientists warn
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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Death rates aren't a feeling. I want some hard numbers.
I feel like we just don't care if we live or die anymore.
I know I've read reports about the latest variants being much less deadly. I did see one study recently which for patients presenting to hospital covid was a few percentage points more likely to result in death compared to hospitalized flu patients. There were a lot more covid patients though.
Found it:
So there is some data backing up the feelings I've gotten from everything I've been hearing and seeing.
So that's almost twice as bad as the flu.
I mean, that's one way to look at it. I looked at it as only a couple percent higher death rate than the flu. Either way, a little less than 2x is way better than like 5x worse.
Obviously it's better than before, but it's also worth keeping in mind these deaths are in addition to the flu.
Also, there are good and bad flu seasons. I see no reason for COVID to not be the same.
There’s one crucial thing you overlooked in this: in 2020, most people hadn’t been infected, and hadn’t gotten the vaccine (because there was no vaccine until December,and even then it was in extremely short supply). Now, most people have some sort of immunity, be it from vaccine or from a prior infection. That definitely skews the hospitalization numbers downward. You can’t compare then and now, unfortunately, since there’s no real community that hasn’t been vaccinated and hasn’t caught it - and so you can’t compare their numbers.
That's fair, but I think you can still compare it to the flu, which is not that far off from covid percentage wise. At this point both the flu and covid should be at an equal level of people having vaccines and natural antibodies, right? Even if you go with covid being about twice as deadly as the flu, twice as deadly as almost nothing is still almost nothing.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans will die this year from COVID. Sure, almost nothing. Just a 9/11 every two weeks or so.
Thousands die every day from tons of other stuff also, just a part of life.
Wow... ghoul, much?
I call it reality.
And that's the problem.
That reality is reality? People die of lots of different things, I'm sorry I'm that's news to you.
It's the problem that people like you let this be reality. That we just dismiss millions of preventable deaths as mere statistics rather than doing simple and easy things like wearing masks during pandemics.
I wore one when I was required to and didn't wear one when I wasn't, so sorry for following the rules?
I’m sure “almost nothing” is quite comforting for the families of the 1.1 million Americans who died.
I'm sorry, but people die of lots of different things all the time, it sucks but it's a part of life