Comment by literalAardvark
2 days ago
Everyone I know lost someone to COVID. I almost croaked twice to it.
Idk where that "small minority" is but it sounds like you might not value your friends very highly.
Sure, it wasn't 80%, but still, it's not that isolated and I hate this narrative that it was a light cold.
The IFR (infection fatality rate: the chance of dying for an individual who contracted COVID) is under 1%.
That’s a small minority by any reasonable measure, especially in a thread comparing it to the plague.
One could argue that the plague also has a low kill rate these days.
The IFR was only low because we could get all the infected to the hospital.
What?! I know hundreds of people who have had it, and only one I know went to the hospital. Zero died. I’ve had it three times. Zero hospital visits. One was “bad cold”; one was “mild cold”; the last was “would have never known I had anything if not for a complete loss of smell, which made me test”.
Where is this place where everyone who gets infected with C19 goes to the hospital or seriously risks death?
3 replies →
I know a couple in Missouri who lost 5 family members between his and her side. All obese. I believe 4 of them died after the vaccine was available, but they refused to take it.
I'm sorry but you're way off base, or deliberately reacting to information that you perceive as having a political agenda that it actually doesn't have.
How I value my friends has nothing to do with the death toll and mortality rate I saw anecdotally, of nearly nobody I know dying from it out of hundreds of people of many ages that I knew at the time. Do you imagine that me valuing my friendships more or less somehow changes the clinical mortality stats for a carefully monitored virus? Really?
Also, COVID wasn't a light cold, but for many people, the vast majority in fact, its symptoms were moderate to mild and far from fatal. Again, this isn't politics of any kind talking, it's just the raw numbers from any reliable source you care to look at. IFR wasn't anywhere close to 10% by the way, as you say further down. Most people, by far, with COVID, were never hospitalized for it (that would have been impossible considering what percentage of the population eventually got it) and the IFR rate among them wasn't 10%. I'd truly love to see your source for that whopper.
Globally, in absolute averaged total, as far as any source I've seen indicates, COVID had/has an IFR that roughly breaks down as follows: This is from the National Institute of Health btw.
"For 29 countries (24 high-income, 5 others), publicly available age-stratified COVID-19 death data and age-stratified seroprevalence information were available and were included in the primary analysis. The IFRs had a median of 0.034% (interquartile range (IQR) 0.013–0.056%) for the 0–59 years old population, and 0.095% (IQR 0.036–0.119%) for the 0–69 years old. The median IFR was 0.0003% at 0–19 years, 0.002% at 20–29 years, 0.011% at 30–39 years, 0.035% at 40–49 years, 0.123% at 50–59 years, and 0.506% at 60–69 years. IFR increases approximately 4 times every 10 years. Including data from another 9 countries with imputed age distribution of COVID-19 deaths yielded median IFR of 0.025–0.032% for 0–59 years and 0.063–0.082% for 0–69 years. Meta-regression analyses also suggested global IFR of 0.03% and 0.07%, respectively in these age groups."
In any case, all of this deviates slightly from a more basic point there's simply no comparison between COVID and the Black Death, in no scenario or circumstance, and mentioning that is not denying that COVID could be dangerous. It's just a statement of obvious facts about how much, much more horrific one of those two pandemics was historically.
"Sure, it wasn't 80%, but still, it's not that isolated and I hate this narrative that it was a light cold."
All of my friends, extended family and friends of friends got Covid. Nobody died. The only people that died had pre-existing conditions.
To the vast majority of the population, it was similar to a bad cold.
Compared to the plague? Absolutely, it definitely was. As a society it’s a sign of how far we’ve come that we have eliminated that kind of illness.
I mean I know dozens of people who caught it and nobody died. Anecdotes don’t mean much.
Everyone caught it by now, so you know more than that.
Doesn't mean it wasn't deadly during the initial wave.
The national death rate went up in 2020 & 21, a mix of died with covid, died due to covid delaying medical procedures minus less road accidents.
From US Excess Deaths Continued to Rise Even After the COVID-19 Pandemic | SPH https://share.google/RSjwObWdN7bwwJ5od
The COVID-19 pandemic sharply exacerbated the rise in US deaths in 2020 and 2021, more so than in other countries, and with long-lasting consequences that continue to be realized. But the persistent disparity in US mortality in comparison to its peers is largely driven by crises that began long before the pandemic.