4 ms·
There's a surprising amount of well-intentioned but misinformed speculation in this thread. "We don't know" is the best answer to a lot of the questions about
by cletus 7y ago
There's a surprising amount of well-intentioned but misinformed speculation in this thread.
"We don't know" is the best answer to a lot of the questions about Spanish flu. What we do know is that it disproportionally killed young, healthy people who could go from no symptoms to dear in 24 hours. There's a lot of speculation as to why. I've seen medical experts theorize this is likely due too a cytokine response, meaning basically that a healthy immune system goes nuts. Apparently there are other diseases that have fit this pattern.
The mortality rate is estimated at about 3%. Influenza is 0.1%. Coronavirus is somewhere between those.
Best guess of why the second wave was so deadly was due to a mutation that likely happened in Europe.
It's true we have things we didn't in 1918 but we still have surprisingly few tools to combat viruses. Fun fact: only one virus has had a cure developed and that was Hepatitis-C in recent years. To be clear, vaccines != cures.
We also have problems we didn't have in 1918, specifically mobility of people. It's that mobility combined with people being highly contagious while being asymptomatic that makes this particular diseases such a challenge.
- TheCondor 7y agoThanks for this, I was going to say that we have had to infer most of the details about it or earlier pandemics.
- kakwa_ 7y agoThe mortality rate of Covid-19 seems higher than that. The around 3% mortality rate is what you get by dividing the number of deaths by the number of infection (past and present) (as of today: 5359 / 140875 = 3.8%). But this is incorrect as the number of currently infected people is quite high (half the total number of infections) and unfortunately, a few will die in the near future. If you divide the number of deaths by (recovered + deaths), the mortality is much higher (as of today: 5359 / (70174 + 5359) = 7.1%). Which seems actually about as high as the Spanish Flue right in between the low and high estimate (20M/500M, 50M/500M). And it's source for worries since our medical systems are 1) much more developed than in 1918, and 2) they are not yet completely overloaded. If it were to spread rapidly and overload our health systems, the mortality rate could rise even more, let's hope it doesn't reach that level.
- dntbnmpls 7y ago> The mortality rate of Covid-19 seems higher than that. Sure if you intentionally mislead people by cherrypicking data. > The around 3% mortality rate is what you get by dividing the number of deaths by the number of infection (past and present) (as of today: 5359 / 140875 = 3.8%). 140875 is the number of confirmed and tested infections. The number of actual infections is certainly much higher. So the mortality rate is most likely much lower than 3.8%. After all, most coronavirus infections are mild for the vast majority of people. > If you divide the number of deaths by (recovered + deaths), the mortality is much higher (as of today: 5359 / (70174 + 5359) = 7.1%). Sure if you ignore the hundreds of thousands of infected who "recovered" from mild symptoms. > If it were to spread rapidly and overload our health systems, the mortality rate could rise even more, let's hope it doesn't reach that level. The standard pattern. Try to fearmonger with intentionally misleading stats and then try to come off as a good samaritan. Why do all the coronavirus fearmongering comments all follow the same template?
- kakwa_ 7y agoIf it was fearmonguering, it was not intentional on my part. Sorry for that. Indeed I missed the mild cases which are not quantified but likely quite numerous.