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I don't think people feared catching the virus at all. Exponential dynamics doesn't change anything in your response in that situation. I think every winter vir

• nullc 7y ago
  It's still making a large portion of the people who aren't dying extremely ill. I think one of the biggest public health communication disasters of covid19 is the reliance on mortality as the communication endpoint. It's acceptable for other threats-- like automotive accidents-- to speak in terms of mortality because there isn't a huge population which is much less exposed to dying but still exposed to serious illness. Automotive accidents also seriously injure many more people than they kill, but not in a way that lends itself to a false impression of immunity. "Death" makes a nice clear warning for the risks of driving, and other very bad but not death outcomes are just some factor of the death outcomes... it isn't like the audience is comparing death rates to population numbers then deciding that the death from driving isn't worth worrying about just because we didn't also include maimed-for-life. For covid19 we've ended up making many 20 and 30 year olds believe that it doesn't threaten them. It does. They may not be dying in especially large numbers-- especially where either hospitals are not overloaded or where they're engaging in the ethically dubious practice of triaging younger people ahead of others based purely on their age rather than, e.g. response to treatment--, but they are still becoming seriously and painfully ill and ending up with severe immune system damage -- which takes a long time will recover and will result in latent mortality --, and for many likely lifelong injury in the form of extensive lung scaring. Infections like influenza are much less contagious-- with an R0 of 1.3 vs 2 to 3 (an enormous difference)--, less deadly, face a population which is at least somewhat resistant (in part due to heroic vaccination efforts) and which knows how to rapidly create new and effective vaccines against it. It's not really that comparable.
  • amenod 7y ago
    Curious: what are you basing this on? Do you have some statistical data that shows hospitalization rates of young people _because of_ (instead of just _with_) corona virus? I myself haven't yet seen any data that would make this virus any worse than the flu (which means it's still dangerous, just maybe not "everybody-hide-under-the-rock" dangerous). Even data from Italy doesn't show mortality any higher than previous years. Do you have links to data that supports what you wrote? I agree it is a communication disaster though. If I see another chart with red line, logarithmic scale, not starting from zero or with some approximated (red) curve that doesn't specify the formula... :-/
    • DanBC 7y ago
      > hospitalization rates of young people _because of_ (instead of just _with_) corona virus? What do you think the mechanism is here? Why are people being hospitalised with covid-19, if it's not covid-19 causing the hospitalisation? People under 50 don't spend much time in ITUs on ventilators, until covid-19 happens and now the ITUs are full of people with covid-19 having air pumped into their lungs to push the fluid out. What's causing that if not covid-19?
      • thu2111 7y ago
        That's already well understood. People are counted in the stats produced by hospitals if they have the virus, not if they've been hospitalised because of the virus. Literally if someone breaks their arm and they're tested positive, that goes into the stats for "COVID-19 cases". This is also true if someone dies of anything whilst having the virus; they're recorded as a "COVID-19 death". The statistics here don't tell us what they sound like they're telling us. We'd see exactly the same pattern if the rules were suddenly changed to require every hospital admission to be tested for the common cold in a regular year - the number of "cases" and "deaths" would increase dramatically every day. People under 50 don't spend much time in ITUs on ventilators That statement is far too vague. People of all ages spend time on ventilators every years, especially during a flu outbreak. This is especially true of young children (under 5) whom COVID-19 doesn't affect at all! And COVID-19 is known to affect very few under 50s; the numbers here are so tiny the media can literally write entire stories about individual cases. So what does "people" and "much time" mean in this sentence? You can see some data on deaths from pneumonia by age group here: https://ourworldindata.org/pneumonia#pneumonia-mortality-rates-by-age https://ourworldindata.org/pneumonia#pneumonia-mortality-rat... Of course deaths isn't the same thing as hospitalisation as the young are more likely to recover than the old. So this data isn't exactly what you're talking about, but it's at least quantifiable. It's not safe to make a claim about this virus without comparing it to known values from prior years or outbreaks, when comparing the same thing. Every single number we're being presented with is presented without context and it leads to catastrophic mistakes of understanding. Number of positive test increases is shown without the number of negative test increases as well (i.e. an exponential increase in testing looks like an exponential increase in cases), deaths are counted without any investigation to decide what caused that death and so on. It's very easy to get a totally misleading impression of what's going on. This is likely why in so many parts of the world hospitals are now reporting themselves as empty for weeks, despite the supposed "exponential growth" that should have overwhelmed them by now. In fact in Switzerland hospitals are needing to apply for emergency funding because the huge drop in patient numbers has caused their revenue to dry up.