6 ms·

So much emphasis is placed on the fatality rate, but there’s a lot of middle ground between asymptomatic and dead.

irq11 6y ago
”So much emphasis is placed on the fatality rate, but there’s a lot of middle ground between asymptomatic and dead.“ ...and this is the same middle ground that exists for every other cold and flu, every single year. Anosmia is a common side effect of a variety of illnesses, and in the vast majority of cases, it resolves on its own. But this fact doesn’t make good headlines
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
irq11 6y ago
This is the same middle ground that exists for every other cold and flu, every single year. Anosmia is a common side effect of a variety of illnesses, and in the vast majority of cases, it resolves on its own. But this fact doesn’t make good headlines.
- macintux 6y ago
  Indeed, but there is no shortage of evidence that this disease is more damaging than the flu. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-12/covid-19-s-health-effects-can-last-long-after-virus-is-gone https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-12/covid-19-... > “These data demonstrated that the recovered SARS patients had a poor quality of life 12 years following recovery, and were susceptible to inflammation, tumors, and glucose and lipid metabolic disorders,” researchers wrote.
  - irq11 6y ago
    I wasn’t making a broad comparison to the flu. But if I were, I’d cite the most recent CDC numbers, which put the overall fatality rates somewhere around 3-4x worse than the flu, in the expected case: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena... Yes, this virus is worse than the flu. But not nearly to the extent being portrayed by the OP. All illnesses have long-term sequelae. (Also, since you’re right that we have ample data on this virus, it seems an odd choice to cite data for SARS, when discussing Covid-19.)
    - Lewton 6y ago
      Where are you getting the numbers for flu? As far as I'm aware the best guess for flu IFR is 0.04% compared to COVID-19s 0.4% IFR Note that CDC data on the flu is not on the IFR, they only have an estimate for the symptomatic fatality rate which doesn't include asymptomatic flu cases, while their COVID-19 IFR is including asymptomatic cases too. (This seems to be because really caring about the true IFR of a virus is a recent development spurred on by this pandemic)
      - irq11 6y ago
        The numbers I cited from the CDC for Covid are symptomatic fatality rates. You can work out an asymptomatic rate by using their estimated percentage of asymptomatic infections, if you like. > Where are you getting the numbers for flu? As far as I'm aware the best guess for flu IFR is 0.04% compared to COVID-19s 0.4% IFR Any number of different sources; 0.1% is the generally accepted estimate of overall IFR for influenza in an average year, based on statistical extrapolation from seroprevalence surveys. Here’s an article that tries to be as fatalistic as possible, which still cites an overall IFR for flu of 0.1%: https://www.healthline.com/health-news/why-covid-19-isnt-the-flu#Higher-fatality-rate https://www.healthline.com/health-news/why-covid-19-isnt-the... If you absolutely do not want to rely on CDC numbers, here’s a literature review on the subject which puts the symptomatic IFR at 0.1%, at the extreme high end. Most estimates of symptomatic IFR, according to the review, are between 5-50 / 100k: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809029/#!po=0.694444 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809029/#!po=0.... There’s clearly a large variance in estimates for the flu at all levels, but no reasonable way to claim a 10x difference in severity for Covid without cherry-picking the worst estimates for it, and the best estimates for influenza.
        Lewton 6y ago
        > The numbers I cited from the CDC for Covid are symptomatic fatality rates. I guess the CDC are using symptomatic case fatality to mean the IFR then? Or else it doesn't make any sense. > Any number of different sources; 0.1% is the generally accepted estimate of overall IFR for influenza in an average year. Here’s an article that tries to be as fatalistic as possible, which still cites an overall IFR for flu of 0.1%: That was exactly what I was talking about, they use this source from the CDC https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm which again is explicitly talking about "symptomatic cases"
  - GuB-42 6y ago
    Loss of smell is special because it tends to happen to mild cases more than severe cases. The idea seems to be that SARS-CoV-2 can infect both the upper and lower respiratory tract. Lower infection attack the lungs and are typically much more severe. Presumably that's what makes SARS classic so deadly. Upper infections are typically milder but spread more easily, that's what the flu and common cold do. Loss of smell would indicate a upper respiratory tract infection, and therefore a higher chance of generally mild symptoms, more like the flu than SARS. I don't know what the latest scientific literature has to say about that though, everything is so recent. Loss of smell wasn't even recognized as a symptom 3 months ago...
  - 5ociety 6y ago
    1. Is there such evidence? I don't consider articles to be evidence. 2. How MUCH more than the flu? 0.00000000000000001%? Any amount is enough to justify mass hysteria, right?
    - tsimionescu 6y ago
      Given that this disease is killing more people than malaria, while infecting far fewer, I don't think you want to find out just how bad it can get if we don't take strong measures to stop it.
      - 5ociety 6y ago
        You do get the fallacy here right? You can say that about anything. Shouldn't we also put severe restrictions on sugar consumption since that kills more people than malaria and covid19 combined? You can use your argument about literally anything that kills people and has a greater than 0 chance of happening. Have you looked at any statistics yourself aside from reading articles? What would be an acceptable death rate to you? and within 10 seconds you downvoted my comment. lol, how are we supposed to have a serious discussion like this?
        macintux 6y ago
        You do know there’s a fundamental difference between something that spreads between people who aren’t symptomatic, and sugar consumption? I downvoted within 10 seconds because it happened to pop up and I’m tired of this silly false equivalency between a novel pandemic with unknown impact and known diseases with known treatments.
        5ociety 6y ago
        Wrong. You downvoted because you downvote all things you don't already agree with. I would be surprised if you didn't also downvote opposing political views. You downvote things. That is how you make a difference in the world, by downvoting things. You should downvote yourself because you've decided to argue a different point for internet points. Lots of preventable things kill people.
HarryHirsch 6y ago
Here's a first-hand account: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/health/coronavirus-peter-piot.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/health/coronavirus-peter-... Also: the Theodore Roosevelt. The captain wouldn't have risked his career for a bunch of sailors with bad flu. But apparently all of the propulsion team was affected to such an extent that they couldn't tend the reactor any longer. It's that bad.
Mikeb85 6y ago
This. I had it. Literally every symptom except loss of taste and smell (but had some other rarer symptoms like the pink eye thing). Also had a cough for like a month, and loss of energy and breath for about a month and a half. Only just recently feel 100%. While it was shitty and lingered a while the worst of it wasn't actually that much worse than a flu for me. Somewhere between the flu and bronchitis on the scale of how sick I've been in my life.
- azinman2 6y ago
  How do you think you got it?
  - Mikeb85 6y ago
    Working in a tourist town, in the hospitality industry (I frequent this site since I did some CS related stuff for my degree years ago but hospitality is my first love). I got it around the last week of February, before any travel restrictions in Canada. We get (or got) tons of tourists from both Asia and Europe.
    - azinman2 6y ago
      Do you feel like you had prolonged exposure to someone at a close distance?
      - Mikeb85 6y ago
        Not really, but it's a small town with a young, active population and way more bars per capita than is reasonable. So I hike, ski, go to bars and restaurants, work in hospitality. I would come into close-ish contact with 50+ people per day for sure. Probably more. Tourists and locals come into enough contact too (servers at restaurants, retail workers, etc...). So Covid was likely floating around here, lots of people I know said they were sick but very few got tested, but our demographics mean that only 1 person died (80+ year old man) and no one else was ever hospitalized.
- 6y ago

”So much emphasis is placed on the fatality rate, but there’s a lot of middle ground between asymptomatic and dead.“ ...and this is the same middle ground that exists for every other cold and flu, every single year. Anosmia is a common side effect of a variety of illnesses, and in the vast majority of cases, it resolves on its own. But this fact doesn’t make good headlines

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

irq11 6y ago

This is the same middle ground that exists for every other cold and flu, every single year. Anosmia is a common side effect of a variety of illnesses, and in the vast majority of cases, it resolves on its own. But this fact doesn’t make good headlines.

macintux 6y ago
Indeed, but there is no shortage of evidence that this disease is more damaging than the flu. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-12/covid-19-s-health-effects-can-last-long-after-virus-is-gone https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-12/covid-19-... > “These data demonstrated that the recovered SARS patients had a poor quality of life 12 years following recovery, and were susceptible to inflammation, tumors, and glucose and lipid metabolic disorders,” researchers wrote.
- irq11 6y ago
  I wasn’t making a broad comparison to the flu. But if I were, I’d cite the most recent CDC numbers, which put the overall fatality rates somewhere around 3-4x worse than the flu, in the expected case: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena... Yes, this virus is worse than the flu. But not nearly to the extent being portrayed by the OP. All illnesses have long-term sequelae. (Also, since you’re right that we have ample data on this virus, it seems an odd choice to cite data for SARS, when discussing Covid-19.)
  - Lewton 6y ago
    Where are you getting the numbers for flu? As far as I'm aware the best guess for flu IFR is 0.04% compared to COVID-19s 0.4% IFR Note that CDC data on the flu is not on the IFR, they only have an estimate for the symptomatic fatality rate which doesn't include asymptomatic flu cases, while their COVID-19 IFR is including asymptomatic cases too. (This seems to be because really caring about the true IFR of a virus is a recent development spurred on by this pandemic)
    - irq11 6y ago
      The numbers I cited from the CDC for Covid are symptomatic fatality rates. You can work out an asymptomatic rate by using their estimated percentage of asymptomatic infections, if you like. > Where are you getting the numbers for flu? As far as I'm aware the best guess for flu IFR is 0.04% compared to COVID-19s 0.4% IFR Any number of different sources; 0.1% is the generally accepted estimate of overall IFR for influenza in an average year, based on statistical extrapolation from seroprevalence surveys. Here’s an article that tries to be as fatalistic as possible, which still cites an overall IFR for flu of 0.1%: https://www.healthline.com/health-news/why-covid-19-isnt-the-flu#Higher-fatality-rate https://www.healthline.com/health-news/why-covid-19-isnt-the... If you absolutely do not want to rely on CDC numbers, here’s a literature review on the subject which puts the symptomatic IFR at 0.1%, at the extreme high end. Most estimates of symptomatic IFR, according to the review, are between 5-50 / 100k: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809029/#!po=0.694444 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809029/#!po=0.... There’s clearly a large variance in estimates for the flu at all levels, but no reasonable way to claim a 10x difference in severity for Covid without cherry-picking the worst estimates for it, and the best estimates for influenza.
      - Lewton 6y ago
        > The numbers I cited from the CDC for Covid are symptomatic fatality rates. I guess the CDC are using symptomatic case fatality to mean the IFR then? Or else it doesn't make any sense. > Any number of different sources; 0.1% is the generally accepted estimate of overall IFR for influenza in an average year. Here’s an article that tries to be as fatalistic as possible, which still cites an overall IFR for flu of 0.1%: That was exactly what I was talking about, they use this source from the CDC https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm which again is explicitly talking about "symptomatic cases"
- GuB-42 6y ago
  Loss of smell is special because it tends to happen to mild cases more than severe cases. The idea seems to be that SARS-CoV-2 can infect both the upper and lower respiratory tract. Lower infection attack the lungs and are typically much more severe. Presumably that's what makes SARS classic so deadly. Upper infections are typically milder but spread more easily, that's what the flu and common cold do. Loss of smell would indicate a upper respiratory tract infection, and therefore a higher chance of generally mild symptoms, more like the flu than SARS. I don't know what the latest scientific literature has to say about that though, everything is so recent. Loss of smell wasn't even recognized as a symptom 3 months ago...
- 5ociety 6y ago
  1. Is there such evidence? I don't consider articles to be evidence. 2. How MUCH more than the flu? 0.00000000000000001%? Any amount is enough to justify mass hysteria, right?
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    Given that this disease is killing more people than malaria, while infecting far fewer, I don't think you want to find out just how bad it can get if we don't take strong measures to stop it.
    - 5ociety 6y ago
      You do get the fallacy here right? You can say that about anything. Shouldn't we also put severe restrictions on sugar consumption since that kills more people than malaria and covid19 combined? You can use your argument about literally anything that kills people and has a greater than 0 chance of happening. Have you looked at any statistics yourself aside from reading articles? What would be an acceptable death rate to you? and within 10 seconds you downvoted my comment. lol, how are we supposed to have a serious discussion like this?
      - macintux 6y ago
        You do know there’s a fundamental difference between something that spreads between people who aren’t symptomatic, and sugar consumption? I downvoted within 10 seconds because it happened to pop up and I’m tired of this silly false equivalency between a novel pandemic with unknown impact and known diseases with known treatments.
        5ociety 6y ago
        Wrong. You downvoted because you downvote all things you don't already agree with. I would be surprised if you didn't also downvote opposing political views. You downvote things. That is how you make a difference in the world, by downvoting things. You should downvote yourself because you've decided to argue a different point for internet points. Lots of preventable things kill people.

HarryHirsch 6y ago

Here's a first-hand account: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/health/coronavirus-peter-piot.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/health/coronavirus-peter-... Also: the Theodore Roosevelt. The captain wouldn't have risked his career for a bunch of sailors with bad flu. But apparently all of the propulsion team was affected to such an extent that they couldn't tend the reactor any longer. It's that bad.

Mikeb85 6y ago

This. I had it. Literally every symptom except loss of taste and smell (but had some other rarer symptoms like the pink eye thing). Also had a cough for like a month, and loss of energy and breath for about a month and a half. Only just recently feel 100%. While it was shitty and lingered a while the worst of it wasn't actually that much worse than a flu for me. Somewhere between the flu and bronchitis on the scale of how sick I've been in my life.

azinman2 6y ago
How do you think you got it?
- Mikeb85 6y ago
  Working in a tourist town, in the hospitality industry (I frequent this site since I did some CS related stuff for my degree years ago but hospitality is my first love). I got it around the last week of February, before any travel restrictions in Canada. We get (or got) tons of tourists from both Asia and Europe.
  - azinman2 6y ago
    Do you feel like you had prolonged exposure to someone at a close distance?
    - Mikeb85 6y ago
      Not really, but it's a small town with a young, active population and way more bars per capita than is reasonable. So I hike, ski, go to bars and restaurants, work in hospitality. I would come into close-ish contact with 50+ people per day for sure. Probably more. Tourists and locals come into enough contact too (servers at restaurants, retail workers, etc...). So Covid was likely floating around here, lots of people I know said they were sick but very few got tested, but our demographics mean that only 1 person died (80+ year old man) and no one else was ever hospitalized.
6y ago