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Since top comments here are anecdata about how terrible covid is for a young person, just thought I'd share my experience. Everyone I know who has gotten covid

• mlang23 6y ago
  Thanks for posting this. While the rate of cases in my vascinity isn't as high as your seems to be, I only hear about mild to "strange weird cold". I am glad for them. Doesn't seem like the big danger the media is trying to sell. At least not in my circles.
• dpweb 6y ago
  Averages don't matter. Most people walk away from car accidents unhurt. Still, seatbelts are mandatory. We choose a level of precautions (cost) according to the risk. Which is what bugs me about the non-mask crowd cause it costs NOTHING. Having yourself injected with a newly developed substance is a different thing. Let's face facts, the long-term effects are unknowable - you trade that for the short-term protection.
  • ffggvv 6y ago
    i’m not comparing them but you could say the same for the flu. as there are many people who die from it. it’s all a matter of where you draw the line of risk/reward
    • thomasz 6y ago
      Our healthcare systems are designed to handle a bad flu season. COVID is different in so far as it's far more deadly, and that it puts a higher burden on the health care systems because the average time spent in an ICU is way longer.
      • Izkata 6y ago
        > COVID is different in so far as it's far more deadly It's not really "far more" deadly. The main problem is the lack of immunity and everyone getting it at once.
        • thomasz 6y ago
          Which results in way more deaths.
    • fweespeech 6y ago
      https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-estimates.htm https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-e... The estimate for this flu season is 24k to 62k deaths. 246k people have died from Covid so far, despite precautions. Its a substantial difference.
      • disgruntledphd2 6y ago
        And flu season hasn't even started. Covid hit after flu season, so those numbers are probably a better case scenario.
    • clint 6y ago
      Its also extremely disappointing that we don't treat the seasonal flu more seriously. People talk about this, it just took a pandemic for most people to pay attention. Folks should be wearing masks when they are or even might be sick with ANY transmissible disease. Its actually pretty insane that pre-covid, folks would go into public and work while endangering who knows how many people (I know a lot of people don't have the option, which is a whole other bag of worms). I find it extremely depressing that people compare this to other easily preventable deaths (I see it often online and from my own family) and say: "See we handle the seasonal flu pretty horribly, why are we trying so hard with COVID-19?"
      • mattbk1 6y ago
        My hope is that masks become much more socially acceptable for regular cold/flu after all this.
      • el_benhameen 6y ago
        I heard a stat that in the southern hemisphere's 2019 flu season, the rate of flu tests that came back positive was something on the order of 13%. This flu season, the test positivity rate is 0.6%. Obviously lockdowns and even significant social distancing aren't going to happen for the flu, but I think you're right that we could easily do so much better when it comes to other transmissible diseases, and I hope that at the very least masking sticks with us.
      • noelherrick 6y ago
        Amen! We should all: - Wear a mask when even slightly ill - Stay home as much possible (even getting another person to pickup food) if you have symptoms - Get the flu shot Stores, schools, etc. should also really think about circulation, hand sanitizer, and perhaps even nightly UV-C disinfectant. Company culture needs to change: when sick, people should work from home for a job like programming and companies need give more sick leave for jobs like teaching where telecommuting doesn't work as well. Businesses really need to think about their part to play in protecting their customers. As a side note, my mother who is older wasn't interested in the flu shot and I always wondered why. Even if it's 60% effective, that's just halving your chances of a sometimes fatal disease for $20 and a fifteen minute visit to a pharmacy. The US in particular needs to figure out how to do public health better.
  • hintymad 6y ago
    Yeah, that's always my take on wearing masks: it's a decision of risk management. The potential downside of not wearing a mask is just too much larger than that of wearing one, especially when we still have much to know about the virus.
  • just-juan-post 6y ago
    > Let's face facts, the long-term effects are unknowable - you trade that for the short-term protection. Sure, lock yourself in your house until the virus goes away. We are fine with that. Just don't impose those restrictions on everyone.
    • akiselev 6y ago
      Let's apply that thought process to climate change, condoms, and surgical PPE too! Don't you dare impose reality on me!
      • ardy42 6y ago
        > Let's apply that thought process to climate change, condoms, and surgical PPE too! Don't you dare impose reality on me! Or drunk driving.
    • tayo42 6y ago
      What about the people who don't have that luxury to lock them selves away but want protection. The people stocking shelves, picking and packaging your food, delivering your stuff from Amazon
  • aantix 6y ago
    I wouldn't say it costs us "NOTHING". Most no longer make eye contact. Or shake hands. I can't tell whether someone is genuinely smiling or laughing. Voices are muffled. They're a distraction. I miss face to face conversations with strangers. I miss talking fast, getting excited, and not having my glasses fog up because I apparently breath fast when excited. There's an element of humanity that's simply been lost. EDIT: This isn't a response to what is the appropriate trade-offs for lives lost. It's specifically a response to the idea that "nothing" is lost when wearing a mask.
    • disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      So do I. I desperately want to get back to being able to see random strangers, and my colleagues in an office. I want my newborn to see her grandmother and my family. I'm just not willing to trade off a bunch of deaths for that.
    • snazz 6y ago
      I can't wait for them to be gone too, but I happily wear one if it protects the people around me.
      • aantix 6y ago
        For how long? 5 years? Ten years? The rest of your life?
        • snazz 6y ago
          I expect that the pandemic will follow Bill Gates's prediction—the developed world will be back to "normal" sometime near the end of 2021. For at least a decade, I expect it to be socially acceptable to wear a mask. However, I think that we'll be comfortable going to concerts and grocery shopping with no social distancing or masks long before then.
    • bavell 6y ago
      I do my part and wear a mask in public but I can't wait to stop breathing so much re-circulated CO2... I can practically feel my blood-oxygen levels dropping after prolonged use (perceived or actual)...
  • wendyshu 6y ago
    You mean medians don't matter?
• dangus 6y ago
  Why not just use the actual data and not anecdata at all? And also, the extremes are important because statistically more people hit those extremes than with other respiratory viruses. There are states reporting nearly full ICUs right now. There are states (re)opening field hospitals. The whole reason for lockdowns and restrictions isn’t to prevent a huge amount of deaths. Most people don’t die from Covid. The whole point is to keep our hospital system above water.
  • rwcarlsen 6y ago
    Why was the most upvoted comment before mine anecdata? Obviously people find anecdata relevant or it wouldn't be so upvoted.
    • dangus 6y ago
      Why are you worried about who is upvoted?
      • rwcarlsen 6y ago
        I'm not - I just wanted to try to provide a more balanced view after the fashion that the community seems to be interested in.
• beamatronic 6y ago
  Are these average towns? Or millionaire towns?
  • rwcarlsen 6y ago
    Think of a typical ag-focused rural town filled with mostly below-median incomes.
• elorant 6y ago
  I had it too. Symptoms were pretty negligible, a medium severity headache and an exhaustion for a day. Slept for 12 hours straight, next day I was as good as new.
  • watermelon59 6y ago
    Did you get tested?
    • elorant 6y ago
      I did an antibody test a few months later. I couldn't be tested when I had it because I didn't think it was covid. Only after talking to someone who have had covid and developed similar symptoms I realized that I might have been infected too.
• just-juan-post 6y ago
  That's not now the modern internet works. It's now competition and one of the best ways to score points in this competition is by manipulating the empathy of your fellow human. I wish the internet was still about real discussion but now it's about heartstrings and upvotes. Haven't you notice the same pattern with the "long covid" stories? Light on science, heavy on heartstrings. An internet based off of rational discussion is long dead, even here on HN. Just watched the mods (hi @dang ) wipe nuke a story about Sweden's Covid-19 success off the front page. [1] Oh well. [1] = https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25112382 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25112382
  • rwcarlsen 6y ago
    It's surprising to me how difficult it is to have a discussion in the (cyberspace) open holding what I consider the internet-minority-viewpoint on covid. Even on HN (among other platforms), which is one of the places where I often go to find good balanced viewpoints, when sharing anything remotely different from toeing the covid line (i.e. vaccines will save the day, everyone must get vaccinated, we must force people to wear masks, schools should be closed, the virus is causing the economic disaster, etc.) I see people get downvoted, censored, etc. to oblivion. It's nice to see that there are other folks out there that don't exhibit the wild levels of fear and concern for what I consider to be much ado about nothing.
    • just-juan-post 6y ago
      It doesn't at all help that we have both China [1] and political parties manipulating public opinion for votes [2] I miss the old internet where I could talk to rational people like you but now Eternal September has truly arrived. [1] - https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/china-covid-lockdown-propaganda https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/china-covid... [2] - https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-kamala-harris-got-big-social-media-boost-indian-troll-farms-1544047 https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-kamala-harris-got-big-soc...
    • ardy42 6y ago
      > It's surprising to me how difficult it is to have a discussion in the (cyberspace) open holding what I consider the internet-minority-viewpoint on covid. The thing is, not all viewpoints are equally valid, and some are both unreasonable given the facts and have actually dangerous implications. For instance, minority viewpoints like promoting herd immunity as a solution at this point (like some prominent people were doing as recently as a month ago [1]) is about the dumbest thing ever. It's pretty much "let's try to get everyone sick (with the death and disability that entails) just before our vaccine effort bears fruit and would make that pain unnecessary. It's nonsense, and at this point it makes more sense to downvote than to beat the same dead horse yet again. [1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-embraces-idea-herd-immunity-fauci-calls-concept/story?id=73634243 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-embraces-idea-herd-imm...
• wobblyasp 6y ago
  Because even those who are vehement supporters of lockdowns/wide spread health measures understand that this only affects a small percentage of those who contract it. We don't need examples of people who had no issues, 99%+ of people won't have issues. Everyone knows its not going to kill most people, that's not what they're trying to prevent. They're trying to prevent it getting into long term care homes, or into at risk communities (indigenous, low income, obese, etc). They're trying to give you good reasons to want to wear a mask, want to cut down on your social interactions, and want to help stop the spread.
  • rwcarlsen 6y ago
    Yes - but when we only hear about, think about, and look at the extremes, it becomes too easy to let our thought-processes about the situation become (even subconsciously) skewed. It's too easy to forget that the constant barrage of stories and information is actually about the extremes. It takes deliberate effort to keep the balanced view.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • wobblyasp 6y ago
      For sure; that's why people reiterate the 99%+ metric. This isn't a cataclysmic virus that will wipe out life on earth, but it will tax health care systems far beyond what they're capable of handling. It will devastate economies, lock downs or not, globally. It's far to easy to dismiss the effects if we see it "only" hurts <1% of people; which is why people feel the need to constantly reinforce the negative impacts.
      • soulbow 6y ago
        Serious question, I don't have a political agenda by asking this: How will a virus that hurts <1% of people devastate economies, lockdowns or not? Economic devastation from lockdowns is clear. Economic devastation from a virus that primarily hurts the elderly is not clear to me. Again, I'm not making any points about the value determination of lives saved vs GDP saved, only asking how you quantify the economic impact of a virus.
• newscracker 6y ago
  > Nobody has any lingering issues. I think it’s too soon to declare that, with long term lung/organ damage being indicated for people (of course, this also depends on a few different factors).
  • usaphp 6y ago
    So why is it too soon to declare about long term covid damage, even tho we had it for almost a year now and have data of millions of people who had it, but it’s not too soon to declare that a vaccine that was created in 2 months and tested on 50k healthy adults is safer?
    • arichard123 6y ago
      We understand that covid is causing scarring on the lungs heart and kidneys and other organs, in some cases. This would reduce function of those organs, and that reduction may not impact people until they are older. That's why it's too soon to declare it for covid in any individual case. Vaccines work differently, if they caused such scarring for example, it would be accompanied by a bunch of other symptoms which would have been spotted and tested. As a result you can't point to something like I have for covid and make the same argument. Yet, we do understand the vaccine protects us from covid, so we can make an argument about it being a net positive overall.
    • headmelted 6y ago
      I don’t think the parent has said that, though. All they’ve said is we shouldn’t draw conclusions yet about long-term COVID damage. No mention of vaccines.
    • dagmx 6y ago
      Because we can extrapolate from our scientific understanding of both? We know fairly well what damage covid-19 does to the body, and we know fairly well what other similar Corona viruses have done. Similarly we know the qualities of these vaccines and the likelihood of their success and failure rates. The vaccine isn't created by pure chance. It's a result of an iterative scientific process.
    • 6y ago
• think814 6y ago
  The reason why extreme cases are showcased, is because it fits a certain narrative. We all know what that narrative is - that Covid prevention should take precedence over everything else. The fact that the prevention is worse than the disease, in terms of economic hardship, depression, deprivation of education, etc; the fact that prevention measures hit poor people and minorities much more than rich people (who can move around and educate their kids in private schools that largerly do not shut down) - these are all inconvenient facts. At least be honest - say you know lockdowns are horrible for many people that even if they got the disease would be fine (save for the extreme anecdotes!) but we still decide to impose them. Really hard to have an honest conversation based on facts these days.
  • gootdude 6y ago
    Agreed, changing up my habits to wearing a mask in public was definitely a much bigger hardship compared to the lucky few that met their maker.
    • jeofken 6y ago
      Let’s try to keep snark and sarcasm out of the discussion, and instead argue out of data or first principles. HN is a rare bastion of light on the internet - a refuge of civil discussion
  • wbl 6y ago
    Countries that actually are serious close bars not schools. Life is basically normal in Wuhan and New Zealand. Meanwhile Christmas is cancelled this year because Western governments didn't do exactly what China did.
    • csharptwdec19 6y ago
      Wuhan's lockdown was extreme however; literally locking people inside their homes. Most western societies will not stand for that. New Zealand had the advantage of having a huge amount of experience with protecting their biodiversity. I'm willing to bet a lot of that experience was transferrable to this situation.
• aws_ls 6y ago
  We had it in our family few weeks ago. Total 6 persons got it. Thankfully for most was very mild, including me. One person had a bit prolonged cough/cold for 5-6 days.
• jmcgough 6y ago
  Keep in mind that most people on HN are white and middle/upper income with good health insurance, so I'm not sure you'll get a good representative sample here. This disease is exacerbating existing differences in health and healthcare access. Black Americans are twice as likely to die from this than white, and have higher risk of infection as well.
  • blix 6y ago
    Some of my family members work(ed) at a south-side Chicago hospital that treats mainly low-income black people. The hospital is shutting down because of the pandemic (or at least using it as an excuse to get out of a low-value market). The area already had poor healthcare access, and it will get much worse in the near future. I feel a lot of well-off people are not considering effects like these, which will likely be quite large, when they weigh the long term consequences of our disease response. And it's weird to me that even the most progressive people in my life are happy to use grocery delivery and similar services that essentially transfer disease risk from privileged groups to poor minorities. It's like people don't have the emotional bandwidth to be worried about the disease and inequality at the same time.
    • nineplay 6y ago
      > use grocery delivery and similar services that essentially transfer disease risk from privileged groups to poor minorities Is using a grocery delivery service a greater risk vector than making a trip to the store in person? That's not obvious to me, certainly poor minorities can work at grocery stores too. Is is it necessary true that grocery delivery service providers are poor minorities? At the risk of revisiting the Prop 22 debate, my downstairs neighbor is a college student who's happy to go out and do some deliveries as time allows.
      • blix 6y ago
        If you order through e.g. instacart somebody usually still has to make an in-person trip to the store and take things off shelves. It's the same vector, but you are paying someone else to be exposed to it. It's not necessarily true but it is statistically true. Gig workers are more likely to be non-white and have lower educational attainment than traditional workers, and non-white gig workers are more likely to rely on gigs for primary income than white workers.
• jaequery 6y ago
  When hospitals are overwhelmed by the so called “nothing but a cold”, and you have a heart attack or some other emergency and waiting outside the hospital, you will then understand when it’s too late. Take a look at what’s currently happening at El Paso Texas. There’s no hospital to go to.
  • xahrepap 6y ago
    This. A million times. I live in an area where people are so more often than not downplaying how big of a deal Covid itself is because "99% have no lasting symptoms. Just a bad cold is all." or "My spouse had it. NBD." Mostly, you can't convince them otherwise. But I wish they could just see the effect it would have on non-covid hospital cases and think about that, if nothing else.
  • nostromo 6y ago
    For the record, this happens every few years due to influenza too. Most recently in 2018: https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patients/ https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...
• VectorLock 6y ago
  I've known two people who had it. One died. This might skew your "average" anecdata a bit.
• mips_avatar 6y ago
  Last night my neighbor suffered heart failure as a result of COVID. We won’t know how he got it, but it torments me that the movers he hired last week refused to wear masks while in his house. You’re right that catching COVID is unlikely to kill you, but if you flaunt precautions the loved ones of those who died will remember and be pained by your lack of concern.
• beezle 6y ago
  Here's the thing though. You (and the others you mention) are not likely to have had any diagnostic testing done to see if there have been knock on effects from the virus. That you may not have symptoms of other problems does not in itself mean there has not been damage done to organs or nervous system.
• eli 6y ago
  Since we have reasonably reliable data about hospitalizations, deaths, and transmission rates I don't think we should rely on anecdotes at all.
  • splaytreemap 6y ago
    Saying that isn't going to stop the news from running a story about the one healthy young person who died from it. The only way to counter this sort of disinformation campaign from the media is to individually tell the story of the 99,999 other healthy young people who got it and we're fine.
• tchocky 6y ago
  The people you know don't matter. The goal is not to overburden the health system. Hospitals have a limited amount of intensive care units. And if Covid patients fill them up doctors need to do triage (that happened on the first wave in Italy). Then it's not only an issue of people who have Covid, but also a problem of other people who need an intensive care unit. Also just because you don't know anyone doesn't mean it's bad. If we can reduce people dying it's worth doing it. And it's just not a few in this case.
  • elorant 6y ago
    That's the thing though. If we scare the shit out of everyone then they will all run to the nearest hospital the moment they have even mild symptoms. And then things will get worse for everyone. Doctors who are already exhausted might catch it and die, patients who entered the hospital for other reasons might also catch it and die, and the list goes on. We need to chill the f*ck down because there's enough panic spreading around.
    • tchocky 6y ago
      Of course we don't need panic. People should go to their family doctor first (and before going there just call, mine now only works with appointments for flu like symptoms). Here in Germany doctors can also give out a sick leave over the phone. The hospitals should only be visited in severe cases.
    • adrr 6y ago
      Hospitals are already filled with Covid patients. There’s almost 70,000 people who are hospitalized with the virus. Elective surgeries are being postponed again. People don’t understand the seriousness of the virus and it continues to spread uncontrolled straining our medical infrastructure.
      • elorant 6y ago
        Yes, and most of them shouldn't even be at the hospital. That's the point I'm trying to make. By making everyone hysterical they run to hospitals like flock, hindering the ability to nurse other patients with serious problems. Just stay home if you have covid, in the majority of cases hospitals can't help you either way.
• naavis 6y ago
  The small minority who get serious symptoms are enough to overwhelm hospitals if many people get the disease. Then hospitals cannot treat heart attacks, strokes, car accidents and other serious emergencies.
• ta8645 6y ago
  Sex workers have continued to see clients without using masks or observing social distancing rules. Yet they have not been noticed as a particularly affected group or even as a large transmission vector. So either we're not collecting the data that would reveal them as actually a problem, or something else has to explain why they are immune to the devastation that is supposed to be associated with Covid.
  • joshuamorton 6y ago
    Individual interactions 1:1 aren't the primary spread concern. Super spreader events and individuals are. Covid-19 is primarily spread by a small set of individuals who spread it to a large number of people. And people aren't likely to mention the sex worker they saw to a contact tracer, meaning the vector will be overlooked. Combine that with a relatively young demographic, and an ability to control who you interact with fairly carefully.
    • ta8645 6y ago
      So you're saying there are a lot of situations where masks and social distancing aren't important. This is a message you should spread more widely because it is currently lost in the noise.
      • joshuamorton 6y ago
        No. You might, might be able to interpret my comment as saying that for the very unique set of circumstances that involve sex work, masks aren't important. But that still wouldn't be a charitable interpretation. Please follow the hn guidelines. Masks and social distancing are always important, and always reduce the likelihood of spread. There are situations when those aren't possible. For example my dentist can't exactly maintain 6 feet of distance from me at all times. But can I wear a mask while in the office. For that reason we should maintain social distancing and mask precautions where possible, to keep the chance of spread low. While most transmission is via super spreader individuals, you can't know if the one person you give covid-19 will end up a spreader.
• nevinera 6y ago
  Humans are excellent at recognizing patterns, and as a result, we have strong heuristics for determining which things are worth worrying about, based on our own experiences. This particular virus has landed in a weak spot in our collective judgement mechanisms. Most people would consider a 1% chance of some event happening low enough to not worry about the impact of that event, and indeed, in a typical group of people that number is low enough that probably none of your friends or family will die of it. But if we recalculate the odds in terms of a particular in-group, and tell you that, of the 25 people you know and care about, there's a 22 percent chance that one of them will die, that seems like a large risk, and one you would work hard to avoid. And if we then polled all of the people like that, the majority of them wouldn't know anyone that had a bad case! We'd have anecdotes popping up constantly telling us "actually it wasn't that bad" and "stop worrying so much", alongside other anecdotes like "my sister was in the hospital for 3 weeks" and "my wife died in the waiting room". And if you look around in reality, you do in fact see both sets of anecdotes. (I used a 1% rate for serious cases because it's easy to work with, and not because it's accurate. Reality is as always more complex.)
  • Supermancho 6y ago
    > if we recalculate the odds in terms of a particular in-group, and tell you that, of the 25 people you know and care about, there's a 33 percent chance that one of them will die, that seems like a large risk, and one you would work hard to avoid. Isn't that 25% chance that someone will die of the personal cohort?
    • nevinera 6y ago
      Not exactly, but yes my math is wrong - it should be 22% that some member of the cohort dies. (`1.0 - (1.0 - X)^N`). I'll update the post.
• afjl 6y ago
  I think a lot of criticism is quite fair. I'm actually very keen to learn much more about the covid cases around you. What symptoms did they display? What was the timeline of their symptoms, or how did their illness develop/proceed? How soon after initial infection, did person-to-person infection begin? When were the infections/illnesses occurring (Feb/Mar/Apr? Or more recently?) What are the symptoms that stood out to you/them the most? What made them think that it was covid vs another upper respiratory disease? Did they get tested, what tests were used, and how accurate were those tests? What were the treatments, and treatment modalities that were recommended to them by public health officials or private physicians? Do they have post-illness physical records you're willing to share? I, too, (and I'm sure we all do) have quite a bit of other anecdata I could share - in my workplace, a number of people and their families have been infected. There's a wide variance of experiences - from very mild, to multiple deaths. I chose not to include that information because I couldn't verify their disease progression, or symptom development, or treatment regime. I can provide that actual in-depth information on my experience, based on counsel from my physician and medical health professionals. Ultimately, the most important questions: how do you create policy for a population, when their experiences are so different? Is this really the best we and our governments can do?
• ardy42 6y ago
  > Since top comments here are anecdata about how terrible covid is for a young person, just thought I'd share my experience. ... We don't want to paint our picture of the situation using only extremes. How about we include the "average" anecdata too? The reason for those anecdotes is to counter the false narrative that young people are basically invulnerable to Covid, and should therefore live like it doesn't exist. That false narrative has been quite prevalent, even here, as an oblique way of arguing against public health measures. There's no actual prevalent narrative that no one escapes Covid unscathed that needs to be countered.
  • rwcarlsen 6y ago
    Nobody is invulnerable to anything. But we should never make generalized/universal policies to the detriment of the masses motivated by long-tail extremes. Just because we don't know how to reliably measure the (real and large) impact of mitigations, doesn't mean we can/should pretent that impact doesn't exist. It's all about tradeoffs. And I'm tired of emotional heart-strings cases that are "easy" to measure stamping out all the real effects of mitigations that are "hard" to measure. And I've also heard way too much about, "but if we could have responded effectively/quickly like China/Vietnam/New Zealand then we wouldn't have been _forced_ to do these other damaging mitigations" - that is a theoretical idea/world that we don't live in. Given the actual situation - that we live in a country with free-spirited/selfish people with pretty significant individual liberties, how should we address the virus? That is the real question.
  • nostromo 6y ago
    > There's no actual prevalent narrative that no one escapes Covid unscathed that needs to be countered. Maybe not on HN, but if you talk to regular people that get their news from newspaper or cable news, they tend to be very misinformed about Covid-19’s severity and prevalence. A poll done in the UK found that people, on average, thought Covid-19 deaths were 100 times more numerous than they actually are. https://www.kekstcnc.com/insights/covid-19-opinion-tracker-edition-4 https://www.kekstcnc.com/insights/covid-19-opinion-tracker-e...
  • codingslave 6y ago
    1700 people under the age of 35 have died in the USA. Let that sink in. Out of EVERYONE in this country, only 1700 have died under 35
• ecocentrik 6y ago
  Including it is fine. Amplifying it to the point where people don't recognize the potential for suffering the serious effects of the virus or passing it on to others that will suffer the serious effects is dangerous.
• jjeaff 6y ago
  I find it unlikely that you would have much insight into the severity of disease in the 400 people in an entire community unless you just mean that no one died or hospital admissions were low. Because covid (or the flu for the matter) can be awefully severe and miserable and long lasting without requiring hospitalization.
• ipython 6y ago
  Geez, because there are more than first-order effects from the person who contracts the virus... this argument ticks me off so much, as if the only concern is "well, I don't die/get sick/have lasting effects, so what is the big darn deal?" Let me tell you what the big darn deal is, from the perspective of someone who likely won't get sick either. My wife just suffered through sepsis from a previous surgery. She ended up being admitted into the ICU for three days. I learned after the fact that there are roughly 40 staffed ICU beds in the entire county, population ~400,000. Those beds could easily be taken by COVID patients in a situation where you have uncontrolled community spread, and the hospital is now making difficult choices of who deserves those beds. Now as she recovers her immune system is still fragile. In her normal condition, she probably would be OK after contracting COVID-19. Now, perhaps not so much. If others around me assume that contracting COVID-19 is "no big deal" and end up transmitting it to her, that may not be a problem for those people. It would be a huge deal for me. What's missing in these rosy pictures of COVID-19 is the lack of awareness that... gasp... we live with other people, and that we all have a duty to protect each other, not just ourselves! What is so wrong with that? If wearing a mask helps me protect others around me, then why not do it? Honestly, if that's the worst encumbrance you've encountered in your life so far, then you've had quite the privileged experience, and as I'd say to my children, you're damn spoiled. If you don't want to listen to me, listen to the people who have taken an oath to protect my life and yours: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-enraging-deja-vu-of-a-third-coronavirus-wave https://www.propublica.org/article/the-enraging-deja-vu-of-a.... It's absurd the entitlement that some people display, thinking "well, if something bad happens to me, there will be someone to save me". At the end of the day, the nurses and doctors that treat you are people too. Respecting them means more than sending flowers or banging on pots, it means doing your part to help ensure they can care for the true emergencies and not just idiots who can't be bothered to follow some simple rules to help out the greater good.
  • rwcarlsen 6y ago
    Just because people drive like A-holes around me when I'm riding my bicycle on the road doesn't mean that I should try to get the government to take away their cars by force. Or to force them to never go over the speed limit. Or to force them to only drive smaller cars with better visibility out the windows. Sure it would be nice if people did all these things. But I don't think it's right to force any of it. I'm sorry about your wife - that would be really scary and suck. I hope that both of you are able to stay safe and healthy.