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> There have been 1.5 million confirmed Covid deaths It'd really be halpful to frame with some kind of context. TB kills that many annually. To make matters wo

> There have been 1.5 million confirmed Covid deaths It'd really be halpful to frame with some kind of context. TB kills that many annually. To make matters worse, it's a curable disease, so these deaths are entirely unnecessary, but when was the last time you heard a peep about that? It's been raging for decades, and WHO is targeting 2030 as the end of it.

corin_ 6y ago
You're ignoring the fact that this is despite huge restrictions around the world to limit its spread, if approached the same way as TB it would do insanely more harm.
jacobolus 6y ago
The best current estimate of the IFR of Covid is something like 0.5% with good medical care, or much higher without. If populations take no action whatsoever to curb spread, somewhere between 1/3 and 2/3 of people will likely be infected. If we multiply that by the population of the world, we get something on the order of 15–50 million people dead. Not as bad as the 1918 flu, but worse than any pandemic since, roughly comparable to the entire death toll of AIDS over the past 40 years. Thankfully all around the world people have taken significant steps to slow the virus down, and so hopefully the vaccine will arrive in time to save tens of millions. I am happy to agree with you that humanity could do a whole lot more to prevent deaths from infectious diseases, including tuberculosis.
- shadowprofile77 6y ago
  Truly, where do you keep pulling the most alarmist numbers you think you can plausibly get away with from? COVID IFR at 0.5% with exceptional treatment? No, none of the wider more recent data backs this up, and please, don't just take my word for it. The CDC's more recent overview results don't at all back up your claim even though they do state that IFR can vary by region due to demographic and other factors. https://www.cdc.gov/library/covid19/112420_covidupdate.html https://www.cdc.gov/library/covid19/112420_covidupdate.html
  - jacobolus 6y ago
    First, off the bat: why are you so aggressively hostile and abusive? Your link estimates the Covid IFR in the USA to be about 0.6%, compared to e.g. 0.4% for China where the population skews younger or 0.8–1.1% for several European countries and Japan where the population skews older. https://www.cdc.gov/library/covid19/images/november2020/1124_FIG3.png https://www.cdc.gov/library/covid19/images/november2020/1124... I’m somewhat suspicious about the numbers for lower-income countries though. In Mexico for example Covid deaths have been grossly undercounted. These kind of high-level estimates are hard to do reliably when they are built on poor-quality low-level data. I don’t know why you are pretending that “good medical care” (by which I mean, the average in a typical developed country with a well funded medical system that has not yet been completely overwhelmed; as compared to the “poor” level of care available in many developing countries or in places where hospitals are collapsing) is equivalent to “exceptional treatment”. I don’t know what you mean by “exceptional treatment”, but your link says nothing about it. There have been a large number of estimates of IFR, and they consistently range from about 0.4% to about 1.5%, mostly toward the middle of that range. Judging by the best current science, the 0.5% number I used is probably a slight underestimate, but it is at at any rate in the right ballpark. If you e.g. guess the actual number of deaths in absence of any countermeasures would be more like 10–20 million instead of the range I gave of 15–50 million, that seems plausible enough (though I stand by my estimate). It’s a counterfactual in any case, since in practice extreme countermeasures were adopted in many parts of the world.
lazyasciiart 6y ago
Speaking of necessary context - in 2019 the US saw several hundred people die of TB, vs ~250,000 of covid so far this year. For better or worse, it's been possible to control the spread of TB so that it is no longer a great threat in the west, and that is what controls the amount of American money and public interest spent on it. But, the way this control has been achieved is that the US and many other rich countries require anyone applying to immigrate (and many people not applying to immigrate, if they are from a risky country) to be screened for TB and be treated successfully before they are allowed to enter the country (with some waivers where treatment is unlikely to be available where they are). On top of all these border controls, at least $100 million is spent specifically on TB just inside the US every year, in order to keep the number of annual cases down somewhere around 10,000. Until 2019 healthcare professionals in the USA were required to be screened for TB every year. People in America who do contract active TB disease are required to take medication daily, personally supervised by a healthcare professional, for six months - to make sure they do it correctly. And all this is only possible because TB takes a pretty significant amount of contact to spread, and there's a detectable latent stage (sometimes lasting an entire lifetime) of infection before it becomes contagious - neither of which is true with covid.

corin_ 6y ago

You're ignoring the fact that this is despite huge restrictions around the world to limit its spread, if approached the same way as TB it would do insanely more harm.

jacobolus 6y ago

The best current estimate of the IFR of Covid is something like 0.5% with good medical care, or much higher without. If populations take no action whatsoever to curb spread, somewhere between 1/3 and 2/3 of people will likely be infected. If we multiply that by the population of the world, we get something on the order of 15–50 million people dead. Not as bad as the 1918 flu, but worse than any pandemic since, roughly comparable to the entire death toll of AIDS over the past 40 years. Thankfully all around the world people have taken significant steps to slow the virus down, and so hopefully the vaccine will arrive in time to save tens of millions. I am happy to agree with you that humanity could do a whole lot more to prevent deaths from infectious diseases, including tuberculosis.

shadowprofile77 6y ago
Truly, where do you keep pulling the most alarmist numbers you think you can plausibly get away with from? COVID IFR at 0.5% with exceptional treatment? No, none of the wider more recent data backs this up, and please, don't just take my word for it. The CDC's more recent overview results don't at all back up your claim even though they do state that IFR can vary by region due to demographic and other factors. https://www.cdc.gov/library/covid19/112420_covidupdate.html https://www.cdc.gov/library/covid19/112420_covidupdate.html
- jacobolus 6y ago
  First, off the bat: why are you so aggressively hostile and abusive? Your link estimates the Covid IFR in the USA to be about 0.6%, compared to e.g. 0.4% for China where the population skews younger or 0.8–1.1% for several European countries and Japan where the population skews older. https://www.cdc.gov/library/covid19/images/november2020/1124_FIG3.png https://www.cdc.gov/library/covid19/images/november2020/1124... I’m somewhat suspicious about the numbers for lower-income countries though. In Mexico for example Covid deaths have been grossly undercounted. These kind of high-level estimates are hard to do reliably when they are built on poor-quality low-level data. I don’t know why you are pretending that “good medical care” (by which I mean, the average in a typical developed country with a well funded medical system that has not yet been completely overwhelmed; as compared to the “poor” level of care available in many developing countries or in places where hospitals are collapsing) is equivalent to “exceptional treatment”. I don’t know what you mean by “exceptional treatment”, but your link says nothing about it. There have been a large number of estimates of IFR, and they consistently range from about 0.4% to about 1.5%, mostly toward the middle of that range. Judging by the best current science, the 0.5% number I used is probably a slight underestimate, but it is at at any rate in the right ballpark. If you e.g. guess the actual number of deaths in absence of any countermeasures would be more like 10–20 million instead of the range I gave of 15–50 million, that seems plausible enough (though I stand by my estimate). It’s a counterfactual in any case, since in practice extreme countermeasures were adopted in many parts of the world.

lazyasciiart 6y ago

Speaking of necessary context - in 2019 the US saw several hundred people die of TB, vs ~250,000 of covid so far this year. For better or worse, it's been possible to control the spread of TB so that it is no longer a great threat in the west, and that is what controls the amount of American money and public interest spent on it. But, the way this control has been achieved is that the US and many other rich countries require anyone applying to immigrate (and many people not applying to immigrate, if they are from a risky country) to be screened for TB and be treated successfully before they are allowed to enter the country (with some waivers where treatment is unlikely to be available where they are). On top of all these border controls, at least $100 million is spent specifically on TB just inside the US every year, in order to keep the number of annual cases down somewhere around 10,000. Until 2019 healthcare professionals in the USA were required to be screened for TB every year. People in America who do contract active TB disease are required to take medication daily, personally supervised by a healthcare professional, for six months - to make sure they do it correctly. And all this is only possible because TB takes a pretty significant amount of contact to spread, and there's a detectable latent stage (sometimes lasting an entire lifetime) of infection before it becomes contagious - neither of which is true with covid.