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It's absolutely disingenuous to use CFR to drive home a point about absolute deaths rates in a population. People with asymptomatic infections (which are the m

It's absolutely disingenuous to use CFR to drive home a point about absolute deaths rates in a population. People with asymptomatic infections (which are the majority of them) do not have any reason to get tested, so they do not count as "cases".

tombert 5y ago
That's probably true, so maybe the 2% death rate is too high, again, let's assume that the OP's point of 0.5% is accurate. As I said, that still implies that if everyone in the United States got it, 1.5 million of them would die (320,000,000 * .005). That's a lot of people. If a government did nothing to prevent a terrorist attack that killed 1.5 million people, most people would (rightly) be pretty upset. EDIT: Also, forgot to mention, it's totally disingenuous to only look at "deaths". We do not fully know the long term health effects, but as I stated there's potential neurological effects, potential risks of type 1 diabetes, and people permanently losing smell.
- lax4ever 5y ago
  While I can appreciate where you are coming from, countering a terrorist attack typically has something that we don't have with COVID and that is information. The world was introduced and expected to react to this disease without any sort of "tactical" knowledge. Even if you include the other four variants of coronavirus, the availability of information can still be considered sorely lacking. Discounting government-provided information, even medical sources had a harder time providing a consensus on how the disease was transmitted during the first few months. That the larger questions like why we have such a large population that appears to be asymptomatic remains unanswered while we are still being pushed to "one-size-fits-all" remedy (and a remedy that appears to only be there to debase the severity of symptoms) doesn't help. Unfortunately, we need information, and information is going to take time. The long term arguments for health side effects are on both sides of the coin here.
tremon 5y ago
It's also similarly absolutely disingenuous to use any other number that's not based on measured (or measurable) facts. CFR is the only one we have right now, what else do you suggest?

tombert 5y ago

That's probably true, so maybe the 2% death rate is too high, again, let's assume that the OP's point of 0.5% is accurate. As I said, that still implies that if everyone in the United States got it, 1.5 million of them would die (320,000,000 * .005). That's a lot of people. If a government did nothing to prevent a terrorist attack that killed 1.5 million people, most people would (rightly) be pretty upset. EDIT: Also, forgot to mention, it's totally disingenuous to only look at "deaths". We do not fully know the long term health effects, but as I stated there's potential neurological effects, potential risks of type 1 diabetes, and people permanently losing smell.

lax4ever 5y ago
While I can appreciate where you are coming from, countering a terrorist attack typically has something that we don't have with COVID and that is information. The world was introduced and expected to react to this disease without any sort of "tactical" knowledge. Even if you include the other four variants of coronavirus, the availability of information can still be considered sorely lacking. Discounting government-provided information, even medical sources had a harder time providing a consensus on how the disease was transmitted during the first few months. That the larger questions like why we have such a large population that appears to be asymptomatic remains unanswered while we are still being pushed to "one-size-fits-all" remedy (and a remedy that appears to only be there to debase the severity of symptoms) doesn't help. Unfortunately, we need information, and information is going to take time. The long term arguments for health side effects are on both sides of the coin here.

tremon 5y ago

It's also similarly absolutely disingenuous to use any other number that's not based on measured (or measurable) facts. CFR is the only one we have right now, what else do you suggest?