5 ms·

“Relatively high mortality”? Can you think of any virus even close to COVID mortality that we take these kinds of draconian measures to prevent?

creato 5y ago
Can you think of any virus that caused hospitals around the world to be overwhelmed with patients, compromising their ability to treat normal ailments?
- nostrebored 5y ago
  Hospitals are frequently overwhelmed and operate at capacity limits basically constantly in large parts of the world
smus 5y ago
Yeah let's play this game! Let me count all the viruses that killed close to a million Americans in the last 2 years! 1. COVID
- hcurtiss 5y ago
  Transmissivity /= mortality rate
  - smus 5y ago
    Why are we talking about the mortality rate and not the overall mortality of the virus? Seems that the metric that matters is how many people it kills. Especially since we are actively fighting the virus harder than most in the past few years.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
bink 5y ago
I'm sure you know this but there hasn't been a pandemic virus as virulent and deadly as COVID-19 in modern times. For some perspective, Chicken Pox killed roughly 100 Americans every year and that vaccine was mandated in effectively all schools and universities across the country.
- hcurtiss 5y ago
  The chicken pox vaccine was invented in Japan in the 1970s, was approved for kids in the US in 1995, and required in schools sometime in the early 2000's, depending on the state -- nearly 30 years after its invention. This is very unlike the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine.
ethbr0 5y ago
> Can you think of any virus even close to COVID mortality that we take these kinds of draconian measures to prevent? SARS-CoV-1 (2002), MERS (2012+) "Of the 7 coronaviruses, the former four can cause common cold symptoms, but SARS-CoV-2, SARS-CoV, and MERS-CoV can lead to severe respiratory syndromes, with about 6.76%, 9.6%, and 35.5% mortality rates, respectively." [0] We just dodged a bullet because they were regionally-contained and/or had lower transmissibility. But if you were in Asia before and after 2002, you noticed. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7334925/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7334925/ Edit: And if we want to go to the more-lethal, less-transmissible end of the spectrum (so roughly equivalent in terms of public health risk), the regularly recurring Ebola outbreaks in Africa. Most recently the 2013-2016 campaign. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ebola_outbreaks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ebola_outbreaks
- hcurtiss 5y ago
  That paper was a meta-study from July of last year based on papers even older, and it's loaded with problems. This paper in the Lancet [1] and this paper in BMJ on Delta [2] both have mortality at significantly lower. World-o-meter has the mortality rate in New York at 0.28%. [3] [1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(21)00393-5/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3... (Among RT-PCR-confirmed cases tested by Oct 1, 2020, 342 (2·4%; 95% CI 2·2–2·6) of 14 237 died within 30 days of their positive test. Mortality was 0·4% (95% CI 0·3–0·6) at ages 0–39 years, 2·0% (1·7–2·3) at ages 40–64 years, 7·5% (6·4–8·7) at ages 65–79 years, and 15·4% (11·6–19·6) in those aged 80 years or older (figure 4)) [2] https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n579 https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n579 (The absolute risk of death in this group of community identified participants, however, remains relatively low, increasing from 2.5 to 4.1 deaths per 1000 cases.) [3] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-rate/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-...
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    You're confusing case fatality rate (detected infection denominator) with infection fatality rate (total population denominator). The study I cited was (broadly) CFR. That Lancet study is (broadly) IFR. If you proactively surveillance test 13.5% of Madurai's population, you're going to get a different class of people in your denominator, and your calculated mortality is going to decrease. The BMJ study is probably the most broadly compatible, which leaves us at 2.5% (non-Delta) or 4.1% (Delta), which appears to be case fatality rate? If we want to argue apples:apples, we should use EMR-based studies that attempt to calculate IFR, as at least they're reasoning with the same population composition. This [0] has SARS-CoV-2 at somewhere between 0.26% and 0.83% IFR. Which for context, is compared to respiratory flu at 0.0088% (estimated total population EMR due to flu) [1]. So we'd expect about 29.5x as many people to die from SARS-CoV-2 (using the high end estimate of flu and the low end estimate of SARS-CoV-2, to generate the lowest possible multiple). If you want to, you can probably dig European numbers out of this excess mortality calculation [2], although that's all-cause mortality, with no attempt to isolate cause. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7543961/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7543961/ [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5935243/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5935243/ [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7346364/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7346364/

creato 5y ago

Can you think of any virus that caused hospitals around the world to be overwhelmed with patients, compromising their ability to treat normal ailments?

nostrebored 5y ago
Hospitals are frequently overwhelmed and operate at capacity limits basically constantly in large parts of the world

smus 5y ago

Yeah let's play this game! Let me count all the viruses that killed close to a million Americans in the last 2 years! 1. COVID

hcurtiss 5y ago
Transmissivity /= mortality rate
- smus 5y ago
  Why are we talking about the mortality rate and not the overall mortality of the virus? Seems that the metric that matters is how many people it kills. Especially since we are actively fighting the virus harder than most in the past few years.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

bink 5y ago

I'm sure you know this but there hasn't been a pandemic virus as virulent and deadly as COVID-19 in modern times. For some perspective, Chicken Pox killed roughly 100 Americans every year and that vaccine was mandated in effectively all schools and universities across the country.

hcurtiss 5y ago
The chicken pox vaccine was invented in Japan in the 1970s, was approved for kids in the US in 1995, and required in schools sometime in the early 2000's, depending on the state -- nearly 30 years after its invention. This is very unlike the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine.

ethbr0 5y ago

> Can you think of any virus even close to COVID mortality that we take these kinds of draconian measures to prevent? SARS-CoV-1 (2002), MERS (2012+) "Of the 7 coronaviruses, the former four can cause common cold symptoms, but SARS-CoV-2, SARS-CoV, and MERS-CoV can lead to severe respiratory syndromes, with about 6.76%, 9.6%, and 35.5% mortality rates, respectively." [0] We just dodged a bullet because they were regionally-contained and/or had lower transmissibility. But if you were in Asia before and after 2002, you noticed. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7334925/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7334925/ Edit: And if we want to go to the more-lethal, less-transmissible end of the spectrum (so roughly equivalent in terms of public health risk), the regularly recurring Ebola outbreaks in Africa. Most recently the 2013-2016 campaign. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ebola_outbreaks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ebola_outbreaks

hcurtiss 5y ago
That paper was a meta-study from July of last year based on papers even older, and it's loaded with problems. This paper in the Lancet [1] and this paper in BMJ on Delta [2] both have mortality at significantly lower. World-o-meter has the mortality rate in New York at 0.28%. [3] [1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(21)00393-5/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3... (Among RT-PCR-confirmed cases tested by Oct 1, 2020, 342 (2·4%; 95% CI 2·2–2·6) of 14 237 died within 30 days of their positive test. Mortality was 0·4% (95% CI 0·3–0·6) at ages 0–39 years, 2·0% (1·7–2·3) at ages 40–64 years, 7·5% (6·4–8·7) at ages 65–79 years, and 15·4% (11·6–19·6) in those aged 80 years or older (figure 4)) [2] https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n579 https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n579 (The absolute risk of death in this group of community identified participants, however, remains relatively low, increasing from 2.5 to 4.1 deaths per 1000 cases.) [3] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-rate/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-...
- ethbr0 5y ago
  You're confusing case fatality rate (detected infection denominator) with infection fatality rate (total population denominator). The study I cited was (broadly) CFR. That Lancet study is (broadly) IFR. If you proactively surveillance test 13.5% of Madurai's population, you're going to get a different class of people in your denominator, and your calculated mortality is going to decrease. The BMJ study is probably the most broadly compatible, which leaves us at 2.5% (non-Delta) or 4.1% (Delta), which appears to be case fatality rate? If we want to argue apples:apples, we should use EMR-based studies that attempt to calculate IFR, as at least they're reasoning with the same population composition. This [0] has SARS-CoV-2 at somewhere between 0.26% and 0.83% IFR. Which for context, is compared to respiratory flu at 0.0088% (estimated total population EMR due to flu) [1]. So we'd expect about 29.5x as many people to die from SARS-CoV-2 (using the high end estimate of flu and the low end estimate of SARS-CoV-2, to generate the lowest possible multiple). If you want to, you can probably dig European numbers out of this excess mortality calculation [2], although that's all-cause mortality, with no attempt to isolate cause. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7543961/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7543961/ [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5935243/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5935243/ [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7346364/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7346364/