3 ms·
Given the virality and case fatality rate we knew at the time, we were on track to lose hundreds of millions of lives from covid back then (assuming no vaccines
by gfd 5y ago
Given the virality and case fatality rate we knew at the time, we were on track to lose hundreds of millions of lives from covid back then (assuming no vaccines and hospital infrastructure collapse).
Even with those worst case scenarios, there was still significant pushback to taking immediate global actions.
And this is no where near the same scale of a threat.
- tebbers 5y agoWe were nowhere close to losing hundreds of millions of lives to Covid. So much exaggeration.
- Robin_Message 5y agoCFR was something like 1% early on, and higher in Wuhan where there was a partial collapse of health systems. World population is >7 billion, so 1% gets you 70 millions deaths. If hospitals collapsed and treatments hadn't been found, a not inconceivable 2-3% fatality rate would get us to "hundreds of millions". (This estimate is unrealistic in other ways though, e.g. communities would begin imposing their own and hoc lockdowns if hospitals were overwhelmed, and global spread might have been slowed.)
- oneoff786 5y agoNo it wasn’t. The samples just weren’t random samples.
- gjulianm 5y agoNon-random samples get you to up to 10% fatality rate. I have the data for my region and in march-april 2020 the IFR was 10-15%. Of course, that was due because there weren't enough tests and only the ones that were really sick entered the statistics. But for the original strain, IFR was around 1% and that number was pretty consistent among a broad number of studies. Also, take into account the amount of diseases that are getting late treatments due to healthcare saturation. I don't know of any formal studies but you only need to talk with any doctor to see that they're consistently seeing diseases in later stages and therefore harder to cure.