3 ms·
Covid turned out to be much less lethal than originally thought when the only people that were identified as having Covid were the ones sick enough to go to the
by troupe 4y ago
Covid turned out to be much less lethal than originally thought when the only people that were identified as having Covid were the ones sick enough to go to the hospital. The places that "DID take COVID seriously" were places that were initially reacting to statistics that didn't consider how many people had already had Covid and hadn't been to the hospital.
I wonder if we'll someday look back on some of the things we do to prevent climate change and view it through a similar lens.
- jacquesm 4y agoThe thing to take away from this is: we got lucky. Very, very lucky. A somewhat longer incubation time, a higher lethality, a bit more asymptomatic spreading and the figures would be entirely different. If the first variant would have been one of the later mutations you'd be looking at a world in mourning today.
- jjeaff 4y agoI don't think it actually changed as much as you are implying it did. Some studies of infection in the general population have indicated that infection rates were much higher than estimated, but some of those studies were rushed and haven't held up well. I remember some earlier ranges that said it could be as high as 3-5%, but mostly it has stayed around 1% and that fell significantly after the vaccine. I mean, if we assume that every single person in the US has been infected already with COVID, that puts the death rate at 0.2% and without a vaccine, it would have been a lot higher.