this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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[–] [email protected] 56 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Unless the strain is killing a sizable amount of people getting it it'll be hard to get people to wear masks en masse again.

[–] [email protected] 63 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Even if it kills (which it likely will), our track record shows that didn't care enough about that, and in a decreasing manner. So it'll only be worse.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Pretty sure every virus has killed people, from the cold, to flu, and of course covid. It feels like now the death rate for the latest variants of covid are pretty comparable to the flu, the virus has lost a lot of its killing power over time.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Except the flu does not regularly disable those who it infects

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

As someone who wound up with chronic fatigue syndrome after getting covid, thank you for this. This piece of shit virus is worse than most people want to admit.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Of course it does, the flu kills millions and leaves even more disabled.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)
  1. the sheer number of Covid infections has made long Covid into a global crisis

  2. amazing that you recognize the existence of not only long Covid, but other post-viral illnesses, and think it gives weight to your “Covid is no big deal” argument

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Pretty sure every virus has killed people, from the cold, to flu, and of course covid.

False equivalency intensifies

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Death rates aren't a feeling. I want some hard numbers.

I feel like we just don't care if we live or die anymore.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fun fact: the CDC readjusted what the 'normal' rate of deaths is to include the years of the pandemic so now it's harder than ever to find hard numbers because "excess deaths" was one of the last ways to get any information at all!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Plus a world wide fast aging population would increase the death background number even if nothing else happens.

Anything that doesn't make an observable, statistically significant difference, has no cause to further impose restriction on how people live their lives

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Plus a world wide fast aging population would increase the death background number even if nothing else happens.

Sharp edges don't happen from demographic trends. This is pure rationalization.

Further than what?? What restrictions??

And what are you implying? Covid has no observable affect on public health? Tell that to the millions of people still getting disabled every year.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I know I've read reports about the latest variants being much less deadly. I did see one study recently which for patients presenting to hospital covid was a few percentage points more likely to result in death compared to hospitalized flu patients. There were a lot more covid patients though.

Found it:

death rates among people hospitalized for COVID-19 were 17% to 21% in 2020 vs 6% in this study, while death rates for those hospitalized for influenza were 3.8% in 2020 vs 3.7% in this study

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2803749

So there is some data backing up the feelings I've gotten from everything I've been hearing and seeing.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So that's almost twice as bad as the flu.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean, that's one way to look at it. I looked at it as only a couple percent higher death rate than the flu. Either way, a little less than 2x is way better than like 5x worse.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm not sure how severe an effect this would have on the numbers, but the death rate would non-negligibly go down after millions of the most vulnerable people died in the first wave. As well, the newer variants get more contagious and bypass immune responses more easily, and we're taking way fewer precautions as a society. so 6% is a lower percent but still an incredibly high number

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I saw it as an evolutionary benefit to be less deadly. The way I'm seeing this, the virus's purpose in life is to spread, so a higher infection and contagious rate with less death rate is ideal from an evolution standpoint.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Ideal for it, not ideal for anyone who enjoys the full function of their mind and circulatory system.

The mind thing isn't a dig at you btw, it's a reference to the brain fog

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There’s one crucial thing you overlooked in this: in 2020, most people hadn’t been infected, and hadn’t gotten the vaccine (because there was no vaccine until December,and even then it was in extremely short supply). Now, most people have some sort of immunity, be it from vaccine or from a prior infection. That definitely skews the hospitalization numbers downward. You can’t compare then and now, unfortunately, since there’s no real community that hasn’t been vaccinated and hasn’t caught it - and so you can’t compare their numbers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (11 children)

That's fair, but I think you can still compare it to the flu, which is not that far off from covid percentage wise. At this point both the flu and covid should be at an equal level of people having vaccines and natural antibodies, right? Even if you go with covid being about twice as deadly as the flu, twice as deadly as almost nothing is still almost nothing.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That's the same shit that businesses were pushing last time because they didn't want to close for a few months, ended up making everything worse.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yup. More effective action faster would have had a higher same-day-you-make-the-decision cost but would have been tremendously less harmful economically to all the entities blocking it for fear of the economic impact to them. They were digging a mass grave and then leaping into it.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's important to note that every state I'm aware of has long ended their testing and reporting, literally doing the Trump thing. So we actually have no idea what the numbers are.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The numbers I've seen are from hospitalized patients, which should still be tracked, and tracked in a similar way to the flu. It doesn't give us the full story for sure, but it gives us something to compare.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I’ve you’ve been vaxxed, or had a previous infection, or get some paxlovid… yes. If not, no, not really any better. It hasn’t gotten weaker.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Do you have any studies or research to suggest covid hasn't gotten weaker?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Unfortunately, the myth that virii become weaker over time is a long standing misconception, and the anti-vax people pushed it because it fit their narrative.

These articles discuss it with immunologists & doctors & geneticists, though, so it seems that it’s a known truth and so, like gravity, isn’t extensively studied. Instead, they’re focusing on actual prevention via better vaccines and personal behavior/responsibility.

Hope this helps!

Https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/01/14/1072504127/fact-check-the-theory-that-sars-cov-2-is-becoming-milder

https://abc7ny.com/covid-update-pandemic-do-viruses-get-weaker-as-they-evolve-omicron-variant/11463220/

https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-not-mutating-to-be-weaker-over-time-genetics-2020-7

https://en.as.com/en/2022/02/07/latest_news/1644263846_400285.html (note that this site is a Spanish-language sports site, but it was nice to find this there)

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Viruses tend to mutate to be more contagious and less lethal, it's just how natural selection/evolution works. The strains most likely to survive will be the ones that don't kill their hosts before they can do so.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That’s false. Show me your research.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The issue is that it happens out of sight out of mind so it's just an abstract statistic that it's easy to ignore or pretend away. If Covid-19 killed you by making your head spontaneously fall off we'd have eliminated it or reduced it to a few tiny isolated pockets simply by the change in the public's attitude to it. But because it kills you "quietly" out of sight in a hospital bed or at home, people were able to just convince themselves everything is basically normal.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

get people to wear masks en masse again

The time when people wore masks en masse must be something that I'm too American and lung-scarred to remember

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’m too American and lung-scarred to remember

Due to a history of smoking and multiple bouts of pneumonia I was already fairly sure that my "dying of old age" (which noone truly does) would consist of drowning on fluids from my own damaged lungs one day. Then the drowning on fluids from your own damaged lungs plague came and people decided they'd rather other people die by drowning on fluids from their own damaged lungs than follow simple enhanced hygiene practices for a bit.

Mostly I try to just block that out but it's come back into sharp focus today...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

If you put about 15 minutes between an action and it's consequences there's a strong subset of our population that will just completely lose the connection between the two. That, to me, was the primary problem. Well, that and the fact that it's impossible to measure how many times you didn't get COVID due to masking or vaxxing