Chris Hayes thinks that COVID-19 has overwhelmed us:
Something profoundly jarring about the scale of death of Covid and how it overwhelms everything else that are also horrible crises. I think we've basically (and somewhat understandably) turned our minds off to it, because it's too large for sustained contemplation.
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) December 9, 2021
At the risk of being irritatingly contrarian, I've long thought this was wrong. We focus a lot on huge numbers—50 million cases! 800,00 people dead!—but the truth is that these are relatively small numbers.
The total US death rate from COVID-19 is a little over 0.2%. But that's cumulative. During the first year of the pandemic, the annualized death rate was about 0.15%. Over the next nine months, with vaccines available, the death rate declined to 0.1%. If you're under 65 it goes down further to 0.035%. That's about one in 3,000. And if you're vaccinated it goes down to nearly zero.
Here's my point: I suspect that part of the public anxiety over COVID is due to the gigantic mismatch between rhetoric and reality. We are told loudly and often about how bad the COVID pandemic is. We have mask mandates, vaccination mandates, travel restrictions, business shutdowns, deep cleanings, remote schools, and constant reminders of how many people have died. And yet, the reality today is that most of us have only the tiniest sliver of a chance of dying from COVID-19.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that the deaths of the elderly don't matter. I'm not saying that COVID-19 is no big deal. I'm not ignoring long COVID. I'm just pointing out that for the vast majority of people, the risk of dying from COVID-19 is minuscule but they're being kept in a constant state of terror regardless.
I'm not sure what to conclude from this. I'm really not. I just wanted to point it out so that other people could chew it over.
Considering that every day I see people out in groups unmasked, and people in stores wearing their masks blatantly wrong, I don't think "constant state of terror" has applied for a long time.
Yes, & that's why our county now has been rated as having a higher risk of covid than Mobile, which has a lower vaccination percentage.
That is exactly right. Watch a football game on TV. Lots of people out having fun. That fear ended last spring. The willfully unvaccinated have no fear. I’m vaccinated and neither am I afraid.
Over/under on decibel counts for chants of "Let's go, Brandon" by SEC Speed Mavens at the Georgia-Michigan & Alabama-Concinnati games?
(Also, who does Sen. Tommy Tuberville (Q - Touchdown Club) root for in the Tide v. Cats match? Former Auburn coach, so WAR DAMN EAGLE (Fuck Bama), but unmistakably took a shit on Cincinnati's football team as coach & not really welcome on the Bearcat bandwagon.)
Where do you live that people still have to wear masks? Since the vaccine rolled out and the CDC said vaccinated people don't have to wear them I haven't seen any businesses that require it.
Thing is, the death rate may be low, but covid is extremely contagious, so lots of people get it. Covid kills 1000 people per day last I checked. That's a lot.
Covid has killed more people than WW1, WW2, Korea and Vietnam combined. It has also killed more people than the US Civil War, but combined with the others, total wars are still winning. So far.
Covid has done this in a much shorter time scale. It takes about a month for covid to kill as many people as die in automobile accidents in a year.
One aspect of what has made this so hard to deal with is the combination of low death rate plus extremely high infection rate. It looks like Omicron is pushing that even further with an even higher infection rate, and a slight or no dropoff in lethality.
Yeah, the individual risks aren't super high. But that just encourages to spread it around until someone it can kill gets it.
Nope, omicron is weaker and notably. You need a nostril rip and detachment.
@Spadesofgrey:
and your clinical data to support your assessment that:
"Nope, omicron is weaker and notably. "
I look forward to your professional referred references on this point.
Especially since there has not been adequate time to collect the data required to support your contention.
Please don't call me names, but here's some data for you to chew on. At least right now it looks like it's producing about half the ICU cases per total cases that Delta did. Also the time in the hospital is noticeably shorter. There are a lot of experts doubting this, and they've proposed all sorts of reasons for this discrepancy, but none of them have posted any data that refutes this conclusion. It's all "but maybe it's this" or "maybe it's because of that."
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1468310548609744904.html
Bloomberg just did a scare article about excess deaths. They're up 2x in couple of weeks! OMG!
Well, they're 2x from 21 November. (gasp!)
But they're only up 30% from 7 November. (yawn).
But they're up 13x from 31 Oct!!!!! (THE SKY IS FALLING!)
I reality, excess deaths right now are less than the interval between the last two waves of COVID-19 in South Africa.
Not enough data are in yet to be conclusive with respect to omicron, but it certainly appears a possibility that this coronavirus is following the pattern of past coronavirus, i.e., reduced lethality accompanies endemicity. This is what humanity experienced during the pandemic of 1889 (Russian “flu”); mind you, non-trivial numbers of people were still dying from that coronavirus pandemic as late as the year 1900. That particular coronavirus, is, of course, utterly endemic to our species at this point, and is a significant source of the common cold (and even kills people on occasion).
@qx49:
you stated:
"At least right now it looks like it's producing about half the ICU cases per total cases that Delta did. "
which at this point is at best anecdotal data.
As has been reported multiple times, the data is not available yet to make the call whether omicron is more or less a serious infection than previous strains of covid-19.
So before we suggest making policy on what is at present unsupported (shall we perhaps say wishful thinking?) let's wait for the data before reaching such conclusions.
Confirmed: 2020 sore loser Mayor Mike is going to primary joebiden.
You are a moron, notably.
I need a "nostril rip and detachment"? I can't parse that well enough to tell if you are threatening me with violence, or if you are trying to say something about omicron.
I mean, usually your trolling here is at least intelligible.
42,000 Auto accident deaths /yr is a big deal, Not enough to stop using cars, but enough that you probably know of someone who died in crash. I know a few.
45,000 Gun deaths /yr is a big deal. Not enough to do anything in the face of gun nut/ gun lobby resistance, but enough that you probably know someone who died by bullet. I know some.
800,000 covid deaths in 1.5yr is a huge deal. Almost 20 years of highway crashes or 20 years of American gun carnage, all in a year and a half. I know more covid victims in the last 18 mo that all of the vehicle and gun victims I can count all my life, and I wish they hadn't been lost.
And it's also a big deal because it changes everything. Kevin has a high risk condition; I have one too, and while covid hasn't killed us it sure has changed the experience of the last 18mo. And then there's the long-term effects.
There have been worse plagues, but this still sucks hugely.
But , and this is a politically difficult point to make , but not all deaths are equal.
Covid mostly kills the very old or very sick who have less future years of life to lose and whose quality of life is in decline. And for covid might just not be based on age because it might really be killing people who mostly are close to death anyway.
What is worse ? Ten 90 year Olds in poor health dying of covid in a nursing home or one 18 year old soldier dying in combat in war ? I think the latter is worse .
We tend to avoid thinking in these terms and easier to consider all lives equal. But, for things like covid , to make proper policy decisions, you are forced to think in this way .
And one thing something like covid does is force us to face the reality of eventual death and the chance of death at all ages. For reasons of sanity, most simply try to live their lives without thinking of it until they get pretty old. And you can exaggerate the relative risk of covid by not considering what the risk of dying of something else is.
One thing to think about is that life expectancy went down by about one year in 2020. Which sounded horrible to many and thought that covid cost everyone one year of life in 2020. Which is not the case . What it meant was that, if the pandemic never ends, and continued forever with the death levels of 2020, that someone born in 2020 would on average live one less year than without covid . And, if you think about it, is not civilization changing. And hard to justify things like permanent masking for that .
my wife works in a hospital caring for l&d patients. they've had one mother die of covid and one newborn die of covid. not every death from the virus is someone already on knocking on death's door. far from it.
this disease needs to be taken seriously, because it does kill. but taking it seriously doesn't mean panic or that we protect ourselves beyond what is reasonable..
And it also kills, at lower rates, younge people. Indeed it appears that 25% of the deaths (almost 200,000) are from those under 65:
- https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
Your argument about not affecting younger people is not supported by the data.
Are you 15 years old ? Because that is around where you should be on average for knowing about as many covid victims as victims of car crashes and guns .
If you know more covid victims and are older , that is likely due to chance or because you are a demographic more likely than most to know covid victims ( work at a nursing home ) or less likely to know car or especially gun victims .
Or perhaps you really do know more car crash victims and gun victims but since those are scattered back in past years, you have forgotten some.
And I am at an age and have some medical issues putting me at higher risk too which is bad for me and you and kevin . But Kevin's point is that , for the much larger majority who are younger and healthier, and who have more " valuable " lives ( re having more years to live ) , the covid risk is really not high enough to change their life , except through how measures used to control it mainly for the benefit of you and me lower their quality of life.
While perhaps for me personally, everyone being masked might be beneficial , is it really fair to ruin the precious childhood years of children with things like masking when their risk is less than flu ( yes even including more covid cases) ?
We should definitely go back to the golden years when we ruined the precious childhood years of children with overconsumption of sugar, cheap toys and overpriced ‘fashion’.
At ~400,000 COVID deaths in 2021, that's the equivalent of 1,650 Boeing 757's dropping out of sky — or 4 or 5 per day.
Most occurred by April 1st
However, although kevin is correct about the low death risk from covid, especially for the young , that is not the perception of much of the public. Who have been misled by biased news coverage and biased cdc statements into believing the risk of dying for the young is far higher than it really is. Polls show that the public estimate of chance of dying and hospitalization from covid is way overestimated by democrats for the young ( and somewhat for the old) and also overestimated by Republicans, just not as much.
In that regard, the misinformation result is mostly for democrats who ate flat wrong and even Republicans are misinformed in the perceived democratic direction.
And interesting how that might lead to different vaccination rates. Democrats might be more vaccinated BECAUSE they are MORE misinformed than Republicans on this . Even if the final decision is more correct imo . Based on my assessment of risks of vaccine ( although the correct number there is more debatable) democrats are closer to correct procedures are discounting vaccine risks too much ..and Republicans overstating significantly vaccine risks .
So possible example here where two mistakes offset for democrats. They overstate covid death risk greatly but understate vaccine risk , which just offsets some their earlier mistake and leads to a more correct final decision. Republicans might be more correct on either issue individually, but if their errors reinforce each other, they end up further off .
What vaccine risks? Billions of people have been vaccinated with tiny risks. Death rates in Republican voting counties are 3.5 times Democrat ones. Democrats are being public spirited and looking after themselves and their neighbours.
Nope, your numerals are wrong.
I agree vaccine risks that we can see so far are fairly small and I said that and that they are being overestimated by many Republicans and also a good number of democrats.
But some Democrats, probably like you , are underestimating vaccine risks and costs. When you say " what vaccine risks " , you imply they are zero , which is just misinformed. And covid risk is also very low at young ages , enough so that many can say " what covid risk " and be no more wrong than you.
Trying to make a personal risk decision when risks are very low on both sides gets hard , especially if the risk is uncertain.
And , imo, the bulk of the vaccine risk and cost is NOT from the very rare serious reactions. I expect these have been grossly overestimated largely for the same reasons " long covid " is grossly overestimated.
But what about other things. One is possible longer term serious side effects that only manifest after a year or two so we would not see them yet . So no real world evidence or trials proves anything in that regard. And , given the vaccines use a new method, that increases that risk . Still think it is fairly low but not nonexistent and not easily quantifiable. And no scientist can say they know for sure .
And there is also the immune system cost because the vaccine focuses your immune system to covid spike , it focuses it away from other things . Making you somewhat more vulnerable to other infections. Yes , many times young people lose antibodies with natural immunity faster than from infection. That is because the vaccine tricks the immune system into more antibodies than is best for THAT person. Stronger vaccine immunity may NOT be a good thing for the vaccinated.
And now you have original antigenic sin. If vaccinated with current vaccines or got infected with original covid , your immune system remains forever primed to best fight original covid which does you little good if it is extinct . If omincron becomes the dominant endemic strain and people catch it multiple times over there lives , best for young to have never got vaccinated and first covid infection was omicron. Not sure a huge factor because most got delta first anyway.
And of course you also have the side effects of feeling sick for a few days after vaccine ( which tends to affect young more ). For you or me, with our higher covid risk, small issue relatively. But not for young .
Putting it all together , for a healthy 20 year old , was getting vaccinated a good idea comparing risks and costs? Back in spring 2021, really just not a clear decision to me . Could argue either way. Based only on personal concerns. Today, with omicron coming, seems clear no to me if not yet vaccinated.
But , considering that costs and risks are fairly low either way for young, if they factor in what is good for their older family and friends and society as a whole , I think it was an easy decision to get vaccinated.
And that is the way it should have been presented to the young. That we are not sure whether it is selfishly a good thing for you to get vaccinated and we respect different views on that. But we are ASKING , not trying to coerce or trick by overstating covid risk, you to take a very small risk of vaccination in order to help others with a high covid risk, even if your covid risk is minimal, people would have responded better to that message..
>there is also the immune system cost because the vaccine focuses your immune system to covid spike , it focuses it away from other things . Making you somewhat more vulnerable to other infections.
You totally made this up. If there were anything to your cockamamie zero-sum theory of immunity, we wouldn’t be administering MMR and DPT vaccinations to kids.
Yes, on this I agree. Vaccines are a inefficient way compared to natural immunity, but for people at risk, can be enough of a lead to avoid bad consequences.
The risk of "longer term serious side effects that only manifest after a year or two so we would not see them yet" is in the immediate neighborhood of zero. No vaccine has ever demonstrated deleterious effects delayed more than a month or two from the date of administration. There is no reason to believe, or even suspect, that covid vaccines are any different in that respect.
Rational thought is a Republican troll pretending to be reasonable, which means supporting everything Republicans do and condemning all Democratic policies.
You can tell by the alternative facts.
It comes down to risk analysis. Its obviously great that the risk of dying from Covid is low for children, but since children can pass it along to parents and grandparents just as easily as grandparent to grandparent or parent to spouse, in my view the lower risk of children is borderline irrelevant.
I didn't say completely, irrelevant, but borderline.
This would apply even if Covid were only fatal to those over 70. Considering its an airborne virus I suppose if this was established you could just lock up all the over 70s -- oh, hold on, we already had that situation, it was known as "Covid spreads through nursing home."
Covid did not get into the nursing home like Peter Sellers in the Pink Panther, it got there through another person, almost assuredly an asymptomatic person, and lets take this further and assume it was a nursing home employee.
Well, if the nursing home employee got it from their ten year old or their spouse its kind of irrelevant to the dead, would you agree?
Anyone who is taking precautions is not just taking them for him or herself, the odds are overwhelming that they are taking such precautions, whether its mask wearing or vaccination or some form of limited interactions, for themselves and others.
The mainstream media has been very so-so in getting this point across, probably because the weakness of such media is not realizing most people are idiots.
The conservative media has, as far as I have seen, completely ignored the fact that any countermeasure is more likely to save someone else.
Conservatives are fundamentally selfish and don't care about others, so have no interest in taking precautions for the benefit of others.
Since about 200,000 people under 65 have died form covid-19, this is hardly a minor issue fo the young.
155000. Don't lie.
As of Dec. 8, 2021, the CDC counted 198,179 COVID-19 deaths in people aged 0 through 64, so DonRolph is correct. Here is a link for anyone who wants to verify this: https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-by-Sex-and-Age/9bhg-hcku
I don't agree. About 40000 of those are questionable and borderline. 50- it's 90000. Yawn.
First you claimed, without any supporting evidence, that DonRolph was lying. Now you concede that DonRolph's number was correct, but claim, without any supporting evidence, that a quarter of the of the reported deaths are “questionable.”
As a sanity check, we can look at excess deaths. The CDC reports 788,268 COVID-19 deaths and 902,097 excess deaths since the start of the pandemic. That suggests that the CDC is undercounting COVID-19 deaths, not overcounting them.
Links:
COVID-19 deaths: https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-by-Sex-and-Age/9bhg-hcku
Excess deaths: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
@ratiojal thought
since the deaths from covid-19 for those under 65 is still 25% or so of the deaths of those who are older, covid-19 is still a major risk of death even for younger people.
While the vaccine risk is of the order of parts per million, the risk of death if you contract covid-19 is still parts per thousand, and if you do not get vaccinated then you will get covid-19.
And again, this is *before* the highly effective treatments are about to be approved. We shouldn't be doing most of what we are doing anymore. It's just political.
We routinely take anti-disease precautions for reasons other than simple death.
Long COVID/chronic and life-altering symptoms are far more common than death. Some of these things, such as myocarditis, can be fatal.
I think Kevin has a point. It's hard to know what the right comparison is. Nearly 800,000 deaths coming up on two years is a lot of deaths. Far more than from causes like traffic accidents or suicides for example but also a lot less than from heart disease and cancer. Right now the weekly death rate in the US from COVID is about 1200 not dramatically higher than the flu in a typical flu season. I think that's a more apt comparison. They are both a much bigger concern for the elderly.
It's certainly possible that the COVID death rate will go up again this winter and
we should continue to push for vaccinations and sensible behaviors. I will continue to wear a mask in the supermarket and other venues at least for now in part because I have regular contact with an 86 year old with many health issues.
But I think we should turn down the volume some. The Chris Hayes quote above is just short of pants on fire hysteria and I don't think that's useful.
A lot of old deaths. Even under 75 and younger it doesn't hit hard unless. Compare that to 1918-20.......this is very similar to OC43 and 1889-99.
The thing is, if we just sort of decide to ignore it and dispense with masking and social distancing, we could possibly triple the infection rate, which would triple the death rate. So, instead of 1000 deaths/day, we would see 3000.
That's way more than deaths by heart disease or cancer.
Nope. It's endemic and declining. Less than a hundred deaths by June. You need nostril ripped.
That is just an elemental error that many get wrong.
If restrictions cut the rate of spread to one third of what it would be without restrictions ( which is wildly optimistic anyway) , that will NOT mean that total infections, and thus deaths , are cut by same amount . Because that lower infections initially cause a lower buildup of natural immunity and thus prevent the reduction of spread rates due to that. So restrictions today , by lowering spread rate today, increase the spread rate in future, and likely by more than future restrictions can lower it.
Restrictions mostly just delay infections to a later date , from peaks to when they otherwise be lower . I.e. " flatten " the curve but not change the total infections in the curve . Which was exactly how it was properly presented at first and has some value in itself.
Restrictions may reduce total infections, but very complex depending on many factors such as strength and how long lasting natural immunity is . But never as much as they reduce infection rate.
In some situations ( not saying covid ) restrictions at some time can increase total cases . Say natural immunity was near perfect and permanent ( like chicken pox ) but base R was low enough that, if everyone has natural immunity, new births might not be enough to keep it endemic. So you then want zero restrictions in one bad wave , because you want max possible infected. And then hit the restrictions when cases drop low , to drive it extinct . But zero chance of that with covid .
Now simply delaying infections can have value , if buying time for vaccines so less chance of dying when infected. Or maybe, today, to delay until less virulent onicron gets here big. Sad if get infected with delta today and die if it would have been omicron in two months and you would have lived.
Please stop making this crap up. Cite actual data or stop commenting. Actual data says vaccine immunity is superior to naturally-acquired, and even with 70% vaccinated (most of the Northeast, e.g.), SARS-Cov-2 still finds plenty of new hosts. Natural immunity would be even less effective at reducing spread. So your whole comment here is just wrong.
Dude, you still are making stuff up. Restrictions don't work with this a disease that spreads so easy. Unless you want a strict military cordon like in the movies. It simply doesn't work. Accept it, deal with it. Put a gun under your noise, pull the trigger and end it. May then, you find peace.
Yes. Justice Ginsburg’s umbrella.
It isn't an apt comparison, though, because that 1200 rate (even assuming you are 1. correct and 2. this is in the range for annual flu) isn't occurring in a "everybody just do everything as normal and take no precautions against any kind of disease except for the lackadaisical handwashing Americans have always followed" set of circumstances.
Take away those circumstances and COVID is far worse than "it's actually just like the flu now" - how is this hard to understand? If you're going to counterfactual it, you have to ACTUALLY counterfactual it.
I'm not pushing a counterfactual. In case I wasn't clear I'm not suggesting that we drop all precautions. 800,000 deaths from this disease is heartbreaking. I'm all for pushing vaccinations hard and I'm all for continuing with some of the other precautions like mask wearing indoors but the level of near hysteria in comments like Chris Hayes's above is not useful and it can obscure other issues that need our attention as well, like Trumpism and the assault on our democracy, continuing gross inequality and of course climate change which could be a factor in future pandemics. That's all.
I need to make a significant correction to what a t I wrote earlier. I misread the NY times covid data...Deaths are over 1200 PER DAY not per week. Sincere apologies.
perhaps you mean 1200 deaths per day which is much higher than the flu.
I misread the numbers from the nytimes. It's over 1200 deaths PER DAY. I stand corrected. Will correct elsewhere in this thread too
I need to make a significant correction to what a t I wrote earlier. I misread the NY times covid data...Deaths are over 1200 PER DAY not per week. Sincere apologies.
@RZM
1200 deaths per day in a routine flu season?
References?
A typical flu season yields a few 10s of thousands of deaths at most, so you are arguing that flu only kills for maybe 30 days a year?
The worst flu season recently took 52,000 lives and in the peak period death rates were probably much higher than 1000 / week (I haven't found that info.) . Which is why it's wise, especially if you are older or have health issues, to get a flu shot. That said, I completely bungled the covid death rate number I took from the NY Times which I read as 1200+ per WEEK. Correct number is 1280/DAY or roughly 10,000 per week. Mea culpa.
And as I stated early on, pushing vaccination and taking other precautions (mask wearing indoors for example) still makes total sense. But I think the near hysteria level language of Chris Hayes may be counterproductive at this point.
Nevertheless the flu comparison I made was completely wrong.
Yes but ... Republicans keep coming after Joe Biden for Covid death rates, while saying they are not a problem out of the other sides of their mouths.
The same mouths that voted nay on BIF but tout construction as a result of BIF in their districts.
If not for shameless hypocrisy, the GQP wouldn't exist.
My question for Kevin is, why concentrate on death?
Personally, Long Covid freaks me out, I have plenty of bodily complaints already, thanks. Becoming lower energy and (much worse, for me) suffering "cognitive fog" would mean the end of my career, for starters.
I modify my behavior to avoid all sorts of things less drastic than death, and I'm pretty sure I'm not that weird of a person.
Yeah, this.
Long covid is not that common. Why liberals obsess over this now while they sneered at 2000's pandemic threats is head scratching. Sounds like they took orders from a elitist, so their talking heads to push this.
Per:
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/long-covid-50-percent-lingering-symptoms/2021/11/12/e6655236-4313-11ec-9ea7-3eb2406a2e24_story.html
it wold appear that your comment that long covid is uncommon is not supported by the data.
Wrong. That is not what the data shows. That considers 3 months long covid. It is not. Stop posting this crap, I won't respond. Your full of crap.
Kevin, you need to order out for better trolls. The ones you've got are just useless.
+100
for a while i didn't care about spades idiotic comments, but they are becoming more prolific and since kevin's commenting platform doesn't allow upvotes and sorting, it is getting a bit more annoying. i really can't comprehend what would drive someone to spend their days trolling an obscure blog's (sorry kevin, not THAT obscure) comment section where everyone knows you are a troll and an idiot.
Hayes is just another Tucker Carlson. Probably a homo like Tucker as well.
Too bad there isn't a vaccine for whatever you've got.
+10
A true Revolutionary like Chris Hayes would never ask Hunter Biden to write a letter of recommendation.
Because Hayes would turn to Corina O'Driscoll.
But uh...
Keep in mind that all of those deaths are WITH precautions (to varying degrees). If we weren't treating it like it was a deadly pandemic...
I am not sure I agree with you. yes 800000 dead is a small number but how many of the 50 million infected are suffering from shortness of breath, memory losses and else.
Get real Kevin....
Not that much. In 10 years, probably forgotten while Spanish flu mythology still outstrips it.
You seriously believe that covid-19 will be forgotten in 10 years?
This is the largest fatality number form a natural disaster which the US has ever encountered.
Spanish flu only killed about 675,000 people ion the US.
Yes. It looks like it may save Social Security as well.
@Spadesof grey
and kill hundreds of thousands of those under 65 who are still actively working and typically supporting families.
And it’s mostly the willfully unvaccinated and people like Colin Powell who are dying. I don’t care about the first group one bit.
The fact that most cases are asymptomatic helps give rise to nonsense. People can say they took horse pills, or horse manure, and did not get sick, ergo, you should take the same stuff...
The pandemic is still flooding hospitals in areas and health care workers are on their last legs. I don't want to get Covid--but I mainly wear masks, etc., because I don't want to be spreading it.
Last year, Covid was the third leading cause of death. This year---aiming for #1??? It's not just the rate of death, the relative rate of death needed to put it in context. Unlike cancer and hearth disease, covid is solely caused by an infectious agent, so we can take some simple steps to stop it.
Current problems are mainly with un-vaccinated. We need higher levels of vaccination than we first thought, but still, we should be at 90+% fully vaccinated by now. If so, the omincron variant would be scary, but much less so--masking back up would probably be fine and we'd deal with it like a bad flu season.
Deaths from Covid are down a lot from the very beginning since we learned a lot about treating it--but not much change over the past 6 months. Soon, real pills to stop covid will be available, but probably still months away for enough to be available. Maybe then, it will be treated like the flu--with vaccines as needed without all the attacks.
Given that covid disproportionately kills the old and the already sick, I would expect that a high covid death rate would be followed by a decline in death rates from other illnesses. If covid kills off a lot of the heart and cancer patients, they won't be able to die of heart disease or cancer, so death rates from those causes should go down.
The idiot northern Republican idiots that vote on here don't seem to get precautions have been followed. I was described by a Doctor, a women that has had covid 3 times, 3 different variants. All mild. No long term problems. Coronavirus is much like it's sibling the rhinovirus. It's incredibly infectious. Yes, it is. Precautions simply don't always work. Some people are more prone than others. Yet Chris "I am private version of Tucker" Hayes tries to whip his viewers up in a frenzy. Kill them all.
800,000 dead people might sound like a lot, but when future generations look back on our time, you can be sure what tragedy they'll be talking about.
https://twitter.com/LEBassett/status/1469072886581403651?s=20
(comments are a hoot)
KD has not lost the ability to shock especially considering his misbegotten situation. As the great culling continues (1800 dead yesterday), the greatest loss of life this country has ever experienced (north of 1,000,000), KD belittles the tragedy. If it wasn’t for the vaccine, the number would be 2-3 greater.
You're right, Kevin, this is annoyingly contrarian.
I lost 4 friends to Covid.
That’s 4 more than I lost to car accidents, cancer, heart disease…..
And no. They didn’t take Covid seriously.
But 4 is a small number so…..
Kevin,
I think you’re assuming the results of all of these public heath measures and then arguing that they’re unnecessary because they were successful. There’s a clear line from the Black Plague that killed half of Europe’s population and each successive pandemic in which increasing scientific research and public health measures lessened the length and severity that pandemic.
My point is it is those things which now seem perhaps overly melodramatic are the difference between past pandemics and the current uneasy but not apocalyptic situation. But it seems to me that without all those things which you now consider to be excessive or unnecessary, we would be in roughly the same place as people were without all the things you thing were probably pointless.
And people are, in fact, still dying even with the advancements we’ve made recently. The NYT just moved a story about the death about a Republican official in Michigan who “did not believe in the vaccines “and thought that vaccine passports and the showing of proof of vaccination were something out of Nazi Germany.
So this guy is dead. Maybe in the overall scheme of things out of all the teaming billions upon billions of people on this planet, this man’s death is truly insignificant as Kevin suggests but to his family and his friends I’m sure it’s a tragedy. And it’s a tragedy of his own making and the making of the other people in his party who have deliberately prolonged and intensified this pandemic.
What are you having for lunch today?
I’m thinking about beef chow fun, Hong Kong style. And you?
This is the sort of analysis which leads us to ignore / justify the suffering of US military misadventures, gun violence, and eventually, climate change. We humans really don’t care about all the deaths from these things. I mean, if you ask us, we’ll say we care. We might even think about it and occasionally be moved by some tragedy when it affects someone more like us. I get mad about US military waging war and others just throw up excuses as to why they think it’s ok or don’t want to talk about it. Veterans are heroes etc. etc.
Turning deaths into statistics dehumanizes the problem. That is Mr. Drum’s approach to nearly everything. Is it some sort of coping mechanism? Or is he just really this rational and dispassionate?
A problem seen through history. You make this worse than it is.
No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.
Or not. Statistics don’t diminish me.
The percentage of people in the US who have died from COVID-19 is almost exactly .25%, but calling that the death rate is more than a little misleading. Using your 800,000 out of 50 million, gives a death rate of 1.6% and the study I link below says the best guess for long Covid (symptoms after more than 12 weeks) is just under 5%. The 1 in 3000 also isn't really the death rate from Covid, if you haven't been vaccinated you should multiply that by a bit more than 6--still not huge, but why not use the actual rate.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/11/18/1055071699/coronavirus-faq-what-is-long-covid-and-what-is-my-risk-of-getting-it
Rational thought is a Republican troll pretending to be reasonable, which means supporting everything Republicans do and condemning all Democratic policies.
I don’t read rational thought’s comments, for the most part, and I recommend ignoring them. Never offers any data or facts or citations, just makes sh!t up. Paragraph after paragraph of hypotheticals and speculation. Bah!
I would think if I was "pretending " to be reasonable, I would by definition NOT be a troll, if that means posting obnoxious comments designed to illicit a response by posting in an insulting or extreme way. Even if just pretending, the act of appearing reasonable sort of precludes being a troll.
Now if you think that being a troll simply means the act of disagreeing with what you think and disrupting the insular bubble of groupthink you want to live in ( and of course that is what you mean) , then I plead guilty .
But that is fairly sad for you . But not as sad as the effect your comments have on others here who are willing to engage with contrary viewpoints and have a good open discussion and actually maybe even make some real counterarguments to what I say . It seems the ones like you who just yell " troll" are the ones who actually have no argument to make. And your point is to try to intimidate those who are willing to engage with someone who does not always think the way they do . To shut down such discussion across partisan lines because God forbid anyone ever even is willing to consider any opinion other than the party line of their tribe.
The really sad thing is that yelling " troll" at anyone who dares to contradict the groupthink does tend to work, especially at liberal sites where more are petrified about being cancelled if they do not comply and not engage the " troll".
And you see the same sort of stay in the bubble thinking at conservative websites where I post and get accuses of being a liberal troll. Although they do tend to be a little less able to intimidate and shut down everyone willing to engage .
And yes I do tend to post giving the more conservative republican viewpoint , even sometimes when I do not agree with it and take the more liberal side ( and sometimes I deliberately do not make that clear). Because I see no value in wasting my time posting on things I agree with the consensus here and just adding to the echo chamber. Even if you disagree with it, hearing the opposite argument and at least understanding what it is helps YOU.
Today I do lean more towards the republican viewpoints which usually happens against the party in power for me. Actually my positions somehow tend to be the overall minority opinion. I tend to agree with democrats on issues where the public agrees with Republicans more and vice versa. Seems I am a natural contrarian.
And I note that I do sometimes post here a view supporting the liberal side, but usually when it is a good argument for the liberal position which nobody here is thinking of. For example, today I did post that I never hear liberals giving a good argument for proportional representation instead of individual districts, which is that district elections have devolved onto mainly pure party votes. If people are always going to vote for " their party " and treat them as pr parliamentary elections, might as well just have pr parliamentary elections .
Also sad they you choose a covid post for this. Why the hell does covid have to have partisan positions where all Republicans have to believe x and all democrats y. It is too important for this partisan crap.
Kevin is only saying that maybe there's been some over-reaction, and it's a good point. I've thought about this some, probably because at 75 and never had a cold in the last 50 years, which I spent drinking like a chimney and smoking like a fish I think I'm invulnerable, and I also scorned surgical masks back in the day when you saw them mostly during Asian airport stop-overs. And in my home country most people die before they are seven and you learn to let it go.
But there is something about modern America that makes us fearful and over-reactive, like when those dudes commandeered the airplanes and flew them into the World Trade Center and everyone thought it was Pearl Harbor and girded loin for the Long War. You want a guy like, Fauci, who you hired to man the watch-tower, to get excited when a threat appears. But you also want to be a little sluggish about reacting to his concerns, maybe?
All of this would probably never have come up if the USA hadn't installed a circus clown in the Presidency, and proceeded to normalize uncamoflaged stupidity. But we did it and there's no turning back. We could have come back from Reagan, but we can't come back from Trump. The pooch is screwed, the USA is an official s-hole country, and this here discussion is moot..
Kevin - Deaths are not the only reason people need to be constantly reminded (maybe even terrified). In some states, such as New Mexico where I live, ICUs are over-full, and there is a wait to go from the ER to the ICU. In today's Santa Fe New Mexican: "As of Tuesday, there were 13 available intensive care unit beds and 57 medical and surgical beds available statewide...On a recent day, an unidentified Albuquerque hospital had 90 people waiting for a hospital bed." And NM has a terrible nurse shortage.
I don’t interpret Kevin here to be minimizing the risk of the coronavirus. I interpret him to be providing an explanation as to why a lot of people apparently aren’t particularly concerned about the danger. And yes, this implies their reasoning or cost benefit analysis may not be very solid.
These death rates Kevin cites are for the population as a whole, not only those who get infected, right? Also, given the numbers, one understands why many people may feel blasé about the danger. Nonetheless, even a very modest danger is nothing to be sneezed at when when it’s, um, one’s LIFE that’s at risk. Tail risk, people!
this whole post is just....very wrong.
1) .2% death rate over 2 years is A LOT. 50 million cases and 800+ is a huge deal.
2) People aren't living in constant terror. Mostly, people are living pretty normally with some simple precautions. I literally have no idea what you're basing this idea of constant terror on.
3) The reason the death toll isn't dramatically, catastrophically worse is at least some people were appropriately fearful and took precautions and got vaccinated.
Seriously, Kevin, have you already forgotten the dark days of hospitals with no beds and no respirators with bodies being piled into trucks because there was no where else to put them?
Old people. Many nursing homes. You simply have no leg to stand on.
I'm pretty fat so I'm at risk.
My kid ain't vaccinated (too young).
Covid killed Powell who had your cancer.
My family+in laws have lost 7 people.
If you don't to worry, go right ahead.
Put me on team empathy - I'm never going to say 800,000 or so dead is not many or not important. Those folks were someone's loved ones. And above and beyond the dead we have the folks suffering with long term COVID symptoms:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/12/09/long-covid-work-unemployed/
"Hard data is not available and estimates vary widely, but based on published studies and their own experience treating patients, several medical specialists said 750,000 to 1.3 million patients likely remain so sick for extended periods that they can’t return to the workforce full time."
If you told anyone their chances of dying in an accident would increase 10 fold or getting killed by gun violence was increased 10 fold you would lose your shit. That's the order of magnitude on those deaths. They mostly happen to be older, which is quaint if they're not your relative, but devastating for many. You're just fucking losing it. None of us should want to contribute to someone else's death. But fucking brain dead people spout your "not many people die" statistic as a reason to ignore common sense things like masks and vaccine. And they're killing more people. It IS a cumulative thing. And the cumulative nature of carelessness and stupidity has killed hundreds of thousands. You're just going soft-headed.
iamr4man -- NYC has perfect set of charts comparing hospitalizations, cases, and deaths split between vaccination status.
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page#dail -- scroll down to "weekly rates"