If I'm not mistaken, the rate in the paper is bigger, 0.25% against 22k/11M = 0.20% in Belgium.
But if the newspaper I read are right, there is a catch: when tests were not available, Belgium counted as a covid death every case where it could be suspected. Even nowadays, in case of comorbidity, covid is always written down as the cause of death. So 22k is probably a maximum, and, taking into accound the 25% uncertainty on the denominator, the real rate could very different.
I think you're misreading the comment you replied to. "+/- 25% of a 11M of the population having been infected" means about 25% of 11M, or 2.75M, officially infected. 22k/2.75M would imply a 0.8% fatality rate.
Seems low compared to New York City as well. NYC has already had 30,564 deaths. Even if the whole population had already been infected, that would put the death rate at around 0.36%
Antibody surveys suggest around 40% have been infected which puts the death rate around 0.91%
> Indiana's IFR for noninstitutionalized persons older than 60 years is just below 2% (1 in 50). In comparison, the ratio is approximately 2.5 times greater than the estimated IFR for seasonal influenza, 0.8% (1 in 125), among those aged 65 years and older (5).
That is just one factor though in which COVID-19 is worse than the seasonal influenza though.
COVID-19 has a basic reproduction number of 3.3 – 5.7, while the seasonal influenza has one of 0.9 – 2.1 [1], which means that it spreads far more easily. You cannot just wait until summer for influenza season to be over.
With influenza you have a higher rate of existing immunity in the population. With COVID-19 it is basically non-existent, except maybe for a few single people that had SARS or MERS before.
Younger people are also more affected [2]
You are longer sick from COVID-19 and if you have to stay in the hospital you will stay there longer and are more likely to end up on the intensive care unit [2]
In the end you cannot compare a pandemic situation to influenza season.
The paper you're citing says "younger" means 59, vs 66 for influenza:
> Patients with COVID-19 were younger (median age [IQR], 59 [45–71] vs 66 [52–77]; P < 0001) and had fewer comorbidities at baseline with a lower mean overall age-adjusted Charlson Comorbidity Index (mean [SD], 3.0 [2.6] vs 4.0 [2.7]; P < 0.001) than patients with seasonal influenza.
Also, this is data from a single hospital, across two different years. The overall trends for SARS-CoV2 are not even remotely debatable: the risk of mortality rises exponentially with age. It's one of the most striking features of the virus. To claim, based on this one paper, that "younger people are more affected" is to miss the forest for the trees.
"In the end you cannot compare a pandemic situation to influenza season."
You absolutely can, and in fact, you're doing it. What you're trying to say is that Covid is somehow unilaterally much worse than influenza, but that isn't true. It's much worse for the elderly (>65), but for most other age groups, it's about the same, if not a little bit better. You have to squint and split hairs and pick sources selectively to start making strong claims of increased severity in age groups under ~50, and it's simply not a believable claim for people under the age of ~30.
The disease can be bad without exaggerating its threat.
I just took the first study I could find. You seem to claim that it’s conclusions are wrong and that young people are less affected of COVID than influenza. Do you have good studies to back this up?
For every person that dies (an agonizing death akin to medieval torture), a few more are in intensive care fighting for their lives. For every one of those, others end up in the hospital, spread the disease to others, suffer from “long covid”, or merely suffer greatly. Every person that gets covid adds to the likelihood the disease will become uncontrollable in the long term and endemic.
Keep wearing your masks and social distancing people. It’s hard, it’s a sacrifice, but together we can conquer this disease and return to life “as normal”.
Think about what leads to new variants: every time someone is infected, the virus replicates and has 10e9 chances to come up with something which is advantageous for it. If, like the U.K variant, it lucks into someone with a compromised immune system it might get even more chances to evolve an effective combination.
The way we get it to stop winning is to stop buying it lottery tickets. Masks, vaccines, and other measures like paid sick leave cut into that number enormously.
New variants are going to come, but vaccinated people may have some protection against them, or they may recieve a booster tailored to new variants, if they are extra vulnerable.
Also, treatments are being developed. If we can turn future variants of Covid into something like a common cold, we are going to be fine living with it. We just need to prevent bilateral pneumonia with a cytokine storm that threatens to kill the patient.
The reason COVID=19 hit the way it did was because it was novel; there were not similar diseases from an immunological standpoint being spread widely. Right now, exposure to one COVID strain (or a vaccination against a COVID strain) seems to confer some benefits against infection and/or serious disease from another COVID strain. In other words, as COVID becomes less novel, we become more prepared for new variants. We may end up having to have annual COVID vaccines the way we do flu vaccines, but even people who are unvaccinated against a particular flu strain have antibodies from previous flu strains that offer some measure of protection. That's going to drive down the reproduction rate and the lethality of future COVID strains.
That said, there may not be a clear "end point" in the sense of we go back to how things were before. We may simply be heading towards a new steady state with periodic vaccination efforts and some risk of COVID variants all the time.
Here is something for you to consider: this is the new 'normal'.
That world you lived in 18 months ago? Gone. Not coming back. There is no 'end point', it just goes on and we learn to adapt. Eventually we get better at it, learn more about what is and is not a risk, and a few things start to look like the 2019, but most things don't go back.
I am not saying it is certain, but there is a distinct class of people who expect everything to go back to the way it was and to do so immediately. They need to consider the possibility that things might _never_ return to the way they were. It is possible that all of the vaccines will work better than we expect and covid-19 will become a mostly-controlled intermittent disease that eventually becomes background noise like influenza (still a killer, but almost a part of the landscape), but it is equally possible that it takes more work for a longer period to get it under control.
The person I was responding to was demanding an 'end point to all of this' and I was suggesting that maybe there isn't one. I don't need to provide proof, only to show that it is possible and the request for some sort of definitive planned end to all of the containment and mitigation work is an unreasonable and childish demand.
Many of the components of "back to normal" are about voluntary compliance with disease control measures. For example, I currently hang out with friends only outdoors or in very small groups - not because I couldn't do more, or because I'm afraid to, but because I'm hoping to prosocially blunt the spread of disease. Right now, I've already started going to restaurants (although I was never a big restaurant guy to begin with); I plan to start hosting and attending parties a few weeks after I've been vaccinated, and I plan to stop wearing a mask in public once Covid vaccines become as available as flu vaccines in my local area.
I'm very open to suggestions that it might make sense to wait a little longer before partying or taking off my mask. I'm sure other people are too. But the burden of proof is on you (or others who think the same way) to explain why this is important and what the timeline is. If your position is just a lecture about what we "need" to adjust to, or an assertion that life might never be normal again, that's not really going to get anyone to comply.
If you told people in March, 2020, that this would still be going on over a year from now, and likely 18+ months from now, what do you think the reaction would be? "You're crazy"???
Trump was talking about "reopening" things for Easter last year. He should've said Easter, 2022.
I was looking back at some old texts from a friend, last year around this time... "I hope this isn't going on 6 months from now."
People want to be optimistic. We need to prepare people for reality.
There are already areas of the country where "this" isn't going on, where businesses are open at full capacity and the public is happy to patronize them. Even in the most socially distanced areas, there's lots of people going on vacations and eating in restaurants and having house parties with their friends and family. So when you talk about reopening in Easter 2022, it's hard to connect that with the state of things today, much less the likely results when vaccines finish rolling out.
We will absolutely see another surge before the vaccine roll out is completed. So tens of thousands of more people will die because states reopened too quickly.
Easter, 2022 is no more realistic than Easter, 2020. Expectations need to be set that are reasonable and err on the side of caution and pessimism.
The source of this thread was a comment attempting to set the expectation that things will never get better, and nobody will ever again live the way they did in 2019. There’s a huge chasm between that and your (reasonable) claim that some people have moved a bit too fast and there may be public health consequences.
"Never" is always an exaggeration. I took that to be hyperbole, meaning "not for a very, very long time." Maybe the western world has this fully under control in a year. What about the virus mutating everywhere else? All you need is the next patient zero to get on a plane with some highly resistant variant and this starts all over again.
> For every person that dies (an agonizing death akin to medieval torture)
I think this is wrong, at least in rich countries, at least those that are sane enough to cure their ill citizens.
A friend of mine died of covid last year. Then a family member this year. They were both sedated, and did not suffer at all on their last days in hospitals.
Sedation is death with a respiratory illness like this. How were they feeling before they were sedated? Probably like they’d been drowning for hours. For all intents and purposes, that was the end of their life as far as their experience of it.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s great that we can provide palliative comfort for those final hours/days. But it doesn’t tell the full story.
Just for clarity/augmentation/pedantic detail: you might be sedated and end up an a ventilator.
But ventilators are really bad for COVID survival and really a last ditch, long-shot chance try to salvage your life. Practitioners hold off on the sedation and associated required ventilation as long as possible to try and spare your life.
> Keep wearing your masks and social distancing people. It’s hard, it’s a sacrifice, but together we can conquer this disease and return to life “as normal”.
This ghost is not going back into the bottle. It's way too widespread for that now. Even the WHO has determined that. Even if one country manages it, some tourist will bring it in.
The vaccines don't stop the spread enough either to kill it completely. People will still get sick and spread it, they just don't get as sick in large numbers. The simple fact that even a country that has the ability to rigidly control all outside sources like New Zealand is unable to avoid the occasional outbreak. However they do seem to reduce the risk of severe illness enough to bring it to a level comparable to other endemic diseases. PS: Don't get me wrong, I'm totally pro-vaccine and will get at as soon as I finally can.
I really hope that politics will deem the resulting levels sufficient to drop the other measures like the masks and distancing. Once the danger level is comparable to other endemic diseases I think we should.
And I really hope that SARS-CoV-2 mutates to a variant that isn't as deadly. Most diseases have, after all as evolution favours it (not as deadly means we won't fight it as hard). But I doubt we'll ever be COVID free. That point was passed once we didn't strictly quarantine China back in Feb 2020. But anyway that's water under the bridge.
The vaccines appear to be plenty effective enough to stop the spread, if enough people get them.
We don't have great information about the variants, but the big improvements in Israel and England are encouraging, even with vaccination still ongoing.
> Should reinfection prove commonplace, and barring a highly effective vaccine delivered to most of the world's population, SARS-CoV-2 will likely become endemic.
The thing is, we don't know if reinfection will prove commonplace. We don't know how long immunity will last given a two-shot regimen—though the strong immune response that people are having on the second shot might be cause for hope. We don't know how the virus will mutate on it's point/spike, the main infection vector that the RNA vax target. We just don't know.
Research is emerging, time will tell. In the meantime, it's fear mongering.
Well I will get the vaccine as soon as I can get it (which is not very soon, sadly). I'm not anti-vax, but the last few weeks the news has been all about "Don't be surprised if people still get COVID after being vaccinated". Like here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26522853
With that in mind I don't think eradication will be achievable. It only takes one person with a resistant mutation. I think we can hope to bring it under control. But not eradicate it.
What does 'control' mean? In humans, if a small number of people are sick and you know who they are, you can eradicate the infection with isolation (it would only take a couple months).
That it infects various animals may make that unworkable, and the difficulty in vaccinating a large percentage of people globally is another problem.
But the effectiveness of the vaccines against the current variants does not appear to be a problem, high levels of vaccination will slow the spread of the virus dramatically in those populations, to the point where it barely exists (compare to polio, which is still endemic in some places around the world).
As far as zoonosis (animal-transmitted human diseases) go...
Rabies infects a lot of animals, but many places of the world are now effectively rabies-free thanks to smart inoculation of foxes etc. with baits.
We had last proven rabies case in the wild in 2002. (The Czech Republic, a landlocked continental country, not an isolated island.)
You can still fall to rabies contracted from bats if extremely unlucky, but compared to countries like India where the disease still runs rampant, rabies is a solved problem in most of Europe.
Maybe there will be a similar way to inoculate the wild mustelids against Covid one day. To be honest, human antivaxxers strike me as a bigger problem than random mink. I don't meet many mink on a regular day, but people with their masks halfway down are all too common.
