This pandemic, along with all of the ones before, is mother nature's way of saying that there's too many people in this world, and she's gonna take some of them out.

The world population will eventually become naturally immune from this particular strain of virus, just like it has to all of the previous strains before the first vaccinations were ever developed.

Unfortunately, some viruses take more lives than others and you must accept that. These viruses have been around A LOT LONGER THAN THE HUMAN POPULATION has. This is their playground, we are merely their guests.

One should worry more about that next giant meteor that is due to hit Earth........which is late.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j12J3PCai5A

If disease A kills 100% of 1000 people before running out of steam, and disease B kills 1% of 1,000,000,000 people, disease B is 10,000 times deadlier. If you have a choice of two jobs, one which makes $1000 an hour and lets you work one hour a month, or another that pays $100 an hour and gives you 40 hours a week, which job pays more?

I know which disease I'd rather catch, and it's not the one with a 100% mortality rate.

As I stated previously, covid-19 poses a greater risk to a population/community due to how easily it spreads. It poses less of a risk to an individual.

Disease B has killed 10000 times more people but is 99% less deadly?

You have enough hours in a month to work both?


:D

That was my first thought, I could squeeze that extra hour into my work week.

My first thought was how is that analogy about work hours relevant to the thoughts just before it about mortality rates. :iono:

A better analogy would imo be risk to grenading an engine with i/h/e (easily accessible with relatively low risk) vs a turbo kit (less accessible, higher risk). There are likely way more people that have grenaded their engine with bolt ons however it is way more accessible and the percentage of people that have grenaded their engine with a turbo is likely higher although the overall number is lower.

Then you can look at as to whether the engine would have grenaded independently of I/H/E (i.e people in their 80s with chronic disease with poor prognosis like cood, cardiac failure, kidney failure etc).

In the end its way more complex than alluded to. Unfortunately nuance doesnt seem to exist anymore.

Why aren't I vaccinated yet?

Well despite having a severe phobia of needles, the single reason I'm not vaccinated yet is that vaccination isn't available yet for people under 40 years of age in my country (unless you're a front line worker or have some other co-morbidity).

Sitting here eagerly waiting my turn!

Oh, I understood that portion.

See what happens when your country is too rich to receive COVAX help but not fully stocked yet? We are just catching up here, with 2nd doses expected to be stretched as long as possible. The door is open for 18+ in my province as of yesterday.
Patience, and good common sense my friend. I'd think there has to be a way to overcome a phobia that isn't exactly like staring over the edge of a high rise building, but then again most phobias aren't rational are they?

What you seem to be mentioning did get studied. And retracted lol. It's worth reading the original PDF that was published and the reason for retraction. Very interesting.



https://www.jhunewsletter.com/articl...ue-to-covid-19

Super interesting, I haven't seen that data yet. I think we sort of knew that covid would be the final nail in the coffin for people that are on death's door, but I would have expected there to be a larger number of deaths in that age group though. If anything that sort of cements what I'm saying regarding nuance.

Covid can simultaneously be dangerous to a community and not very dangerous to a high percentage of individuals. It's dangerous due to the fact that it spreads so easily and causes respiratory distress to a high enough percentage of individuals to overwhelm the medical system.

To illustrate this in another way, where I live there's a population of approximately 75,000 with two local hospitals with a bed count of approx 750 between the two of them. There's approx 40 to 50 ICU between both.

I've seen data suggesting that anywhere between 5-10% of people infected with covid 19 need medical attention (ranging from steroids & antibiotics on the less serious side to intubation on the more serious side). Let's assume 35000 people (50%) become positive within a small window of time, that would mean anywhere from 1750 to 3500 people will require medical attention. There are only 750 beds. 1-2% will require intensive care, or 350 to 700 people while there are 40-50 ICU beds. This is overwhelming and then you also have to realize people go to the hospital for things that are unrelated to COVID-19 (fractures, COPD exacerbation, cardiac arrest etc). This means numerous people will receive insufficient care.

This has been simplified but I think the point gets across.

Also the study was likely retracted because people are idiots and will use it as data to push their agenda. The same thing happened when the CDC published data and people arrived at the conclusion that only 6% of people died from covid which is not what the data said at all.

Everything has definitely been over simplified but sometimes I appreciate it so I can live life and be less worried which is nice. (I worry very little but people who don't care at all and people who are 600% alarmists both worry me some lol)

I wondered from teh beginning why we were tracking cases instead of deaths like we do for everything else but that seemed to sway back to normal toward this ending of it. Like with flu, we don't track cases because tons of people get it and never go to the hospital. Ironically, the same could easily be said with covid though it seemed to be insanely contagious, it wasn't all that deadly for say, people under 50.

95% of deaths were 50 and above and 80% of deaths were 65+. (thanks study cited by AARP!) When I see numbers like that, I dont' worry at all. It does make me wonder if politicians (most in those age brackets for sure) weren't blowing things out of proportion because they were most at risk lol.



But you're right about nuance but nuance is dying. Everyone wants to stop reading books and go back to judging covers. It negates the need for nuance.

It's for sure deadlier if you're older and or have other comorbidities. In 30 and under risk of death is fairly low even compared to something like Flu. For children, it's near zero.

Death is not the only metric we should be looking at though. It is a novel disease so we don't know if it might cause you to develop some sort of fibrosis or cancer or cardiac abnormality in 30 years. There does seem to be evidence that covid causes some long-term issues.

Look at something like HPV where it was implicated in cervical cancer at a relatively long period of time after the disease was discovered.

In my opinion this is why the vaccine is lower risk than the disease and why I chose to get it, along with protecting my patients and family members.