Quote:
Originally Posted by MuseChaser
|
Cool. Although, I don’t really know if it matters at this point. It will be good data to compare to the mortality rate of other variants if they can tease out that data, but that will be hard. If the Delta variant struck first then it would have likely killed more people, but the early variants already did that, so the early or overall mortality rate is not a great indication of the severity of any new strains.
The trend with this data is for articles to conpare the mortality rate to the seasonal flu, which is pointless because we don’t have robust data on tge flu prepandemic. We weren’t mass testing the whole country. We weren’t screening every admission to hospitals for the seasonal flu. In all likelihood, the seasonal flu would have a huge number of asymptomatic cases, which would lower the mortality rate of the seasonal flu and make this pandemic look far worse, but we really don’t need this type of data to assess the severity because we have a death toll, and we have lived this pandemic out.
What we do know if roughly 650k+ have died, which is around 0.2% of the US population, and the death toll is most likely short of the true death toll. If we had no vaccine and no new variants then 0.3% is about one million people. We hit 1,386 new deaths a few days ago. A thousand a day is 365k a year, so we could still hit that 0.3% soon, despite the vaccine and our efforts to fight this disease unless boosters and vaccination rates improve. Without the vaccine, would we hit over a million? I think it would have been likely. We already have mortality rates in cities or towns that are higher than 0.3%, so that suggests the mortality rate is higher. New Jersey is at 0.3% and is still adding deaths despite the 60% fully vaccinated and 70% partial vaccination rate. It isn’t a lot, but I think my point is that we shouldn’t be dismissive about the severity of this virus.