In NYC, about 1.5 out of 1000 people have already died from covid. If you assume that every single person in the city got it, it’s already worse than the flu. Antibody tests show that maybe 1 in 5 people in the city have had it. So it’s more like 7 times as bad as the flu. Per case. Lots of people are immune to the flu. Lots of people get their flu shot. We don’t know yet if anyone is immune to this thing. So it spreads faster, there may be more cases, and it kills a lot more of those that do get infected.
NYC is exactly the problem with how our dear leaders have sloppily dealt with COVID. The Mayor and Governor prescribed a one-size fits all policy that might make sense in a place like where I live in rural Vermont, but which is not ideal for a densely populated area like the largest American city.
But statistically speaking, NYC is an outlier. In statistics, you typically drop outliers from your results if they skew too far from the mean. We should try to figure out why NYC is an outlier, but it doesn’t make any sense to pretend like the rest of the country is going to have the same results. As you point out, maybe they have a different strain? Maybe New Yorkers on average are more susceptible due to a combination of co-morbidities. Maybe the biggest difference between LA and NYC is that Angelinos get more sun, which bolsters their immune system. We don’t know. But it’s disingenuous to look at an outlier as a guidepost. No one would do that unless they were trying to catastrophize in lieu of finding tangible, meaningful meaning from the data.
We do know that we’re not just miscounting normal deaths as covid, because you can see the total death count rising everywhere it goes. I sent you a graph of that, for New York, in the last comment. Here’s another, it’s consistent across states, across countries:
The graphs you posted don’t mean that they’re not miscounting. Public health officials from everyone from the CDC to local doctors are noting that if you die of Covid right now, the death is counted as a Covid death. The total death count rising doesn’t say anything qualitative about what people are dying from. If you have advanced COPD, heart disease, diabetes, obesity and a hangnail, but you test positive for Covid the day before you die, did Covid kill you? According to your graphs: yes. But no autopsy report would ever say “Covid” as the cause of death. The autopsy would note that you had a half dozen co-morbidities along with a lung infection that pushed you over.
You should read some autopsies. They’re usually pretty in depth, and they describe everything remarkable about the person. A lot of them will describe someone’s hairstyle. They’re that granular.
So we have no idea how many people who were terminal died with Covid instead of from Covid. We can’t really know at this point, but we might assume some Covid deaths aren’t really attributable. We don’t know if it’s 10% or 50%. But whatever it is, it seems likely that Covid deaths are getting a bump. That bump is important because it could mean Covid is much less lethal for most populations.
I see Katie Couric posting Covid death-porn stories every day of “young” people dying. Almost all of these people appear to be obese. She doesn’t say whether they were smokers, or if they had heart disease, hypertension, cancer, liver disease or any of the other top 10 causes of early death. Weird huh? We don’t see stories posted from mainstream media people about a 30 year old keeling over from a heart attack. But that’s how most 30 year olds are likely to die, outside of a car accident or suicide. Now, if a 30 year old has a cardiac event and they test positive for Covid, it’s Covid that got them, and Katie Couric jumps on the corpse to plant the Covid flag in it. We shouldn’t buy it. We should ask way more questions. We should ask why Katie crops photos so we can’t see the deceased in their mobility scooter.
Maybe the news has been alarmist for so long that you can no longer see real danger?
It’s true the news is always alarmist in a way designed to scare people out of their freedoms. That should mean we’re more circumspect during a plausible crisis, not less. We don’t need to buy into the mainstream narrative just because it occurs during a pandemic.
The real danger is still for older people with compromised immune systems. That’s my father in law. He has a pretty severe and rare form of lung disease. But he’s doomed if he catches a bad cold. He is always socially distanced. We are always on guard when we visit him. But shutting down 90% of the economy doesn’t make him safer! Keeping him away from potential vectors makes him safer.
Remember: the initial shut down was supposed to flatten the curve, not prevent everyone from getting sick. It was supposed to keep our hospitals from being overwhelmed. Our hospitals are very much underwhelmed except in a few outlying hotspots. In Vermont, our curve is so flat you can hardly call it a curve. My county has had 1 death and never rose to more than 40 active cases. Our hospitals are closed except for the ERs. We’ve shuttered dozens of small businesses. We destroyed our economy to flatten the curve and still, we have no idea if it will work. It’s been a big fat guess.
And we have never before had a dichotomous decision foisted on us in the way you presume: that we have a premise that if it’s true, we have to shut down the entire economy and if it’s false, well too bad. We could (and you better believe they will) come up with that kind of dichotomy for a variety of scenarios. If the Russians/Chinese are going to attack, we need to initiate marshal law and nationalize food production. Oh if we’re wrong? No biggie.
If gun owners are dangerous zealots who want to gun down elementary school children… If habeus corpus means we might release a dangerous criminal… If a mosque houses just one terrorist… if a newspaper could publish classified secrets that harm the state… etc. etc.
That’s an authoritarian line of reasoning for making policy decisions. And my whole point is that it’s bad news.
