Ed Ames
Member
What is the death rate again? And I don't mean the elderly that are dying from multiple morbidities.
Yes, COVID is less deadly to the young. Let’s explore what that means.
The case fatality rate for children 0-14 appears to be somewhere around 0.026%. Put that in perspective: there are 60,000,000 people in that category, so by advocating for ignoring measures that have worked worldwide to control infections you are advocating for the death of about 15,800 children 14 and under.
To make you feel a bit better about that, let’s look at people age 15-44. The case fatality rate for that group is about 2.519%. Since there are about 130,000,000 people in that age group, you are looking at potentially 3,274,700 deaths amongst people aged 15-44.
We’re at a potential 3,290,500 deaths for people under 45 at this point, using information gathered through the 138,000 or so deaths already counted In the USA so far (and ignoring the fact that there is good evidence to support that being a significant undercount).
That’s about 1% of the total population. And yes, that’s based on case fatality rates, and infection fatality rates are generally lower, but at this point the CDC is adjusting IFR upwards not downwards so there is no guarantee it’ll be significantly lower. But let’s quarter the number. .25 percent of the population under 45.
Then we get into this little detail: there is growing evidence that this isn’t a “one and done” risk. You take your chance now, and three or four months later you are back in the at-risk pool again. Meaning you might face that risk up to 4 times a year. But let’s say it’s just twice a year. If that turns out to be the case we aren’t looking at just .25% of the under-45 population dying, but an attrition rate of 0.5% of the under 45 population every year. So you could have 1,645,250 die in a year, and then another 1,628,79o die the following year, and so on.
Remember: humanity has never actually made a coronavirus vaccine. Not one that was safe to use. All this talk about vaccines by next year? Well that’s the hope, but we were also supposed to have an HIV vaccine in the 1980s and here we are 30+ years later without one.
I won’t get into the older people since you apparently don’t care if they die, but it is worse for them. Which, to be blunt, means most of you reading this.
And on the other hand you have both a scientific consensus that masks work, and examples of it working in other countries. Japan has gone through this whole thing with just masks and social distancing (they didn’t shut down but they had basically 100% mask wearing compliance) and they are standing at around 1000 dead in a population of about 126,500,000 people on a tiny sliver of land. We have less than 3 times the population and 138+ times the deaths, and I guarantee our death count is going to skyrocket in a few weeks as the 60,000 new cases and climbing we’re adding per day with a 4% overall case fatality rate works its way through the course of the disease (it takes weeks to run its course) and turns into 2,400 dead per day.
For scale: the US lost about 4400 people in Iraq from 2003 to 2011. That’s both the war and occupation. The US is currently losing that many people per week, and we’re on track to lose more than that every two days soon.
Edit to add another little reality check. At this point about 1% of the US population has had covid. About half of those still do. Of the half who no longer have covid, somewhere between 8% and 10% are dead. That means that potentially just in the people who are already infected today we have another 138,000 deaths waiting to happen, and we’re adding a lot of new cases every day.
So man up and wear a mask.
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