| >In the general population overall, Covid is undeniably more deadly than the flu, but only about 3-5x (and I think 3x personally right now). I don't see how you get close to 3X more deadly than the flu. If 14% of New York state residents have been infected, 20M population, 15000 deaths + another 3000 that are infected now and will die (this disease takes a long time to kill people) you get an IFR of 0.64. If the IFR for flu is 0.05, that makes covid 12X more deadly than the flu. Lots of people reporting an IFR of 0.5 based on the NY serological data; that is "right censoring" the deaths. It's got to be a bit higher than that. Either way you have covid with 10X the infection fatality rate of the flu. If worst flu years have IFR of 0.1 then covid is still 5X worse than the worse flu seasons. And as contagious as the worst flu seasons too. So twice as contagious as the flu, 10X deadly. Much more likely to put you in the hospital, and thus overwhelm the hospital system, causing many ancillary deaths. This NYTimes article sums it up: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/well/live/coronavirus-doc... At the peak in NY, hospitals stopped seeing heart attacks and strokes, because those people were too afraid to go to the hospital. Many of those people died at home, as supported by the overall death rates in NY. The narrative put out there by those that look at the recent serology results and say "this proves that this disease was really just a bad flu all along; we can reopen the economy without fear" is just not supported by the data. An IFR of 0.64 and hospitalization rate of double that, like 1.2%, for a disease this contagious, shuts down the economy until we get a vaccine or effective treatment or a Korea-like testing/tracing regime in place. And one more thing: the Great Depression was great for public health. https://www.pnas.org/content/106/41/17290 Yes suicides go up. But this is more than compensated for by other benefits. Overall, people may well be much healthier in a depressed economy. We will certainly see a decline in car accidents. |