[jimktrains2]

Species is a much more fluid term than I think you realize.

Also, we don't know that most people are more or less unaffected by covid-19. We're only beginning to understand long term affects of even mild cases. Please don't spread misinformation.

[Teever]

Ring species[1] are a particularly fascinating example of the fluidity of the concept of species.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species

[chmod775]

> Species is a much more fluid term than I think you realize.

I am aware it sometimes tells you nothing at all.

> We're only beginning to understand long term affects of even mild cases. Please don't spread misinformation.

Asymptomatic cases are not the same as mild cases.

Besides, always assuming the worst-case scenario, especially when all previous experience tells us to be optimistic, is not a workable strategy.

[jimktrains2]

My point wasn't to assume the worst, but to point out that we don't know what the long term affects of even mild cases are, and there is a non-trivial amount of mild-and-worse cases.

[holoduke]

Covid is comparable to flu with a higher mortality rate. Don't make it bigger than it is. 99.95% of the people are doing perfectly fine. Genetics are thus pretty effective

[raducu]

Please, please, please stop saying that it is comparable to the flu in any way!

I got a mild case of COVID-19, even the doctors in the hospital agreed on that; I was able to help other patients do stuff they couldn't, I could easily climb 2 floor worth of stair while 90% of the patients had to make frequent resting stops.

37 days after first symptoms, I'm still not back to my previous energy levels, I still cough, I got tinnitus in my right ear and pain when ejaculating.

None of this has ever happened with any flu or cold that I ever got.

[inglor_cz]

"I got tinnitus in my right ear and pain when ejaculating."

Uh, thanks for warning, I guess? (nervously adjusting my FFP2 mask)

[dragonwriter]

> Covid is comparable to flu with a higher mortality rate.

So, like 1918 pandemic flu?

[virmundi]

There is also evidence that the Spanish Flu was made worse by a magic new drug of the time: aspirin. Sadly we dosed people far beyond safe. We made them internally bleed to death. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091002132346.h...

By the way, here's evidence that the Spanish Flu had a 20% death rate: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ten-myths-about-1918-...

[autokad]

the 1918 spanish flu death rate was around 20%. It was only in March 2020 after covid19 was mainstream news it got edited in Wikipedia to show 2% (not sure if that's changed by now), you can check the edit history. But in short, in 1918, there were coffin shortages, compared to the toilet paper shortages with covid19.

covid19 and the Spanish flu are not even in the same weight class, not even a little bit, whereas yes, like it or not, covid19 is most likely in the same weight class as the flu depending on your thresholds with the flu at .1% and CV19 around .5 to 1% (likely closer to .5%).

yes, there are some people with long term effects of cv19. that's also true of the flu. Many scientists think age related dementia is caused by repeated exposures to the flu/cold. flu/cold have also caused heart and organ damage to many, it just doesn't get reported on. 'oh, this person died of organ failure, wonder why'. It's already a proven fact that the flu has caused the onset of type 1 diabetes for example. There are also many reported cases of heart disease caused by the flu. the flu sucks.

people loose their sh*t when you talk about this. it doesn't minimize the effect of covid19, it just highlights the flu is something serious. for some reason, people are too immature to handle that. or maybe it goes against their worldview we should burn the world to the ground in order to stop covid19.

[tsimionescu]

If the flu is .1% and CV19 is between 0.5-1%,that means that it is between 5 and 10 times as deadly. I'm not sure I would call that 'about the same'.

Also, these are the numbers for CV19 given unprecedented social distancing measures, entire hospitals dedicated to it, border closures and so on. If nothing had been done, it seems likely, given regional examples like Italy's Bergamo area, the death rate could easily be 10 times what is observed today, if not more.

Equally, with much stronger and more targeted measures, the death and infection rate can be brought to essentially 0 without impacting the whole population as much, as shown by Vietnam.

It is still absurd to call a disease that has already killed many more people than malaria this year 'similar to the flu'. Sure, the flu is bad, but in conservative estimates, Covid19 is 5 times worse (and in more equal comparisons, where we would take similar measures to what we do for flu, it is probably more than 100 times worse).

[autokad]

its not a secret nor disputed that the definition of a covid19 death is anyone who happens to die and is also covid19+. its also no secret nor disputed that many hospitals have and still calling any respiratory death a covid19 death without testing if they are covid19+. even public health officials calling for forever lockdowns acknowledge at least half of all of the covid19 deaths would have died in 2020 regardless.

It also didnt help that our health system was killing covid19 patients by giving putting them too aggressively on respirators. it's an inconvenient truth you get shouted at for bringing up.

Even with these absurd metrics for mortality, its clocking in at .3%. So in my opinion, its in the same weight class as the flu, but if you have such a problem with it, that's why I qualified the statement as I said it, depending on what your threshold is.

Keep in mind, the flu at the end of 2019 going into 2020 was a particularly bad flu. the mortality rate of those going to the hospital was around 6% according to the CDC.

it would not be 100 times worse than the flu. we have so much data on covid19 now, and nothing has really changed since the cruise ships, which was basically a free experiment for the world that has been promptly ignored over and over.

[jimktrains2]

I agree that some people may think things are worse than they are. I feel like the zeitgeist, at least in my area, is a lingering uncertainty of exactly how bad things are, due to a lack of testing, and of how bad things can get, as we saw in italian and new york hospitals.

My understanding, however, is that the transmissibility of covid-19 is 3 to 10 times greater than the common flu. For instance, our local public transit agency doesn't have dozens of drivers testing positive for the flu and having symptoms each year. Coupled with the, something between 2 and 10 times greater death rate, the largest concern is overrunning hospitals if there is a bad wave in an area. As another example, because it's more transmissible, my community is also worried about getting infected because don't want to infect family if we get it, whereas I don't think we worry about the same with the flu.

My understanding of the current situation is that if everyone would wear a mask and social distance, there would be very little reason to continue with many of the other precautions that have been instituted. As you said, we live with the flu, so we don't need to make the transmissibility 0.

I'm going to be very interested to look back at this in a decade and see what we've learned and what could have been differently. How overblown, or conversely, how valid are our fears right now? The biggest problem is we just don't know, and won't for a while.

[lebuffon]

To your point about transmissibility versus Flu there is this report: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6937a6.htm

It looks like our protections for Covid-19 were very effective against Flu transmission at least that is the assumption.

[VLM]

The topic can only be discussed using political speech until November 3rd then on the 4th we can go back to using scientific speech.