[qwerty1234599]

Daily reminder: new respitory diseases come and go, nobody usually cares.

What makes Covid different and what caused the shutdowns was when Lombardy alone had 450 deaths a day. No regular influenza could do that.

It's not as if we decided out of thin air the virus was dangerous.

[supernovae]

We flattened the curve... we bought time... most of us took active measures. It's helped. We have evidence it works.

Yet, people, who i assume are smart people, say that we're overreacting and we're causing societal harm and taking away their freedoms.

I can only laugh and cringe...

History shows that those cities that took active measures in every prior epidemic survived better and recovered better and thrived after.

This isn't our first pandemic, wont' be our last. Where we failed is we were woefully unprepared, our administration convinced people it's not that bad but here we are months later, deaths are still pushing upwards of 1,000 americans a day and people are saying its no worse than the flu.

There is no evidence to support this argument unless you're trying to deceive people.

You don't even need to know statistics. Take the worst flue year where we had 48k deaths that year. Covid is 5x worse that and we still haven't even made it through an entire year.

Take our best flue year - 1986-87 - where only 2,868 or so died. We'll be 100x times worse than that year with COVID alone and we're just NOW entering the common flu season.

The basic math doesn't support some of these studies that seem to use statistics for political gain rather than simple math for communicating the obvious differences.

And lets not forget - the death toll is only under control because we are taking active measures.

[__blockcipher__]

> It's not as if we decided out of thin air the virus was dangerous.

But this is kind of exactly what we did. Go look at a yearly all-cause mortality chart going back the last 110 years. You’ll see this year is a noticeable but not so great uptick (of which many of the deaths will be overdoses, suicides, lack of medical treatment for preventable diseases etc btw). Whereas say the 1918 Flu pandemic was much more deadly in absolute and relative terms both.

Remember we’re talking about a disease that for many is so mild that they never realize they have it. For others like the very elderly it can be very bad, with a 5% chance of dying if infected, but it’s no surprise that surveys that ask people to estimate COVID-19 mortality show that on average people overestimate the fatality by between 10-100x.

SARS-2 is real, but the real virus really is in our minds. I hope one day you will come to see things my way too.

I also hope more commenters here will go mode out what happens when you perform universal rather than targeted mitigation measures: universal ends up with more mortality by slowing down infections in those who are not at risk, which delays hers immunity for almost no benefit.

[supernovae]

In the worst flu seasons we have 50k people die. In the easiest flu seasons we have 3k people die.

So if you take the worst flu season - which we count as a year - we're almost 5x that with covid and its not even a full year yet...

If you take the best flu year, we're pushing 100x that.

Where are we over estimating anything when we break it down into simple terms?

Which btw, these current death rates are with active measures in place. If we didn't have these measures then the trends set early on would be off the charts by now.

[__blockcipher__]

> Which btw, these current death rates are with active measures in place. If we didn't have these measures then the trends set early on would be off the charts by now.

Sweden contradicts this.

> So if you take the worst flu season - which we count as a year - we're almost 5x that with covid and its not even a full year yet...

The way we count COVID deaths is fundamentally different from how we count Flu deaths.

It's much better to look at total deaths and compare to previous years. You'll see we've experienced an uptick this year but not one that is nearly as massive as you would predict based off the hysteria

[supernovae]

Sweden doesn't contradict anything. Search for the news right now and you will see their cases are increasing and they're dealing with trying to control it.

Really, the only hysteria there is, is from people like you projecting it.

Wearing a mask and socially distancing is rational.

[bart_spoon]

> Search for the news right now and you will see their cases are increasing and they're dealing with trying to control it.

This applies to all of Europe though. Places like France, Germany, Belgium, and Italy are all seeing skyrocketing daily cases.

From what I remember, it’s not that Sweden didn’t encourage mask wearing or social distancing, it just didn’t make anything mandatory, and it didn’t enforce any lockdowns. It hasn’t particularly saved their economy from any damage, although it didn’t seem to cause them to have rates of infection or deaths to get much worse than the average in Europe, and their hospitals didn’t get overwhelmed.

If anything, it seems to demonstrate that the idea that avoiding lockdowns will save the economy isn’t realistic, and the economy, but lockdowns aren’t going to help much either.

At this point it seems like all anyone can do is wear a mask, do what you can to socially distance while living a relatively normal life, and wait for either a vaccine or the pandemic to pass its course.

[curlypaul924]

I'm not a big fan of the word hysteria (literally "condition of having a uterus"), but that said, the two are not mutually exclusive. Wearing a mask is rational, and there are also people acting irrationally out of fear (remember how hard it was to get toilet paper?).

[JungleGymSam]

That's not happening anymore. Time to be adults, instead of terrified children, and find alternatives to lockdowns and mask-shaming with the occasional assault, and arrests from local governments.

[gruez]

>and find alternatives to lockdowns and mask-shaming with the occasional assault

assault for wearing masks, or failing to wear masks? I'm only aware of the former.

[timr]

"No regular influenza could do that."

Sure it could. The whole point of the IFR calculation is that it gives you an average perspective on how fatal a disease is, relative to other diseases. It's not an absolute maximum fatality rate, for every circumstance.

Put a strain of "normal" flu in a vulnerable population with no pre-existing immunity, and it would do a lot of damage. But if you don't count all the other people who had it without symptoms, then you get a misleading picture.

Also, of course, you have to realize that the population of "Lombardy" (~10M) is a bit larger than the population of New York City (~8M), where we see 100-300 deaths per day as a baseline mortality rate:

https://www.baruch.cuny.edu/nycdata/population-geography/pop...

[bonzini]

450 deaths a day was not the total, those were only those from confirmed COVID patients. Excess mortality was more like 650.

[timr]

Citation required (I've looked, and all I can find are annual mortality rates per capita, which are higher, certainly, but not double the rate for a year). Even if you're right, a doubling of baseline mortality per day is certainly something plausible for influenza in specific scenarios.

Italy as a whole is now seeing new cases per day roughly twice that observed in the spring, and yet deaths are up a tiny fraction of what you would expect from the Lombardy example. So it's not clear that Lombardy represents a typical outcome, even for Italy:

http://opendatadpc.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...

Point being, again, it's difficult to draw conclusions from data points that are on the extremes of the distribution. The IFR is a measurement of average behavior.

[bonzini]

Source: https://www.corriere.it/dataroom-milena-gabanelli/covid-risc... (in Italian). 45000 excess people are estimated to have died in about 60 days, for an average of 750 per day so I was even remembering fewer than the actual value.

Testing was awful in the spring, serological surveys were made in June and estimated that only 15% roughly of the cases were caught and other surveys estimated even lower percentages (as low as 6%). The territorial distribution is also much more even this time, so it is easier to cope for the healthcare system.

My point is that any a priori estimate of the IFR falls apart if the healthcare system fails and the purpose of lockdown is to avoid that. You don't lock down because it's the only way to keep the IFR down; you lock down when you realize that tracing is failing to capture and/or isolate many cases, and therefore lockdown is the only remaining way to keep the IFR down.

[timr]

OK, first, I need to say this: that news article has a number of false claims. Most notably, it claims that the fatality rate (# deceased / # infected) is 1-3%. Regardless of your opinions on the paper being discussed here, no credible source believes that the IFR for this virus is over 1%. That information is simply wrong.

That said, the claim for 45,000 excess deaths in March and April appears to come from this:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

With this table having the details:

https://www.thelancet.com/cms/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)31865-1/...

The 45,000 number in that table is for all of Italy, whereas Lombardy specifically had excess mortality of 25,212 in March and April, with another ~700 in May. So that's 420 excess deaths a day in March/April, over a baseline of 275 (16,480 deaths in Lombardy, on average, for March and April of 2015-2019). This is nowhere near the 650 excess deaths per day you claimed in the GGP comment, but is a factor of about 2.5x over baseline.

For whatever it's worth, here's a paper that makes a claim of a much lower excess mortality figure of 5740 for Bergamo, and 3703 in Lombardy in the first four months of 2020, using better-controlled models for mortality in the regions:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7520169/

I think it's somewhat pointless to debate the exact number of people dying every day, because we'll never know, and in any case, the virus was clearly quite deadly in that place at that time. However, both of these sources note that excess mortality spiked in March and April, and by May, had returned to below normal levels. So whatever happened in Lombardy, it was a statistical anomaly, and we should be careful extrapolating from it.

Did the virus cause significant excess mortality in Lombardy in March and April? Yes. Could the flu cause similar levels of excess mortality in a naive population? It can, and it has. The 1958 pandemic killed about 116,000 people in the US, which is well above the 12,000-60,000 people we see per year in modern times, and worse on a population-adjusted basis:

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1957-1958-pandemi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_influenza_statis...

People like to make comparisons to the 1918 pandemic, but if anything, Covid-19 appears to be on par with the 1958 pandemic in terms of overall severity.