[Guvante]

Technically the wild and crazy ones were "it was bio engineered" and "let's ignore it and gain herd immunity". The former was being touted as justification for violence against Asians and the latter would involve millions of deaths in most countries. Tens of millions world wide.

[dsyrk]

Would being a result of gain of function research with a particular furin cleavage site be considered “bio engineered”?

[Guvante]

I don't feel like playing "there isn't enough evidence to prove me wrong"

[dsyrk]

Source: https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...

Relevant text: For the lab escape scenario, the double CGG codon is no surprise. The human-preferred codon is routinely used in labs. So anyone who wanted to insert a furin cleavage site into the virus’s genome would synthesize the PRRA-making sequence in the lab and would be likely to use CGG codons to do so. “When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus,” said David Baltimore, an eminent virologist and former president of CalTech. “These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2,” he said.

[sdsaga12]

Approximately 3.5 million globally have died from covid according to the WHO: https://covid19.who.int/

If you include deaths from related factors, like increased poverty or unrest, I'm sure the numbers go up a bit, but not to tens of millions.

I don't state this as an attack, by the way. Covid and its entangled cultural and political issues are enormously emotionally charged, and, one way or another, that tends to skew our perception of even relatively simple facts.

One thing I think the Hacker News community does well, at least aspirationally, is try to keep sight of the fundamental technical details of issues. For a pandemic, having an accurate intuition of its scale falls into this category IMO.

[Guvante]

COVID has a death per case rate of 3% give or take. It is estimated that only 1/3 of cases are confirmed. Thus we lose 1% of the people infected.

70% herd immunity without vaccines is 0.7% of your population basically. While I don't think we would lose the 49 million that implies unless we ignored it completely that does make saying we would lose 10s of millions if not for vaccinations not far fetched.

Yes I would put good odds we stay under 10 million in reality. I was only talking about the "natural herd immunity" idea.

[sdsaga12]

I see, I thought you were listing your understanding of the death toll that had already been reached in actuality and not the theoretical potential death toll without vaccine intervention. That makes more sense.