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by tsimionescu 1735 days ago
Edit: my 10% number below is definitely wrong, even for CFR. I messed up some numbers.

> I know that's what you believe, it's not what I believe. I believe it is ridiculous and immoral to coerce and force people into medical treatment for a relatively minor illness that others have freely available access to effective vaccines against.

A minor illness??? This is the worse illness that has affected the world since the Spanish flu. It's worse than AIDS, malaria, it even beat tuberculosis in terms of raw people killed in 2020. Calling COVID19 a "minor illness" is simply delusional at this point.

And this death toll was only kept somewhat in check because of the biggest social disruption and curbing of liberties since WW2. If social isolation weren't forced, we would have seen situations like we did in Lombardia in the early days - not 1% death rates, but 10% or more because of overwhelmed hospitals.

3 comments

> It's worse than AIDS

It's more acute than HIV was, but HIV still has an order magnitude more deaths. I remain hopeful that covid deaths won't reach those levels.

Covid19 killed 1.89 million people worldwide by Jan 1st 2021, according to Our World in Data. HIV killed the most people per annum in ~2004, at 1.7 million worldwide, ~23 years after the first outbreak (1981).

If we can stop Covid19 with vaccinations, lockdwons, contact tracing, then hopefully it will not reach HIV levels of cumulative historical deaths. But otherwise, it would reach the same death toll as HIV did in 40 years in about 12 years like 2020.

And note, HIV was enough to completely change human sexual interactions maybe forever - at least for ~30 years.

I said relatively minor, comparison being to something like smallpox. And certainly compared with the unfounded fearmongering you've written here. There would absolutely not have been 10% death rates! Have unvaccinated hospitalization rates ever gone above even 1%?
Edit: my 10% is definitely wrong, even for CFR. I messed up some numbers.

> There would absolutely not have been 10% death rates.

But that's exactly what the death rates looked like in all regions that didn't impose lockdowns soon enough. The case of Lombardia is perfect - it's one of the richest regions on Earth, and while local hospitals were overwhelmed, it was surrounded by other rich regions that could accept patients. And even so, it had ~10% death rates in the early days of the pandemic, before lockdowns.

They didn't really look like that, it was probably more like 1% and that is quite an outlier.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

A lot of places around the world have had little or no lockdowns or vaccinations and have not seen anything like 10% fatality rate over the population. This is fear mongering.

Oops, you're right - I completely messed up the numbers. 10% is way too much, even for CFR. Still, 1-2% death rates is a huge number.
No problem, hope I can help you sleep a little better tonight :)
> It's worse than AIDS, malaria,

Malaria has killed ~2 million in 2 years. It's actually just around half of Covid but while Covid deaths are slowing, Malaria is steady.

Sure, because Covid has a vaccine that can actually be afforded by most of the population suffering from it. Malaria has been completely eliminated from all rich regions of the world, and it only festers in places that can't afford the vaccine.