[eli]

Thousands of Americans are losing their lives every day to Covid. New cases are MUCH higher than they were at any point in 2020 or 2021 (though it looks like we may finally have crossed the peak of this wave).

I'm sorry, but it isn't over yet. I wish it was. However wishing it or asserting it doesn't make it true. This was a sensible argument to make in July 2021 when vaccines were more effective and cases were literally 1/10th as prevalent.

I encourage the "over it" crowd to talk to the parents of young children, a cancer patient, or literally anyone who works at a hospital.

[theli0nheart]

I am a parent of young children, and we probably have more reason to feel "over it" than other folks. I spent the first two weeks of this year balancing full-time work with a kid at home because he tested positive. I got a fever for about a day, but that was it. But the disruption to my work and his education was far worse than any alternative. The entire class ended up getting sick with COVID anyways.

We were triple-vaccinated. Our kid had his first shot in early December. We spent basically all of December in lockdown. All of the little one's playdates were cancelled because everyone was freaking out about Omicron. And we still got sick. What was the point?

I'm absolutely done with the lockdowns, the masks, the strict controls, etc. The older people in my life are sick of it as well; they don't know how many years they have to live, and they don't want to spend the rest of their lives holed up inside a building. We have lives to live.

Hopefully, we as a race start taking into account quality of life in addition to length of life. We have a looming mental health crisis on our hands and it's exactly because of the fear-mongering; who knows how many years we're going to have to spend cleaning up this mess (it will probably be decades).

If you haven't gotten sick from COVID yet, you probably will. At this point it really is just a virus. The time for pulling out all the stops to prevent ICU overflows is over. This might be a permanant fixture in our lives and I'm more sick of the constant fear-setting than I am from the virus itself.

[eli]

I believe a higher percentage of ICU beds are occupied nationally than at any point in the pandemic: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/hospitalization-7-day-trend

If ICU overflows are when we pull out all of the stops, can we pull out just some of the stops before it gets that dire?

It's already not great. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/overwhelmed-by-omicron-surg...

[theli0nheart]

> I believe a higher percentage of ICU beds are occupied nationally than at any point in the pandemic

According to the data you linked:

   COVID ICU Beds Occupied:

   January 17-23, 2022 : 26,236
   January 4-10, 2021  : 29,175

So there were 2,939 (or ~11%) more beds occupied due to COVID about a year ago.

[eli]

Sure but that's not what I said. A higher percentage of all ICU beds are occupied today than at any point on the graph. If you need an ICU bed and one isn't available, you probably don't really care if that's because too many covid patients or reduced ICU capacity or a shortage of nurses.

In any event, would you agree that hospitals cancelling elective surgeries is indicative of an overworked system?

[oxymoran]

Have you talked to the parents of young children? Because those are exactly the people that are over it. A)kids are at statistically zero risk of covid unless they have cancer or something B) we have all already had covid because little kids are germ factories 3)the vaccines have been available for over a year now so you have had ample time to get one if you want to 4)the masks and lack of social engagement for children is very detrimental to their development.

I was completely on board with the first year or so of all these restrictions. But I am done sacrificing my child’s well being to spare the elderly. If the vaccines work, then why are people still afraid? I believe they work, so I am not afraid. I don’t understand why even the most ardent vaccine evangelists are still cowering in fear if they truly believe in their effectiveness.

The case count has exploded so what? Just think how many people actually have it but never bothered getting tested because it was so mild. The death rate is the same/similar to when we had a fraction of the cases we currently have.

[eli]

Yes, I am myself the parent of young children.

> kids are at statistically zero risk of covid unless they have cancer or something

At risk of what? Dying? What about passing covid on to others? Or covid symptoms that do not go away? What about merely needing to be hospitalized? That still seems pretty bad. My local Children's Hospital has more pediatric covid patients than at any time during the pandemic and the city has re-authorized crisis standards of care.

> the vaccines have been available for over a year now so you have had ample time to get one

Kids 5-12 have only had a few months and kids under 5 still have no vaccine.

> But I am done sacrificing my child’s well being to spare the elderly

That strikes me as rather cruel. What exactly are you sacrificing? Isn't every school in the country back to in-person? Is it having to wear a mask?

Look, I'm also tired of covid and don't want to have to think about it ever again. But the problems with the actual virus still far outweigh problems caused by our response to the virus.

[immibis]

Perhaps they meant the impact of the parent dying will be much greater if they have young children.

[NicoJuicy]

There's a difference between effectiveness against "new cases" vs. heavy illness.

Deaths/severity is not rising even though there are a lot of new cases.

Deaths ( = going down): https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/worldwide-graphs/#...

Severe cases ( small increase): https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/worldwide-graphs/#...

While new cases > x 7 https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/worldwide-graphs/#...

Additionally, it should be noted that the severe cases with Omicron are almost all unvaccinated ( not even boostered). If you want to check stats, please try to find a source that seperates delta ( which is not gone!) from Omicron.

Edit: And since it's January. An honest comparison would be Januari 2021 with Delta because of family / friend gatherings. It's a pretty busy social time ;)

[eli]

Thousands of Americans dying a day isn't bad enough? How much worse does it need to get before it's something we should still be very concerned about?

And deaths are in fact rising. According to your chart they were around 6000/day (7 day average) on Jan 1 and are 7600/day in the most recent data two weeks later.

[NicoJuicy]

First of all. Not thousands, but 571 as i checked on a population of 320.000.000 in the US and with a reasonable amount of people unvaccinated ( and they chose for this, other people aren't responsible for other people's decisions)

And as mentioned in my above comment.

Can you show me how many are dying because of Omicron specific and how many are related to previous Delta infection that were already admitted in the hospital?

I'm not saying people aren't dying. Lockdowns aren't in place for the flu and that has also 52 k. deaths per year ( = 145 per year) and is much less contagious as Omicron. Also, Delta is not gone yet.

You have to compare numbers with reality. Otherwise I can ask you at how many deaths per year you would reduce restrictions or at what death/severity rate.

0 is definitely impossible as some people will remain unvaccinated. You could have the same argument that 10 people are dying per year...

PS. Compare it with December 2020/January 2021 which would be comparable with visiting family/friends multiple times. We aren't anywhere near that peak with *7 infections.

[eli]

Most states don't report deaths on the weekend, which is why you should look at the 7-day average. It was 3,866 deaths on Friday.

[NicoJuicy]

Sure. Compare cases vs deaths over a 7 day average with a comparable timing ( eg. January 2021)

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/worldwide-graphs/#...

Lots of more new cases, less severe ones.

It works both ways to have a fair comparison.

[kevingadd]

Deaths per day is higher on the chart you linked than it was not too long ago.

[NicoJuicy]

Did you take end year meetings into account?

We are just out of the busiest social time of the year.

[refurb]

Thousands of people die everyday during bad flu epidemics like 2018 when 80,000 Americans died over a ~6 month flu season.

We didn’t keep kids from school, we didn’t panic when hospitals were overwhelmed, we didn’t shut down businesses.

[dchuk]

That many people are dying a month right now. It’s nearly an order of magnitude different situation.

[afavour]

> when 80,000 Americans died over a ~6 month flu season

Where are you getting that number? CDC estimates 27k:

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html

which puts it below current COVID numbers by a big chunk.

> We didn’t keep kids from school

At this point schools are largely closed because there are too many teachers out sick to teach effectively. There isn't a particularly simple answer here.

[disambiguation]

Weird, here's another CDC source that cites a non-finalized estimate of 61k (45k - 95k)

The lower bound itself is higher than the 27k estimate.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html

[bairrd]

Flu season doesn't lead to insanely high excess death rates, and overwhelm hospital capacity, making things like biking now a much higher risk activity as any visit to a hospital due to a broken bone or something is far more likely to result in a lack of proper treatment. That we are in 2022 and still discussing this leads me to, very grimly, believe that we are in some period of hyper-darwinism, where this train of thought will only go away once the virus has incapacitated/killed those who seem to not understand what the word "excess deaths" means.

[mistercheph]

Yes, maybe after that it will come for people who can't tell plural from singular. I am all for grammatical punishments of the most grim variety.

[bairrd]

Willful missing of the point. Also not implying that the outcome is anything approaching a good outcome, just a grim Darwinian one, where thinking responding to covid in any way to improve life expectancies is just some sign of weakness. Our further atomization and slide towards a individualist society will leave us living shorter, less collaborative lives where we will try and treat cancer with a juice fast or some nonsense, instead of transforming our fundamental relationship to healthcare away from a not-for-profit one. But one is something a consumer can do, the other requires collective action, and that's only for the hysterical weaklings to dream of, so instead we will just virtue-signal our way towards dying at 30 on a bowflex machine after taking unregulated gym substances or whatever in a failed attempt to steel ourselves against our lack of societal fabric and collective ability to combat anything.

[refurb]

Feel free to hide under a rock avoiding covid while ignoring all the other risks you take everyday.

Hospitals hit capacity during flu seasons - did you wear a mask everyone, keep your kids home, work from home and cancel all travel plans? I’ll bet you didn’t even know they were at capacity.

I’m vaccined, I’m moving on with life.

[bairrd]

Risk mitigation whilst hospitals are at capacity? Nah, gotta live my life! Otherwise they might perceive me as weak-willed, and more important than my continued existence is to ensure I am not perceived as a weakling! Anything else is others being hysterical! Fuck doctors, am I right!

[refurb]

Hospitals hit capacity during flu season all the time.

Did you stay at home, keep your kids from school and cancel all travel plans last flu season when hospitals got overwhelmed?

You probably didn’t even know they were overwhelmed, did you?

[esalman]

Last flu season a bunch of my family friends did not die from flu, nor did any relative suffer long term consequences from flu.

My coworker from 5 years back died yesterday. He is 2 years younger than me. I am not even 40.

[immibis]

So, even by your inflated number, 20 times fewer than COVID-19, if we assume we are halfway through the pandemic?

[giraffe_lady]

maybe we should have

[eli]

What kids are being kept from school?

[wokwokwok]

800000 people have died over the past two years in the US alone.

That’s an order of magnitude difference.

That’s why the response was an order of magnitude more substantial.

I’m baffled you think this is somehow surprising.

[refurb]

I’m baffled my point went over your head.

We have tens of thousands of thousands of deaths every year. In the past decade 300,000 died of the flu and nobody notices.

[it_does_follow]

People did notice. Pre-pandemic this was the major reason most people got flu vaccines: it's nice not to get the flu, but even nicer not to kill grandma when you visit the nursing home. Bad flu seasons were heavily reported, and people were aware that, while mild to most, the flu can be very deadly to at risk populations.

In pre-pandemic years if there was a flu as contagious as omicron people would be in a panic.

I'm sorry you don't like reality, I've never been a huge fan myself, but what's happening is happening.

[immibis]

And in the next decade, based on current death rates, 4,000,000 Americans will die of COVID-19. Are you saying there's no difference between 3x10^5 and 4x10^6? Well, the difference is not that large, but apparently it does cross our arbitrary threshold for "this is actually quite bad and we should probably stop it from happening"

[refurb]

Huh? You’re extrapolating two year of a pandemic, most before a vaccine out 10 years?

That’s ridiculous right?