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by pc86 836 days ago
What angle? I'm talking about the definitions of the words.

Pandemic: occurring over a wide geographic area (such as multiple countries or continents) and typically affecting a significant proportion of the population; characterized by very widespread growth or extent

Endemic: characteristic of or prevalent in a particular field, area, or environment; a disease or outbreak of disease that is typically present in a particular region or population : an endemic disease

COVID doesn't even really qualify as endemic based on the dictionary definition, but it's certainly not a pandemic.
1 comments
Dylan16807 835 days ago
Wide geographic area, yes. Significant proportion of the population, yes. Very widespread growth or extent, yes (specifically the extent option).

How does it not fit the dictionary definition of pandemic?

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pc86 835 days ago
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home

17,310 admissions, down 10.3% week over week

2.1% of deaths, down 8.7% WOW

1.5% of ED visits, down 14.6% WOW

7.4% of tests are positive, down 0.9% WOW

None of those numbers indicate growth. None of those numbers indicate a significant proportion of the population. I'll give you geography, but that's also characteristic of an endemic illness - distributed across a large geographic region among a small percentage of the population with relatively little impact.

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Dylan16807 835 days ago
Notice how I didn't say growth, since it bounces up and down. And that looks like a significant proportion to me.

If your argument is that these numbers are not enough for "very widespread extent", then are you saying it was never a pandemic to begin with?

And you already said it was endemic. Are you arguing that a pandemic needs bigger numbers than that?

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pc86 834 days ago
You didn't say growth but the definition of pandemic is "characterized by very widespread growth or extent."

98.5% of ED visits are for something else. What would that number have been in 2020 or 2021?

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Dylan16807 834 days ago
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/us/covid-cases.html

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html

The severity has dropped more than the prevalence.

Hospitalizations suggest that in the US the peak in Jan 2024 was around 80% as big as Jan 2023. If that's accurate, then Jan 2024 had more cases per day than most of 2020 and a good chunk of 2021. That's a lot of extent. There had been 120 thousand cases in the entire world when pandemic was originally declared, and the US is currently doing a multiple of that each week.

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