While it’s easy to focus our attention on the crazy 30%, a lot of progress is being made. Yay, science!
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Folks keep forgetting this in their panic over the disease.
I mean, really, once you’re dead, do you care if it was covid or some lingering malady like old age?
(s.)
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Reality isn’t toothless. I remember back in mid 2020 when some epidemiological projections were that more than 1million Americans would be killed by covid. And, of course, they were derided as as fear mongering.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/us/coronavirus-deaths-estimate.html
We’re currently at 840K dead and this is likely an underestimate.
Between 160 million and 214 million people in the United States could be infected over the course of the epidemic, according to a projection that encompasses the range of the four scenarios. That could last months or even over a year, with infections concentrated in shorter periods, staggered across time in different communities, experts said. As many as 200,000 to 1.7 million people could die.
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I’m going to have to get back to you on that one.
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I’d probably rather get hit by bus and be immediately done in than drowned laying in a hospital bed.
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Well, Scott Atlas and the Texas state leadership (what with the suggestion older folks take one for the economy) were there a while ago.
Not that they were knowingly volunteering to be part of the cull, however.
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Being smothered, in my own bodily juices or otherwise, was never on my bucket list…
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Yup, I’d rather die laughing … and almost did!
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Not to worry.
Number of deaths for leading causes of death
- Heart disease: 659,041
- Cancer: 599,601
- Accidents (unintentional injuries): 173,040
- Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 156,979
- Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 150,005
- Alzheimer’s disease: 121,499
- Diabetes: 87,647
- Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 51,565
- Influenza and pneumonia: 49,783
- Intentional self-harm (suicide): 47,511
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But my question to Dr. Fauci is, will the virus continue to evolve?
I’m not Dr. Fauci, but… yes! Yes it will. This is the way of all viruses. This is why people catch so many colds (different strains/variants of rhinoviruses and coronaviruses) and why the flu vaccine which you should absolutely get annually is a “crapshoot” (biologists have to make a guess as to which strain will be dominant that season).
SARS-COV-2 is going to become a normal part of our virus ecosystem, just like cold and flu viruses. This is a fact; people need to accept it. There is no stopping it from evolving short of eradicating it, which as Fauci points out we’ve only done with smallpox. So the hope is that the dominant strain goes the way of omicron; i.e. more potent but less serious. Luckily this is advantageous over the alternative, as killing your host too quickly means you won’t spread. There is no law that says future variants have to be less dangerous, but that sure looks like our trajectory.
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It seems that the best we can actually hope for is that between vaccination and exposure, COVID becomes no more “scary” annually than the flu. But note, the flu – scarier proper name “influenza” – is a serious condition for many many people, but most of us have learned to live with it.
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And so if Omicron will always be with us, must we get boosters perpetually every so often for it and its inevitable arising variants?
If it stays dangerous enough to cause problems, maybe, but as others have pointed out we already do this with the flu.
Best case–which omicron actually seems to be on a trajectory towards–is a virus that is more common but significantly less dangerous, vaxxed or not. At that point it’s effectively dumbed down to being no more than another common cold coronavirus.
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Because for cultural reasons a lot of us are anti-intellectual self-indulgent babies who throw huge tantrums at the very suggestion that a small personal sacrifice be made to hugely benefit the entire society.
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Marge ‘n a box!
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I just can’t with these people claiming China created COVID and let it loose. I don’t care, it’s a virus, we need to/needed to learn to deal with it. It’s like Pandora’s box, there’s no chasing a virus back to whence it came.
I mean the whole Pandora’s box story is symbol/story for dealing with reality. So lets figure out how to deal and recreate/create a life where we don’t ignore it.
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This is Nazi analogy you’re looking for. You can move along.
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I always find the origin debate a strawman for the current situation. Sure, okay, maybe it was incorrect food handling or even a lab. Fine whatever, save it for a different discussion. None of that changes how poorly the US–and entire western world I guess–handled it initially (poor testing and public health policies) and continues to handle it now (being too sensitive to the voluntarily unvaxxed via policies and broad messaging).
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There’s this from his Twitter handle
" It’s not compassionate to bankrupt America!"
Damn boy you’re dumb. Don’t care that Warren Davidson was and Army Ranger, must of had too many knocks to the head. He isn’t the first person to try and make vaccine mandates synonymous is Nazi treatment of the Jews, so he should have learned this doesn’t end well with the person trying to push this crap.
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Exactly.
If China incorporates won’t they have corporate immunity from all the law suits?
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