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Which horse film is your favorite?
This poll is closed.
Black Beauty 2 1.06%
A Talking Pony!?! 4 2.13%
Mr. Hands 2x Apple Flavor 117 62.23%
War Horse 11 5.85%
Mr. Hands 54 28.72%
Total: 188 votes
[Edit Poll (moderators only)]

 
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brugroffil
Nov 30, 2015


Ok. I'm still not sure why you need to fudge those numbers. From February 2020 through September 2021, the CDC estimates 921k deaths. That's a bit worse than 750k in two years. And ultimately, predicting that this whole thing would burn out fairly quickly with relatively few deaths is still much more categorically wrong than the Imperial College's early models.

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Professor Beetus
Apr 12, 2007

They can fight us
But they'll never Beetus
Real quick warning for the thread. Some of you are running at an 11 and I need you to take it down a notch. Try to be kind and remember that everyone posting in this thread is coming from all kinds of different places wrt Covid, and everyone is doing their best to disseminate information and deal with it as well as they can. This is something awful after all, so I've given a lot of leeway, but if you find yourself unable to post without being aggro, it might be time to take a break or utilize that ignore button.

We're all in this together, no matter how much that might suck.

Owlofcreamcheese
May 22, 2005
Probation
Can't post for 9 years!
Buglord

brugroffil posted:

Ok. I'm still not sure why you need to fudge those numbers.

fudge what numbers? That was literally what the most prominent prediction was in march 2020. the imperial college of london's report.

fosborb
Dec 15, 2006



Chronic Good Poster

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

fudge what numbers? That was literally what the most prominent prediction was in march 2020. the imperial college of london's report.

If absolutely zero controls were put into place, yes, including even personal behavior changes which would be inevitable as medical systems became overwhelmed

The model acknowledged all of this

enki42
Jun 11, 2001
#ATMLIVESMATTER

Put this Nazi-lover on ignore immediately!
I think the overall takeaway is that nearly everyone was wrong about COVID in March of 2020 in a bunch of ways. Even pointing to a million deaths now includes a bunch of stuff the early models wouldn't have even considered including like far more transmissible variants, effectiveness and hesitance around vaccines, etc.

I bet 50+% of the posts that were posted in the spring of 2020 were pretty significantly wrong if you went and took a look.

mod sassinator
Dec 13, 2006
I came here to Kick Ass and Chew Bubblegum,
and I'm All out of Ass

Professor Beetus posted:

Real quick warning for the thread. Some of you are running at an 11 and I need you to take it down a notch. Try to be kind and remember that everyone posting in this thread is coming from all kinds of different places wrt Covid, and everyone is doing their best to disseminate information and deal with it as well as they can. This is something awful after all, so I've given a lot of leeway, but if you find yourself unable to post without being aggro, it might be time to take a break or utilize that ignore button.

We're all in this together, no matter how much that might suck.

Who? What? Give specifics. I am honestly at a loss as to what aggression has occured. There are no threats, no name calling, etc. If anything your call out here and implication of taking some kind of action with no details is quite passively aggressive.

brugroffil
Nov 30, 2015


Owlofcreamcheese posted:

fudge what numbers? That was literally what the most prominent prediction was in march 2020. the imperial college of london's report.

750k deaths in two years, but you already know that's what I was referring to because it was already pointed out.

Lazy_Liberal
Sep 17, 2005

These stones are :sparkles: precious :sparkles:

mod sassinator posted:

Who? What? Give specifics. I am honestly at a loss as to what aggression has occured. There are no threats, no name calling, etc. If anything your call out here and implication of taking some kind of action with no details is quite passively aggressive.

another successful mod sassination.

anyways, my kid gets the vax in ten days and i'm stoked as hell. if everything works out, they'll start kindergarten after winter break.

Professor Beetus
Apr 12, 2007

They can fight us
But they'll never Beetus

mod sassinator posted:

Who? What? Give specifics. I am honestly at a loss as to what aggression has occured. There are no threats, no name calling, etc. If anything your call out here and implication of taking some kind of action with no details is quite passively aggressive.

Specific behaviors I am referring to would be calling people "you dumb gently caress" or things of that nature. If you're not doing that, great! Keep it up.

Owlofcreamcheese
May 22, 2005
Probation
Can't post for 9 years!
Buglord

brugroffil posted:

750k deaths in two years, but you already know that's what I was referring to because it was already pointed out.

I feel like you are in some other conversation that I'm missing. I don't know what you are saying.

Stereotype
Apr 24, 2010

College Slice

Professor Beetus posted:

Real quick warning for the thread. Some of you are running at an 11 and I need you to take it down a notch. Try to be kind and remember that everyone posting in this thread is coming from all kinds of different places wrt Covid, and everyone is doing their best to disseminate information and deal with it as well as they can. This is something awful after all, so I've given a lot of leeway, but if you find yourself unable to post without being aggro, it might be time to take a break or utilize that ignore button.

We're all in this together, no matter how much that might suck.

some people are understandably upset that a million people have died and everyone is still acting like it'll just go away on it's own despite no evidence of that being a likely outcome nor any signs that it is trending in that direction.

Xombie
May 22, 2004

Soul Thrashing
Black Sorcery

Stereotype posted:

some people are understandably upset that a million people have died and everyone is still acting like it'll just go away on it's own despite no evidence of that being a likely outcome nor any signs that it is trending in that direction.

It doesn't look to me like anyone said it will "go away" at all. Only that it will become less deadly, through a mix of vaccination and previous infection. Two things that demonstrably decrease the likelihood of severe outcomes if someone contracts the disease, in addition to significantly decreasing the chances of symptomatic infection at all.

Xombie fucked around with this message at 21:24 on Nov 10, 2021

Solkanar512
Dec 28, 2006

by the sex ghost

Stereotype posted:

some people are understandably upset that a million people have died and everyone is still acting like it'll just go away on it's own despite no evidence of that being a likely outcome nor any signs that it is trending in that direction.

Anyone can be upset about people dying without being a shithead to everyone else. Furthermore, there is plenty of evidence that COVID-19 will not go on in the same way forever, and disagreeing with that evidence doesn't give anyone the right to treat others like poo poo either. You aren't quoting anyone specifically, so it's difficult to take this seriously.

The aggro posting is bullshit and the endless excuses defending this toxic behavior are tiring.

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

mod sassinator posted:

How are they explaining the method or process by which COVID becomes less dangerous to people?

This is like people in this thread saying "COVID will never kill 240k Americans" in March last year (a real thing that happened). Zero explanation for why or how, just an emphatic assertion that COVID will not do the bad thing I don't like or don't want to hear. We all know viruses don't work like that--you can't just say "the bad virus won't do the bad thing" and expect it to happen.

There's a difference between people's normalcy bias of March 2020 and unfounded assertions that COVID will make you just as sick the second (or third, or fourth) time you catch it, because that's generally not something viruses do.

Stereotype posted:

some people are understandably upset that a million people have died and everyone is still acting like it'll just go away on it's own despite no evidence of that being a likely outcome nor any signs that it is trending in that direction.

There's also a difference between saying that COVID is going to be less dangerous over time because more and more people will be either vaccinated or have already recovered from catching it in the past, or both, and saying that it'll "just go away."

brugroffil
Nov 30, 2015


Owlofcreamcheese posted:

I feel like you are in some other conversation that I'm missing. I don't know what you are saying.

Per the CDC, there have been more than 750k deaths in less than 2 years, making this statement incorrect:

Owlofcreamcheese posted:


750,000 in two years is higher than 240k,

It's pretty simple.

Stereotype
Apr 24, 2010

College Slice

Solkanar512 posted:

Anyone can be upset about people dying without being a shithead to everyone else. Furthermore, there is plenty of evidence that COVID-19 will not go on in the same way forever, and disagreeing with that evidence doesn't give anyone the right to treat others like poo poo either. You aren't quoting anyone specifically, so it's difficult to take this seriously.

The aggro posting is bullshit and the endless excuses defending this toxic behavior are tiring.

What evidence are you talking about? I agree that COVID-19 will not "go on in the same way forever," but I also think that there's a strong possibility that is because it gets even worse. Since the initial outbreak we've already had one new strain that was significantly more infectious and I don't know of any reason why we wouldn't expect other strains that are either more infectious still or more deadly or can completely evade vaccines. There is no way that anyone could know that "covid is going to be less dangerous over time," which someone literally just posted, and stating it as an empirical fact as they and many others in this thread are doing leads to complacency and is dangerous and will result in a ton of deaths.

I think that if I vehemently defended drunk driving people would be upset with me and "post aggressively" or engage in "toxic behavior" and I don't think we'd see the same backlash against them for doing so.

Professor Beetus
Apr 12, 2007

They can fight us
But they'll never Beetus

Stereotype posted:

What evidence are you talking about? I agree that COVID-19 will not "go on in the same way forever," but I also think that there's a strong possibility that is because it gets even worse. Since the initial outbreak we've already had one new strain that was significantly more infectious and I don't know of any reason why we wouldn't expect other strains that are either more infectious still or more deadly or can completely evade vaccines. There is no way that anyone could know that "covid is going to be less dangerous over time," which someone literally just posted, and stating it as an empirical fact as they and many others in this thread are doing leads to complacency and is dangerous and will result in a ton of deaths.

I think that if I vehemently defended drunk driving people would be upset with me and "post aggressively" or engage in "toxic behavior" and I don't think we'd see the same backlash against them for doing so.

Nobody here has any influence over public policy and you should keep that in mind. Go to Twitter if you want to blow off steam and yell at actual harmful people like anti-vaxxers. Thus far very few people have been probed for toxic posting in this thread but there always seems to be much gnashing of teeth and wailing every time I try to suggest that people remember that there are fellow human beings on the other side of the keyboard. If the prospect of not being able to post for six hours after being an rear end in a top hat is so terrifying then I'm not sure what you're doing on this website.

Also, apologies for being so blunt, but if you think the posters here are going to have any measurable impact on covid in general, you are out of your god damned mind. This is a problem that needs to be solved at an institutional level. I do encourage everyone here to mask up when sharing air with others, get vaxxed and boosted if you're due, and don't eat out in restaurants, but I'm not delusional enough to think that's going to impact anything beyond a handful of people in this thread and maybe not even that.

Professor Beetus fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Nov 10, 2021

Xombie
May 22, 2004

Soul Thrashing
Black Sorcery

Stereotype posted:

What evidence are you talking about? I agree that COVID-19 will not "go on in the same way forever," but I also think that there's a strong possibility that is because it gets even worse. Since the initial outbreak we've already had one new strain that was significantly more infectious

The new strain has been more infections but despite that has not been more deadly for the vaccinated and previously infected.

quote:

and I don't know of any reason why we wouldn't expect other strains that are either more infectious still or more deadly or can completely evade vaccines.

Because you can't just think up a bad thing that's theoretically possible and assume it's the inevitable outcome just by virtue of it being bad. These strains would have to exist to make any assumptions about their affect. Delta is already more infections but is, in reality, not more deadly for the vaccinated and previously infected.

quote:

There is no way that anyone could know that "covid is going to be less dangerous over time," which someone literally just posted, and stating it as an empirical fact as they and many others in this thread are doing leads to complacency and is dangerous and will result in a ton of deaths.

We do know, given the available evidence, that Covid is not even remotely as dangerous to the vaccinated and previously infected. These are two cohorts that cannot decrease, only increase as a percentage of the populace. Hence, Covid will necessarily become less deadly over time.

Bel Shazar
Sep 14, 2012

brugroffil posted:

Per the CDC, there have been more than 750k deaths in less than 2 years, making this statement incorrect:

It's pretty simple.

Wouldn't more deaths in less time still be more than 240k?

Pingui
Jun 4, 2006

WTF?

Bel Shazar posted:

Wouldn't more deaths in less time still be more than 240k?

The objection is over "less than two years" (19 months) versus "in two years".

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

Stereotype posted:

I don't know of any reason why we wouldn't expect other strains that are either more infectious still or more deadly or can completely evade vaccines.

Because in the same way that variants are a variant of original COVID, new vaccines would only need to be a variant of the original vaccine.

We are far more likely to see a completely new pandemic spring up out of bats or whatever than we are for COVID to mutate its way into something that the current vaccines are powerless against.

quote:

I think that if I vehemently defended drunk driving people would be upset with me

Yes, but I'm not sure how we got here!

Stereotype
Apr 24, 2010

College Slice

freebooter posted:


Yes, but I'm not sure how we got here!

why would you be upset about me telling people that drunk driving is totally okay to do? we have to live our lives after all. lots of people here are saying that going to big social gatherings is a-okay, and covid has killed 100x as many people as drunk driving. so far this year the same number of people have been killed by drunk driving as have died of covid while vaccinated. seems to me like suggesting that we have to just live with covid is actually significantly more incorrect and deadly than telling people that drunk driving is a fine thing to do.

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

Stereotype posted:

why would you be upset about me telling people that drunk driving is totally okay to do? we have to live our lives after all. lots of people here are saying that going to big social gatherings is a-okay, and covid has killed 100x as many people as drunk driving. so far this year the same number of people have been killed by drunk driving as have died of covid while vaccinated. seems to me like suggesting that we have to just live with covid is actually significantly more incorrect and deadly than telling people that drunk driving is a fine thing to do.

Driving home drunk from the pub endangers people around you with the benefit being nothing more than saving you the cost of an Uber.

Seeing your friends and family in person after 18 months of on/off lockdown - with vaccinations and all the ongoing state-mandated NPIs - is a significantly higher benefit, with a level of risk that is never going to go away, and indeed which is present every time you go to work or buy groceries or see your GP. It's going to present for (best case scenario) years to come.

What do you want people to do? Remain at home literally forever?

Herstory Begins Now
Aug 5, 2003
SOME REALLY TEDIOUS DUMB SHIT THAT SUCKS ASS TO READ ->>

enki42 posted:

I think the overall takeaway is that nearly everyone was wrong about COVID in March of 2020 in a bunch of ways. Even pointing to a million deaths now includes a bunch of stuff the early models wouldn't have even considered including like far more transmissible variants, effectiveness and hesitance around vaccines, etc.

I bet 50+% of the posts that were posted in the spring of 2020 were pretty significantly wrong if you went and took a look.

eh not really. views among epidemiologists were quite split on the likely severity of a covid pandemic (about a third expecting something that would be controlled and therefor not that severe, about a third who expected it to be quite severe but not worst case and about a third who expected deaths to make it substantially into six figures). existing epidemiological models of covid were... basically dead on wrt the threat covid posed if not addressed. And variable compliance with protective measures has absolutely been modeled from day one. Similarly all three of those points (eg variants, vaccine efficacy and vaccine hesitancy) were brought up as major concerns pretty much from day one. Particularly so at the time when it was unclear how well any of the vaccines would work and there was a real possibility that we'd have vaccines with non-trivial risks instead of the largely incredibly safe vaccines that we fortunately ended up with.

that said, there were some colossally loving stupid and widely promoted models out there predicting some real boneheaded poo poo (ihme i'm looking at you) being made by people who absolutely should've known better and a lot of the more pertinent, knowledgeable discussion was quite removed from your usatoday covid pieces or w/e. still, I'm basically just arguing the inverse of what you're saying because yeah a ton of the posting at the time was way off, but I do think it's significant that a lot of what happened was neither a surprise nor unpredicted

Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 01:31 on Nov 11, 2021

Xombie
May 22, 2004

Soul Thrashing
Black Sorcery

Stereotype posted:

why would you be upset about me telling people that drunk driving is totally okay to do? we have to live our lives after all. lots of people here are saying that going to big social gatherings is a-okay, and covid has killed 100x as many people as drunk driving. so far this year the same number of people have been killed by drunk driving as have died of covid while vaccinated. seems to me like suggesting that we have to just live with covid is actually significantly more incorrect and deadly than telling people that drunk driving is a fine thing to do.

In 2020, the Flu killed 24,000-53,000 Americans. Kidney disease killed 52,000. 44,000 died from suicide. 133,000 people died from Alzheimer's.

Even if breakthrough COVID infectious ended up killing 15,000 people per year, it would have trouble cracking the top 15 causes of death in the US. Currently it sits at around 10,000 deaths, just beating out melanoma (not even all skin cancers, just the one you get from going to the beach without sunscreen) at 7,180.

Can you see why people are not going to be interested in shutting down society for zero COVID with this kind of prognosis? Covid has become a preventable disease.

Xombie fucked around with this message at 02:37 on Nov 11, 2021

John_A_Tallon
Nov 22, 2000

Oh my! Check out that mitre!

Xombie posted:

In 2020, the Flu killed 24,000-53,000 Americans. Kidney disease killed 52,000. 44,000 died from suicide. 133,000 people died from Alzheimer's.

Even if breakthrough COVID infectious ended up killing 15,000 people per year, it would have trouble cracking the top 15 causes of death in the US. Currently it sits at around 10,000 deaths, just beating out melanoma (not even all skin cancers, just the one you get from going to the beach without sunscreen) at 7,180.

Can you see why people are not going to be interested in shutting down society for zero COVID with this kind of prognosis? Covid has become a preventable disease.

I don't know about you but I am looking forward to the next deadly variant that pops out of the COVID mines. And by "looking forward" I mean "dreading the likely collapse of society as the hospitals are overwhelmed and the fatality rate jumps to the levels seen in India."

How are u
May 19, 2005

by Azathoth
But the Delta variant is not really more deadly to people who have been vaccinated. I dunno, I don't have the same fear that some ultra-deadly-mega-covid is going to pop up.

Owlofcreamcheese
May 22, 2005
Probation
Can't post for 9 years!
Buglord

John_A_Tallon posted:

I don't know about you but I am looking forward to the next deadly variant that pops out of the COVID mines. And by "looking forward" I mean "dreading the likely collapse of society as the hospitals are overwhelmed and the fatality rate jumps to the levels seen in India."

Why won’t they Just make a vaccine against that too?

Thorn Wishes Talon
Oct 18, 2014

by Fluffdaddy

Stereotype posted:

What evidence are you talking about? I agree that COVID-19 will not "go on in the same way forever," but I also think that there's a strong possibility that is because it gets even worse. Since the initial outbreak we've already had one new strain that was significantly more infectious and I don't know of any reason why we wouldn't expect other strains that are either more infectious still or more deadly or can completely evade vaccines. There is no way that anyone could know that "covid is going to be less dangerous over time," which someone literally just posted, and stating it as an empirical fact as they and many others in this thread are doing leads to complacency and is dangerous and will result in a ton of deaths.

There's still a lot we don't know about the novel coronavirus specifically. But generally, pathogens tend to evolve to become less deadly over time, due to evolutionary reasons — those that kill their hosts faster are necessarily also worse at spreading, which puts them at a disadvantage compared to more infectious but less deadly strains.

The other thing worth noting is that now that we are confident in our knowledge of mRNA vaccines and have a vast and well-funded apparatus for developing and manufacturing them, any strain that is detected to evade the current vaccines would elicit a pretty quick response in the form of a modified version of that vaccine.

Professor Beetus
Apr 12, 2007

They can fight us
But they'll never Beetus
The bigger problem, especially in the US, are the vast numbers of anti-vax and unvaxxed folks who are doing their best to collapse a healthcare system already under the tremendous strain of our incredibly lovely society that already has awful working conditions for front line staff. The system was already unhealthy before covid and covid has just exacerbated to a degree that has made it obvious to many more people.

John_A_Tallon
Nov 22, 2000

Oh my! Check out that mitre!

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

Why won’t they Just make a vaccine against that too?

They could but could they get enough of the population to take it? It doesn't take much mass death to render a society unable to function properly. Look at the Cambodian genocide for an example of that, if you can stomach it.

Thorn Wishes Talon posted:

There's still a lot we don't know about the novel coronavirus specifically. But generally, pathogens tend to evolve to become less deadly over time, due to evolutionary reasons — those that kill their hosts faster are necessarily also worse at spreading, which puts them at a disadvantage compared to more infectious but less deadly strains.

The other thing worth noting is that now that we are confident in our knowledge of mRNA vaccines and have a vast and well-funded apparatus for developing and manufacturing them, any strain that is detected to evade the current vaccines would elicit a pretty quick response in the form of a modified version of that vaccine.

You're talking about an indeterminate time frame for a less deadly variant to evolve, and you're making a logic error that a lot of people make when they talk about selection pressure on a virus: you're comparing the selection pressure a virus experiences in a naive population to the selection pressure a virus experiences in a population with immune members. Remember that the selection pressure a virus experiences from a dead host is the exact same selection pressure a virus experiences from a host that has sterilizing immunity. If a variant evolves that can achieve breakthroughs in previously immune hosts, it comes out ahead. If it kills the host in the process, it STILL came out ahead in terms of gaining chances to spread. In the long term, eventually, less virulent variants will probably win out, but in the short term you will see very nasty variants succeed. Normally it wouldn't matter much, but the health care system has reduced capacity and we have a significant population of people who have decided getting any sort of vaccination is a political statement.

Owlofcreamcheese
May 22, 2005
Probation
Can't post for 9 years!
Buglord

John_A_Tallon posted:

They could but could they get enough of the population to take it? It doesn't take much mass death to render a society unable to function properly. Look at the Cambodian genocide for an example of that, if you can stomach it.

68% of Americans have taken some vaccine, are they going to suddenly stop in this future when the disease is made far worse for some reason?

Professor Beetus
Apr 12, 2007

They can fight us
But they'll never Beetus

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

68% of Americans have taken some vaccine, are they going to suddenly stop in this future when the disease is made far worse for some reason?

Well the 32% of unvaxxed Americans are certainly a problem for the healthcare system right now, hopefully with kids getting vaxxed we can at least get into the 70s but that's still a lot of people that are going to continue getting sick and dying and clogging up the hospital system. It's staggering.

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

Xombie posted:

In 2020, the Flu killed 24,000-53,000 Americans. Kidney disease killed 52,000. 44,000 died from suicide. 133,000 people died from Alzheimer's.

Even if breakthrough COVID infectious ended up killing 15,000 people per year, it would have trouble cracking the top 15 causes of death in the US.

It'll end up being deadlier than the flu. It's currently killing about three or four times as many people in the UK as the flu does. This is nonetheless still preferable to eternal lockdown.

John_A_Tallon
Nov 22, 2000

Oh my! Check out that mitre!

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

68% of Americans have taken some vaccine, are they going to suddenly stop in this future when the disease is made far worse for some reason?

Right now, at 32% of the population unvaccinated, the Delta variant produces about a third more hospitalizations than the wild type did with 0% of the population vaccinated. Nurses have burnt out and quit the profession, and hospitals are having trouble finding enough nurses to treat all the sick people. Right now it's balanced at about as bad as it can be before the system outright breaks. We're not going to get more nurses very quickly. Even with nursing enrollment rates up we are not outrunning the attrition rates yet. Still, as long as the system doesn't actually break, COVID fatality rates for those infected can stay around 1.4%. The rate jumps when you do not have proper medical intervention, as seen in other countries.

Now, imagine a variant (let's call it the Iota variant since it's an imaginary hypothetical) that can evade vaccines and infect the entire population, vaccinated or not. Even if Iota achieves an R0 that's the same as the wildtype, that's a massive pool of people who could end up sick. Ask yourself this: is the healthcare system, as it is, able to deal with an increase in total number of patients?

Edit: NO NEED TO IMAGINE! Omicron is here, and it's going to be bad.

John_A_Tallon fucked around with this message at 03:01 on Nov 27, 2021

Smeef
Aug 15, 2003

I posted my food for USPOL Thanksgiving!



Pillbug
"The flu" is also not one virus, which makes comparisons even more limited.

e- To elaborate, on one hand this could be interpreted to show that Covid-19 is way deadlier than any individual influenza virus. On the other there might be some dynamics that should be reason for optimism. For example, when people catch the flu multiple times, it may not be the same virus, or if it is the same virus, there might be more immunity. This could suggest that we could expect Covid-19 to less deadly. (I don't know if that's actually the case, just an illustration.) As I recall, influenza viruses mutate a lot more than coronaviruses, too.

Smeef fucked around with this message at 03:50 on Nov 11, 2021

ModernMajorGeneral
Jun 25, 2010

John_A_Tallon posted:

I don't know about you but I am looking forward to the next deadly variant that pops out of the COVID mines. And by "looking forward" I mean "dreading the likely collapse of society as the hospitals are overwhelmed and the fatality rate jumps to the levels seen in India."

You're right that a horrible variant that causes hospitals to be overwhelmed and mountains of bodies to pile up is always on the horizon, but one lesson of the covid pandemic is that society eventually returns to function as normal even when there are hundreds of thousands of bodies and hospital systems are collapsing (see: India)

I'm not saying that this is something to be optimistic about - it's one of the reasons why we have this pandemic (governments and the ruling class have realised they can continue to function without bothering to stop thousands of people from dying) - but I think saying 'this huge wave of covid cases will surely lead to social collapse' is kind of the covid doomer equivalent of people who say 'this huge wave of covid cases is surely the last one' - it keeps happening all over the world and it just keeps resetting to (worse) baseline every time.

John_A_Tallon posted:

They could but could they get enough of the population to take it? It doesn't take much mass death to render a society unable to function properly. Look at the Cambodian genocide for an example of that, if you can stomach it.


This seems like an extremely bad example if you are arguing that it doesn't take a lot of deaths to cause social collapse.

ModernMajorGeneral fucked around with this message at 07:02 on Nov 11, 2021

Stickman
Feb 1, 2004

How are u posted:

But the Delta variant is not really more deadly to people who have been vaccinated. I dunno, I don't have the same fear that some ultra-deadly-mega-covid is going to pop up.

The Delta variant is more deadly to people who have been vaccinated than prior variants are to people who have been vaccinated. Mostly likely a bit over twice as deadly, mostly from an across-the-board increase in virulence but also due to a small decrease in vaccine effectiveness. In order for it to not be more deadly, VE vs death by Delta would have to be greater than against prior variants.

Stickman fucked around with this message at 07:38 on Nov 11, 2021

pidan
Nov 6, 2012


Thorn Wishes Talon posted:

There's still a lot we don't know about the novel coronavirus specifically. But generally, pathogens tend to evolve to become less deadly over time, due to evolutionary reasons — those that kill their hosts faster are necessarily also worse at spreading, which puts them at a disadvantage compared to more infectious but less deadly strains.

But this doesn't apply to covid as much, because it can be spread before it causes any alarming symptoms. For an extreme example, consider HIV, which can spread for years before killing the host, and therefore is under no pressure to become less deadly. And in a majority-vaccinated population, immune escape is arguably a more important factor than deadliness, e.g. Marek's disease in chickens became deadlier for unvaccinated chickens after widespread vaccination.

And even then, I don't think plague or smallpox or even measles evolved to become noticeably less deadly, more like the human population evolved to be more resistant, which is obviously not going to happen in our lifetime and also needs unacceptable levels of die-off.

On the other hand, ignoring vaccine effects, it seems plausible that future generations will generally get covid while young, and thus be somewhat immune to it when old and vulnerable. Similar to how it used to be with EBV and chickenpox (which can be deadly in adults) and arguably even another coronavirus, if the theory about the 1890s "Russian flu" pandemic being caused by a common cold coronavirus is accurate.

pidan fucked around with this message at 07:39 on Nov 11, 2021

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Stickman
Feb 1, 2004

Xombie posted:

In 2020, the Flu killed 24,000-53,000 Americans. Kidney disease killed 52,000. 44,000 died from suicide. 133,000 people died from Alzheimer's.

Even if breakthrough COVID infectious ended up killing 15,000 people per year, it would have trouble cracking the top 15 causes of death in the US. Currently it sits at around 10,000 deaths, just beating out melanoma (not even all skin cancers, just the one you get from going to the beach without sunscreen) at 7,180.

Can you see why people are not going to be interested in shutting down society for zero COVID with this kind of prognosis? Covid has become a preventable disease.

The best estimates I've seen from epidemiologists are 40-100k+ per year in the US with our likely vax coverage (varying year-to-year). Of course this is spitballing based on current waning of protection and it's possible we might get lucky with attenuation, but I definitely wouldn't count on something ridiculously low like 15k per year. It's going to be an ongoing disaster, on top of the ongoing disaster of influenza and other "preventable" respiratory disease that we seem to forget to get around to preventing. We've thoroughly hosed over our already lovely healthcare system, so I wouldn't be surprised if hospitals have yearly triage until the manage to expand capacity and somehow retain underpaid, overworked staff (lol).

It sucks, but any "it's fine to just open up" perspective is based solely on wishful thinking or callous disregard born of broken systems. Maybe we'll get lucky, but that's lovely public policy to push for.

Stickman fucked around with this message at 07:56 on Nov 11, 2021

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