Agreed. In hindsight, covid wasn't all that bad.
Is this a joke?
7 million people died in 3 years from it and "it wasn't all that bad?"
I'm glad you didn't fit the demographic that needed to be worried, but for those that it did and for all those that lost loved ones to this (i. e. most people), this post is incredibly tone deaf.
Haven't you heard? It's basically just a cold, dude.
What was the IFR for adults under 40 with no comorbidities?
Don’t know, but that number isn’t especially relevant, as a huge percentage of the population isn’t young and healthy.
Thats kinda the way diseases work. They prey on people with comorbidities. If you limit your concern to things which regularly kill healthy people under 40, all you‘d care about are accidents. Once you survive the neonatal period, all the deadly regulars - heart disease, most cancers, stroke, dementia, diabetes, etc. are rare until middle age. As far as infections go, lower respiratory stuff (pneumonia) is probably the most common killer of younger people, but still isn’t too deadly by IFR.
Well, my comment was specifically about healthy adults under 40, so pointing out the existence of non-healthy adults and people over 40 isn't particularly relevant. I know those people exist, and I was very explicitly talking about other people.
Again, why is it so hard for you people to follow very simple, straightforward arguments?
My reading comprehension is fine, thanks. To review, below is the exchange which led to this discussion:
I think the real lesson is how fragile our modern civilization is. Imagine if COVID has a higher mortality rate than being marginally higher than the common cold. Preppers don't look so silly anymore.
Agreed. In hindsight, covid wasn't all that bad. Healthy people under 40 or so -- most workers -- never actually had anything to fear from this virus. And supply chains still completely melted down.
To recap: Chadstroma says covid is only marginally worse than the common cold. You agree, and add most workers had nothing to fear from it.
He‘s wrong in his assessment of covid relative to the cold. You’re wrong for agreeing with that erroneous assessment. I also think it’s off-base to minimize the impact of covid to its IFR in young, healthy people. Even if one ignores the sizable chunk of the workforce with one or more risk factors for severe covid, or lost productivity incurred among healthy workers contracting covid, lower risk people still have loved ones with higher risk, at the minimum. Arguably, everyone had something to fear, particularly early in the pandemic, when we knew less, had fewer prevention/treatment options, and the virus was more deadly.
The last three years didn’t happen because modern civilization is perilously fragile. The meltdown occurred because we’ve not seen an infectious threat like covid in our lifetime. This is true even in hindsight, despite normalcy returning to some facets of society.
If a new, contagious disease becoming the top daily killer for months on end and crippling the world economy was not “all that bad”, I’d hate to see what you think warrants widespread concern.
Your reading comprehension is not actually okay if that was your takeaway.
I didn't say that covid is "only marginally worse than the common cold," and the thing I was very obviously agreeing with was that poster's point about supply chains being fragile. Go back and read the post if you don't believe me. Although, while we're on the topic, covid really wasn't all that qualitatively different from influenza in the population that I was talking about. You know that perfectly well. In this context "covid wasn't really that bad" doesn't mean that covid wasn't bad -- it means that covid could have been a lot worse. A MERS infection, for example, is about a thousand times riskier than a covid infection*. In that context, covid really does belong in the same general bucket as influenza, as opposed more dangerous pathogens. (Seriously -- if I had to choose, I would rather get covid-19 again than get influenza, and I don't think I'm irrational to feel that way. Obviously I'd prefer a cold over either. And of course, the flu has given us covid-19-like pandemics in the past, which is another point of similarity.)
Here's the thing though. Over the past week or so, I have gotten dog-piled by people in this thread over the following claims:
1) It is reasonably likely that covid originated from the Wuhan Institute of VIrology. Even if it didn't, that's a highly plausible scenario that should not be casually dismissed.
2) mRNA vaccines cause myocarditis in rare cases.
3) People who were otherwise healthy and not too old were not in any serious danger of dying from covid, even in the pre-vaccine era.
I know why those statements are triggering to you. All three of them are coded as "conspiracy-adjacent" or "anti-vaxx-adjacent" in your little world, and seeing them expressed in writing sets you and other people in this thread off. But all three of those statements are empirically true, with the caveat that we can quibble over what "reasonably likely" means in (1). I don't believe any conspiracy theories involving the pandemic, and I was first in line when it was my turn to get vaccinated. But we are adults, not toddlers, and we can hold an assortment of ideas in our heads simultaneously. We all would have preferred for the vaccines not to have side effects, but they
do have side effects, and some of them are serious. People who can't acknowledge that are just being childish. Covid sucked, but it could have sucked much, much worse. Again, it is childish to pretend otherwise. Covid killed off a lot of people who old and/or infirm while passing over people who were young and healthy. That might offend your sense of justice, but the virus doesn't care about your sense of justice.
Some of you folks seem to expect that every fact of the world will neatly line up with your policy preferences. That's not how the real world works. Not in this context. Not in any context.
I have an unusually full calendar today and I've said what I had to say, so I will let you and your little clique go back to your hand-wringing. But do understand that my tolerance for this sort of thing has reached its end. If you, or any other poster, don't want to discuss this topic in good faith, or if you just want to take pot-shots at people, either put me on ignore or expect that you will not receive a respectful response. If a moderator wants to pull me aside and tell me to back off, that is 100% fine. You, however, are not a moderator and you can absolutely get bent with the tone policing.
* I know you know this, but anybody else reading this post who thinks I'm exaggerating to make a point should look it up. That's not an exaggeration.
