Chico Escuela posted:James G posted:If over 80 percent of the population would recover normally if infected (and the remaining could get treated if hospitalization is required), why would there need to be a vaccine for everyone?
I'm learning quickly about our society that it is perfectly acceptable if people die everyday, but not just from this ONE thing
There is a lot of behavioral economics research in the past 20 years or so (including some that won a Nobel Prize) demonstrating that people are bad at assessing risk. And one of the kinds of risk they are particularly bad at assessing is novel threats--like COVID-19. We ride in cars all the time (or used to, before we were ordered to stay home) and don't give a thought to the fact that doing so is the most dangerous activity most of us will undertake that day. That risk is familiar, so we discount it.
But... working from your numbers (the last time I tried math on this site I completely screwed up, but here goes):
U.S. population = 330,000,000
Assume 80% of population gets the virus (could be completely wrong; bear with me) = 264,000,000
If we assume a 1% death rate (which guess could be much too high), then 2,640,000 fatalities--that is roughly the population of the city of Chicago.
If we assume 0.1% fatality rate, then 264,000 dead--roughly the population of Madison, Wisconsin.
Any or all of the above assumptions could be drastically wrong. But they show the potential scope of the problem. And that doesn't mention the strain on the health care system. These are likely worst-case figures--I don't claim otherwise. But IMO there is no way to realistically work these numbers to come up with merely a trivial risk.
I don't know what the answers are. But this is serious stuff. So is the economic dislocation caused by attempts to slow the virus' spread. The next year ain't going to be easy.
If you go with a median of those numbers, you still are only to the number of deaths each year that are mostly funded by us/our government.
https://www.cdc.gov/reproducti...a_stats/abortion.htm
Why is there an uproar about the deaths from Covid-19 and not these that are pretty much the same every year. This has been an epidemic for years 623,000 number from CDC for US and 12,387,435 and rising. https://www.worldometers.info/abortions/
I don't understand the difference. Life is life. We don't have to have a long political debate about it but it is a moral issue which is what Covid-19 deaths are about. Whether anyone going out in crowds jeopardizes someone else's life.