Quote:
Originally Posted by Pants
I don't put much stock in these numbers because the testing is just so hopelessly inconsistent.
The Germans have a really low CRF but they probably tested a shit ton more people than Italy. There also shenanigans when it comes to causes of death and how those are tracked across all the affected countries.
Who ****ing knows, man. All we know is that tens of thousands of people are dying and it will be in the hundreds of thousands soon. ****ing sucks.
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This is absolutely true, so I hope this doesn't come off as callous, but...
I do think it's still important - not for the purposes of driving policy necessarily, but for our own mental health - to keep in mind the context a bit. It sounds like most are now expecting this to be in the range of 100k to 200k people dead in the U.S. For context, cancer and heart disease both kill around 600k people per year, and accidents, respiratory illness, accidents, and Alzheimer's disease all kill around 150k per year. For an individual person in their 80s, this probably moves their chances of death in the next 12 months from like 15% to 20%. Is it concerning? Absolutely. Should we be taking precautions? Of course. But chances are, a vast majority of the people you know will be just fine.
All of the work we're doing is still absolutely necessary, as without doing anything we'd likely be talking about deaths in the millions. My only point is just that, if we all hunker down and do what we're supposed to do, we'll remember this time more in terms of everyone getting stuck at home and the economic impacts rather than because the number of fatalities was unfathomably horrific (and I say that as a good thing).
I'm more worried about developing countries than I am about the U.S., Italy, or Spain at this point.