K&A during another virus spike

[George and Dragon]

On 05/08/2020 at 16:50, tehmarks said:

The problem is that it's irrelevant how dangerous it is to the average person - the problem is that is seems to be incredibly contagious. A small percentage of a very large number is still a large number; the number who need hospitalisation may be very small in percentage terms, but it's still a huge number of people in absolute terms. What do you think is going to happen if left to spread unchecked? What do you think is going to happen to your prognosis when you arrive in intensive care having suffered a heart attack, or a stroke, or some other grievous illness - and there's no space for you?

 

I could say I dont give a flying ' because I'm a very fit and active 31 year old - but that's not right, is it?

 

The great mistake is the government not understanding the mathematics of exponential growth and being criminally slow to act to begin with. If Boris Johnson had been listening in GCSE maths, we wouldn't be in anything like the situation we are now.

 

Of course it's in the news still, because it's still news. It's affecting a huge number of people's lives on a daily basis - if that isn't newsworthy, we may as well give up on journalism. Maybe tell your daughter to stop watching the news with her young children?

Smelly is right in at least one respect: it's not a particularly dangerous virus unlike Ebola which kills about 50% of all those infected or SARS (9.6%). Covid-19 is reckoned to be fatal in about 1% of cases and seasonal flu about 1 per 1000.

However, Covid (R0=2.8) is about twice as contagious as seasonal flu (R0=1.3) but less than 1/5th measles (R0=15). 

Fortunately, measles doesn't kill very many since we now have a vaccine and, before the vaccine was developed, it was more dangerous to poorer individuals. Many users of this forum will, I'm sure, have contracted measles as children before the vaccine was available.

 

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-05/how-bad-is-the-coronavirus-let-s-compare-with-sars-ebola-flu