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Friday, September 3, 2021

COVID and Flu.

 

Scooby's note: 
This post was sent in as a comment for another post but was irrelevant to the subject. However  it has an interesting subject and deserves to be a post. 
So some recent studies cam out suggesting that that up to 80% of everybody has either the vaccine or had Covid. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/02/health/covid-vaccines-seniors.html That is already over the states herd immunity. This was done for a study of over 1 million people. One thing this study suggested was that twice as many people had caught Covid that was reported which reduces the death rate by half, which is starting to put in more like a bad flu. You can ask why did we have so many excesses deaths than previous bad flues? One possibility is that Covid is simply way more contagious than most flues so way more people got it than the would with other flues. This sort of makes sense due to the spike protein which they said was very efficient. If this is true Covid is not that much deadlier than flues we had in the past but way more contagious.

15 comments:

Anonymous said...



What I would like to know is how many people getting Covid with the Delta variant have been vaccinated versus people who never had the vaccine, versus people who had Covid alpha or beta. I keep fining conflicting data.

Anonymous said...


600k Americans have died of Covid. That is around 0.18% of the population.

Lets us compare that to some other stats.

5.6% identify as LGTQ, about of those are 1/6 are transgender or about 1% or Americans. You are five times more likely to know someone who's is transgender than to have died of Covid.

If you are in Gen Z than 15% are LGBTQ
https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/nearly-1-5-young-adults-say-they-re-not-straight-n1270003
with about 3% as transgender.

Gen Z also has one of the lowest Covid death rates showing that being LGBTQ lowers you chance of Covid death.

The point is the number of Covid deaths is pretty low and when you take into account that 94% of those that have died had pre-existing conditions it makes you think that maybe the whole way we have approached this and spent Trillions of dollars was not the best approach.



Anonymous said...

Keep at it, pandemic denier. You obviously haven't had to watch a loved one choke to death in the ER of ICU yet.

Anonymous said...

Keep at it, pandemic denier. You obviously haven't had to watch a loved one choke to death in the ER of ICU yet.

9/06/2021 5:45 PM

Yes I have seen that to a 70 year and and 79 year old due pneumonia, also called old mans friends. This was well before Covid. I have also seen several pass in their 70s due to heart attack, many in theirl 60s, 70s and 80s due to diabetes. Life is finite. All of it sad but they have lived good lives. Sort of sad but also good compared to what else I have seen.

I have seen many die their teens and 20s due gun violence, crime, substance abuse, car crashes and industrial jobs . If you live long enough to die you're in 60s from Covid you have done better than many. The world is much more brutal than the middle and upper class know. Yes some of the immigrants from Vietnam, Central America, Middle East, Eastern Europe, know the truth, but perhaps you do not.

I do not deny the pandemic, I also do not deny the reality that life is finite and Covid is killing people at average age 82. People only live so long, do you really want young people to suffer the best years of their lives so that you can live to 83? Has it really been worth the lock down?






Anonymous said...

5:45 almost everyone on the planet has witnessed the torture that people go through on their death beads in order to satisfy the medical establishment. Some of us demand to make our own choices in life. In the end we all get planted regardless of how we feel about pandemics or the associated political movements.

Anonymous said...

In the beginning the data coming out of italy and south korea indicated that about 5% of cases would need hospitalization. For the US population that is 15 million people. The US has 1 million staffed hospital beds total and only about 200k open under normal conditions.

We did the lockdowns and other measures to prevent the hospitals from being overwhelmed and the healthcare system from collapsing. Also to buy time for the doctors to figure out how best to treat infected people and to buy time to develop, test, manufacture and deploy a vaccine. It worked.

Now, in the south about half the population is unvaccinated and they have abandoned any measures to slow down the spread of delta. You can see for yourself in real time what a collapse of the health care system looks like. People unable to access care for the usual injuries and conditions because the beds are all taken by unvaccinated covid cases.

Anonymous said...

Has it really been worth the lock down?

9/06/2021 9:27 PM

No one has ever been "locked down." If you were, it is because you were convicted of a crime. Otherwise, you are just being hyperbolic for your own reasons.

Anonymous said...

No one has ever been "locked down." If you were, it is because you were convicted of a crime. Otherwise, you are just being hyperbolic for your own reasons.

9/07/2021 6:01 PM

Sigh, the term "lockdown" was commonly used by the Governors, the media and on social media in the context of actions taken to address Covid. Perhaps you forgot when all those stores where closed, schools, colleges where online, the contraction of the economy, all those optional medical procedures that could not be done, people not allowed onsite at work, avoiding people et. I was using the term "lockdown" in the same way the term was actually used in 2000 in the context of the COVID. I would have presumed that you where on planet earth at the time and understood this. In case you have not noticed this has had huge consequences for the world economy. It very well may lead to a massive expansion of the underclass that have been out off work for so long.

The question is are you actually confused how the term "lockdown" has been used in the context of Covid, or are you in acting simply in bad faith using definition of "lockdown" in different contexts?

In any case yes the question still stands was the lockdown and all the implications it has brought with it worth it as compared to other approaches which may have actually saved more lives and would not have done so much damage to the economy. By the way I am not the only person asking this question it is currently being debated by many economists.

Anonymous said...

9/07/2021 11:53 PM

I live in NJ and during their "very restrictive" "lockdown," I went anywhere I wanted to go and did whatever I wanted to do. I adjusted my expectations according to public health requirements and was just fine shopping when and where I needed to and everything else. Anyone who didn't adjust their expectations probably felt "locked down."

Scooby said...

You have a great attitude!

Anonymous said...

Anyone who didn't adjust their expectations probably felt "locked down."

9/08/2021 6:10 PM

For millions adjusting meant they could no longer work (which was in the 10s of millions). I get it that you work at the lab and lock down consist of staying at home and being paid to watch Netflix. In contrast millions of others including people in industrial jobs, building, construction, food, farming, transport, small business, packing, infrastructure, entertainment, independent contractors, could no longer work. There is a reason housing prices went up, food prices are going up, inflation, lumber, parts and many things are now in short supply. Many economists expect that that inflation will stay with us and that the some economists have said the long term effects will only get worse. Here is a good one for you, during the pandemic the upper 1% got even richer but the bottom 50% got much poorer. In the end the long term economics of the pandemic are going to be brutal for a large swaths of society. Some have even said that this will lead to a much lower economic mobility for the lower 50% of society for perhaps 10 years or more. Also you may not have noticed but some of these effects included large increases in crime, drug use, family abuse and a large impact on school learning. Again I know that for the wealthy having your kid have low quality online eduction for a year was no big deal, since you can compensate with many methods, but this will have much bigger consequences for the kids of lower middle and lower classes. There are some studies suggesting how this will lead to much lower acceptance rates to good colleges for this generation kids for the lower percentiles.

I know these things do not matter to you and you do not care. There are many economists studying just how bad the "lockdown" has been and will be not just a portion of Americans but also a portion of the people on earth. In fact there are some estimates that the potential number of years lost due to stress of being unemployed when you are young is a year or more per person. Multiply that by millions of people and you can see why many economists think the lockdown may have caused way more harm than it helped.
In fact there is considerable evidence for this already. If you look at the excess deaths during the pandemic there are hundreds of thousands more deaths than could ever be directly confirmed from Covid. One possibility is that these where Covid deaths that for whatever reason did not get counted but some other social scientists and medical scientists have speculated these may have actually been deaths due to increased stress. If you are living paycheck to paycheck on and found yourself out of work than yes that could have been a lot or stress. More data will be need to be collected on this to find out. Stress can have many health effects short term and long term.

I understand in your little bubble it was just an inconvenience, the pay checks kept coming, or the pensions checks kept coming, and even if things got twice as expensive it is only a small dent in your life, you had no plans to start that business, expand on the business you already had, pay off the house, or car. After all "shopping" was just fine because you had lots of money. The issue that 1/3 of people live pay check to pay check so being out of work was very stressful. Also for people who did not live pay check to pay check having to start eating into your savings that maybe had plans for is also stressful. Also being out of work for year can effect your skill level, there is a reason that employers do not like to see big gaps on resumes.

Anonymous said...

9/08/2021 10:07 PM

When has a worldwide pandemic not required sacrifices? 650,000 of your fellow citizens have died. How about their sacrifices?

Anonymous said...

650,000 of your fellow citizens have died. How about their sacrifices?

9/09/2021 5:26 PM

What was the average age of these citizens and there pre-existing conditions. 94% of Covid deaths had preexisting conditions or
comorbities and the average age death, about 82 years old.

650k dead sounds like a lot. A better question would be how many would have died if we never did a lock down kept people working, kept schools open, kept all the jobs going, but instead concentrated just caring for the old or those that are vulnerable? What do you think that number could have been? No one actually knows, but suppose it was only 900k, than we saved 250k, however if you take into account the possible deaths caused by the lockdown itself it is between 150-300k depending on your estimates of the excess deaths so you get to saving maybe 100k but possibly costing -50k, not to mention all those other factors that I said in a previous post. Any serious economists can tell you that we messed this up big time.

I have seen claims that the lockdown could have saved millions of Americans but this absolute nonsense when do the actual math. The keep using the 1% death rate, but even that number is wrong because you need to modify your distributions due to the age of the those most likely to die.

Now I am going to show you something that even I cannot find in the news but is rather revealing.

We have lost 650k however 2.8 million Americans die each year, so in any 2 years we will 5.6 million die. In 2020 we had excess deaths 3.2 million, so you could argue that it was the Covid plus regular deaths. However in 2021 the number of deaths is now below the average excess deaths, this crossover occurred in March. It is a bit odd since we still have people dying of Covid, how is it that we are now getting less deaths than average? That was because the people that died of Covid would have mostly likely died within 2.5 years due their co-morbidities anyway. In other words we will lower excess deaths than average for the next 2 years. After 3 years there will almost no memory of this at all. A claim I keep seeing is that the people that died could on average have lived 6-8 years longer. This is only true for the average 82 year old, it is not true for sick 82 year olds who on average would have lived 2.5 years more.

The idea that Covid is like the 1918 flu is also wrong where the average age of death was like 32, which for the time means more like 20 to to 25 years of life lost, while for today maybe 40-50 years.

Now I have never advocated for doing nothing but in light of the people who would most likely have serious health consequences, the way the lockdowns where done simply made no sense . They should have concentred on the vulnerable and it could have actually saved more lives. By the way a bunch of economics and health experts now admit this at least in private. I get that hindsight is 20:20 and early on they simply had no real good numbers so the kind of assumed the worse. It sure did not help that China was very helpful with the numbers. You can bet after this whole thing is done they are seriously going to reconsider how to deal with pandemics. They treated this like the 1918 flu which it is clearly not the case.

Anonymous said...

9/09/2021 10:26 PM

Wow, you know everything! That's really impressive!

Anonymous said...

Wow, you know everything! That's really impressive!

9/11/2021 5:31 PM

You know data and data analysis are kind of important in science and the labs. I only did a simple calculation there are many higher order approximations you do as well. I never claimed to know everything, but even with limited data you can make some reasonable estimates.


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