Oh and don't try to patronise me on the deaths per 100k numbers, do you really think I don't understand what that means and why they would use that?
i'm sorry - your comment above suggested you believed it was a false way to report deaths. So i tried to explain why deaths per capita or as a percentage of the population is much more useful to compare between nations. i am happy you did appreciate that, even though what you wrote suggested quite the opposite.
Incidentally, if what really bothers you is the total number of people dying, then maybe the solution would be to drastically reduce the human population. because the more people there are, then the more will die every year.
unlike earlier spikes the majority of people getting it and ending up in the hospital because of it were this time in the 20 to 40 ish age range and a significant number were "kids" which if you were to listen to the dandelions of the world are all but "immune" which most us us has always defined as "you can NOT get it" NOT "well you will "get over it" or "you will not die"
Not wholly clear what you are saying. If you are saying that vaccines have now protected the old -who got them first - and so the only ones left to end up in hospital are younger people, then yes thats true. But it will be far fewer people in hospital, which also seems to be true. It doesnt change that the risk for the young is very small, and that the same small proportion are ending in hospital now as ever did.
The model most commonly presented by 'experts' at the start of this was SEIR susceptible, exposed, infected, recovered. It implies that every person falls exactly into one of these categories. Unfortunately, thats just a model and it is wrong. Models are always approximations and simplifications intended to allow simple mathematical calculation, but hopefully still containing enough truth to give useful predictions.
But it doesnt work. Firstly real immunity is not all or nothing. Most testing reports either positive or negative, either you have covid, or you have antibody to covid, or you do not. But every such test is choosing a threshold and defining one side as positve and one negative. In the real world people may have covid present but too little to test postive. Or similarly antibody. if they have a little antibody it may be considered too small to prevent an infection, but it must reduce its severity. Moreover, it implies you will have stored templates for rapid productionn of much more antibody if needed.
The modelling was wrong because some people were immune to covid and some were completely non immune as described, but most were somewhere in the middle. The great bulk of people will be safe even if they get infected. A minority will not be safe at all if infected. Its two different groups with a crossover, which we can very roughly approximate using age. Further, the initial dose you get affects the outcome. If everyone gets a small infecting dose, they will tend to get mild infections, and if large infecting dose more serious infections. So..trying to influence the epidemic to deliberatly give people mild infections is likely the best way to go to minimise deaths. nowhere is this incorporated in the modelling.
The critical determinant of deaths has been how readily high risk people have been infected. In the Uk it is acknowledged that hospitals and care homes were the biggest soruce of fatal covid infections. yes, mass spreading events are a real thing, and the worst of them have been in hospitals. Yet we didnt close hospitals. Some on here have suggested the US system was less prone to this, because it has more single rooms. i dont know if this is the case or not. It might be that in the Us where many have to pay for medical care, more stayed away from hospitals until they had really no choice, and this led to fewer covid deaths.
Not that the US has done very well in those death stats. Currently US on about 90% of Uk deaths. France on 80% of Uk deaths, Sweden 70%, India 10%, Japan 5%.
The Uk strong national lockdown policy has produced worse results than most. Trump's lack of national leadership may have cut your deaths by 10% by preventing a useless policy being imposed.
Coronavirus chart: see how your country compares | Free to read | Financial Times
