Here's a different discussion topic and a bit a-political. I tend to be data driven and I continue to be amazed we have shut the whole world down for 0.3% or less infection to fatality rate, and 'most' of those being elderly or at risk due to co-morbitities.
I will be up front I don't have a specific % to justify these actions but off the cuff; if someone had asked me back in 2019 what would it take for the world to react like this, with this draconian shutdowns, quarantines, loss of freedoms... I would have been more likely to say probably as high as a 5-10% fatality rate. Call me monstrous but, I certainly would not have thought a less than 1% rate would get us here. This comes with the understanding that taking kids out of school for a year, ineffective masks everywhere, businesses closed, hundreds of thousands of them lost forever, along with those people's livelihoods and in some cases life savings,.... The real and total pain of the shutdowns is largely ignored in most discourse. Maybe as painful is how effectively CV has divided the country, family members arguing and no longer taking to each other over their stance on masks, closures, vaccines,... It is all so very sad.
I understand that the force behind most of these messages seems to be driven by our hospital capacity. The hidden secret here is that the whole world's medical capacity is in no way designed to handle a pandemic, never has been and never will be. Hospitals have to generate revenue and positive cash flow for their ERs and ICUs they simply don't by equipment, hire people, and build facilities to handle beyond the 90th percentile situation. All businesses run off of ROI. Hospitals are a business and they need a return from their investment. An empty ICU bed in this context is not a good thing for the hospital's CFO. Historically, it's not all that uncommon for a bad typical flu year to overwhelm the capacity of those facilities, since they are not sized for big surges.
It hurt me personally this weekend when we rushed my wife to emergency only to experience a horrible 8 hour ordeal. She didn't see a Dr. For nearly 3 hours and did not receive any pain meds for more than 3. I was not allowed into the ER due to CV, and they simply wheeled her into a hallway facing a walk and left her there for an hour and a half. She moaned 'help me' while CV burnt out staff stood 5 feet away enjoying small talk, telling jokes, while ignoring her pleas. That kind of behavior is unacceptable and I dealt with it once informed.
Am I bitter or deluded thinking we would have been attended to quicker had more people been Vaxed? No, not at all. Viruses do what they do. Too many people think we can actually manage our way out of this with largely ineffective social rules. In retrosoect it was complete stupidity to think early in April of 2020 that we could eradicate CV by the initial 2 week shut down. What a joke, but millions were totally convinced at the time.
Name one highly contagious by aerosol virus in history that we have been able to easily control and beat. Unfortunately, it will never and can never happen. Sure we can flatten the curve but the area under the curve remains largely the same, hence we extend the misery to some extent.
Again, so all of this for less than 0.3%, maybe I am heartless to raise the question, but I am still a bit suprised?
I am curious. Am I on an island or all politics aside what would you have thought the death rate would need to be before the whole world reacted they way we have for CV19?
