Comment by gf000

Comment by gf000 6 months ago

But it's quite trivial to see that vaccination will heavily decrease the possibility of transmission - it's like continuously coughing up millions upon millions of viruses vs only re-transmitting a few.

And you are right that in the long term Covid will probably become just like the regular flu, as it mutates to more infectious, but less and less dangerous - but I don't see how it's relevant. At the height of the pandemic not the weakened strains were at play, and you surely know that a^n will either very quickly die out, or very quickly explode depending on the given 'a' - masks, vaccination, and staying home absolutely helped decreasing the possible reach of the disease.

somenameforme 6 months ago

I don't see how you can say these things absolutely helped when at this point in time I wouldn't ask you if you've ever caught COVID, but rather how many times have you caught it. It doesn't matter how many shots you've injected, how many masks you've worn, or whatever else - you've almost certainly gotten COVID, and probably multiple times. Even Antarctica managed to end up with multiple outbreaks.

And furthermore, if you look at a graph of the typical cycle of a flu-like epidemic they all look extremely similar, including the COVID graphs. For instance here [1] is one for the Spanish Flu. Scroll down a bit here [2] to see the US death graph for COVID. It's essentially identical. With COVID there was a narrative attached to each of the waves, but in reality it was a lot like financial analysts. They can explain everything when they know the results, down to why the market moved 0.7% yesterday. But their analysis of what will happen to the markets tomorrow is somehow no better than you'd get from a palm reader.

[1] - https://static01.nyt.com/images/2009/04/30/health/0430-nat-1...

[2] - https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

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gf000 6 months ago

How do you explain then the differences between countries? Of course, different measurements/demographics aside.

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- somenameforme 6 months ago
  
  There's a nice visual here [1] that shows excess mortality instead of relying on COVID numbers. This helps control for different standards in measurement/demographics, to some degree. After all was said and done the difference between countries was pretty small. The US had a relatively poor outcome for COVID and ended up with excess deaths of 434 per 100k. Australia had one of the best (amongst advanced economies), and ended up with 163. There were large relative differences, but the absolute differences were small - those values are (per 100k) 99.72% the same.
  And behaviors were not really predictive of outcomes. Gibraltar, for instance, was the first 'country' (they put the micro in micronation) to achieve complete vaccination coverage. The media ran tons of stories on them being a window into a post-COVID future because cases there plummeted. Then the next COVID wave hit and cases skyrocketed there, just like everywhere else. After all was said and done they ended up closer to the US than Australia with excess mortality of 300.
  [1] - https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus
  
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