No it's absolutely not. Your risk of dying, or of having life altering chronic illness, from not immediately seeking medical attention if you are having a heart attack or stroke is far higher than your risk from COVID, and those people aren't showing up at hospital right now.
Update: updated the stat to 0.25%, based on the official fatality count of 21,045 and a population of 8.4mil.
In 2018, NYC’s premature death rate was 189 per 100,000, or 0.189% of the population. In a single quarter COVID-19 has already surpassed all causes of premature death combined. And that’s before the epidemic is done, and before we’ve had a chance to re-test earlier deaths to adjust the numbers properly.
You’re not wrong that some people will die from otherwise treatable heart attacks, and that’s tragic. But to assert that more will die from staying home than not requires some pretty extraordinary evidence.
Assuming you have a heart attack, your chance of dying is 20%. Higher if you don't get treatment.
That's as high or higher than your chance of dying from covid-19 assuming you're in the highest risk group.
A conservative estimate of likelihood to catch covid if you go to a hospital at this point is 5%. In reality it's probably lower.
These end up mostly cancelling out, so if you the I the chance you're suffering from a heart attack is higher than the chance of catching covid you should go to the hospital. (And this is me still fudging the numbers to make covid look comparatively more dangerous than it really is).
People will needlessly sir if we collectively overstate tht dangers of covid. That's without a doubt true. People will also die if we understate them and don't take reasonable precautions.
The fact that hospitals aren't pouring new Covid patients out of their ears. Major hospitals are handling lots of cases, and have many more than one hundred employees. They're not hotbeds of transmission, from what I've seen.
You're certainly at more risk in a hospital than at home, but it's not that crazy. Since it seems like you're in the bay area, consider that for the chance to even be 5%, something like most new Covid cases in the bay would need to come from hospital employees or patients. I don't think that's happening.
Haha, no, I am from the Central Asia. All you you just said are handwavey arguments, "I think", "I believe". I think for example, that chances of catching Covid in hospitals in US, at the peak of the epidemic were way above 20%. How is this an argument?
Even if we have one, the larger problem will be scale. Having more than one type of effective vaccine available may actually be useful, since our existing manufacturing capacity for the different manufacturing processes can be used.
That is also why all the major players with vaccine development already in humans (including but not limited to this one) have already started making manufacturing deals with large pharmaceutical corpoprations.
Vaccination on large scale will likely require tens of millions of doses, if not more (and let's not forget you may need more than one inoculation).
The vaccine manufacturing point needs way more attention. We were talking about ventilator manufacturing weeks after there was no chance they'd be done in time.
The economic benefits to distributing a vaccine quickly would be huge, but I haven't heard world leaders talking about how to do it--they're still on the last war. Luckily, Bill Gates is spending on it, but this needs way more attention because this is our chance to be ahead of the virus for once.
So according to In The Pipeline[1] they essentially modified their existing MERS vaccine so that it worked for SARS-COV-2. Their original vaccine had already gone through phase 1 trials and had shown efficacy and no harmful side effects.
Derek Lowe is terrific in communicating complex ideas in the field to concerned lay observers like me; he's been a great resource for reliable information about the science of this thing.
Just to clarify; the ChAdOx1 MERS prospect hasn't proceeded to a trial demonstrating efficacy in human subjects (as yet).
That's a particularly important distinction here, given the nature of the novel delivery mechanism[1] and prior observation of complications in SARS-CoV-1 vaccine development[2]
Here's the thing though, that binary choice is predicated on what we know right now, tomorrow we may know more, and we will definitely know more in a few weeks, in a month or two we may know enough that we have better choices to make. Our ability to treat this virus is very limited right now, but that may not be true in a month, so just throwing up your hands and saying let everyone die now when we don't have good treatment options is basically just signing peoples death warrant for no good reason.
This, precisely. Maybe we find better treatment (especially treatment that reduces the incidence of patients needing hospitalization or ventilators). Maybe we get testing technology widespread enough that we don't have to treat everyone like they're positive unless proven otherwise. Maybe we get antibody tests that allow us to figure out who isn't immunologically naive to the virus. Maybe we learn more about how it spreads. Maybe we learn more about why some people are asymptomatic.
Basically there are countless ways in which quality of life can be improved over time as we continue to maximize efforts to contain spread.
Yeah sure. a month, a year, a decade. How much of my life are you willing to steal?
The fatality rate for octogenarians is 15%. Octogenarians also have a 10% chance of dying every year anyway. At 18 months of lockdown 15% of them are dead anyway and you took a single digit percentage of my life away
Interesting. Is it misinformation if presented with the explicit disclaimer that I'm not sure about it and people should research themselves? I always understood misinformation as purposefully wrong and malicious information.
Worst case scenario (of people acting on my previous comment), people believe they can be reinfected and would practice further physical distancing. That does not seem malicious, but hey, I might be wrong.
Yes I think it is misinformation. It doesn't matter how much you hedge what you are saying, because the implication of you saying it means that you believe it.
Think about it this way, if your mother was concerned and you said, "Don't quote me on this, but as far as I know, you can be infected twice", you can bet your ass she would believe you.
Viruses can mutate, changing their protein coating so as not to be recognized by your immune system. Why do you think the common cold has not gone away, or why new flu shots are needed every season?
We simply do not know what this virus will do.
The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 came in waves, and they were different.
Immunity to coronaviruses does tend to fall within a year or so, but this is believed due to immune memory rather than viral mutation (coronaviruses have a modest mutation rate). This is a different mechanism than influenza. Subsequent reinfections are believed to be mild. A vaccine would provoke a longer immune memory by way of an adjuvant. Discussion of this in the TWIV podcast:
http://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-591/
That's science though. You have to just try and learn as much as you can, from as many different directions as possible, because we have no idea which approach will lead to useful discoveries until it does.
Your prior should be that immunity works as it does with every other virus and you should require very strong evidence to the contrary (evidence, not anecdotes) to convince you otherwise. Throughout our evolutionary history we have come into contact with innumerable viruses and to a greater or lesser extent we have immunity to all of them post exposure. For many our immunity is long lived, on the order of years.
