I'm going to relinquish my own words today in favor of my friend Dave who offered an excellent counterpoint to my discussion of Covid and the failure of the government and media to properly explain it to the general population. Dave has done some excellent research that fills in many of the blanks. Too bad that much of what we get in the news is only sound bites and fear mongering.
~70k drug overdoses in the US in 2019. 200k+ deaths from Covid from March through November. This includes the insane death curve of the opioid thing over the past few years. Back around 2010 we had a bunch of years with 12-15k per year. I hope that puts Covid in perspective. I have three doc friends, in different areas of the country, who have never seen anything like this in 20-35 years of work at the hospitals they are at. They claim dying the way these folks do is about as dark as you can imagine with slow-growing brain tumors as amongst the few ways they would less prefer to go.
Note that if 1/1000 people died in the US it would be a tiny percentage and still 320k. The kill rate is much higher than that if we all got it though.
A bit more: I know a 38 year old 2:45 marathon runner who got it. No comorbidities*. He was sick for 4 weeks, was not hospitalized, and has lost nearly 60% of lung function. He will never run again, so he is now an ex-marathoner with his last in late fall 2018. I also know a guy who lost his father-in-law and that man's brother in the same three week period. One had heart disease (so do 50% of men over 47 years of age by they don't know it) but the other didn't have comorbidities. Maybe they just didn't win the gene pool but who knows.
We can know a lot of folks who got sick and "are fine" but that doesn't mean the hospitals won't overflow and such as it doesn't take that many folks who would have otherwise been fine to block them up.
Dave
* the simultaneous presence of two or more diseases or medical conditions in a patient.
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