Adults and persons aspiring to become adults only. You are warned.
The United States consists of some three-hundred and thirty million people.
Thus far, some 200,000 - 250,000 have died of either presumed or proven Covid-19 infections.
These persons are overwhelmingly past reproductive age, in retirement, in nursing homes, or already afflicted with frail health.
250,000 / 330,000,000 = 0.076%, rounding up.
Internationally there are some seven billion, eight hundred million people.
Thus far, some 1,500,000 have died.
1,500,000 / 7,800,000,000 = 0.0193%, rounding up.
Every year, seven billion, eight hundred million move one year closer to their life expectancy and the end of their terminal illness known as ordinary metabolism.
A full 100% are dying.
Some sixty million people finished dying this year. At 1.5 million deaths, 0.025% of these deaths were due to Covid-19.
For comparison, in 2017...
17.79 million deaths from cardiovascular disease.
9.56 million deaths from cancer.
3.91 million deaths from respiratory diseases.
2.56 million deaths from lower respiratory infections.
2.51 million deaths from dementia.
2.38 million deaths from digestive diseases.
1.78 million deaths from neonatal disorders.
1.57 million deaths from diarrheal diseases.
1.37 million deaths from diabetes.
1.32 million deaths from liver diseases.
1.24 million deaths from traffic accidents.
For comparison again, the Asian flu pandemic of 1957-1958 killed more than one million worldwide (0.034% of a world population of 2.87 billion, and a case mortality rate of 0.6%). Deaths in the United States were 110,000 (0.00062% of a population of 177 million). There was no shutdown.
I had Covid, my wife had Covid, my two older children had Covid, my 84 year old grandmother had Covid. My grandmother was barely affected and pulled through easily, but the only reason she and anyone else in the nursing home is alive, hugging their great grand-children, is being kept from them. This is a torture of kindness. The only person to have died of a respiratory disease in my most extended possible social circle was my children's Sunday school teacher, 26 and healthy, of ordinary influenza in early January.
The reason we need lockdowns all over the world is because people who are inordinately afraid of death think we need lockdowns all over the world, and their leadership sees this as a great opportunity to posture as protectors of their constituents against selfish political adversaries who want to get everyone else killed.
From my perspective this has been yellow journalism par excellence, in which "have a Zoom call Thanksgiving" will be remembered with as much head-shaking shame at our own gullible stupidity as "remember the Maine".
People die, and as much as materialists mock spiritualists who believe in eternal life for those who adhere to ritual and obeying the grey-haired man at the podium, they remain just as certain that if we all cloistered in our materialist bubbles and entrusted our bodies to the grey-haired man on television with a lab coat, this angel of death will pass over us.
It will. But it isn't hurried. The Asian flu, H2N2, was vaccinated against in 1958, mutated, and returned as H3N2, causing the 1968 Hong Kong flu pandemic. Asian flu killed one million. Hong Kong flu killed four million. Covid-19 may kill six million. Covid-30 may kill twenty-four million.
Those who finish dying a few years early are a hundredth of a percentile.
Sixty million people finished dying in 2019. Sixty million people will finish dying in 2020. Sixty million people will finish dying in 2021.
The fearful man dies a thousand times, the brave man dies only once. Stop being dead.
I don't care. You were warned.
What sort of statistics are these? You can't take the average death toll of a pandemic, including the time of its initial slow spread, judged against the entire world population, and extrapolate from that how deadly it is.
For more accurate data, use the most recent time from in a country that has failed to contain it. Let's call it the last month and a half in the USA.Week 40 2020: 3,919 of 56,656 deaths in USA from COVID-19 (6.92%)
Week 41 2020: 4,433 of 57,997 deaths in USA from COVID-19 (7.64%)
Week 42 2020: 4,714 of 56,233 deaths in USA from COVID-19 (8.38%)
Week 43 2020: 5,336 of 56,674 deaths in USA from COVID-19 (9.42%)
Week 44 2020: 5,801 of 55,477 deaths in USA from COVID-19 (10.5%)
Week 45 2020: 6,175 of 53,367 deaths in USA from COVID-19 (11.6%)
Week 46 2020: 4,573 of 42,566 deaths in USA from COVID-19 (10.7%)
9.22% of total deaths across 7 weeks are from COVID-19.
Let's call that a baseline 9% chance of any given person dying early, or a 9% decrease in life expectancy for everyone, if we continue with current measures and the vaccines don't come out in the planned timeframe, because we can't rely on things to always work as planned. 9% of our lifespan gives us an expected utility of about 7 years locked down before it stops being worth it, depending on how much you value a year of lockdown vs dying a year earlier.
We have unknown factors that may increase this, including: How quickly people can be reinfected, how long it takes to mutate enough so that it can reinfect someone, whether a second infection is more mild or worsens the brain and lung damage it causes, and how much worse it will be as the numbers go up and hospitals get overloaded. We don't have enough ICU beds and ventilators for everybody.
Ah, but we have vaccines to save us from our addiction to coughing in each other's unprotected faces. They will save us. Please ignore that pharmaceutical companies like to charge $100 for an epipen when they'd be profitable at $40 per year per person. I'm sure they'll be reasonable and everyone will be able to afford the vaccines. If not, I'm sure our entirely reasonable GOP-locked senate will pass a budget to help the poor people who can't afford them.
After that, surely people will get them even if they need yearly boosters. And of course we don't have fearmongering about the Democrat plans to inject microchips into the vaccines to track people, or about vaccines causing autism.
We can't just hope everything will go perfectly when there are so many unknowns with a pandemic, and so many malign knowns.
Thus ends my years long plan to never post in this crazy thread.