this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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[–] [email protected] 56 points 9 months ago (4 children)

"For a small number of people, the disease could be fatal." Is three million people a small number? And as others have pointed out, the pandemic isn't over. https://www.who.int/data/stories/the-true-death-toll-of-covid-19-estimating-global-excess-mortality

[–] [email protected] 31 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I don't want to be that guy because it is a big number. However, in terms of the human population, there are 8 billion of us and when it comes to the difference between a million and a billion. It is about a billion. So about 0.04% of the human population. Terrible tragedy, yes however it is true.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago (1 children)

But they didn't say a small percentage, which would be accurate, but a small number, which is not.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago

That is fair, I thought I read percentage. My mistake.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Calculating impact by dividing the number of deaths caused by a thing that has existed for 4 years over a population size that includes people more than 100 years old won't arrive at any sort of meaningful number. That's why you use rates, or per capita, or some other way of adjusting for population size and time. COVID 19 is the third most common cause of death in the US in 2020 and 2021. Calling one of the most common causes of death a small number of people is grossly inaccurate.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

I wanted Jimmy Kimmel’s segment This Week in Covid History to keep going.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

The Economist had a much higher estimate in the middle of the pandemic

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (2 children)

But it is over. It's never going away just like Influenza and all kinds of other shit.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

The pandemic is still ongoing. The US literally just had the second biggest wave of infections since 2019 this past week. It's estimated that there were 2 million new cases on Jan 11th alone. The only reason it seems over is because they won't let people test for it/keep track of case numbers and because the vaccines were effective against the new variants, which have been more infectious and more dangerous than the 2019 strain was.

You're right that it's never going away, but that doesn't mean that it's less dangerous than it was 3 years ago.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I didn't say it was gone. Just like the housing "crisis" and the death of the American Dream. Covid-19 is now just another fact of life now. It has become endemic to the world.

So long as humans exist - so too will Covid-19 alongside every other flu/virus/bacteria that has ever plagued us.