Covid-19 comparison

Race is a sociological construction. There is no difference in human immunity in any “race” you could separate from any other with regards to a novel virus. That’s not how humans work.

Additionally, if you had any of these other charts, you would not be happy. We are nearly the worst by any measure

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Yeah I don’t think he’s going to be real happy with how those charts play out. Basically across the board, even into what a lot of people would be willing to give up to have a superior response to a similar crisis like this.

Because this seems like another practice round pandemic, not as fatal as a MERS or original SARS, but much more virulent. What happened next time, when nature splits the difference very contagious but has an across the board 5-6% mortality?

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I saw an article about the Spanish Flu and the similarities to COVID-19. In mentioned a new working paper that had the US Spanish Flu death rate by income level - .38% for higher economic status, .52% in middle, and 1% for those at the bottom.

There is just a lot of social divisiveness right now.

COVID is something that will take societal cooperation to get under control, but we let it get turned into another issue to divide us …masks in particular were turned into something much more than a medical precaution that, as we saw in the Houston area, benefits the public as a whole.

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Yep. So very true.

This topic could have started with…

I got this on FB from a friend who is friends with a doctor who works in the med center (it could be any medical center in any city).

I never expected this to be so politicized but we found a way…and it is where and why we are where we are.

I just SMH when on the news a few times I heard them say “Some encouraging news, new cases are under 40k…”

We have become that desinsitized that we call it a win, when we go under 40k. If we had said that in early May we would have been shocked…but not now.

With our average of 1000 coved deaths a day…someone is dying about every 80 seconds…in the time it takes to read this thread, someone will die at the levels we are on.

In 2018, per the CDC the latest year for which final data is available, the top 10 leading causes of death among all ages in the United States.

  1. Heart disease (655,381)
  2. Cancer (599,274)
  3. Unintentional injury (167,127)
  4. Chronic lower respiratory disease (159,486)
  5. Stroke (147,810)
  6. Alzheimer’s disease (122,019)
  7. Diabetes (84,946)
  8. Flu and pneumonia (59,120)
  9. Nephritis (51,386)
  10. Suicide (48,344)
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The current deaths as a percentage of the current population is the wrong metric to look at because this is what we experienced while social distancing measures are put into place, and thus far. Also COVID has only spread in select parts of the country. So if we did nothing and let COVID run its course through the whole US as many people, including the OP, are proposing, that percentage would be many times higher.

I saw a lot of people on FB throwing out posts about the death rate being “only” 1% of those infected. We have a poplulation of 328 million. Assuming we just let covid run wild and infect the entire population, you are looking at millions of people dead in 12 months. Even if only half of the population catches COVID, with a 1% death rate, you still have over a million people dead in 12 months. That is catastrophic.

We have to do better than just letting large swaths of people die because it’s the easy way out. That’s a loser mentality.

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I’d guess Japan gets a lot of inbound travel from China. It’s pretty remarkable how well they’ve done.

This is something I thought about when the OP said that people have a higher chance of dying in a car wreck. NO, no they don’t.

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I’ve been saying something similar for months. Even a .5% death rate would kill a lot of people before we get to herd immunity (likely north of a million).

And, the death rate goes up if we overload our healthcare system.

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Yep, ~39K died in car accidents last year.

Either way, a car accident isn’t an infectious disease.

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This explains it all for me. Any time people grasp to find a couple developed countries with worse deaths per capita than us and present them with no details saying “well we aren’t the worst so it isn’t that bad”, it is a straight loser mentality. It would be like out football team going 2-10 and a thread starting showing a couple teams who only won 1 game. We did ok!

The thing that is really bad is always downplaying the deaths. Why would the OP let us know 3 million people in the US die every year? Basically saying these 170k (or even if its 300k by the end of the year or 500k next year) aren’t special. Who cares if they died, millions of people die. Before this virus, I have never seen this used for any type of death. Wouldn’t it be crazy if somebody said that there are only 50k suicides a year so that isn’t too bad? Imagine if somebody broke down the percentage of deaths from terrorism to say we should just ignore it.

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Yes. And with regards to desths from cancer, heart disease and car accidents…we are constantly working to improve on the number of people that die from those. This is why seatbelt laws exist! This is why there is so much urgency around cancer research. We have to try.

Also people look at the deaths since the start of COVID and March and say “well that wasn’t so bad so what’s the big deal?” I said from the very beginning that if the social distancing measures worked, people would push back because they never understood how bad it would have been.

You can’t look at current data and assume things will stay flat. As we saw here in Houston in June, once the phenomena of exponential growth in the infection rate kicks off, things get out of hand quickly. So you need to be forward thinking. And when you look at data, you have to extrapolate forward, not look at snapshots of the present.

There is a HUGE misunderstanding from a good chunk of people why numbers go up and down. Also not understanding it isn’t a switch you can flip so a good measures may take weeks to see results and a bad decision may not show up for weeks either. I guess just not wanting to really learn about the virus or ignoring data because they don’t want to have to adjust their life to prevent spread/deaths.

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Also the false claim that more have died from suicide because of the shutdown or would die if we were to shutdown again

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You completely missed the point. Nothing to do with genetic protection, nor to showing the US is best in any category. Go back to your first sentence for answers on the reason for existing charts. I have no expectation nor attempt to blame when the US is not the best at this. It is what it is. Different society.

I think Americans have “fight the system” mentality baked in. I mean, this country was born out of protests and revolt from England.

From an article in March 2020…

“Rudderless, blindsided, lethargic, and uncoordinated, America has mishandled the COVID-19 crisis to a substantially worse degree than what every health expert I’ve spoken with had feared. “Much worse,” said Ron Klain, who coordinated the U.S. response to the West African Ebola outbreak in 2014. “Beyond any expectations we had,” said Lauren Sauer, who works on disaster preparedness at Johns Hopkins Medicine. “As an American, I’m horrified,” said Seth Berkley, who heads Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. “The U.S. may end up with the worst outbreak in the industrialized world.””…yep we have the worst outbreak.

“Aspects of America’s identity may need rethinking after COVID-19. Many of the country’s values have seemed to work against it during the pandemic. Its individualism, exceptionalism, and tendency to equate doing whatever you want with an act of resistance meant that when it came time to save lives and stay indoors, some people flocked to bars and clubs. Having internalized years of anti-terrorism messaging following 9/11, Americans resolved to not live in fear. But SARS-CoV-2 has no interest in their terror, only their cells.”

My question is why you want a chart that adds “racial or cultural diversity” because the virus cares little about sociological constructs. For what reason would this matter?
To me, it seems you want to try to explain away our horrible response to this virus as a by-product of “diversity.” Did I jump to the wrong conclusion?

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I was thinking the same thing…

People are just trying to rationalize the virus and the deaths.

Rationalization is actually a defense mechanism that allows you to justify bad behavior or feelings. It’s a way to distort facts to make things look better than they do – to convince others and yourself that your motives and actions are good, not bad.

In other words, rationalization equals “making excuses” (justifiable ones at that), which is the opposite of reason and logic.

And the reason why you’re able to rationalize things (and are good at it) is because…People are very good at lying to themselves.

It is why so many people desperately cling to misinformation or a conspiracy theory, because there is just a crumb or logic and reasoning built that allows people to latch on.

As George Costanza said “It’s not a lie if you believe it”

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That was the impression I got. Which of course is bunk. Now we can certainly layout the chart where folks that would fit the “racial and diversity” idea have fared far worse in this pandemic. Both for short and long term reasons.

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My guess is that many here would not be receptive to a lesson on structural racism in healthcare.

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