The maths of it all and what it means to Ireland

My maths is nonexistent S, but my hunch is that when the numbers are finally in this virus will prove to have an overall mortality rate of 0.5% or maybe lower. Way worse than a seasonal flu, even a bad one, but not 2% and certainly not 10% or above as some commentators have suggested. I also suspect it will hit different demographics and populations differently, not just by age and underlying conditions, but by wealth status, geography(hotter countries less) and maybe even genetics, up to population level.

Overall it will most look like we temporarily lost the advantages of 21st century healthcare and technology. Say if you imagine if tomorrow all antibiotics stopped working. It would make Covid19 look like a picnic on a sunny day.

paleoperson wrote: »

There is zero reason to believe it will hit 0.5% of people when the numbers keep saying at least 2%, taking everything into account. I mean are you talking 0.5% of the entire population or of who get the virus? Of the entire population I could get on board with.

I'm talking entire population, before it burns out through vaccines, effective contagion controls and better treatments.

It's annoying how people keep making optimistic predictions right throughout this with no basis. If you want to keep holding onto hope that's fine, but assuming optimistic things without any basis for it is biased and will only end in disappointment.

As will presuming the sky is falling down from the same massively incomplete numbers, or pessimistic predictions right throughout this with no basis.

Wow!

Humans survived very well for hundreds of thousands of years in the savanna in Africa. They did not get diseased only extremely rarely, they did not get viruses. Your idea that a large amount of the population would be dying if there was no antibiotics is absolute farce.

Clearly and in spite of your handle you've not that much info on palaeolithic(or later) human populations. While "stone age" man could make it to 60, or even above in some rarer cases, the average age of death was more like 50. If you made it to adulthood in the first place. Their child mortality rate was off the scale. Palaeolithic finds and later burials have a scary number of dead children. In earlier Neandertals we have slightly more children's bones than adults. Oh and there isn't one example of an adult Neandertal without some pathology or other. Modern humans show similar, though we started to live slightly longer, or more older people were buried and preserved, around 40,000 years ago. The once type specimen for Cro Magnon modern humans was covered in facial cysts and died in his early 40's. Walk around any older graveyard and look at the ages and then look at the all too usual additions of children. Hell, my maternal grandparents lost two kids in childhood, my paternal, one. And they had a few bob for the time.

The other great apes living in Africa today only very rarely get sick. Your idea of them getting sick a lot of the time is totally erroneous. Without medical science? You must be joking. Medical science rarely helps, only a few times in your whole lifetime.

I've never had an antibiotic. At 52. When I tell doctors that they're usually WTF? really? I'm a fairly rare example of that in the West. Never had a flu save for the swine variety and I brushed that off handily enough. No vaccinations other than for polio. Caught all the other childhood doses and a few funky ones on top. However, do a straw poll on Boards and you will find a remarkable number of people posting here, that would be dead long ago without modern medicine. That goes across the board. We've never lived longer on average in the history of the human species.

Yeah there's blood pressure medication, but that's offset by the fact of what we're eating to begin with - totally unnatural foods.

Here comes the so called "paleo" diet bro science.... 1) yes eating the modern paleo type diet is significantly better than the all too usual cakes and pasta and chinner dinners with oodles of salt and sugar of many. That goes without saying, but you can say that for every single other decent diet out there. Eat less and better, move more. Why, I can't believe I feel better!! No sh1t Sherlock. 2) Almost nothing you can buy in a modern shop today resembles the available foods in the palaeolithic. This goes quadruple for fruit and veg. Pick any you like and a palaeolithic bloke or blokess(they were usually getting the lion's share of grub calories in, particularly fruit and veg) and the majority of the time they'd ask you WTF are we looking at here?

Additionally, this virus is a remarkable example of something that has happened due to modern civilization. It starts off with the highly unnatural close contact between humans and animals in the wet markets. After that the entire spread of it - it would still have been confined to a small region China and died out there. At worst it would never have gotten past a place where it took more than two weeks to travel - eg. across a desert by boat from one island to another.

I hate to break it to you, but palaeolithic folks had way more up and closer contact with wild animals. Domestic animals mixed with wild are the issue. It also depends on what you consider modern civilisation. Plagues are among the very first things recorded when we invented writing.

What's more - something that is often a worry with viruses like this is if it would mutate to a more virulent form. This was a huge concern with the bird flu type viruses including swine flu - apparently this isn't such a concern with this one (we hope). But if it was one, then it has 7.3 billion potential opportunities to mutate, as opposed to the original human population of 100,000 humans or so.

Coronaviruses mutate at much slower rates than influenza viruses and tend to get milder with time. Flu is a bit of an outlier here, though only slightly as it seems it's down to dumb luck when a very nasty one comes along.

Really, I don't know how you came up with that howler.

by reading a lot.

Andrew00 wrote: »

When people say oh thousands of people die in Ireland every year due to the flu

So how come we never hear of it? "oh did ya hear Tommy down the road died of flu"

Or you never see it on death notices

True, though both my parents died of hospital acquired pneumonia and that wasn't on their death notices.