Covid19 Part XVII-24,841 in ROI (1,639 deaths) 4,679 in NI (518 deaths)(28/05)Read OP

growleaves wrote: »

As I've said before, to take the worst second wave of a disease in history (Spanish flu) as normative defies sense. The unique confluence of factors leading to a nightmare scenario are just about possible, that doesn't make them likely. Proceeding on the basis of extremely-unlikely-but-not-impossible scare scenarios is stupid, insane and (where it affects people badly) wrong.

There's much to that. Using the Spanish flu as a model is deeply flawed. Like you note the factors were very unique to that pandemic. The First World War for a start, which looks to have upended the usual trajectory of a virus to become less deadly over time and made it more deadly. The theory being that where it spread in the trenches the first mild version kept men at their posts, but the less mild more deadly form had men brought back from the front into hospitals where that more vicious strain spread from them into the wider population in the second wave.

That's not happening with Covid19. While there is some debate over the current genetic strains and how fatal or not they may be, this virus doesn't mutate to nearly the same degree or speed of influenza viruses and there's no human management of it like there was in 1918.

Micky 32 wrote: »

You are partly correct that the normal flu would probably kill them BUT Covid is far more CONTAGIOUS. That’s the difference and it makes Covid far more deadly.

We're still in the dark on this point too. It seems to be mad contagious in some settings, whereas in others it's not. So you'll have a choir all come down with it after a few hours together, yet you'll have other cases where it hasn't appeared to have spread in single households.

It's level of lethality seems to vary all over the place too. So in Italy it's been murderous even after lockdowns and other restrictions, yet not nearly as murderous in Sweden with much fewer restrictions. It appears to hit non Europeans(and East Asians) worse, at least in the West(Africans and African descendants of the slave trade differ in other diseases and conditions).

It's a puzzling bugger in many ways at the moment. In one sense it's not puzzling as it overwhelmingly follows the usual groups and risks of fatalities and serious illnesses. So it kills more men than women, it kills far more old than young, more poor than rich etc. Men die younger than women on average, old people die far more than young and poor die more than rich. The only outlier and it's a mad one is that it doesn't kill smokers to nearly the degree it should. In fact it seems they're protected against catching it in the first place, are less likely to progress to serious illness and ICU, though if they do it then starts to kill them more than non smokers. Which you would expect, though even there it should be killing more of them*.




*I had a thought on this last point. Is it possible that when smokers do progress to serious illness and end up in hospital and the fact that they obviously give up smoking at that point, that what protective effect is present likely in nicotine being removed is a negative that causes more to die than might have?