> Covid was exactly the right amount of deadly, 0.5-1%
Tough to say that's "exactly the right amount of deadly" for a pandemic when the Black Death and Spanish flu killed larger fractions of their total affected populations (in the latter case, of humans) [1].
Perhaps fairer to say post germ-theory pandemic. During Spanish Flu it was in its infancy. During the black death it was all about miasma.
Also, the window for spread with the ability to get on a plane and be on the other side of the world post infection, but pre symptoms is a "latter half of the 20th century" thing.
It was good practice for pandemic response. I think (blasphemy, which on its own is wild) the global reaction was too strong on an acute level, but was worth it as prepararion for a deadlier pandemic.
It was a natural reaction though. People saw the Italian hospitals overflowing and thought "oh crap! We can't let that happen here!" At least where I am they tightened and/or relaxed restrictions on a county by county level based on how full hospital beds were getting.
Which makes sense - the british called it flattening the curve. No matter how well funded your health service, it doesn't have enough beds, staff or supplies (like ventilators) for a widespread pandemic, because that would be wasteful (of public funds in a single-payer system, and of money that would otherwise be profit in a private system).
Or it was too little because it still spread easily?
I'm on the border of three countries and you'd always see symptom reports go up in a region, sewage analyses go up, hospitalizations go up, and finally shortly before mortality started to show an increase (several weeks' lag from the moment of infection) they'd decide "guys, here's the statistics, we have to lock down now". Yeah great, now that everyone caught it they have to pretend being on the ball. And people still literally rioted against lockdowns. Or the masking thing, the resistance against filtering your breath... at this "too strong" level in your opinion, I don't see that the outcome was significantly different from "yolo protect yourself as much as you like but don't expect anyone else to be mindful"
In another time it might have been good practice, but in reality I think, between the grifters pushing fear and those just too self-centered to go a few months without a haircut (yes oversimplifying and straw-manning), it actually precluded the chance that many people will ever cooperate with a pandemic response again.
in terms of an age corrected population distribution, actually I think you'll find it's lower. that's the whole point of "at risk" in this scenario being mostly age >70yr (or wherever you chose to draw your risk factors) also this is tends to be over-estimating as the reported infection rates are failing to account for asymptomatic carriers which themselves follow an age-based distribution (I'm sorry but as far as a systematic goes, this is poorly recorded, poorly understood and very very poorly modelled, which is made even worse by the politicization of cv19 causing an mis-representation in people volunteering for randomized testing in a large number of western datasets). Again in very high population countries with poor vaccine rates, uptake and very slow roll-out we didn't end up with hundreds of thousands of bodies stacked high ready to be buried. that unfortunately is a large-scale uncomfortable truth to quite a few.
>in terms of an age corrected population distribution, actually I think you'll find it's lower
The data I linked is giving IFR for each age band, so that people see the actual data instead of sweeping affirmations like "the IFR is X" or "the IFR isn't X".
The data is also coming from multiple studies, some under very controlled conditions with systematic testing, such as military service recruits, or prisoners.
>Again in very high population countries with poor vaccine rates, uptake and very slow roll-out we didn't end up with hundreds of thousands of bodies stacked high ready to be buried. that unfortunately is a large-scale uncomfortable truth to quite a few.
_sigh_ 2020, 2021.... I'm talking about clearly 2023 onwards once it was crystal clear to everyone fluent in actual stats what the risks were.
Again, give me the ~15million bodies we expect to see dead in India for a 1% fatality vs the ~100k that is a -serious- discrepancy from a nation that hasn't mastered other hygiene issues yet at a national level. And I'm supposed to believe they magically conquered cv19 better than the crazed lockdown nations of the west?
Oh please don't give me the "le multiple studies in bio" argument. By that logic magic mushrooms and witchcraft are far more reliable due to 'working' for centuries. The field is full of reproducibility crises and follow the leader herd mentality, chemistry, even bio-informatics maybe, but bio as a whole, eesh...
Collecting the data in controlled conditions is exactly my point, you're trying to infer to a whole general populous on something that became insanely politically charged. Given the complete absence of admitting this or even trying to factor this into studies makes the whole thing a stack of cards.
