Originally Posted by
Abdula
I am not sure what you believe you are accomplishing here. Your stance seems to be that you are willfully ignorant and you believe that your ignorance is some kind of shield. Yes your little corner of the world is largely unaffected. That means the same must be true everywhere. People are not so tactless as to plaster images of dead bodies everywhere and so this makes you doubt the severity of the situation. Again being willfully ignorant as there have been such things posted online for months now.
Yes there is not a lot of information available about a new strain of corona virus that we have only known existed for less than half a year. The country it first emerged in was also less than forthcoming. So again your argument is that ignorance, a lack of information, makes this disease less of a threat not more. Do you have any idea why the regular flu and regular pneumonia, as you call them, do not kill more people every year? The woman I happen to be in a relationship with just spent 20 days in the hospital with pneumonia in january. Guess why she did not die? Proper medical care, effective treatments and there were not hundreds of thousands of people who needed treatment at the same time.
So what point are you trying to make here. Comparing this situation to something that happened centuries ago when there was no way to quickly disseminate information. When people naturally did not have ready access to soap or clean water much less modern medicine. When things like respirators, ventilators and antivirals did not exist and people could not check for something as simple as hypoxia. Yes things are not as bad as they were in a time when people did not even believe in the existence of micro organisms. You should check out what maternal and infant mortality rates were back then, it might interest you to learn just how much things have changed.
It spread from person to person just like the flu and it had an unknown incubation period. The rate of infection is exactly the issue here. Prion diseases have a mortality rate that I am sure is more appealing to you but you cannot acquire them from someone coughing on you and so there is not any hoopla about them. So yes modern society is better at dealing with pandemics. I live in a country with over 330 million people 1% is a staggering number. Also 98% of the deaths in NYC have been of people who have other underlying medical conditions or some comorbidity. So if 1% is not enough for you think of 98. Also for people 70 and older the mortality rate starts at 4% and only increases. Your utterly fallacious argument is we are doing everything we can to prevent more people from dying and so more people are not dying and thus you think this is a hoax. We should all do nothing and allow millions of people to die so you can feel more comfortable in your ivory tower.
Your complete lack of understanding of how infectious diseases actually work is amazing. Yes diseases do in fact run their course and then disappear it has happened often throughout history. You know, just like the flu you keep mentioning. You get it and you recover but you can always be reinfected or infect someone else. Thus all the efforts to prevent transmission.
Your entire point is that this is a hoax and people should just ignore the obvious facts because there are not enough facts to satisfy you. Just possibly allow millions of people, that insignificant 1%, to die. Which, by the way, would in fact make this one of the deadliest pandemics ever. Forget being a skeptic. You are either being an idiot, being deliberately obtuse or incredibly immature. In any case, this is not a good faith argument but it has certainly been entertaining.
Just as an aside, stop saying the death rate for the flu is higher. That is false, just some misinformation you have heard or read and decided to regurgitate without even verifying. For example the CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, estimates that over 48 million people in the U.S got the flu in the 2017-2018 flu season. That only resulted in 79,000 confirmed deaths. Not the 480,000 which would constitute 1%. Compare that to the 291,000 confirmed cases of Covid in New York that has resulted in over 17,000 deaths and you see the disparity. We peaked at over 700 deaths a day. Come on just think of how many people you have heard dying of the flu throughout your life. If 1% of the people who got the flu died every flu season, just think of what high school would have been. If you are simply going to deny anything that is not inline with your prejudices then do not bother.