re: #233 KGxvi

at 70% and 1% death rates, you’re still looking at about 2.5 million people. And that doesn’t consider the downstream effects. How many people end up with new pre-existing conditions related to the virus? How many people who need treatment for other ailments can’t get them because hospitals are overrun? How many people end up unemployed/homeless because the epidemic kills the economy, and as a result end up in a bad state of health?

I’m not suggesting that this is not a catastrophe, both economically and in terms of physical well-being or that there are not terrible long-term health consequences for the disease, only that we don’t really know the CFR because we have no good estimate for the number of those who actually have had the disease and there is also a problem with the number of deaths, since especially at the beginning of the pandemic, many were attributed to other causes. OTOH, some may have died later when they supposedly “recovered” from damage inflicted by the disease— are those all getting classified properly as due to Covid?