Eric Fox7 said:But honestly, that number doesn't mean squat—it’s not giving us the full picture at all.
The only real, accurate figure we have right now is that the mortality rate here in the United States is sitting at a fucking 1.4%... everything else is just the Golden State Warriors guessing in the dark.
We won't know the actual, definitive number until this whole epidemic is finally over, but it's going to be way closer to my estimate than to whatever nonsense Branko is peddling.
It’s probably impossible to measure mortality accurately, and it can't be a single universal number because the disease hits older people much harder. You can see this in daily death reports—even without official statistics, it's clear that while infections happen across all age groups, the elderly and those with underlying conditions make up most of the fatalities. Every country or region has its own demographic quirks. For example, Italy or the US tends to have an older population with many people over 65, whereas African nations usually have high birth rates and a very young population. Plus, it depends on the season; the virus and the human body react differently at -10 degrees versus +35. So, statistics from Italy compared to, say, Nigeria might look completely different. To build solid, large-scale statistics, you need a lot of time; these real-time tallies aren't really reliable by any standard. Studies from Heinsberg or Iceland are trying to find the bigger picture, but they feel more like surveys than comprehensive research. It takes years to get a clearer view, though these studies already suggest we won't see 10% of the world's population die if they catch it. However, if the virus hits a nursing home where everyone is 80+, the mortality rate in that isolated sample could hit 100% if everything goes wrong. I wrote a little while ago, maybe a few weeks back, that the baseline annual mortality rate in the USA is 1.4%. That means just by breathing and walking around, there's a 1.4% chance you'll pass away this year for some reason (which is a pretty grim statistic and not exactly a highlight for the US). But since everyone is lumped together, it's obvious more seniors will die this year than young people. If research shows the cumulative mortality of corona is around half a percent, and that overlaps with that 1.4% baseline, then we should carefully look at how many deaths occur in the US by the end of the year and whether corona actually significantly changes the overall stats. We can debate all we want, but some of these seniors might have passed away later this year from something else anyway. Not everyone, of course, but it wouldn't be zero. Over the last 15 years, the number of deaths in the US has hovered between 50,000 and 54,000 annually. For this disease to truly justify shutting down the entire system and wrecking the economy and quality of life, it would need to add at least an extra 10,000 deaths per year—something we can't even know for sure if it would have happened without restrictions (since that's not how we proceeded). Back in early 2015, we had a very harsh winter, and that year saw nearly 4,000 more deaths than the previous two, yet nobody shut down the economy for that. On the other hand, we shouldn't deny the numbers from Bergamo; the truth is likely somewhere in the middle that no one has found yet. Governments worldwide are making decisions on the fly. Whether they implement strict measures or none at all, it's all guesswork, and above all, these are
political decisions. Maybe save that bolded part in your bookmarks or set it as your phone wallpaper. Everything we are seeing consists of political decisions, not scientific ones. Healthcare funding is a political decision, building or not building a hospital is a political decision, quarantine is a political decision, the Immunology Institute is a political decision, and having Beroš instead of Kujundžić is a political decision, too.
I'm not entirely sure about the exact accuracy of this claim, so I'd probably need to look it up, but in the movie >, the character played by > mentions that every single percentage point increase in the US unemployment rate leads to an extra 40,000 deaths. Since unemployment jumped from 3.5% to over 10%, I guess you can do the math on what that implies. We're talking about hunger, homelessness, substance abuse, alcoholism, poor nutrition, domestic violence, stress, and so on. Millions of people might end up facing those struggles, which is pretty heavy. Maybe that's why > was being so careful with his moves? Their economy seems to move faster—it recovers quickly, but it can also crash just as fast. A house might be worth a million dollars one day and only 100,000 the next.
