Renewed questions about the virus, and hard-to-face answers
Are there things we need to look at? Yes. But if someone doesn’t save your life then you won’t be around to argue about how they could have done it better. It’s also pretty rich to claim the numbers don’t add up and substitute numbers that don’t add up either.<p>Speaking about the war on reality (original title):<p>This article claims an infection fatality rate of 0.15%.<p>Currently we list 604 thousand Americans dead from COVID,  that’s 0.18% of the entire population - not the infected population. Brazil is at 0.23%, and rising fast. Worldwide it’s almost 4 million out of 181M reported cases.  That’s over 2% IFR.<p>If one were to assume that everyone in these countries was infected and we are just really awful at reporting, that number is still wrong. But the US is currently reporting a hair over 1:10 people as having been infected, and Brazil has not crossed that threshold yet, so 0.15% is already empirically - to use the technical term - horse shit [1].<p>Since the quarantine was about firewalling especially vulnerable populations, I won’t hazard a guess as to how this would have scaled, but we do know that if it <i>had</i> scaled, a great many people would have not had or lost access to medical equipment <i>and labor</i> that was in extremely short supply. The argument about how we didn’t actually run out of beds or labor may or may not be true <i>for the rate of exposure we actually experienced</i> but claiming that would not have been affected by a do-nothing policy is arguing both sides.<p>[1] This article should make you cussing-angry, because this sort of retroactive second-guessing is going to get a lot of people killed the next time around. Most especially old people.