SD on 30/8/2020 at 06:59
A closer analogue would seem to be coronavirus HCoV-OC43. Caused the Russian flu in 1889 and killed a million people. These days it's a common cold virus.
SubJeff on 30/8/2020 at 07:23
Does anyone actually know what caused the epidemic of 1889?
Anyway, I'm not sure the death rate is what we should be focusing on. Organ damage in those with mild symptoms send to be a massive unknown timebomb .
Pyrian on 1/9/2020 at 17:29
"Common cold" doesn't kill ~30%. Smallpox was lot deadlier to Native Americans (estimated fatality rates of 80%-90%!), but it was no picnic for Europe, either.
Nicker on 1/9/2020 at 18:25
Smallpox devastated the entire southern and northern continents of the new world. By the time Europeans made first contact with the peoples of the Pacific North West, almost 300 years after Columbus, the coastal populations of Washington and British Columbia had been reduced to a post apocalypse state with hundreds of large villages abandoned for generations. Part of the reason Europeans saw the First Nations as backward was because the people they met were survivors living in the ruins of their civilization.
This is something that the COVID deniers and anti-vaxers (who have now joined forces) clearly don't get, the fact that the hospitals aren't shut down and there are not piles of bodies in the street is evidence that containment is working, not that COVID is a hoax.
SD on 1/9/2020 at 19:00
Of course, milkmaids never died from smallpox, because they had cross immunity from the similar but much less lethal cowpox. This was what prompted the world's first vaccine, and is why the term itself derives from vacca, the Latin word for cow.
A timely reminder for the cross immunity deniers, I hope.
heywood on 1/9/2020 at 19:02
Yeah, I don't know where that smallpox analogy came from. Europe suffered periodic large epidemics of smallpox all the way up until the vaccine became available. Smallpox was around for thousands of years and was dangerous to everyone. It took ~180 years after the vaccine was discovered to eradicate it, with 300+ million deaths in just the 20th century. What an awful disease.
COVID-19 death rates appear to be a lot lower in the waves that are currently going around the world than in the earlier March/April waves. Part of that is due to the demographics of who is getting infected. Also, we are detecting and confirming a higher percentage of the true cases, but I have been wondering if mutation is playing a role in it too. Of course, there's no guarantee that mutation won't make it worse again.
SubJeff on 1/9/2020 at 19:03
Just because you get it with one virus doesn't mean you get it with all.
What's the cross-immunity virus for HIV please?
And where's your explanation re: how cardiac damage attracts viruses?
Hmmm?
heywood on 1/9/2020 at 19:06
Does anybody want to get SARS or MERS to try out cross-immunity from COVID-19?
Pyrian on 1/9/2020 at 19:23
South Korea went all in to doing lots and lots of testing and recorded a death rate of just 0.8%. I feel like the rest of the fatality rates are pretty much just spitballing - we're missing far too many cases to really know.
zombe on 1/9/2020 at 20:42
Quote Posted by Pyrian
South Korea ... death rate of just 0.8%.
O_o ?
Where did you get that number from? Is that some estimate including the undetected cases?
S.Korea is currently having an outbreak (well, who isn't?) - 25% of all their known cases have been identified in the last 15 days. Which is the start of the timespan where people usually die. Consequently, death rate has dropped accordingly quite sharply down to 1.6% from its pre-outbreak plateau of a bit over 2.0% (where there were only 4.6% points worth of open cases left -> 4.6%*2.0% ~= 0.09% wiggle room for the final death rate based on known values).
None of this can be assumed to meaningfully translate for other places besides S.Korea of course.
Anyway, effectiveness of care has improved quite a bit everywhere - probably much less people die now than they would have a handful of months ago. Long term harm still seems to have quite a bit of question marks around it - even leading to death later on it seems.