Mirth wrote:
Severe pneumonia does that to you as well. Tl;dr - don't fuck with your lungs.
Yeah. I think that, while there's no doubt it kills more people than a normal flu — and I feel truly sorry for people like Big Wil who have lost family members to it — and above all seems to have a higher exponential mortality as the age goes up, there's definitely a bit of a scare panic at the moment surrounding covid-19. People act like normal influenza isn't a big thing by comparison, but it is. Not to the overwhelming majority, sure, but a lot of people actually die from it every year. I think the recent numbers suggest 400-500 people die during a bad winter in Sweden, which must translate to 10 000 or so in the UK when you adjust for population size. And that in itself is of course an excellent reason to try and stop sars-cov-2 from becoming yet one more virus strain that circulates permanently, even in a less deadly form.
I caught the regular flu a few years back, and it was the worst thing I've ever experienced in my entire life. I've broken my share of limbs in the past, and I would gladly take a couple of bone fractures over living through that again. I wasn't part of any known risk group either; in fact I had never been healthier in all my life. I was swimming competitively and training 21 hours per week at the time. We ran some tests but I still have no idea why it affected me so badly.
The whole experience left me in little doubt that it would have killed me if I'd been 30-ish years older. It happens sometimes. It's the nature of these diseases. I think everyone has a public responsibility to neither downplay nor exaggerate the difficulties of covid-19. Kel is right that the majority of the people who catch it seem to be more or less asymptomatic. And I feel that's actually important to point out, especially when people talk about permanent lung damage in the thread. A lot of people who catch it would have belonged to the groups that are done in every year by other diseases too, that's just a fact. A lot of people have probably even caught more than one flu strain simultaneously. At the same time we have no previous immunity to covid-19, unlike with the other flu strains, which means it hits us worse when it does hit, in addition to being three times more infectuous and a few times as deadly.
This is going to be a horrid year for everyone, that much is clear. I just feel it's bad enough already without people turning the virus into some kind of boogeyman.
