Who else here remembers learning that AIDS patients (people with acquired immunodeficiency) can die from the common cold, in school? Is it not common knowledge that old folks can die from a cold, too?
It isn’t just some new common cold that we don’t have herd immunity for. Different viruses have different lethality; common cold corona viruses are far milder than SARS-Ncov-2 which is in turn far milder than MERS.
When you have a mortality rate of 66% to 90% for something tha isn't a hemorrhagic fever, it's the ventilator.
The ventilator from what people are saying doesn’t seem to help as much as was hoped, but it’s not like hospitals are killing the patients by putting them on a vent, which is what your comment seems to imply?
https://ltccovid.org/2020/04/12/mortality-associated-with-co...
> Key findings:
> Official data on the numbers of people affected by COVID-19 is not available in many countries
> Due to differences in testing availabilities and policies, and to different approaches to recording deaths, international comparisons are difficult
> Data from 3 epidemiological studies in the United States show that as many as half of people with COVID-19 infections in care homes were asymptomatic (or pre-symptomatic) at the time of testing
> Data from 5 European countries suggest that care home residents have so far accounted for between 42% and 57% of all deaths related to COVID-19.
Like the flu, you don't die from the flu, but really it's the last straw on top of other issues that pushes people over the edge.
But the flu is far more deadly than the common cold, it's misleading to talk about them together like that.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3655081/
> Twenty-two percent of all subjects with isolated coronavirus were hospitalized, but in the population aged ≥60 years this increased to 73%. While our study design precludes the determination of exact hospitalization rates as a result of coronavirus infections, the hospitalization rates were similar to those for influenza.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4181476/
> The high proportion of non-influenza infection in this study (72%) underscores the importance of non-influenza viral infection in contributing to severe illness necessitating hospital and ICU admission in adults, as has been found by others.
However, I'm in favor of ending lockdown and letting corona virus run its course, just like the flu every year. That's the fastest way to get herd immunity.
I wonder if anybody has thought to research using these viruses as part of an innoculation strategy at least for high-risk groups. After all the first 'vaccine' ever developed in the 18th century (really an innoculation) was to intentionally give people cowpox in order to give them immunity to smallpox.
Maybe it's too risky though for some reason? I dunno.