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Re:India's holiest river Ganges is swollen with Covid victims by ganeshkrishnan on Thursday May 20, 2021 @01:38AM (#27217819)
>Since COVID takes out mostly old people with multiple life threatening conditions

My brother's two employees died. One was 28 and other in 30's. No complications, physically active people.

Re:India's holiest river Ganges is swollen with Covid victims by robbiep on Thursday May 20, 2021 @02:44AM (#27218130)
This is an absurd take on it.

What you say is 'Mostly' true - in a bad flu season the medical community has a name for it, clearing out the dead wood.

But 'Mostly', when scaled to really large numbers, is still a scarily large number. And Mostly, in this instance, is still a long way from the truth.

First, there is a significantly increased risk of dying beyond the first 30 days of illness (ie when many people have recovered) [0]

Beyond the first 30 days of illness, individuals with COVID-19 had an increased risk of death (hazard ratio of 1.59 (1.46–1.73)). We also estimated the adjusted excess burden of death due to COVID-19 per 1,000 persons at 6 months on the basis of the difference between the estimated incidence rate in individuals with COVID-19 and all VHA users. The excess death was estimated at 8.39 (7.09–9.58) per 1,000 patients with COVID-19 at 6 months. Individuals with COVID-19 had a higher risk of requiring outpatient care (hazard ratio of 1.20 (1.19–1.21)), at an excess burden of 33.22 (30.89–35.58; all excess burdens are given per 1,000 patients with COVID-19 at 6 months) and at a greater frequency of 0.47 (0.44–0.49) additional encounters every 30 days

Secondly, it is not just death that is a concern (and again i'll stress that really, a lot of young people, through sheer weight of numbers, are dying of this. Huge number of infection, huge number of death, even at <1% CFR). It's long term morbidity. Your risk of death may be less than 1%, but your risk of hospitalisation may be 5-10% depending on your comorbidities and age. A person admitted to hospital and requiring ICU support and ventilation may have a 4-6 week hospital stay during which they lose 30% of their muscle mass. Once they come out of hospital, they need to learn to walk and eat again and go to Rehab for a couple of months. What would that do to your life?

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03553-9