> There are two states and 618 counties that require circuit breakers (i.e. short-term mitigation measures needed to preserve hospital functioning) at this point because their hospitals are at or above 100% capacity (assuming that the number of staffed beds has not increased in the past week). Medical military personnel have already been dispatched to a number of hospitals across the nation. Nebraska also joined a short list of states that have enacted its Crisis Standards of Care plan. But community-wide efforts to reduce spread desperately need to be taken, too. Fourteen additional states are at high risk of exceeding 100% hospital capacity in the next 1-10 days.
Source: https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/state-of-affa...
How much evidence do you need of this being a mild variant?
It really is not. It's mild to double- and triple-vaccinated individuals living in highly vaccinated populations. They get the shot, they brush it aside
The poor souls who didn't managed to get vaccinated, or didn't wanted to, represent the bulk of the hospitalized population and deaths.
The key factor is that the world has spent the last year bulking on vaccines, precisely to allow any infection to be at most mild. And now that we're seeing highly vaccinated populations being exposed and developing mostly mild cases are we now supposed to pretend that vaccines don't exist and the disease suddenly got tame? In whose head does this even compute?
This is only part of the picture - it's actually the people that are unvaccinated and are very old or have comorbidities that represent the majority of deaths.
But we also shouldn't exclude that a large majority of people are dying with Covid-19 at the moment rather than because of Covid (i.e. as c20% of deaths at the moment are within a month of a positive covid test, and c5% of the population likely had Covid in the last month, we can imply that 5% of deaths would have Covid anyway if it had no impact on morbidity, so about 25% (at least) of those Covid deaths are people dying with covid. This is likely an underestimate considering Covid is probably spreading in hospitals).
South Africa vax rate is 52%. Their health officials have declared it to be mild.
It’s mild.
From your dashboard: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Be careful about who is in covid because of non-covid reasons that just happen to have covid, compared with those who are in hospital because of covid.
Choosing what certainly looks like a single dramatic outlier point which is 2 weeks older than the dashboard certainly seems like cherry picking.
Just look at the current dashboard data it shows ~440 deaths per day for the last 2 weeks. Again:
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/
Also note that there almost aren't deaths from other flus over the last 2 years, likely because they don't have an R value >1 due to masking etc.
Look, I'm all for getting back to normal and letting the unvaccinated (and old, poor, sick) die off as god intended, but let's not pretend it's all due to a lack of joyful evenings in the pub.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/01/20/call-scrap-daily...
"Call to phase out statistics comes as it emerges that up to 70pc of virus patients in hospital being primarily treated for other problems"
You are right on your figures though - when you look at excess deaths over 5 years there has been much fewer deaths because of Covid than the official figures would have you believe, but the impact of lockdown will be felt for many years to come.
In a “normal” winter there would be more regular patients in the hospitals.
