Without aging, COVID-19 would not be a global pandemic, since the death rate in individuals below 30 years old is extremely low.
A pandemic is an epidemic that occurs across multiple continents. Note that we can accordingly envision a pandemic with a death rate of zero, but a pandemic none-the-less. Accordingly, I think you’ve somewhat overstated the punchline about aging and COVID-19, though I agree with the broader point that if aging were effectively halted at 30, the death rates would be much, much lower.
That’s a reasonable challenge. However, the definition you cited (from Wikipedia) is the classical definition of a pandemic, and according to the WHO, does not take into account disease severity and transmissability, and would imply relatively harmless influenza outbreaks would also classified as pandemics—which is somewhat controversial in terms of definition. So depending on how you define a ‘pandemic’ (i.e. with or without disease severity and transmissibility taken into consideration) my original claim may be true.
Fair point. It does seems like “pandemic” is a more useful category if it doesn’t include a whole bunch of “things that happened but didn’t kill a lot of people.”
A pandemic is an epidemic that occurs across multiple continents. Note that we can accordingly envision a pandemic with a death rate of zero, but a pandemic none-the-less. Accordingly, I think you’ve somewhat overstated the punchline about aging and COVID-19, though I agree with the broader point that if aging were effectively halted at 30, the death rates would be much, much lower.
That’s a reasonable challenge. However, the definition you cited (from Wikipedia) is the classical definition of a pandemic, and according to the WHO, does not take into account disease severity and transmissability, and would imply relatively harmless influenza outbreaks would also classified as pandemics—which is somewhat controversial in terms of definition. So depending on how you define a ‘pandemic’ (i.e. with or without disease severity and transmissibility taken into consideration) my original claim may be true.
Fair point. It does seems like “pandemic” is a more useful category if it doesn’t include a whole bunch of “things that happened but didn’t kill a lot of people.”