“One more disease among many”—this Wikipedia graphic suggests that respiratory diseases already kill about 3.6M people/year, and pre-COVID I barely spent even a thought on them, nor did I expend extraordinary efforts avoiding them. We could add COVID to the mix and bump the number up to 3.7M people/year, and neither of the above would change.
I meant 100K+ deaths in America, which is 4% of the global population, so millions of deaths globally, and I was implicitly thinking of “disease” as contagious disease that exists in rich countries too. I haven’t looked for numbers but I suspect that COVID is a quite large fraction of American deaths from contagious disease, such that even in April it will not merely be one such disease among many.
But this number of deaths from covid won’t last, immunity from vaccines and past infections will get in equilibrium with some immune escape from perpetual new variants and declining immunity over time, just like it happens for flu strains. The finite number of very vulnerable old people will all die out, and over time the only people who will die of covid are the people who age into vulnerability, just like it happens with the flu.
“One more disease among many”—this Wikipedia graphic suggests that respiratory diseases already kill about 3.6M people/year, and pre-COVID I barely spent even a thought on them, nor did I expend extraordinary efforts avoiding them. We could add COVID to the mix and bump the number up to 3.7M people/year, and neither of the above would change.
Good point; I was imprecise. Thanks.
I meant 100K+ deaths in America, which is 4% of the global population, so millions of deaths globally, and I was implicitly thinking of “disease” as contagious disease that exists in rich countries too. I haven’t looked for numbers but I suspect that COVID is a quite large fraction of American deaths from contagious disease, such that even in April it will not merely be one such disease among many.
But this number of deaths from covid won’t last, immunity from vaccines and past infections will get in equilibrium with some immune escape from perpetual new variants and declining immunity over time, just like it happens for flu strains. The finite number of very vulnerable old people will all die out, and over time the only people who will die of covid are the people who age into vulnerability, just like it happens with the flu.