Posted by: tashi
“I think that graph title is somewhat misleading as the mortality of covid has actually gotten worse and it's only immunity (mainly via vaccinations) that has helped lower it (yeah, yeah, semantics). It misses that the virus itself has gotten more lethal.”
Your semantic distinction is incorrect. Mortality is a defined term in population biology. It’s how many deaths result in a population due to a disease. If for some reason you want to eliminate immunity from the picture, you’ll need to take that mortality rate and correct for vaccination and previous exposure status.
Yeah, I think i was misusing lethal and mortality and like you say not using mortality in the correct semse. Although TBH who knows what I was thinking for sure, middle aged depression and all that - lol. So re mortality. what seems to have happened is that while delta was more likely to kill people and omicron was less deadly, omicron was more infectious so in the end the mortality rate seemed to not change. Of course perceptions might be off because it seems people have become indifferent or complacent due to two years of constant covid news. Part of that is probably the mixed messaging from govt and news that has happened as well. In general, I think the media has done a sub-par job and their credibility has taken a hit. I know I'm paying much less attention to covid news unless it's something I need to know for work, but I'm still putting a mask on when I go to the store and consider how I interact with friends when we hang out. On that front, it seems familiarity breeds some complacency as well. Who knows, that may all changes with the 6th wave.
One thing for sure is that it's still strange seeing chats from people who think all the restrictions are nonsense and that we're being fed a lot of lies. However, when you ask them straight up if they think that no precautions would have been better and then at what point (in terms of mortality) they should have been brought in nobody dares give an answer to that. Some people think we should have done nothing but won't even discuss when it would be ok to do something - it's weird.
Couch, re the lockdown thing, greater social cohesion, more authoritarianism and less value on the importance of freedom probably all play a role in keeping a city of 25mil controlled.