Quote (Thor123422 @ 11 Sep 2020 00:35)
Can't really get long-term studies before a long-term time-frame happens.
That would only be true if we were talking about effects which manifest with a long delay. All the cases that went through the press, however, had these complications/side effects showing up either directly after being healed from covid, or within 2-3 months. The global sample size for this type of long-term effects is in the millions by now, if they were a mass phenomenom, it would have been noticed by now. What is still up in the air is the question of how frequent those effects actually are. They might be quite rare, but still occur often enough to be cause for concern. For example, if the share of cases developing persisting symptoms was 0.2%, that would add up to 2000 cases per 1 million infections. But we really need actual studies to tackle this question, anecdotal evidence is not enough.
Once we have this data, we then have to compare it with the rates with which similar effects are triggered by other common diseases, like influenza or CAP. For example, the 2009 H1N1 outbreak saw - very roughly speaking - a doubled risk of developing chronic fatigue syndrome in patients infected at the height of the pandemic, compared with the H1N1-negative general population.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26475444/Quote
Something that's important to understand about fatalities is also that doctors are just better at treating it now and keeping people alive compared to March. So it's actually expected that we would see a significant decrease in mortality at this point. It's very likely it's real, but it's not because the virus is less risky. If the hospitals get overwhelmed those numbers will go back up.
Better treatment is one factor that contributed to reduced mortality, but if you think it is the main factor, you're wrong. The main reason for the lower mortality in recent weeks is that current infections mostly occur among younger folks, who are at a much lower risk of dying from covid. You are right that the mortality and case fatality rate would go back up if hospitals got overwhelmed - but with the current demographics of the infected population, it would take huge daily case numbers to get to this point.
This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Sep 10 2020 07:01pm