Lethality is not the only metric of interest for any disease, including COVID. There have been reported long term health effects, which matter to people who contract the disease.
Further, if the best you can find for source data is a conservative interest group, you should ask yourself if you are looking for truth, or pushing an agenda.
It's pretty apparent at this point that COVID was heavily politicized, which would explain its dominating prevalence in media and culture. An American has a heart attack every 40 seconds, and it's been this way for almost two decades.
Feels like your own comment explained why “heavily politicized” had nothing to do with it. (There’s a reason almost every country in the world took action against covid-19, despite vastly differing politics and influences)
People have about the same number of heart attacks every year. In the USA, Covid-19 added about a half million deaths additional to what normally would be expected.
People get used to what normally happens but when a new additional source of death comes up, they’ll be more concerned. Especially because covid is contagious and heart attacks aren’t.
> Covid-19 added about a half million deaths additional to what normally would be expected.
Not true. Death rates aren't a linear scale. The total number of deaths last year was already set up to be significantly higher than in previous years (not accounting for covid). The actual death rates were lower than expected the past 4-5 years, which tells us there were many additional people on the brink of death. Also, there's a significantly higher number of
baby boomers reaching the likelihood-of-death-from-strong-illness age over the past year. These are the types of people who more easily die from the normal flu, so the common sense explanation is that they wouldn't stand a chance with a stronger flu-like illness. That also explains why normal flu deaths were basically non-existent last year. (No, it's not because the normal flu didn't happen last year, or because of masks, it's obviously because covid wiped those susceptible people out)
My guess is we'd be in about the same situation had we done nothing at all (no masks, no vaccines, etc). It's all political theater, cash-grabbing corporations, and there's lots of suckers in the world who believe everything they're told.
> It's pretty apparent at this point that COVID was heavily politicized, which would explain its dominating prevalence in media and culture
It seems to me that its "dominating prevalence in media and culture" came as a result of being a once-in-a-generation global plague that killed millions of people, shut down much of the world, and fundamentally altered the way humans live their lives for the better part of two years.
Lockdowns and the mass hysteria began somewhere around March. Everyone believed the virus spread from major points of entry around sometime in January. Yet we now have evidence that this was widespread as early as December 2019 (https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-study-offe...) and the study is undergoing replication as we speak. So were people just not dying in December?
I am not a denialist. I personally known quite a few people that have caught it. It's a real, terrible illness. But I have always remained skeptical about the true risks, the approach to handling the virus, and the testing numbers. Not helping the case was how much we've been lied to or misinformed by public health officials.
If you know anyone who’s been sick with Covid when hospitals were overwhelmed in a foreign country, deaths and bad outcomes are highly different when hospitals can’t help you. They also every single time chose to save younger patients, for obvious reasons.
I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. COVID was and is heavily politicized.
Baltimore Maryland, for example, is still very strict about masks, yet they are closing schools because of lack of air conditioning and Fells Point seems to be disturbingly close to requiring assistance from the National Guard, violence is quite literally out of control. Crime and children be damned, better put a mask on!
The difference is you can clearly do something about Covid and prevent all those deaths, where-as cancer and heart disease we still don't know how to prevent, and what we do know, we are similarly vocal and annoying about: lose weight, exercise, eat healthier, etc.
So it makes sense to mobilize in order to stop the spread of Covid and save all those people from dying from it.
Another aspect is long Covid, where it could be 2 to 20 percent especially younger people, have long lasting symptoms. We don't know the real long term risks here. Not knowing is always scarier, people don't want to risk things. Heart Disease and Cancer to some extent are well understood.
Then you have to consider that the Covid death numbers are with all the measures that were put in place to stop it, and with a lot more people getting intensive care which would have died without. What's still unclear is what would death numbers look like if we'd done nothing to stop the spread and breached medical capacity.
Finally, I think Covid is scary, because as a virus it can mutate, and again, that fear kicks in, where you think it's only killing older people, but maybe at anytime there could be a variant that is more lethal and starts skewing things to younger people.
I don't think any of this is related to politics. It all just seems like expected reaction, a contagious disease that kills lots of people, but can be stopped if you could prevent its spread, which has unknown long term effects, and could possibly grow more lethal any day, and which will still screw you over for a few days even as a young lad. I think that's enough to explain the reaction the world over.
> I don't think any of this is related to politics
I seriously urge you to check your cognitive dissonance to the situation as a whole. This is literally the definition of political theater.
> Covid has actually outpaced cancer and heart disease to become the number 1 cause of death
Not true at all. Did you miss the months of heated discussion when it was found out that hospitals received lump sums of additional money if they checked off "covid" as the "cause" of death? Then they clarified that by making it acceptable to consider covid as the "cause" of death if the patient had any "flu-like symptoms"...aka coughing, shortness of breath. Is it even possible to die without at least one of those "flu-like symptoms"?
I hate to break it to everyone, but we did absolutely nothing to slow down covid. Everything we've seen over the past year has simply been placebos, population control, and political opportunism. Buy hey, can't wait to read Fauci's new book!
Different landscapes between cities, different population sprawl, different customs/lifestyles, etc. E.g. cities in northern Australia are separated by vast jungles. Those areas have warmer/dryer climates. Easier to achieve herd immunity in countries like those. Achieve herd immunity in multiple small areas, it turns into achieving herd immunity everywhere.
Obviously if you can force people by gunpoint to not leave their homes, you can slow the spread (i.e. China)
90% of Australia's population is packed into its large cities Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. Every single one of them had outbreaks, which were successfully tamped down with lockdowns, masks, and contact tracing, the tools you earlier decried as useless.
There are no cities worthy of the name in northern Australia: Darwin, the largest by some measure, is only 140k. The entire Northern Territory has a population of only 240,000, or 1% of Australia.
You can't get herd immunity without a vast majority of the population getting sick, which demonstrably (antigen tests) did not happen in any of those countries.
Last but not least, COVID spread like hotcakes in the warm/dry (often oven-like) temperatures of central India in April.
> which were successfully tamped down with lockdowns, masks, and contact tracing, the tools you earlier decried as useless
Not true. That's what you want to believe, and what you've been led to believe. Show me the science that proves this isn't all a load of horse shit. Show me literally anything that remotely proves any of this had a meaningful impact. Anything. Oh yeah I forgot, people here aren't a fan of science and data when it goes against their fragile leftist beliefs.
If what I said is in fact true, it would all appear the exact same.
I live in Melbourne, the city that had the worst outbreak in Australia, and I have followed the news and scientific discussion across the political spectrum very closely from when the virus was first identified in early 2020.
Melbourne really did suppress the virus, after it started spreading wildly in July/August (mid winter – Melbourne is the only large Australian city that has a cool winter climate comparable to Europe and Northern US) last year, particularly in aged care homes. By November we were getting zero daily cases, and it has mostly remained that way until the past few weeks, when winter weather and hotel quarantine leaks have led to another small outbreak, which is again successfully being suppressed.
The measures used to achieve suppression: lockdowns of varying severity, masks, and smartphone-based contact-tracing.
That said, Australia's isolation from other countries, spread out geography, lower population density and climate absolutely make it easier to achieve suppression. I don't believe what we've done would have been possible in the Europe or the US, though I believe the evidence that these measures slow the spread anywhere they're implemented.
There's many more. At this point there's a pretty good set of studies on transmission data. It seems to all indicate that proximity to other infected people increases risk of transmission, and that contact of contaminated surfaces or others is not necessary. Then you can see that transmission in the air in aerosol and droplets are both possible, and then you can reason about this with the physics on them. The closer to someone else breathing the more virus particle is in the air for you to breathe, the further away, the less of it. The more ventilated the place you are in, the less you breath in other people's air.
The CDC also does a great job at being transparent about their assessment and sources. Read those, and if you scroll down on each page you'll see large list of reference to the studies they've based their assessment on.
> I seriously urge you to check your cognitive dissonance to the situation as a whole. This is literally the definition of political theater
You have Republicans who chose to impose lockdowns and mask mandates.
You have Democrats who chose to impose lockdowns and mask mandates.
You have communist run countries who chose to impose lockdowns and mask mandates.
You have democractic run countries who chose to impose lockdowns and mask mandates.
You have many other countries of various political entities that all chose to impose lockdowns and mask mandates.
To me it seems like a cross-cutting concern that affects everyone no matter their political leanings.
Now the decision to have lockdowns and mask mandates where you reside is obviously political, that's the point of politics, to dictate the laws and regulations for residents in a particular place, but I don't see a political motive behind it. The motives seem very much about controlling the spread of Covid within an area and balancing that with the economic impact. Politicians will make their own assessment for this and determine the public policy they think best manages the spread and maximizes the economy.
I would say there is some appearance of political motives from politician who seem to play the "conspiracy" card. Those seem to have self-driven motivation. But I really doubt any politician putting lockdowns and mask mandates in place is having a good time, being the one to do this is possibly a career ending move, it's a big deal, and I can't imagine what political driver you'd have for it, beyond wanting to not cause a mass spread of Covid in your population and look like a failure at preventing it.
https://www.heritage.org/data-visualizations/public-health/c...