How do we know a pandemic's over?

dann said:
I don't know. Some things seem to be pretty similar. Denmark declared that Covid-19 was no longer a crisis, i.e. "a threat to society," and removed mask mandates and all other restrictions on Feb 1, 2022. At that point, Denmark had had 3,770 Covid-19 deaths - in a relatively well-vaccinated population. Now, Sep 22, we have 7,021. So by the end of this year, we will have had as many Covid-19 deaths since February as we had since the beginning of the pandemic until it stopped being a "threat to society" on Feb 1. And people in general and in particular old people seem to think that 'not a threat to society' means not a threat to their own health and lives. It doesn't.
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So deaths since removing mandates in Denmark are almost half of your total. Our governor removed mask mandates on February 17th of this year. Before that day we had 6,751 COVID deaths. Since then we've had 1,654 deaths. Thats a starkly different ratio than Denmarks.

However, some counties have gone back to mask mandates a few times since then, there's metrics the state DoH looks at to decide. Like I said we have MAGA territory areas with low vacc rates, while the state at large is pretty "blue".

Also, someone was quoting Dr Watcher who said he wouldn't go unmasked until test positivity rates were under 5 per 100k. Our test rates in my country are right around 7 per 100k so we're getting close.
 
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The Atheist said:
The 1.5% was a myth at every stage of the pandemic, and as noted, the current death rate is very low.

There have been 100M notified cases in the past 4.5 months. During that same period, 240,000 people have died. That's a whopping 0.2% fatality rate, and note that number is considerably inflated by there being a lot more people sick in May than September, and the case rate hugely understated due to people not self-reporting.

So yes, the rate is well below 1.5%.
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What is your evidence that the 1-2% fatality rate since 2020 was a myth. I'm not saying 'no way, you're wrong'; I really want to know where you're getting that from.

As for the fatality rate being currently at .2%, I would love for that to be the case. Please point me to a page where they break that down; I don't know where you're currently located. I didn't want to auto-assume that you were in the USA.

The current 7-day average is 286 a day, just over half what it was at the start of that 28-day period.
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That would be great if that continued, but we're about to hit 3 months of festivities. Based on what happened in 2020 and 2021, would we expect those numbers to sharply go up in a month or so?

By a neat turn of statistics, the covid death rate will be less than 10% of the cardiovascular death rate in America within the next few days.

I wonder if we gave things like that the panicked response some people think we should be taking towards covid we might actually save a lot more lives than a disease which is now an endemic disease that we need to learn to live with.
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When cardiovascular disease starts being spread by airborne contact, I will take a much sharper notice and interest in those numbers.
 
bignickel said:
What is your evidence that the 1-2% fatality rate since 2020 was a myth. I'm not saying 'no way, you're wrong'; I really want to know where you're getting that from.
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Every statistic since the pandemic began.

Have a look at the cumulative case & death totals here: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

The fatality rate shows at a neat 1%, but the official numbers of cases have always been massively under-reported.

This was all covered in the Covid thread in the science section. Early estimates of there being 5-10 times more cases than were notified has held all the way through. This is so well known that links aren't even easy to find now, but this, from 2021 tells you: https://www.npr.org/sections/health...the-pandemic-is-10-times-worse-than-you-think

Deaths have also been under-reported - India's have been a bad joke since the very start - and WHO estimates the stated total is only 40% of the real total. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsa...-covid-19-death-toll-by-millions-the-who-says

If we err on the low side of cases and say the total should be 3 billion, and deaths 15 million, then we have a tidy 0.5% actual fatality rate.

bignickel said:
As for the fatality rate being currently at .2%, I would love for that to be the case. Please point me to a page where they break that down; I don't know where you're currently located. I didn't want to auto-assume that you were in the USA.
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I used the official numbers to arrive at that, but it's actually a very high estimate, with reality being that covid is under 0.1% fatal right now.

Again, it's simple maths. Vaccination has lowered the death rate, we now have antivirals that didn't exist early on, and there are less-deadly strains circulating.

USA is showing a fully vaccinated death rate of 0.68%. Again, we know for sure that since vaccinations reached high coverage, case numbers have been under-reported even more than before, because so many people don't even have symptoms, or don't bother self-reporting. I'm very confident that reported numbers are less than 10% of the actual number, and that for vaccinated people, the chances of dying are indeed less than 0.1%.

bignickel said:
That would be great if that continued, but we're about to hit 3 months of festivities. Based on what happened in 2020 and 2021, would we expect those numbers to sharply go up in a month or so?
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Most likely, but influenza will be in the mix as well.

New Zealand and Australia are a good case study of how it goes, with totally open statistics, and it was notable all through winter that the overwhelming majority of people dying of covid already had their toe tags printed. Hospices and care homes took the burden of deaths. People who otherwise got very sick with covid went to hospital and came out again in almost all cases.

And just a word of caution - despite what some may claim, I'm not trying to minimise anything. Two and a half years of posting factually in the covid thread covers where I've been, and if you fancy going back to the very first thread you'll see me laying into people who downplayed the disease in Feb/March 2020.

My position now is that we can't continue panicking over a disease that is no more deadly than influenza. People can still wear masks - heck I wear one myself in some situations and was very grateful last Thursday when an obscure shop I went in had a cashier who was clearly sick and coughing.

But the pandemic, as we've known it, is buried. Get your bivalent vaccination, keep up to date with them and boosters as they become available, get your 'flu vaccine and carry on.
 
You've indicated that the vaccinated fatality rate in the USA is .68%. Do you know what the unvaccinated rate is? (this isn't any kind of statement or gotcha. I actually would like to know what you think it is, and where that number comes from)

EDIT: Shoulda clicked your link. It's 7.73% for the unvaxxed. Dang, that's much higher than I'd expected. It also doesn't make sense... I thought it was always 1-2% for everyone, but it's actually much worse for the unvaxxed.
 
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bignickel said:
EDIT: Shoulda clicked your link. It's 7.73% for the unvaxxed. Dang, that's much higher than I'd expected. It also doesn't make sense... I thought it was always 1-2% for everyone, but it's actually much worse for the unvaxxed.
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You need to allow for the ridiculously high rate of unreported cases. I'd say this year the unreported cases are more than ten times the official numbers, so the unvaxed death rate is like to be closer to 0.5% than 7%.
 
bignickel said:
You've indicated that the vaccinated fatality rate in the USA is .68%. Do you know what the unvaccinated rate is? (this isn't any kind of statement or gotcha. I actually would like to know what you think it is, and where that number comes from)

EDIT: Shoulda clicked your link. It's 7.73% for the unvaxxed. Dang, that's much higher than I'd expected. It also doesn't make sense... I thought it was always 1-2% for everyone, but it's actually much worse for the unvaxxed.
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That chart does not show IFR. Rather it's the death rate in terms of people per 100,000 in each group (vaxxed, unvaxxed, ...). 7.73 is not a percentage. It means that 7.73 people in a group of 100,000 unvaxxed, died in the week shown on the X axis.

To estimate IFR you would need estimates of how many in that group were infected (not diagnosed or it would be CFR) 2 to 5 weeks earlier.

CFR numbers in the USA have been running about .5%. Almost no positive rapid flow tests are even counted in the US. Since Feb., estimates are that infections are 10X the reported cases which would put overall IFR down around .05%. Unvaxxed probably around .15%.

The reasons IFR is so low is that most people in the US have already been infected and a large majority of those most at risk are also vaccinated.
 
So would you say that .15% fatality rate for unvaxxed people would because of a combination of better treatment, combined with so many people already either vaccinated, or previously infected by Covid? Any other factor lowering it down to .15%
 
bignickel said:
So would you say that .15% fatality rate for unvaxxed people would because of a combination of better treatment, combined with so many people already either vaccinated, or previously infected by Covid? Any other factor lowering it down to .15%
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1. Most of the unvaxxed have already had covid. For that matter most of the vaxxed has probably had Covid too. IHME's estimate is that 95% (not sure I believe it's actually that high but it is high) of Americans have been infected at least once. That provides protection against severe disease roughly similar to vaccination. But neither vax nor prior infection are good at preventing infection since Omicron and marginal with Delta.

2. Omicron is generally considered 25% to 50% less virulent.

3. Treatment has improved (Paxlovid and mon-clonals) but indications are it's not reaching that many in the US so not a big factor.

Thus IFR for the unvaxxed has dropped about 5x
 
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marting said:
That chart does not show IFR. Rather it's the death rate in terms of people per 100,000 in each group (vaxxed, unvaxxed, ...). 7.73 is not a percentage. It means that 7.73 people in a group of 100,000 unvaxxed, died in the week shown on the X axis.
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You're a top bloke - I never even looked!

To estimate IFR you would need estimates of how many in that group were infected (not diagnosed or it would be CFR) 2 to 5 weeks earlier.


marting said:
CFR numbers in the USA have been running about .5%.
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The Atheist said:
...reality being that covid is under 0.1% fatal right now.
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Nice to see us still on the same wavelength there, too.
 
At this point, as we're apparently at the cusp of moving over from pandemic to no-longer-pandemic, depending on which geography you're at, I think it's important to remember one obvious but very important distinction:

When the pandemic was raging all around, and some crazies refused to wear masks and comply with other restrictions, then these were ******** that were endangering not just their own worthless lives, but that of others as well, and were therefore a public menace, an enabler of disease and death. Today, in those places where the pandemic's gone --- or almost gone --- and masking et cetera may not be strictly necessary, those oddballs that insist on continuing to mask are at worst eccentrics, at worst germaphobes. They're most certainly not hurting anyone else. Arguably, and even without Covid in the equation at all, they're contributing towards better health, theirs as well others', by keeping at bay other infectious diseases that spread via breath.

What I'm getting at is this obvious distinction: Those that were contrarians during the pandemic were lowlives, ********, a danger to society, a public menace, a threat to health and life, criminals, people who should have been ashamed of themselves, people whose friends and family should have been ashamed of them. While today, contrarians who insist on masking et cetera even when the consensus seems to be moving away from the necessity of doing this, and regardless of whether they're doing this temporarily and deliberately as a better-safe-than-sorry measure, or even because they've become germaphobic, but either way there're at worst entirely harmless eccentrics.



But yes, I guess the pandemic is indeed coming to an end now. There are differences, basis local conditions, obviously. But by and large, I have to say this ---- even as I myself continue, for the time being, to wear masks, and try to maintain the distancing thing as much as possible, and continue to avoid crowds and even smaller gatherings unless absolutely necessary ---- it does seem to me that the world's starting to get back to normal again. Not just pretend-normal, but actual normal.
 
Chanakya said:
At this point, as we're apparently at the cusp of moving over from pandemic to no-longer-pandemic, depending on which geography you're at, I think it's important to remember one obvious but very important distinction:

When the pandemic was raging all around, and some crazies refused to wear masks and comply with other restrictions, then these were ******** that were endangering not just their own worthless lives, but that of others as well, and were therefore a public menace, an enabler of disease and death. Today, in those places where the pandemic's gone --- or almost gone --- and masking et cetera may not be strictly necessary, those oddballs that insist on continuing to mask are at worst eccentrics, at worst germaphobes. They're most certainly not hurting anyone else. Arguably, and even without Covid in the equation at all, they're contributing towards better health, theirs as well others', by keeping at bay other infectious diseases that spread via breath.

What I'm getting at is this obvious distinction: Those that were contrarians during the pandemic were lowlives, ********, a danger to society, a public menace, a threat to health and life, criminals, people who should have been ashamed of themselves, people whose friends and family should have been ashamed of them. While today, contrarians who insist on masking et cetera even when the consensus seems to be moving away from the necessity of doing this, and regardless of whether they're doing this temporarily and deliberately as a better-safe-than-sorry measure, or even because they've become germaphobic, but either way there're at worst entirely harmless eccentrics.



But yes, I guess the pandemic is indeed coming to an end now. There are differences, basis local conditions, obviously. But by and large, I have to say this ---- even as I myself continue, for the time being, to wear masks, and try to maintain the distancing thing as much as possible, and continue to avoid crowds and even smaller gatherings unless absolutely necessary ---- it does seem to me that the world's starting to get back to normal again. Not just pretend-normal, but actual normal.
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And anyone giving them grief for it needs to get a life and mind their own business. I occasionally saw people with masks before COVID. Are they eccentric or are they immunocompromised? None of my business.
 
RecoveringYuppy said:
Has this been repeated yet:

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/u-s-needs-get-daily-cases-down-10-000-fall-n1235644

That was the goal for "return to normal". We (US) never got there. We're potentially still on track for Covid being the #3 killer again this year.
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I don't understand the need for binarys. Why does the definition of pandemic matter? It's pretty clearly entered an endemic phase where vaccines and/or prior infections do little to reduce new infections even while reducing severe disease.

We are at a point where Covid-19's IFR is similar to, or even less than influenza. But we are also going to see considerably more deaths from Covid-19 than influenza. This may seem contradictory, but it's because Covid-19 is far more infectious than influenza. And that is what's kicking up the covid-19 deaths which will almost certainly be much higher than a bad flu season.

That said, flu has long been endemic with 10% to 15% getting flu each season. But covid-19's variants have evolved rapidly and we could well have over 50% of the US infected in 2022. So even if Covid-19 had a bit lower IFR than flu, it will still produce way more deaths than flu.

However, flu is likely to contribute more than it's usual share this winter since flu immunity has dropped from 2 years of very low flu infections due to covid-19 NPIs. I think Covid-19 deaths will exceed flu this winter and that flu will still be a larger factor than usual.
 
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Chanakya said:
I had no clue you could have cloth masks that can hold N95 filters. Are you sure those filters stay effective even after washing? If they do, then agreed, those cloth masks would then be no less effective than the regular N95s, and what's more they'd then look like a better proposition (in terms of both the ecological impact, as well as the cost). Add to that the comfort factor that both you and TM speak of --- and that I've no opinion on, never having used them --- and absolutely, cloth masks would then come out as decisively better than the disposables.

eta: And add on top of all of that the eshetics of it, because I'm sure cloth masks can be made out to look better than these disposables.
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Hiya, the filters aren't washable. The filters are removed and thrown out.
(They're quite cheap too, similar in price to the disposable N95s)

The cloth masks are washable.

I haven't tried wearing an N95 mask under the cloth mask, I'll give that a go and see how it goes.
 
RecoveringYuppy said:
We're potentially still on track for Covid being the #3 killer again this year.
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Based on what?

USA is showing 72,000 deaths over the past six months. I see no reason the rate will double in the next six months, and with better vaccines and still-working treatments, it shouldn't be any higher than the past 6 months, which would put it just outside the top 5.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm
 
ponderingturtle said:
What it means is it has gone from pandemic to endemic, of course there are people getting sick and dying from it, but not in the huge waves like when it was a pandemic. COVID is certainly not going to go away any time soon.
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marting said:
I don't understand the need for binarys. Why does the definition of pandemic matter? It's pretty clearly entered an endemic phase where vaccines and/or prior infections do little to reduce new infections even while reducing severe disease.
We are at a point where Covid-19's IFR is similar to, or even less than influenza. But we are also going to see considerably more deaths from Covid-19 than influenza. This may seem contradictory, but it's because Covid-19 is far more infectious than influenza. And that is what's kicking up the covid-19 deaths which will almost certainly be much higher than a bad flu season.

That said, flu has long been endemic with 10% to 15% getting flu each season. But covid-19's variants have evolved rapidly and we could well have over 50% of the US infected in 2022. So even if Covid-19 had a bit lower IFR than flu, it will still produce way more deaths than flu.

However, flu is likely to contribute more than it's usual share this winter since flu immunity has dropped from 2 years of very low flu infections due to covid-19 NPIs. I think Covid-19 deaths will exceed flu this winter and that flu will still be a larger factor than usual.
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Agreed, absolutely, it's not quite a black-and-white binary, with full-on protection measures called for when the pandemic switch is marked 'on', and one lets it all hang out when the switch gets marked "off"!

Still, I suppose the pandemic designation keeps it all simple. That is, you know that masking, distancing, all of that, is necessary for most everybody (bar maybe some small island country somewhere in the middle of nowhere that maybe for now happens to be safe). There's no two ways about it.

When there's no pandemic, local conditions may still necessitate those restrictions. Or one's own particular situation might make those restrictions necessary --- because one is especially vulnerable, and/or because one is infected. But the blanket no-fine-nuance everyone-needs-to-be-on-full-alert situation, that whole emergency thing, that ...I guess that classification matters, that no-nuance in-your-face emergency red-alert, to get everyone (bar of course the inveterately and pathologically stupid/ignorant/anti-social/suicidal-murderous/crazy) fully on board with all of these measures.



So yeah, agreed, depending on local conditions, depending on one's individual situation, depending on all of that, it isn't as if no-pandemic translates into letting it all hang out now. (Although unfortunately that's exactly what seems to be actually happening, by and large, at this point. Let's just hope this doesn't come back and bite us!)
 
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