COVID-19 had the 5th worst death toll of any pandemic in human history, and is in the top 10 of global population lost. And that was with modern medicine and (with some Republican political exceptions) reasonably aggressive global response.

COVID-19 was bad, worse than most people seem to remember. I've got a pandemic-trained MCE expert in my family. Everyone saw it coming when they saw the numbers, and it happened worse than expected. Hospitals overflowing capacity from just critical cases. Tent hospitals being built. They fucking activated the mass-grave contracts to store the bodies. For the first time in nearly a century. Bet you didn't know that. OEMS doesn't publish actions like that because they don't want to cause further panic. It comes through a private email to paramedics (and, fwiw I thought this part silly, sent under a pseudonym that only people in the field would recognize)

For the record (not that I think you actually care about facts, but I'm putting this up there for neutral observers), the deadliness of a pandemic is not primarily driven by its death rate. Only an ignorant person would look to that first. A virus with a 0.1% death rate could end humankind. Many viruses with high death rates have less of an impact. Potentially more important factors are the spread rate (influenced by the incubation rate and contagiousness window), and immunity rates (both inherent immunity and acquired immunity). That COVID-19 was a COVID family of illness (cold family, no known cures, treatments, or immunization paths) made it worse.

[+] eddie_of_ny@lemmy.ml -3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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[–] abraxas@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Just look at Florida’s and Texas’ response compared to New York and California

Texas had the 3rd highest mortality rate, and Florida the 18th. Expected death rates should be relative to population density. Florida is 13th and Texas is 13th. Both states are dramatically over-represented per capita in US COVID deaths. Your numbers defend my side.

NY has the 7th highest population density and is past the middle of the pack in terms of deaths. California has the 11th highest population density and was middle of the pack.

The highest death states (other than the one you tried to use for your argument) were Oklahoma and Alabama. Both fairly low in population density. Care to read off the other high-death-toll states? West Virginia, Mississippi, Wyoming, Tennessee, Nevada, Arizona...

In fact, I'll take a step further. In swing states (like Florida), the death rate of Republicans was comfortably higher than of Democrats. It led to conspiracy theories that we were secretly creating and spreading the disease, not the fact that they had literal fucking parties to spread it on purpose.

If the masks and vaxxes make you city rats feel safe then more power to you, but there was KO reason that stuff needed to be part of a global response

The reason we needed it for a global response is that if you didn't do it, it spread to everyone and killed them. Vaccination and prevention only works when universally embraced and/or mandated. Both parties were in full agreement about that until the moment Trump started telling people to drink lysol and bleach instead (and there was a huge uptick in that!). Did you drink lysol at his suggestion?