While too much of mainstream media *and* Trump administration focused on the case fatality rate debates, one key fact got overlooked. The risk is systemic. There is no fixed fatality rate. Once your hospitals are overrun, mortality from everything will rise. As now, in Italy.
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I'm never going to get over my anger over the flu comparisons but, as anyone who cared to know already knew since January/February, unlike the flu, COVID-19 causes *primary* pneumonia in a significant number of cases—thus requires ICU to survive. There are only so many ICU beds.
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Many COVID-19 patients need to stay on mechanical ventilators as long as four weeks. The scientific community, including Chinese scientists once their government finally let them speak, have been publishing about all this with amazing speed. See article:https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-23/coronavirus-patients-long-ventilator-stays-strain-hospitals …
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So Italy, a well-off European country with 12th largest GDP in the world, is triaging ICU beds by likelihood of survival. It's called catastrophe medicine. There isn't enough to go around, and they have to choose who gets an ICU bed. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/who-gets-hospital-bed/607807/ …
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We were, of course, going to pay for lack of understanding of what systemic risk means—across the political spectrum. Just comes in different versions. (There are of course those who understood and chose their tax cuts but I'm angry enough at people who should have known better.)
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Chinese government unleashed this pandemic in the first place with their lies and cover-up but once they realized what they themselves were facing, they responded to save their own country. Millions of people in China suffered greatly and gifted us months, and we wasted them.
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"How much of a risk is this to me" is like asking how much of a risk an earthquake is to any one person. Sure, those who live in better houses built to code will do better *if* they are home during the quake, but even then, the systemic devastation of a disaster affects everyone.
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Political reporters who covered this like a competition of the narratives (flu or not!) or what the real case-fatality-ratio might be (as if it were single number to be uncovered!) all contributed to this moment. Unlike the climate crisis, this one is fast-moving so here we are.
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By the way, I hate to have to point this out but I'm seeing a lot of people self-soothe by pointing out fatality rates are high only for the elderly. I won't comment on the sentiment but: once the hospitals are overrun, fatality rates for everyone else will go up, too.
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Thank you, Zeynep, for this comprehensive posting
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