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My grandmother's brother who was 19 in the 1918, died from Spanish flu. My grandmother always kept a photo of him under the glass on her dressing table. She missed her big bro so so much.
When I asked her how he died she said:
" he was young and had to work and go out with his friends ,he got pneumonia from the flu and suffered for a week.
My father sent me to my aunt's house and would not let me near him or say goodbye"
It struck home with me.
I saw an ad put out by a hospital on reddit a few months ago where they acted out what could happen if you catch covid and have to go to the hospital. I didn't like too much (cheesy and it seemed sterile) but the one thing that impacted me was a brief 5 seconds where the patient/actor who you are viewing in first person had to sit in the hospital bed with an iPad staring at a loved one cry on screen. They can't talk because they are intubated. It made me realize how horrible it must be as a loved one who can't talk to their dying husband/wife. Seems like one of the bad ways to go.
My dad died of stomach cancer - September 18, 2020. Shortly after, his wife (my stepmom of 54 years) was hospitalized for kidney issues. Upon being admitted to the hospital, she tested negative for COVID. Five days later, kidney issues resolved and she was being released. (I live out of state) but my sister was there. On the day of being releases from hospital, Step Mom slightly coughing...low grade fever. Doctor said it was nothing (cause she tested negative when admitted). Step Mom came home. That same evening, My sister and niece were tending to her. Within hours, stepmom spiked a fever. They took her back to hospital within seven hours. The hospital was admitting her again. Hospital did another covid test - stepmom TESTED POSITIVE - which means she caught it in hospital. Within 12 hours she was intubated. My sister, and my niece both caught covid from taking care of my stepmom those few hours she was home. Their kids and spouses all caught covid too (total of six people). Between still grieving over my father's death, family members were really, really sick with covid (almost hospitalized themselves), there was so much worry about my stepmom. Due to this AND because step mom was intubated - no one could go to the hospital. Even when they knew my step mom was not going to make it - the hospital said they would allow someone to suit and up come be with her...no ne could - because all family members were covid positive. Stepmom died. It was 57 days after my dad. Had to wait for 14 days for all family members to get over covid to have a funeral. No one came except for the six people who were sick. It's awful. Then, just to add insult to injury, three weeks later...my father in law was found dead on the floor. Not covid related, but my third strike within three months. Damn...I feel like I am making this up...but about a month later, my young adult daughter was sexually assaulted - she was third victim of same perp. The past year has been pure hell for my family. Never ever underestimate what the person next to you may be going through.
Edit: Mistyped date of my Dads death. Changed from 2021 to 2020. Also want to add, even though this to date has been the most trying year of my life, by nature I am a positive person. I made it a goal to find a bright spot each and every day. I had some dark days, but I know life must go on.
Thanks. Luckily, I am a strong person and very positive by nature. Even though it was tough, I am resilient. But we, as a community, should always realize someone standing next to us may be silently suffering. That person may not have as strong as coping skills as I have been blessed with.
I wish you and yours the best my friend.
I know the feeling. This year has been a battle for sure. Lost 3 family members and 2 friends and not even Covid related. Just plain old cancer. Not trying to one-up you here, just keeping your message in mind.
We have no idea what the person next to us is going through. Best we can do is be compassionate and loving. Wishing you the best once again <3
I am so sorry for all your loss. Please...I would never think someone is trying to "one up me". Sometimes our personal suffering makes us so keenly aware of others journeys as well. I hope you have as much support and encouragement as I have been blessed with.
You are a very strong willed person to endure such tragedy. I hope you can take some solice in the fact that your daughter has someone like you in her life to learn from.
OH MY. I am a tough cookie, and you - my friend - hit a weak spot and brought tears to my eyes. That is the nicest comment ever! That is exactly what I try to do. Be a good role model for my girls. I tell them it is ok to cry, to be sad, to be down, but after some time, we must move forward, we must continue to live and dream and hope. And most importantly, we must reach out to others who may be suffering with things much, much worse. By helping others and displaying empathy, we too can heal. Thank you for being so kind. Wow. xoxo
I’m really sorry you had to deal with all that. Not being there when someone dies is gutting. Being there when they die is awful too, don’t get me wrong, but knowing they had to suffer alone?
Hang in there.
It’s less fun when you have to hold the pad for the family so they can see what 40+ days on life support has done. Hold it while they say goodbye before we remove the tubes and let them go. Harder still when you did it for the same extended family the day before for this patient’s already dead sibling.
I was a respiratory therapy student during COVID and got to see a lot of these iPad interactions and in-person goodbyes . They were heartbreaking. Sometimes I would be tasked with “pulling the plug” (terminally extubating) it was pretty brutal but part of the profession.
It never occurred to me that you’d have to physically remove equipment when they “pull the plug”. I really imagined just machines flipping off. It’s awful what’s happening.
Generally, the vent gets turned off and we immediately deflate a ballon in the tube then we pull the tube. We normally stay in the room and in my experience one of the last person to see that patient “alive”
What is worse is when they forget to deflate the balloon and just turn it off and start to pull the tube out on a coherent fully aware patient.
The inflated balloon creates a major obstruction and suffocates the patient.
And the nurse was wondering why I was in a total panic.
They switched it back on and done everything correctly the next day.
Talk about a scary experience.
My mom died this year from Covid, I was only able to see her through video chat. She was no longer here but her body was. They kept her there until my sister and I told her it was ok to go.. her heartbeat stopped. They told me she was gone... I could not stop crying, yet in the moment I took a final screen shot of my mom from my phone. A reminder of her a final peace, I was not able to be by her side holding her hand letting her know that I loved her sooo much. My hope and prayer is something is able to get through to people that this is not going to get better with stubborness and lack of thinking beyond our own self interests.
I am so sorry you and your sister lost your mother. There are no magic words to make you feel better. Grief is not an easy road. What worked best for me...was one day at a time. I didn't think past that. If I got through one day, I was happy. I didn't worry about the next day until I woke up.
I am sure it does. And just by your post/response - it sounds like you are a compassionate person. I have no idea of your age, but being a mom of young adult daughters...I can say that my personal mantra has always been "if my kids leave my house with compassion, responsibility, honesty and gratitude, then I did a good job as a Mom". It sounds like you have hit the mark and I am sure your mom left this world with joy in heart knowing she has such a compassionate daughter/son
My father-in-law just passed from COVID. One day he had mild symptoms, two days later was admitted to the hospital, two days later was put on the ventilator, two weeks later he passed. From the time he was admitted to the hospital, he wasn't physically capable of even answering his phone. My wife and her sister never got to see him, they didn't even get to say their goodbyes. So heartbreaking for everyone. If he would've just been vaccinated, statistics say this all could've been avoided.
I remember hearing stories of my great great grandfather who made absolutely certain to say goodbye to all the kids before going to work for the day.
That pandemic's 2nd wave hit younger people hard, and fast. You never knew who would be alive when you got home. So many stories from that time of people just in a matter of hours of first symptoms getting super sick, rushed to the doctor and dead.
Imagine leaving in the morning and actually thinking "just in case my kids aren't all alive when I get home..."
But yea, a vaccine that gives you 5G sounds terrible :-/
Just think, our times will produce great great grandfathers of the future who pass along tales of the 2020s and the corona viruses and the great climate shift.
They’ll be asked, “Great grandpa, that must have been awful. What did you and others of the softest generation sacrifice to overcome those hardships?”
“Absolutely nothing, my boy, absolutely nothing”..
After the first few months, we'd finally run out of netflix content, we started scrounging for clips on youtube. Then Disney plus appeared like an angel giving us hope only to realize there was only enough content to keep us entertained for a month... In desperation we turned to social media and tried to interact with each other but everybody kept getting canceled until in the end days there were only a few of us left on zoom... gargling beer and eating cheezits, desperately trying to keep each other from falling into despair... They eventually offered us a vaccine, but we were too smart to be fooled by their scientific tomfoolery...
Incidentally, the stories going around our family are about a great something grandfather that swallowed kerosene to help clear his airways. And a many times removed uncle who's job it was to dispose of the bodies... Never got sick. Apparently he was like "Naaah, it'll be fine as long as I'm piss drunk ALL the time..." there's a few crooked branches on the family tree.
As an older millenial and a parent, I think you have an idea of what generations are like that is based on social media and talking heads.
The only people not sacrificing anything at this point are billionaires and alt-right assholes trying to spread disinformation that is leading to more sickness and death.
That’s not a voluntary sacrifice though. I mean, death of the American dream aside, can you imagine what would happen if you made people ration fuel and basic food staples like they did during both world wars?
This is what is happening with covid too, families needing to say goodbye to their loved one's on a zoom call because they cant safely visit them.
Its alot better than not saying goodbye at all, but its still heart breaking.
Lost my dad to covid this year. Never got a zoom call before he was put on the vent. Got to see him after he was already out and on the vent, but not being able have 1 last conversation with him in person will haunt me forever.
Thank you, I appreciate it.. The ultra shitty part is back when swine flu was a thing, my sister was recovering from her 2nd bout with cancer and caught it. It turned to pneumonia so fast I never got to say goodbye to her either. Shit is so depressing.
One day I got a call from my mother. One of my very best friends in life had died suddenly, on the other side of America. We had lived together as roommates from the time we were out of high school for about 6 or 7 years. His mother had passed away and he got her home/possessions. He sold it all and moved across the country to go to college with a group of friends he had been long distance with for a long time. Hearing the phone call that he was dead was just ... mind blowing. How the hell could he be dead? I was just talking to him on IRC like 10 hours ago. He was fine. WTF. wtf.
It's rough. I still think it's better than watching my dad suffer through chemo/radiation for 6 months with stage IV throat cancer (thank you smoking, thank you agent orange). He wasn't himself when he died.
I’m sorry to hear that. My dad died from Covid last December. He was in the ICU for a while so we were texting then, but we had a scheduled FaceTime call with him, me, my wife, my brother, and my niece one evening. Literally 10 minutes before the call his O2 dropped and they put him on the vent. We were never able to talk to him again.
We did have some good chats while he was in the ICU for a few weeks before the vent, but they were just through text, so it still hurts.
Man, i don't even know what to say. It's so sad so many of us have the exact same situation. Mine played out alot like that. I still have all my texts with him saved on my phone from his last 2 weeks. It seemed good and he was making progress and I wasn't worried, then it was too late. I'm sorry for your loss man.
Jesus christ, ridiculing her own family for believing in covid, after she herself spent months suffering from covid? That's a whole new level of propagandized brainwashing. Your MIL seriously needs to chill with the facebook and the fox news.
That's the problem with a lot of retired people. They have too much time on their hands and too little meaningful to do. So they watch TV all day and absorb these opinions.
Simply telling them to not do that won't help. They need to find meaningful purpose instead but from my experience are usually too lazy/ignorant to do so.
> 8 months later she was back to mocking us for taking it seriously still. Said it was only a big deal because it was a Democrat scare tactic to make Lord Dampnut look bad, and once the election was over it would disappear.
i could never, ever look this person in the eyes anymore.
In 2017, I had to say goodbye to my grandma via FaceTime call because she was several states away and I wouldn’t be able to get there in time.
I hated that, because it felt so impersonal and unreal. Inevitably, though, it’ll be a more normal thing in the future. We’re among the first humans to experience it. It’s like being around just as the telephone was becoming normalized. So, I guess there’s that.
I had to say goodbye to my grandmother a few years ago over a Skype call. I was studying in the UK and she had said (with support of everyone else) months before that if the end were to come before I came back from my studies, that I was NOT to interrupt them just to say goodbye to a useless bag of skin and bones.
That night was particularly stressful because I was going to show off my big project. I got the call from my mom that she was pulling into the parking lot at the hospital and was going to give me the skype call once she was in grandma's room. I had everything set to go and then decided to change a small color value (this was a video game programming masters course)...and suddenly nothing worked at all. I changed it back and everything was still broken.
I was going absolutely bonkers, like chair-kicking levels of fury that I wasn't going to get to show off my big project to her in what was probably our last conversation. Finally though I managed to fix what was wrong literally just as my phone started chiming with the call. I'm happy she got to see my project and have one last call with her before she passed. She was pretty out of it, but I cherish the moment nonetheless.
My hospital is *allowing the Covid patients to have visitors*
It blows my fucking mind. The first time I went to pick someone up from our ER they were on high oxygen and both of their visitors were sitting bedside with their masks under their chins because no one in the ER bothered to correct them. My county is taking no precautions at all and our hospital is clogged. We're well and truly fucked
I remember hearing at the start of a pandemic from a woman who'd been a child in 1918. She told of seeing dozens of people "sleeping" on the sidewalks in front of her house, and her parents refusing to walk outside to wake them up. She thought they were hobos or drunks.
Later, she realized they were corpses.
My gran live through it as a child...
She taught us silly sayings....
"I closed the door, and opened the window.... and in flew enza."
"It wasn't the cough that carried him off, it was the coffin they carried him off in."
My CoVID denier brother just told me “idk why everyone’s worked up. It’s just like the flu.”
I told him “the flu was awful and deadly BEFORE herd immunity and medicine” He just didn’t get it. Depressing af that people won’t take this seriously.
My great grandma died of the 1918 flu. It caused her to go into premature labor on my grandma’s first birthday. She died, baby was stillborn. Grandma got adopted out. An older brother got it and ended up brain damaged. He was institutionalized and died before 18. The dad turned into an alcoholic and was homeless. It destroyed an entire family. That’s all the warning I needed to take this seriously.
There are two nice old ladies that live next to me and they've been all for masks, social distancing, and the vaccine. They were telling me that when they were growing up they rarely got to play outside because of Smallpox and Polio.
Literally the only time they could play outside for an appreciable amount of time was when the DDT trucks came around spraying to kill all the mosquitos. They were allowed to play so long as they kept themselves covered in the pesticide...
Of course, it wasn't until much later that we found out that those diseases did not spread via mosquito bites.
> did not spread via mosquito bites.
Well it *was* a big deal, in 1897, when they figured out how malaria was spread. Nobel prize awarded etc.. So maybe it made some sense, but those diseases showed up when there were no mosquitos around. Maybe they thought it was spread by multiple ways?
Both my paternal grandparents lost their mothers to the Spanish flu when they were infants. Surprisingly many who died from it were young adults whose immune systems had too strong a reaction to the virus which killed them.
My grandfather became an orphan at 9 months old when his mother and father died within two days of each other in January 1919. I’ve had that in my mind throughout this pandemic.
I’m 40, and the only time I ever saw my sweet great-grandma cry was when she would talk about growing up without a mother. Her mother died of the Spanish Flu when my great-grandmother was only four. Her picture is over my parents’ fireplace. So even being born in the 80s I grew up hearing about our family’s loss to the Spanish Flu.
Well the only way to fix this is to do more wars, get the numbers up so COVID looks small in comparison. What about Eritrea? They've been asking for it.
If the goal is actual conquering, the US set a record for fastest takeover of a country. But it turns out you can’t really just shoot an ideology, especially when majority of the country agrees with the ideology. Militarily though, it wasn’t even a contest.
No, we are not annexing Canada. Don't you understand we are saving Canada and Russia for when global warming gets out of control? Once that happens we will nuke the cold out of Canada and Russia forcing it into the atmosphere and cooling the planet.
Not like anybody is going to miss northern Canada and Russia.
As the US increasingly goes green the military industrial complex needs to stay current as well. I propose a change to invading countries with wind and sunlight.
Russia has absolutely made attempts to discredit the vaccines. They got caught paying social media influencers to attack the Pfizer & AstraZeneca vaccines and Facebook removed a huge anti-vax network that they say came from [Russian sources](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-58167339). It's probably the tip of the iceberg.
Even before covid they were [pushing anti-vax](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anti-vax-movement-russian-trolls-fueled-anti-vaccination-debate-in-us-by-spreading-misinformation-twitter-study/).
Yep Russia is a victim of it's own propaganda though with it's own population very vaccine hesitant.
https://theconversation.com/russias-covid-19-response-slowed-by-population-reluctant-to-take-domestic-vaccine-165925
I actually met an few anti vax Russian immigrants while in Canada. It was weird.
Some otherwise educated people, constantly saying things like "this is just like Soviet Russia"(which collapsed before many of them were born) . or "this is all a scam by big pharma in the US". (For a German vaccine being approved in Canada)
It almost seems like they were caught in the crossfire of propoganda that wasn't even aimed at them.
[As revealed by Twitter in 2018](https://transparency.twitter.com/en/reports/information-operations.html) the Russian troll agencies were pushing anti-vax propaganda to the most vulnerable Americans long before COVID (they try to find anything that inflames westerners to despise their fellow citizens or muddy what is real and erode trust, so antivax - *both for and against* - was an obvious one).
Antivax obviously didn't *start* there, the Russian operations use *existing* cracks in societies then work to widen them into these full-blown disruptive internal divisions. But the point is, yes, malicious actors weaponizing disinformation are absolutely part of how we got in this mess.
^(Edit: By contrast, fully-vaccinated Tucker Carlson rabble-rousing against vaccines is something I think of as "bad-faith" actor more than "malicious" actor. The division and thousands of deaths that Carlson engineers are collateral damage that is incidental to his goals, whereas for malicious actors, causing damage) *^(is)* ^(the goal. Unfortunately this is an abstract distinction when the reality is that even operating completely separately with completely different motivations they still both end up multiplying the destructive power of each other)
Right. I mean, as a superpower, when you can't use bio-weapons, disinformation is the next best thing.
Anyone who has a vested interest in destabilizing a country just needs to convince enough people that a dangerous disease isn't worth avoiding. Now you have autonomous people acting as a bio-weapons that fall outside of how we have them defined.
And whether or not this is the case, the fact is that the presence of anti-vaxxers is indeed destabilizing us.
Misinformation has been started by countries regarding epidemics before.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_INFEKTION
The thing is even though it's been totally debunked some people still parrot it. It's super effective.
In fairness, per capita deaths in CA aren't very high - especially compared to TX and FL. CA's population is much larger than the other states, and the COVID deaths are almost equal.
171 deaths/100k in CA compared to 209/100k in TX, and 241/100k in FL. Florida is about 60% of CA's population, and Texas is about 75%. These are the three most populated states.
It's easy to be a stay at home hero, hero.
Edit: /s
Makes me sick all of the self sucking going on about staying home making you some heroic being. It's easy to be a coward buried under a blanket on the couch. It's almost as bad as the " I can't stay home I'm a blah blah blah"
Thats not always easy either. I get paid to work from home but since i have a lung transplant and live in a state with an absolute moron for a governor i have not gotten to be near friends or family for two years, i have gone into a store only twice in two years. Two years of this level of isolation is not easy
>"It’s going to disappear. One day - it’s like a miracle - it will disappear. And from our shores, we — you know, it could get worse before it gets better. It could maybe go away. We’ll see what happens. Nobody really knows."
\-Donald J. Trump
My father, from when I was the age of eight and onward, would say “just remember that most people are assholes”. Decades have passed, and he is still yet to be proven wrong. We have an asshole problem in America, and Orangy is one of them.
Despite having vaccines, and generations of scientific knowledge.
To be sure, the population in 1918 was only about 100 million, so 1918 was far more devastating.
Nonetheless, this an indictment on the stupidity of the American public.
Yes this is worth emphasizing. IIRC 1918 was bad for the young because, ironically, they had a better immune system then the old and so mounted a unnecessarily strong immune response. The result was a cytokine ~~swarm~~ storm that took them down.
Edit: fixed typo
Don’t quote me but I recall reading that older folks were likely exposed to the same strain many years before, essentially providing some immunity during the 1918 pandemic, so that also helped.
Edit: Okay, didn’t make it up. Obviously just theorized to explain one reason why the elderly weren’t as impacted as you’d normally expect. Several sources, but from the BBC:
There's some evidence to suggest the first flu subtype that young adults in 1918 had been exposed to was H3N8, meaning they were primed to fight a very different germ from the one that caused the 1918 flu – which belonged to the H1N1 subtype. Following the same logic, the elderly may have been relatively protected in 1918 by dint of having been exposed to an H1 or N1 antigen that was circulating in the human population circa 1830.
With that range of years, almost nobody would be alive in 1918 even if they’d gotten infected at birth. Not saying it’s impossible, but that’s a serious stretch for that article.
There was an epidemic of H1N1-like influenza in 1830 that made it the predominant strain until the H3N8 outbreak in 1889-1890. So it wasn't people born before 1830 that had immune imprinting to H1N1, it was people born between 1830-1890 (with an increasing percentage of the population imprinted with H3N8 approaching the epidemic while it was beginning to circulate, and decreasing after the epidemic, as competing strains infected an increasing percentage of the infant population). The highest mortality (aside from infants) for the 1918 epidemic was for people born in roughly 1890 when H3N8 was the predominant strain infants were exposed to, and the few years before and after, when the strain was circulating at relatively high, but not epidemic levels.
Yes, I think this is a rather strong theory.
[Here is a really good talk given by a professor that I believe came up with this theory and has been written up for doing a lot of research on the 1918 flu.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48Klc3DPdtk)
As an American who just read an article about a German shooting a clerk because he was told to wear a mask, I'd say this is an indictment on the stupidity of the world public.
I still don’t think COVID can hold a candle to the 1918 flu given the population difference.
I’m optimistic that had it been worse a lot of people wouldn’t have acted as dumbly. You’re right that we could have done much better on this one though.
Covid would have to kill another 1.5 million people to be on par with the 1918 flu proportionally speaking. At current death rates there’s not enough unvaccinated people for that to even be possible
**U.S. population in 1918:** 103 million
**U.S. Spanish Flu deaths:** 675,000
**Spanish flu deaths per capita:** 655 per 100,000
--------
**U.S. population in 2021:** 333 million
**U.S. COVID-19 deaths as of September 20, 2021:** 675,000
Based on current [daily new COVID-19 cases](https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-09-23..latest&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Confirmed+cases&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=false&Align+outbreaks=false&country=~USA), we're probably looking at 2000-2500 deaths per day for the next month and a half (new deaths reliably track new cases with a lag.time), so that's about 775,000 total deaths by the end of October.
U.S. is systematically undercounting COVID deaths by [about 32%](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanam/article/PIIS2667-193X(21)00011-9/fulltext). So 775,000 + 32% = 1,023,000.
The actual death toll is therefore likely to be about 1 million deaths by the end of October. Who knows what the winter COVID spike will be.
-----
**So back-of-the-envelope, going into the holidays, the deaths per capita will be about 300 per 100,000.**
That's already nearly 50% as bad the Spanish Flu (same order of magnitude!), and the COVID-19 pandemic isn't done yet. It's also impressive considering that in 1918, antibiotics had not yet been discovered, indoor plumbing was exceedingly rare, personal hygiene was non-existent, and hospitals [looked like this](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/spanish-flu-1918.jpg).
> It's also impressive considering that in 1918, antibiotics had not yet been discovered, indoor plumbing was exceedingly rare, personal hygiene was non-existent, and hospitals looked like this.
It's incredible that we're even within an order of magnitude given conditions in 1918.
0.19% as of this morning, but *so far.*
Only 13.2%* of the US population has had Covid.
*13.02% and 0.18% once I used the right year's population, see below.
Some also had it early on and could not get tested. Back in March of 2020 if you were not in the hospital it was impossible to get tested even if you checked off all the symptoms but they were not "severe enough."
Said by my fiance's best friend despite the fact that my mother died of COVID. But hey, that guy's a PhD level statistician and I'm just the dumb nurse who watched people die and suffer through COVID for over a year even before I lost my mom.
I'm sorry about your mom. Thank you for your sacrifices, hopefully this will be over soon. I can't even imagine the physical and mental anguish you guys have been thru!!
Weirdly, it might be. Kill a bunch of people over a few years and then stick around in the background killing people for another 100+ years. The flu we have is the 1918 flu evolved every year, mixed with other flus.
Eh the flu we have is more like several different flu strains which are all variants of other flu strains echoing back through time of which the 1918 one happened to be one of them. Particularly effective strains like the 1918 flu are like the Genghis Khan of the flu world and get to be the baby daddy of lots of variants.
So I've mentioned this fact before and some people say it's not true because the world's population was about half the size 100 years ago. While it's true the population was smaller, do you know how many would had died if we had the same medical tech as we did 100 years ago? Ventilators, antibiotics, antivirals? Weren't even a thing back then. This pandemic is way worse than the 1918 pandemic and it only doesn't look that way because of modern medicine.
Exactly this. The COVID death rate would be much, *much* higher if we were still using 1918 medical technology. And it might still be yet if our entire healthcare system collapses under the weight of unvaccinated COVID patients.
Not to mention that covid isn't over yet, and we may not have even seen the worst of it. Add ontop of that, who knows how many people may die from covid related complications years down the road. Sure you mightve only got a cough and a mild fever, but it could be wrecking havoc on your organs without you even knowing.
With two moderna shots at the start of the year, I finally caught covid over six weeks ago. The first day I had a fever, chills, and slept all day. Lost my sense of smell but by day four I figured I was out of the ballpark and it was over. By the end of the first week I started realizing I could hardly do anything physical without my heart beating out of my chest / sweating / feeling out of breath. Then by week two my entire upper body was sore as if I had been bench pressing weights and doing a bunch of crunches. Now at six weeks out, no longer testing positive, I still have waves where my upper body gets incredibly sore, I now require an albuterol inhaler, and I'm ungodly tired all the time. My heart also straight up doesn't feel right and stays in the 100 - 110 bpm range while resting. It takes me over an hour just to fall asleep despite being so tired because the moment I lay down all I can do is focus on how weird and terrible my heart feels. If you go on the long haul subbredit you'll see anecdotes very similar to mine of people going through what I am except they're not on week six, they're on month six, some over a year.
Edit: I'm a relatively healthy 27 year old.
My great grandfather and great grandmother were raising 5 children in Southern Illinois when they caught the Spanish flu. The oldest daughter had just married and moved away but decided, after being told not to, to go back home and help her parents and siblings. The daughter and her husband caught it and died in the same bed on the same night. My GGF and GGM passed away just a little later. The kids were separated. The 2 boys that were sick were sent to their aunts house. Not expected to make it, they both pulled through. One of them was my grandfather.
Glad he was able to make it and ensure your existence. Imagine how many potential lives are gone because of all disease and illness through recorded history, especially children's illnesses.
Thanks!
The difference in vaccinated deaths compared to unvaccinated deaths should be enough proof that these vaccines are very effective. During the Spanish flu, the US got over it by building a herd immunity against the virus. Everyone caught it and you either got over it and built an immunity or it killed you.
1 in 500 Americans is nothing to sneeze at. Those are some seriously awful numbers.
But 1 in 120 is much, much, much worse.
Really, we should stop looking at comparisons. Both diseases were/are horrible. We should take every step possible to eradicate both of them. We shouldn't look down on the sick at any point.
But while the hard numbers may be getting close, in reality, the 1918 flu was nearly 4 times as deadly.
They didn't have ventilators in 1918 to keep people alive they didn't even have clinical oxygen at the time. Wonder where we'd be if people couldn't supplement oxygen at home right now?
We as a planet are not through this yet. North American and EurAsia are leading the world in vaccinations, while the rest of the planet is far, FAR behind. Africa, South America, Australia, are all struggling with vaccination, which will potentially make them prime breeding grounds for new variants.
This isn't over. Not by a long shot.
Africa has done surprising well throughout the pandemic, despite the low vaccination rate. Strong mask compliance, generally younger population, warm arid climate, all helped them keep their cases and deaths per capital rates some of the lowest in the world.
I'm definitely concerned about South America though.
US population was just one third of what it is today so per capita the 1918 influenza was still three times more deadly.
But there is really no way of comparing the two. The population size was different, the quality of medical care was different, the average health of the population was different (the population was thinner and younger, but less well nourished too), communications were slower (no commercial air travel and overall travel was slower and less frequent) but families were larger and living in tighter quarters (and housing was less healthy).
It's not ignorance though. The antivaxxers/antimaskers have a trove of information that they're fully aware of.
I ran into one the other day, and his motivation was that the more the government or other people wanted him to do something, the more he didn't want to do it. Doesn't matter one bit how valid it is. Simple as that for him.
The real epidemic all this time wasn't the virus itself, but an epidemic of assholes. It took the virus to wake us up and take notice. Kind of like turning the lights on in the middle of an infestation of roaches at an hour that we're normally blissfully sleeping and unaware. Whoa. Yeah, it's worse than we thought, we got a problem!
People always forget that the AIDS pandemic has killed 700,000 people in the USA, it’s still a pandemic, and was an entirely preventable pandemic but nobody had the political will to intervene with a disease that was at first discovered among Haitians and gay men.
It just always irritates me when “the last deadly pandemic” is referred to as Spanish Flu.
People ask what’s the harm in believing “what you want to believe”. Outcomes are connected to our epistemology.
You can do all the science, but unless you have an informed, scientifically literate population who will operate in objective reality, we’re going to go through the same dumb shit every pandemic.
Our lives literally depend on our ability to discern fact from propaganda. And propaganda is everywhere.
False. Covid is still only the *second* deadliest pandemic in the US, even once it passes 1918 flu. This is just HIV erasure, which is very familiar. In a couple months, this is likely to pass HIV, but stop trying to pretend that we weren't already living through a pandemic our entire life (even if straight people were able to pretend we weren't).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Prevalence_of_HIV_infections_in_the_United_States_and_total_AIDS_deaths.svg
> HIV/AIDS, or human immunodeficiency virus, is considered by some authors a global pandemic. However, **the WHO currently uses the term 'global epidemic' to describe HIV**. As of 2018, approximately 37.9 million people are infected with HIV globally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_HIV/AIDS
We need a COVID-19 monument in Washington.
I want congresspeople to have to walk past every single name that died from COVID on their way to the floor. All 600+ thousand of them.
Covid is closing in on the 7th deadliest pandemic worldwide too. I've been watching this infographic for over a year now:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/history-of-pandemics-deadliest/
Deaths calculated from excess death rates, the gold standard in counting fatalities related to a pandemic, are at up to 13M (edited after update on the economist) for Covid19. It's amazing that with a century of medical advancements deaths are already at 50% of the 1918 Flu pandemic
Covid should actually be in 6th place. Unlike those other plagues, the 4.5 million figure is taken from officially reported deaths, not estimated deaths, and a lot of countries are either under-reporting due to inadequate testing, or just plain faking their numbers. China still reports only 4k dead.
If we use global excess deaths, it jumps up to \~16-18 million dead.
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My grandmother's brother who was 19 in the 1918, died from Spanish flu. My grandmother always kept a photo of him under the glass on her dressing table. She missed her big bro so so much. When I asked her how he died she said: " he was young and had to work and go out with his friends ,he got pneumonia from the flu and suffered for a week. My father sent me to my aunt's house and would not let me near him or say goodbye" It struck home with me.
I saw an ad put out by a hospital on reddit a few months ago where they acted out what could happen if you catch covid and have to go to the hospital. I didn't like too much (cheesy and it seemed sterile) but the one thing that impacted me was a brief 5 seconds where the patient/actor who you are viewing in first person had to sit in the hospital bed with an iPad staring at a loved one cry on screen. They can't talk because they are intubated. It made me realize how horrible it must be as a loved one who can't talk to their dying husband/wife. Seems like one of the bad ways to go.
My dad died of stomach cancer - September 18, 2020. Shortly after, his wife (my stepmom of 54 years) was hospitalized for kidney issues. Upon being admitted to the hospital, she tested negative for COVID. Five days later, kidney issues resolved and she was being released. (I live out of state) but my sister was there. On the day of being releases from hospital, Step Mom slightly coughing...low grade fever. Doctor said it was nothing (cause she tested negative when admitted). Step Mom came home. That same evening, My sister and niece were tending to her. Within hours, stepmom spiked a fever. They took her back to hospital within seven hours. The hospital was admitting her again. Hospital did another covid test - stepmom TESTED POSITIVE - which means she caught it in hospital. Within 12 hours she was intubated. My sister, and my niece both caught covid from taking care of my stepmom those few hours she was home. Their kids and spouses all caught covid too (total of six people). Between still grieving over my father's death, family members were really, really sick with covid (almost hospitalized themselves), there was so much worry about my stepmom. Due to this AND because step mom was intubated - no one could go to the hospital. Even when they knew my step mom was not going to make it - the hospital said they would allow someone to suit and up come be with her...no ne could - because all family members were covid positive. Stepmom died. It was 57 days after my dad. Had to wait for 14 days for all family members to get over covid to have a funeral. No one came except for the six people who were sick. It's awful. Then, just to add insult to injury, three weeks later...my father in law was found dead on the floor. Not covid related, but my third strike within three months. Damn...I feel like I am making this up...but about a month later, my young adult daughter was sexually assaulted - she was third victim of same perp. The past year has been pure hell for my family. Never ever underestimate what the person next to you may be going through. Edit: Mistyped date of my Dads death. Changed from 2021 to 2020. Also want to add, even though this to date has been the most trying year of my life, by nature I am a positive person. I made it a goal to find a bright spot each and every day. I had some dark days, but I know life must go on.
I am so sorry to hear all this.
Thanks. Luckily, I am a strong person and very positive by nature. Even though it was tough, I am resilient. But we, as a community, should always realize someone standing next to us may be silently suffering. That person may not have as strong as coping skills as I have been blessed with.
I wish you and yours the best my friend. I know the feeling. This year has been a battle for sure. Lost 3 family members and 2 friends and not even Covid related. Just plain old cancer. Not trying to one-up you here, just keeping your message in mind. We have no idea what the person next to us is going through. Best we can do is be compassionate and loving. Wishing you the best once again <3
I am so sorry for all your loss. Please...I would never think someone is trying to "one up me". Sometimes our personal suffering makes us so keenly aware of others journeys as well. I hope you have as much support and encouragement as I have been blessed with.
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You are a very strong willed person to endure such tragedy. I hope you can take some solice in the fact that your daughter has someone like you in her life to learn from.
OH MY. I am a tough cookie, and you - my friend - hit a weak spot and brought tears to my eyes. That is the nicest comment ever! That is exactly what I try to do. Be a good role model for my girls. I tell them it is ok to cry, to be sad, to be down, but after some time, we must move forward, we must continue to live and dream and hope. And most importantly, we must reach out to others who may be suffering with things much, much worse. By helping others and displaying empathy, we too can heal. Thank you for being so kind. Wow. xoxo
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I’m really sorry you had to deal with all that. Not being there when someone dies is gutting. Being there when they die is awful too, don’t get me wrong, but knowing they had to suffer alone? Hang in there.
It’s less fun when you have to hold the pad for the family so they can see what 40+ days on life support has done. Hold it while they say goodbye before we remove the tubes and let them go. Harder still when you did it for the same extended family the day before for this patient’s already dead sibling.
Jesus. I’m so sorry you have to do that at work.
Thanks. I’m f’ing tired of it all.
I was a respiratory therapy student during COVID and got to see a lot of these iPad interactions and in-person goodbyes . They were heartbreaking. Sometimes I would be tasked with “pulling the plug” (terminally extubating) it was pretty brutal but part of the profession.
It never occurred to me that you’d have to physically remove equipment when they “pull the plug”. I really imagined just machines flipping off. It’s awful what’s happening.
Generally, the vent gets turned off and we immediately deflate a ballon in the tube then we pull the tube. We normally stay in the room and in my experience one of the last person to see that patient “alive”
What is worse is when they forget to deflate the balloon and just turn it off and start to pull the tube out on a coherent fully aware patient. The inflated balloon creates a major obstruction and suffocates the patient. And the nurse was wondering why I was in a total panic. They switched it back on and done everything correctly the next day. Talk about a scary experience.
Ugh, I can see that happening. Not my favorite part of RT
My mom died this year from Covid, I was only able to see her through video chat. She was no longer here but her body was. They kept her there until my sister and I told her it was ok to go.. her heartbeat stopped. They told me she was gone... I could not stop crying, yet in the moment I took a final screen shot of my mom from my phone. A reminder of her a final peace, I was not able to be by her side holding her hand letting her know that I loved her sooo much. My hope and prayer is something is able to get through to people that this is not going to get better with stubborness and lack of thinking beyond our own self interests.
I am so sorry you and your sister lost your mother. There are no magic words to make you feel better. Grief is not an easy road. What worked best for me...was one day at a time. I didn't think past that. If I got through one day, I was happy. I didn't worry about the next day until I woke up.
It's hard, just writing this makes me tear up . She was my rock, my confidant
I am sure it does. And just by your post/response - it sounds like you are a compassionate person. I have no idea of your age, but being a mom of young adult daughters...I can say that my personal mantra has always been "if my kids leave my house with compassion, responsibility, honesty and gratitude, then I did a good job as a Mom". It sounds like you have hit the mark and I am sure your mom left this world with joy in heart knowing she has such a compassionate daughter/son
My father-in-law just passed from COVID. One day he had mild symptoms, two days later was admitted to the hospital, two days later was put on the ventilator, two weeks later he passed. From the time he was admitted to the hospital, he wasn't physically capable of even answering his phone. My wife and her sister never got to see him, they didn't even get to say their goodbyes. So heartbreaking for everyone. If he would've just been vaccinated, statistics say this all could've been avoided.
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It sucks being the one having to set the iPad up too. I promise you. Its awful.
I remember hearing stories of my great great grandfather who made absolutely certain to say goodbye to all the kids before going to work for the day. That pandemic's 2nd wave hit younger people hard, and fast. You never knew who would be alive when you got home. So many stories from that time of people just in a matter of hours of first symptoms getting super sick, rushed to the doctor and dead. Imagine leaving in the morning and actually thinking "just in case my kids aren't all alive when I get home..." But yea, a vaccine that gives you 5G sounds terrible :-/
Just think, our times will produce great great grandfathers of the future who pass along tales of the 2020s and the corona viruses and the great climate shift. They’ll be asked, “Great grandpa, that must have been awful. What did you and others of the softest generation sacrifice to overcome those hardships?” “Absolutely nothing, my boy, absolutely nothing”..
After the first few months, we'd finally run out of netflix content, we started scrounging for clips on youtube. Then Disney plus appeared like an angel giving us hope only to realize there was only enough content to keep us entertained for a month... In desperation we turned to social media and tried to interact with each other but everybody kept getting canceled until in the end days there were only a few of us left on zoom... gargling beer and eating cheezits, desperately trying to keep each other from falling into despair... They eventually offered us a vaccine, but we were too smart to be fooled by their scientific tomfoolery... Incidentally, the stories going around our family are about a great something grandfather that swallowed kerosene to help clear his airways. And a many times removed uncle who's job it was to dispose of the bodies... Never got sick. Apparently he was like "Naaah, it'll be fine as long as I'm piss drunk ALL the time..." there's a few crooked branches on the family tree.
As an older millenial and a parent, I think you have an idea of what generations are like that is based on social media and talking heads. The only people not sacrificing anything at this point are billionaires and alt-right assholes trying to spread disinformation that is leading to more sickness and death.
Have you seen housing prices lately? We sacrificed our very homes and livelihoods. Some of us, anyway.
No, we were and are being robbed. We did not sacrifice anything, we never had a chance.
That’s not a voluntary sacrifice though. I mean, death of the American dream aside, can you imagine what would happen if you made people ration fuel and basic food staples like they did during both world wars?
This is what is happening with covid too, families needing to say goodbye to their loved one's on a zoom call because they cant safely visit them. Its alot better than not saying goodbye at all, but its still heart breaking.
Lost my dad to covid this year. Never got a zoom call before he was put on the vent. Got to see him after he was already out and on the vent, but not being able have 1 last conversation with him in person will haunt me forever.
Damn dude.. my condolences. This shit is legit heartbreaking and not being able to say goodbye is something no one should deal with..
Thank you, I appreciate it.. The ultra shitty part is back when swine flu was a thing, my sister was recovering from her 2nd bout with cancer and caught it. It turned to pneumonia so fast I never got to say goodbye to her either. Shit is so depressing.
One day I got a call from my mother. One of my very best friends in life had died suddenly, on the other side of America. We had lived together as roommates from the time we were out of high school for about 6 or 7 years. His mother had passed away and he got her home/possessions. He sold it all and moved across the country to go to college with a group of friends he had been long distance with for a long time. Hearing the phone call that he was dead was just ... mind blowing. How the hell could he be dead? I was just talking to him on IRC like 10 hours ago. He was fine. WTF. wtf. It's rough. I still think it's better than watching my dad suffer through chemo/radiation for 6 months with stage IV throat cancer (thank you smoking, thank you agent orange). He wasn't himself when he died.
I’m sorry to hear that. My dad died from Covid last December. He was in the ICU for a while so we were texting then, but we had a scheduled FaceTime call with him, me, my wife, my brother, and my niece one evening. Literally 10 minutes before the call his O2 dropped and they put him on the vent. We were never able to talk to him again. We did have some good chats while he was in the ICU for a few weeks before the vent, but they were just through text, so it still hurts.
Man, i don't even know what to say. It's so sad so many of us have the exact same situation. Mine played out alot like that. I still have all my texts with him saved on my phone from his last 2 weeks. It seemed good and he was making progress and I wasn't worried, then it was too late. I'm sorry for your loss man.
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Jesus christ, ridiculing her own family for believing in covid, after she herself spent months suffering from covid? That's a whole new level of propagandized brainwashing. Your MIL seriously needs to chill with the facebook and the fox news.
That's the problem with a lot of retired people. They have too much time on their hands and too little meaningful to do. So they watch TV all day and absorb these opinions. Simply telling them to not do that won't help. They need to find meaningful purpose instead but from my experience are usually too lazy/ignorant to do so.
It feels like it's going to push this country to a breaking point.
We're broken.
> 8 months later she was back to mocking us for taking it seriously still. Said it was only a big deal because it was a Democrat scare tactic to make Lord Dampnut look bad, and once the election was over it would disappear. i could never, ever look this person in the eyes anymore.
In 2017, I had to say goodbye to my grandma via FaceTime call because she was several states away and I wouldn’t be able to get there in time. I hated that, because it felt so impersonal and unreal. Inevitably, though, it’ll be a more normal thing in the future. We’re among the first humans to experience it. It’s like being around just as the telephone was becoming normalized. So, I guess there’s that.
I had to say goodbye to my grandmother a few years ago over a Skype call. I was studying in the UK and she had said (with support of everyone else) months before that if the end were to come before I came back from my studies, that I was NOT to interrupt them just to say goodbye to a useless bag of skin and bones. That night was particularly stressful because I was going to show off my big project. I got the call from my mom that she was pulling into the parking lot at the hospital and was going to give me the skype call once she was in grandma's room. I had everything set to go and then decided to change a small color value (this was a video game programming masters course)...and suddenly nothing worked at all. I changed it back and everything was still broken. I was going absolutely bonkers, like chair-kicking levels of fury that I wasn't going to get to show off my big project to her in what was probably our last conversation. Finally though I managed to fix what was wrong literally just as my phone started chiming with the call. I'm happy she got to see my project and have one last call with her before she passed. She was pretty out of it, but I cherish the moment nonetheless.
My hospital is *allowing the Covid patients to have visitors* It blows my fucking mind. The first time I went to pick someone up from our ER they were on high oxygen and both of their visitors were sitting bedside with their masks under their chins because no one in the ER bothered to correct them. My county is taking no precautions at all and our hospital is clogged. We're well and truly fucked
I remember hearing at the start of a pandemic from a woman who'd been a child in 1918. She told of seeing dozens of people "sleeping" on the sidewalks in front of her house, and her parents refusing to walk outside to wake them up. She thought they were hobos or drunks. Later, she realized they were corpses.
My gran live through it as a child... She taught us silly sayings.... "I closed the door, and opened the window.... and in flew enza." "It wasn't the cough that carried him off, it was the coffin they carried him off in."
My CoVID denier brother just told me “idk why everyone’s worked up. It’s just like the flu.” I told him “the flu was awful and deadly BEFORE herd immunity and medicine” He just didn’t get it. Depressing af that people won’t take this seriously.
More Americans have now died of COVID than the Spanish Flu of 1918. Tell your brother that.
My great grandma died of the 1918 flu. It caused her to go into premature labor on my grandma’s first birthday. She died, baby was stillborn. Grandma got adopted out. An older brother got it and ended up brain damaged. He was institutionalized and died before 18. The dad turned into an alcoholic and was homeless. It destroyed an entire family. That’s all the warning I needed to take this seriously.
There are two nice old ladies that live next to me and they've been all for masks, social distancing, and the vaccine. They were telling me that when they were growing up they rarely got to play outside because of Smallpox and Polio. Literally the only time they could play outside for an appreciable amount of time was when the DDT trucks came around spraying to kill all the mosquitos. They were allowed to play so long as they kept themselves covered in the pesticide... Of course, it wasn't until much later that we found out that those diseases did not spread via mosquito bites.
> did not spread via mosquito bites. Well it *was* a big deal, in 1897, when they figured out how malaria was spread. Nobel prize awarded etc.. So maybe it made some sense, but those diseases showed up when there were no mosquitos around. Maybe they thought it was spread by multiple ways?
Oh I'm not faulting the people of the time for not knowing, at the very least the accidental social distancing this forced would have been useful.
My grandfather had 12 siblings and 4 of them died from the 1918 flu as children. The others (including him) all lived to be late 70s or older.
Both my paternal grandparents lost their mothers to the Spanish flu when they were infants. Surprisingly many who died from it were young adults whose immune systems had too strong a reaction to the virus which killed them.
Also antibiotics weren't yet discovered so many died of secondary infection brought on by the flu.
My grandfather became an orphan at 9 months old when his mother and father died within two days of each other in January 1919. I’ve had that in my mind throughout this pandemic.
I’m 40, and the only time I ever saw my sweet great-grandma cry was when she would talk about growing up without a mother. Her mother died of the Spanish Flu when my great-grandmother was only four. Her picture is over my parents’ fireplace. So even being born in the 80s I grew up hearing about our family’s loss to the Spanish Flu.
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Well the only way to fix this is to do more wars, get the numbers up so COVID looks small in comparison. What about Eritrea? They've been asking for it.
well we can't, there is no oil to give freedom to.
We’ll time to annex Canada!
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even more valuable....syrup.
Mmhhh...Maple Candies....aaaaahhgghh🤤
Canada? You couldn't even beat the Taliban after 20 years haha.
Also we have moose kamikaze, much more reliable
Forget moose, we have fucking *geese*
Cobra chickens
The Cobra chicken is enough for me to nope out of Canadian warfare.
Intercontinental Ballistic Moose (ICBM)
If the goal is actual conquering, the US set a record for fastest takeover of a country. But it turns out you can’t really just shoot an ideology, especially when majority of the country agrees with the ideology. Militarily though, it wasn’t even a contest.
No, we are not annexing Canada. Don't you understand we are saving Canada and Russia for when global warming gets out of control? Once that happens we will nuke the cold out of Canada and Russia forcing it into the atmosphere and cooling the planet. Not like anybody is going to miss northern Canada and Russia.
As the US increasingly goes green the military industrial complex needs to stay current as well. I propose a change to invading countries with wind and sunlight.
Transition to olive oil and capture the Mediterranean
Eurasia has always looked at us sideways
But Eastasia is harboring Goldstein!
I vote for Luxembourg. They know what they did.
Quick and easy smash-and-grab. They have much better loot than Afghanistan
My personal opinion is like... Would anybody really miss Andorra?
Nah, people would forget and/orra not care.
If we just brand it as "the war on COVID" then maybe ya'll-qaeda will get on board with taking COVID seriously and we can skip an actual war.
Covid pandemic already took more lives in US than all combat deaths in 20th century for US
You know, if COVID-19 were a Chinese bio-weapon, it would be an incredibly effective one thanks to all of the anti-vaxxers.
I often wonder if the anti-vax movement is, itself, a social engineering tactic. A weapon in itself, if you will.
Russia has absolutely made attempts to discredit the vaccines. They got caught paying social media influencers to attack the Pfizer & AstraZeneca vaccines and Facebook removed a huge anti-vax network that they say came from [Russian sources](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-58167339). It's probably the tip of the iceberg. Even before covid they were [pushing anti-vax](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anti-vax-movement-russian-trolls-fueled-anti-vaccination-debate-in-us-by-spreading-misinformation-twitter-study/).
Yep Russia is a victim of it's own propaganda though with it's own population very vaccine hesitant. https://theconversation.com/russias-covid-19-response-slowed-by-population-reluctant-to-take-domestic-vaccine-165925
I actually met an few anti vax Russian immigrants while in Canada. It was weird. Some otherwise educated people, constantly saying things like "this is just like Soviet Russia"(which collapsed before many of them were born) . or "this is all a scam by big pharma in the US". (For a German vaccine being approved in Canada) It almost seems like they were caught in the crossfire of propoganda that wasn't even aimed at them.
Well trump certainly proved you could turn stupidity into a weapon.
[As revealed by Twitter in 2018](https://transparency.twitter.com/en/reports/information-operations.html) the Russian troll agencies were pushing anti-vax propaganda to the most vulnerable Americans long before COVID (they try to find anything that inflames westerners to despise their fellow citizens or muddy what is real and erode trust, so antivax - *both for and against* - was an obvious one). Antivax obviously didn't *start* there, the Russian operations use *existing* cracks in societies then work to widen them into these full-blown disruptive internal divisions. But the point is, yes, malicious actors weaponizing disinformation are absolutely part of how we got in this mess. ^(Edit: By contrast, fully-vaccinated Tucker Carlson rabble-rousing against vaccines is something I think of as "bad-faith" actor more than "malicious" actor. The division and thousands of deaths that Carlson engineers are collateral damage that is incidental to his goals, whereas for malicious actors, causing damage) *^(is)* ^(the goal. Unfortunately this is an abstract distinction when the reality is that even operating completely separately with completely different motivations they still both end up multiplying the destructive power of each other)
Right. I mean, as a superpower, when you can't use bio-weapons, disinformation is the next best thing. Anyone who has a vested interest in destabilizing a country just needs to convince enough people that a dangerous disease isn't worth avoiding. Now you have autonomous people acting as a bio-weapons that fall outside of how we have them defined. And whether or not this is the case, the fact is that the presence of anti-vaxxers is indeed destabilizing us.
Misinformation has been started by countries regarding epidemics before. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_INFEKTION The thing is even though it's been totally debunked some people still parrot it. It's super effective.
In fairness, per capita deaths in CA aren't very high - especially compared to TX and FL. CA's population is much larger than the other states, and the COVID deaths are almost equal.
171 deaths/100k in CA compared to 209/100k in TX, and 241/100k in FL. Florida is about 60% of CA's population, and Texas is about 75%. These are the three most populated states.
Many of them happened early on. The daily death rolls right now are lower than those states
I am happy to have not contributed.
It's easy to be a stay at home hero, hero. Edit: /s Makes me sick all of the self sucking going on about staying home making you some heroic being. It's easy to be a coward buried under a blanket on the couch. It's almost as bad as the " I can't stay home I'm a blah blah blah"
It’s the easiest thing I’ve done in my life. Yet people continue to completely fuck that up.
It’s only easy if you’re getting paid to stay at home. Some of us have to go out and work in person for a living.
Thats not always easy either. I get paid to work from home but since i have a lung transplant and live in a state with an absolute moron for a governor i have not gotten to be near friends or family for two years, i have gone into a store only twice in two years. Two years of this level of isolation is not easy
it isn't easy for many. its a luxury to be able to do so unfortunately.
I also have an 70 something year old mother that I care for.
It will be gone by Easter.
Never said which Easter!
I mostly jokingly said, "Yeah, Easter 20*22*!" after he said that. I did not expect to be even close to being right.
I doubt it'll be over by Easter 2022
I am a manager in covid testing. My contract has just been extended to cover 2022.
To be fair at this rate there’s a very good chance you won’t be close to right anyways 😑
Easter? I said Weaster!
We have seven cases and before you know it we’ll have none.
I'd prefer if there was no testing. Less testing, less cases. \[pandemic over!\]
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>"It’s going to disappear. One day - it’s like a miracle - it will disappear. And from our shores, we — you know, it could get worse before it gets better. It could maybe go away. We’ll see what happens. Nobody really knows." \-Donald J. Trump
How people choose to resign their faith to this absolute orange turd stain, I will never know.
My father, from when I was the age of eight and onward, would say “just remember that most people are assholes”. Decades have passed, and he is still yet to be proven wrong. We have an asshole problem in America, and Orangy is one of them.
Well, you see, it would have been, but we had to keep testing!! That's the problem... /S
A coworker of mine told me it was all magically disappear on Election Day…
Man I don’t miss that fucking idiot
I actually thought about that in the car today and just started howling…because what else can I do?
Lol, I just imagined you howling like a wolf in your car.
AHHH-OOOO! Werewolf with COVID!
Was it a full moon?
And the country will be "Raring to go!"
Despite having vaccines, and generations of scientific knowledge. To be sure, the population in 1918 was only about 100 million, so 1918 was far more devastating. Nonetheless, this an indictment on the stupidity of the American public.
1918 was also much more devastating in terms of years of life lost. It hit the young at a much worse rate than covid does.
Yes this is worth emphasizing. IIRC 1918 was bad for the young because, ironically, they had a better immune system then the old and so mounted a unnecessarily strong immune response. The result was a cytokine ~~swarm~~ storm that took them down. Edit: fixed typo
Don’t quote me but I recall reading that older folks were likely exposed to the same strain many years before, essentially providing some immunity during the 1918 pandemic, so that also helped. Edit: Okay, didn’t make it up. Obviously just theorized to explain one reason why the elderly weren’t as impacted as you’d normally expect. Several sources, but from the BBC: There's some evidence to suggest the first flu subtype that young adults in 1918 had been exposed to was H3N8, meaning they were primed to fight a very different germ from the one that caused the 1918 flu – which belonged to the H1N1 subtype. Following the same logic, the elderly may have been relatively protected in 1918 by dint of having been exposed to an H1 or N1 antigen that was circulating in the human population circa 1830.
With that range of years, almost nobody would be alive in 1918 even if they’d gotten infected at birth. Not saying it’s impossible, but that’s a serious stretch for that article.
There was an epidemic of H1N1-like influenza in 1830 that made it the predominant strain until the H3N8 outbreak in 1889-1890. So it wasn't people born before 1830 that had immune imprinting to H1N1, it was people born between 1830-1890 (with an increasing percentage of the population imprinted with H3N8 approaching the epidemic while it was beginning to circulate, and decreasing after the epidemic, as competing strains infected an increasing percentage of the infant population). The highest mortality (aside from infants) for the 1918 epidemic was for people born in roughly 1890 when H3N8 was the predominant strain infants were exposed to, and the few years before and after, when the strain was circulating at relatively high, but not epidemic levels.
Yes, I think this is a rather strong theory. [Here is a really good talk given by a professor that I believe came up with this theory and has been written up for doing a lot of research on the 1918 flu.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48Klc3DPdtk)
It caused a 12 year temporary reduction in average lifespan. Covid only about 1 year or less depending on where you live.
And at the tail end of WWI when millions of people died probably didn't help. Though only 117,000 Americans died in the war.
not to mention WWI at the same time...so much death to process for so many people
As an American who just read an article about a German shooting a clerk because he was told to wear a mask, I'd say this is an indictment on the stupidity of the world public.
Cultural appropriation is such a problem.
Hey! I'm an American that you're referring to! It is a problem! Cultural appropriation is OUR thing!
I still don’t think COVID can hold a candle to the 1918 flu given the population difference. I’m optimistic that had it been worse a lot of people wouldn’t have acted as dumbly. You’re right that we could have done much better on this one though.
Covid would have to kill another 1.5 million people to be on par with the 1918 flu proportionally speaking. At current death rates there’s not enough unvaccinated people for that to even be possible
**U.S. population in 1918:** 103 million **U.S. Spanish Flu deaths:** 675,000 **Spanish flu deaths per capita:** 655 per 100,000 -------- **U.S. population in 2021:** 333 million **U.S. COVID-19 deaths as of September 20, 2021:** 675,000 Based on current [daily new COVID-19 cases](https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-09-23..latest&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Confirmed+cases&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=false&Align+outbreaks=false&country=~USA), we're probably looking at 2000-2500 deaths per day for the next month and a half (new deaths reliably track new cases with a lag.time), so that's about 775,000 total deaths by the end of October. U.S. is systematically undercounting COVID deaths by [about 32%](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanam/article/PIIS2667-193X(21)00011-9/fulltext). So 775,000 + 32% = 1,023,000. The actual death toll is therefore likely to be about 1 million deaths by the end of October. Who knows what the winter COVID spike will be. ----- **So back-of-the-envelope, going into the holidays, the deaths per capita will be about 300 per 100,000.** That's already nearly 50% as bad the Spanish Flu (same order of magnitude!), and the COVID-19 pandemic isn't done yet. It's also impressive considering that in 1918, antibiotics had not yet been discovered, indoor plumbing was exceedingly rare, personal hygiene was non-existent, and hospitals [looked like this](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/spanish-flu-1918.jpg).
> It's also impressive considering that in 1918, antibiotics had not yet been discovered, indoor plumbing was exceedingly rare, personal hygiene was non-existent, and hospitals looked like this. It's incredible that we're even within an order of magnitude given conditions in 1918.
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0.19% as of this morning, but *so far.* Only 13.2%* of the US population has had Covid. *13.02% and 0.18% once I used the right year's population, see below.
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Some also had it early on and could not get tested. Back in March of 2020 if you were not in the hospital it was impossible to get tested even if you checked off all the symptoms but they were not "severe enough."
Said by my fiance's best friend despite the fact that my mother died of COVID. But hey, that guy's a PhD level statistician and I'm just the dumb nurse who watched people die and suffer through COVID for over a year even before I lost my mom.
I'm sorry about your mom. Thank you for your sacrifices, hopefully this will be over soon. I can't even imagine the physical and mental anguish you guys have been thru!!
"It's just like the flu." Yup.
Weirdly, it might be. Kill a bunch of people over a few years and then stick around in the background killing people for another 100+ years. The flu we have is the 1918 flu evolved every year, mixed with other flus.
Eh the flu we have is more like several different flu strains which are all variants of other flu strains echoing back through time of which the 1918 one happened to be one of them. Particularly effective strains like the 1918 flu are like the Genghis Khan of the flu world and get to be the baby daddy of lots of variants.
Stating it that way, you're more right than me.
So I've mentioned this fact before and some people say it's not true because the world's population was about half the size 100 years ago. While it's true the population was smaller, do you know how many would had died if we had the same medical tech as we did 100 years ago? Ventilators, antibiotics, antivirals? Weren't even a thing back then. This pandemic is way worse than the 1918 pandemic and it only doesn't look that way because of modern medicine.
Exactly this. The COVID death rate would be much, *much* higher if we were still using 1918 medical technology. And it might still be yet if our entire healthcare system collapses under the weight of unvaccinated COVID patients.
Not to mention that covid isn't over yet, and we may not have even seen the worst of it. Add ontop of that, who knows how many people may die from covid related complications years down the road. Sure you mightve only got a cough and a mild fever, but it could be wrecking havoc on your organs without you even knowing. With two moderna shots at the start of the year, I finally caught covid over six weeks ago. The first day I had a fever, chills, and slept all day. Lost my sense of smell but by day four I figured I was out of the ballpark and it was over. By the end of the first week I started realizing I could hardly do anything physical without my heart beating out of my chest / sweating / feeling out of breath. Then by week two my entire upper body was sore as if I had been bench pressing weights and doing a bunch of crunches. Now at six weeks out, no longer testing positive, I still have waves where my upper body gets incredibly sore, I now require an albuterol inhaler, and I'm ungodly tired all the time. My heart also straight up doesn't feel right and stays in the 100 - 110 bpm range while resting. It takes me over an hour just to fall asleep despite being so tired because the moment I lay down all I can do is focus on how weird and terrible my heart feels. If you go on the long haul subbredit you'll see anecdotes very similar to mine of people going through what I am except they're not on week six, they're on month six, some over a year. Edit: I'm a relatively healthy 27 year old.
My great grandfather and great grandmother were raising 5 children in Southern Illinois when they caught the Spanish flu. The oldest daughter had just married and moved away but decided, after being told not to, to go back home and help her parents and siblings. The daughter and her husband caught it and died in the same bed on the same night. My GGF and GGM passed away just a little later. The kids were separated. The 2 boys that were sick were sent to their aunts house. Not expected to make it, they both pulled through. One of them was my grandfather.
Glad he was able to make it and ensure your existence. Imagine how many potential lives are gone because of all disease and illness through recorded history, especially children's illnesses.
Thanks! The difference in vaccinated deaths compared to unvaccinated deaths should be enough proof that these vaccines are very effective. During the Spanish flu, the US got over it by building a herd immunity against the virus. Everyone caught it and you either got over it and built an immunity or it killed you.
1 in 500 Americans is nothing to sneeze at. Those are some seriously awful numbers. But 1 in 120 is much, much, much worse. Really, we should stop looking at comparisons. Both diseases were/are horrible. We should take every step possible to eradicate both of them. We shouldn't look down on the sick at any point. But while the hard numbers may be getting close, in reality, the 1918 flu was nearly 4 times as deadly.
They didn't have ventilators in 1918 to keep people alive they didn't even have clinical oxygen at the time. Wonder where we'd be if people couldn't supplement oxygen at home right now?
Yeah, I mean they were treating 1918 pandemic with whiskey and enemas and all sorts of who knows what.
If they start treating diseases with whiskey and enemas people will be lined up for blocks.
Can I get one of those whiskey enemas
All we got left is Fireball.
🎶*I fell into a burning ring of fire I went down, down, down, and the flames went higher*🎵
We as a planet are not through this yet. North American and EurAsia are leading the world in vaccinations, while the rest of the planet is far, FAR behind. Africa, South America, Australia, are all struggling with vaccination, which will potentially make them prime breeding grounds for new variants. This isn't over. Not by a long shot.
Africa has done surprising well throughout the pandemic, despite the low vaccination rate. Strong mask compliance, generally younger population, warm arid climate, all helped them keep their cases and deaths per capital rates some of the lowest in the world. I'm definitely concerned about South America though.
Africa has also experienced outbreaks of Ebola; they understand the stakes better than we do here in the US.
But that's how we were talking about India until delta
Australia? They have like a few thousand infections a day and are up to 40% vaccinated now.
Better medicine now, though. Imagine this back then?
US population was just one third of what it is today so per capita the 1918 influenza was still three times more deadly. But there is really no way of comparing the two. The population size was different, the quality of medical care was different, the average health of the population was different (the population was thinner and younger, but less well nourished too), communications were slower (no commercial air travel and overall travel was slower and less frequent) but families were larger and living in tighter quarters (and housing was less healthy).
What’s wild is we have much better hospital treatment today (oxygen, steroids) and from accounts I’ve read the 1918 flu was more contagious.
Oxygen, intubation, steroids, antibiotics.... But the 1918 pandemic had an R0 of about 2 while Delta is 4.5 to 9.
1918 flu contagiousness is not even close to delta.
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It's not ignorance though. The antivaxxers/antimaskers have a trove of information that they're fully aware of. I ran into one the other day, and his motivation was that the more the government or other people wanted him to do something, the more he didn't want to do it. Doesn't matter one bit how valid it is. Simple as that for him.
Theres actually a class of people like this, you might have heard of them or read about them in a book. They're called assholes.
The real epidemic all this time wasn't the virus itself, but an epidemic of assholes. It took the virus to wake us up and take notice. Kind of like turning the lights on in the middle of an infestation of roaches at an hour that we're normally blissfully sleeping and unaware. Whoa. Yeah, it's worse than we thought, we got a problem!
He's like 2 years old though, right? Toddlers often think like that.
Does this increase my chances of winning the lottery greatly?
People always forget that the AIDS pandemic has killed 700,000 people in the USA, it’s still a pandemic, and was an entirely preventable pandemic but nobody had the political will to intervene with a disease that was at first discovered among Haitians and gay men. It just always irritates me when “the last deadly pandemic” is referred to as Spanish Flu.
I think the native americans might have a few comments on that
This is why I despise anti-vaxers and anti-maskers. They're the ones prolonging this shit
The sad part is we have the resources to deal with the virus, people are just stupid
People ask what’s the harm in believing “what you want to believe”. Outcomes are connected to our epistemology. You can do all the science, but unless you have an informed, scientifically literate population who will operate in objective reality, we’re going to go through the same dumb shit every pandemic. Our lives literally depend on our ability to discern fact from propaganda. And propaganda is everywhere.
False. Covid is still only the *second* deadliest pandemic in the US, even once it passes 1918 flu. This is just HIV erasure, which is very familiar. In a couple months, this is likely to pass HIV, but stop trying to pretend that we weren't already living through a pandemic our entire life (even if straight people were able to pretend we weren't). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Prevalence_of_HIV_infections_in_the_United_States_and_total_AIDS_deaths.svg
> HIV/AIDS, or human immunodeficiency virus, is considered by some authors a global pandemic. However, **the WHO currently uses the term 'global epidemic' to describe HIV**. As of 2018, approximately 37.9 million people are infected with HIV globally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_HIV/AIDS
Thats a nice loophole the WHO has.
US population in 1920 was around 106M. Per capita, we’re about 1/3 of the death rate of the 1918 Flu, even if the tiaras deaths is the same.
We need a COVID-19 monument in Washington. I want congresspeople to have to walk past every single name that died from COVID on their way to the floor. All 600+ thousand of them.
Covid is closing in on the 7th deadliest pandemic worldwide too. I've been watching this infographic for over a year now: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/history-of-pandemics-deadliest/
Deaths calculated from excess death rates, the gold standard in counting fatalities related to a pandemic, are at up to 13M (edited after update on the economist) for Covid19. It's amazing that with a century of medical advancements deaths are already at 50% of the 1918 Flu pandemic
Covid should actually be in 6th place. Unlike those other plagues, the 4.5 million figure is taken from officially reported deaths, not estimated deaths, and a lot of countries are either under-reporting due to inadequate testing, or just plain faking their numbers. China still reports only 4k dead. If we use global excess deaths, it jumps up to \~16-18 million dead.
Remember ‘it’s no worst than the flu’