SarathW wrote: ↑Sat Mar 14, 2020 2:04 am
I personally think this is more dangerous than the seasonal flu.
The only way to check this is to compare the death from flu other than coronavirus at a given time.
The way I understand death from seasonal flue is only one in a thousand and death from coronavirus is about 40 in a thousand.
You must have experienced flu at least few times in this life, some are mild and some are more sever. We call them all "flu" due to similarities in the symptoms and we don't give a shit what strain of flu it is.
Even within the same strain of flu, severity varies among individuals for various reasons. However, we adjust to certain risks and no longer attribute death to them collectively, but assess based on a case by case basis. For example, if you are young and healthy and have a severe flu that kills you, we consider it reasonable to attribute death to flu in this particular case. However, if you are old with several other diseases, and it happened that you have some infection in your respiratory system, we would consider this as a natural complication of an already fragile health.
Just imagine that we describe all people with terminal illness who develop flu and die afterwords as: died because of flu! This would be unreasonable, would it not? And if they are extremely old, we would accept and say their time is done. The idea of untimely death is often associated with control or lack of.
In the article i shared previously, it is mentioned that some of the coronavirus death toll in Italy are cancer patients. Because coronavirus is presented to us as something distinct from seasonal flu and something new, even cancer patients would be included in its mortality rate, but not so with seasonal flu. Don't forget that they are testing for it to determine correlations in order to make conclusions about causation. Without this type of seeking confirmation, cancer patients would not even get tested for what strain of viruses inflamed their respiratory systems. It would be perceived as something commonly happening for a system that is already collapsing.
Another possible cognitive bias is assuming that the law of average is equally applicable to all members within the group. For example, if we are told that the mortality rate of coronavirus is 3%, the individual might think that if he/she got infected, there is a 3% chance that they will die, which is a flawed reasoning. If the average height of members of this forum is 170cm, you wont find even one of the forum members who is exactly presents that average.
What we already know is that healthy people who got infected describe their experiences as a normal flu, especially if they are not told what strain of viruses they are infected with. And even when individuals experience unusually strong flu, we accepted as strong flu and move on! nothing special.
It is extremely likely that the whole thing is much ado about nothing. The world's reaction, however, is a cause of suspicion, not the virus itself.
'Too much knowledge leads to scepticism. Early devotees are the likeliest apostates, as early sinners are senile saints.' – Will Durant.
