CM11 wrote:Not sure why people are trying to convince themselves that everyone has had it already and it's just that we didn't notice. ICU's are being overrun with healthy people. They won't show up in the death statistics for the most part but I think we'd have noticed a need for a lot more ICU beds around the world over the last few months if it was already prevalent everywhere?
But according to the Italian Minister for Health, only 12% actually died as a direct cause of coronavirus. And even that 12% haven't been entirely healthy people. So a large proportion of these people would have been in the ICU anyway - why does Italy seem to be overwhelmed?
It seems possible that it takes a lot more work to deal with someone confirmed to have Covid than someone who is equally ill, but isn't presumed to have an ultra-infectious 1% mortality disease. As soon as you're separating those people, as hospitals are doing, everything becomes much more stressed, and a problem suddenly exists that actually wouldn't if you didn't know that these people had this disease.
Look, we don't know either way, and I'm not saying that the precautions we're taking now aren't merited or whatever. I'm just trying to put reason to that paper from Oxford and propose how, in the slightly bizarre world of statistics, what they've modelled might not be inconsistent with what we're seeing now.
The only way we'll find out is widespread antibody testing, so I can see why the UK government is so keen to get those kits.