1 in 500 is bad, but it is nothing compared to the dire predictions at the outset. They were actually giving stats at first that if they had played out would equate to 1 in 180 by the end of last year. So, bad as it is, we have dealt with it better than was predicted. The vaccines were available faster than most imagined. No one knows how many lives the vaccines may have saved, but there is evidence it would be worse without them.
Quite true, Rachel. I remember the direst predictions from Hopkins back in March 2020 running upwards of a couple million dead. Those were the numbers that convinced the administration back then to issue the national lockdown.
Gee whiz, that was a weird time, wasn't it? I live near a major airport, and it was so strange not to see airliners all the time. The skies felt like they did back on 9/11. And remember how empty the roads were? I could get anywhere easily, but there was nowhere to go. (Except... the grocery store!
)
Of course, two million is a Big Scary Number, and it came from running one model among many, and those were early days with sparse data, so you knew it wasn't as accurate as later models with better data would be. (I saw an interview with Robert Redfield, CDC director at the time, who said that his counterpart in China thought he was seeing mortality as high as ten percent very early on!) So we really didn't know a whole ton yet. I think two million was probably an extreme prediction, but even one million deaths would have been too many. So would half a million.
Thank goodness for science, scientists, and vaccines. For thoughtful medical personnel, too, who have learned how to lower mortality rates for those of us who suffer from Covid.
If anyone thought that vaccines didn't work, we're running a huge experiment right now with a test group of millions of vaccinated folks and a control group of millions of unvaccinated folks. They aren't randomly selected, they aren't matched by cohort or possible independent variables, and it hasn't been enough time to study them longitudinally, but dash it all - when you see that hospitals are overwhelmed with folks who never got a vaccine for whatever reason, and when it comes to a point that Idaho is issuing statewide medical rationing (
"'Someone who is otherwise healthy and would recover more rapidly may get treated or have access to a ventilator before someone who is not likely to recover,' the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare said in a statement explaining the system"), I'd say the results of the experiment are savagely, savagely clear.
Like you say, Rachel, it feels so awful to say that only losing as many Americans last Thursday as we lost on 9/11 is a relief, but, well, thank goodness we only lost as many Americans last Thursday as we lost on 9/11.
