The deaths/serious cases occur mainly in older people and in Yemen older people are a tiny part of the population, only 2.6% of people there are over 65 there, so it makes sense that that have very few deaths. In contrast in the US over 65s are 17% of the population - 5 times morethrifty++ wrote: ↑Thu Dec 24, 2020 9:38 pm@Life of FI - I guess compared to the 1940s and previously things aren’t so bad. But they seem pretty bad for my lifetime scale.
I am certain that the numbers of deaths and disease actually going on will be well in excess of what is reported in real time. That is always what happens in every pandemic. I’m picking at least 5 million are dead so far. USA will be one of the places with the most transparent reporting. There will be many placed underreporting deaths by orders of magnitude.
Take Yemen for example. It has reported 606 deaths while it has reported less infections than New Zealand where only 25 people have died. That makes no sense. In actual reality, we might find later, that 5,000 people actually died there up until now and the number of infections were 50,000 rather than just 2,000. This will be widespread across the world. The virus is probably the leading cause of death right now and we just don’t know yet. But we will. And unlike the other leading causes of death, it is not lifestyle related which makes a big difference.
There are various reasons why the population there is so young some contributing factors are an ongoing war that killed 50,000 people which led to the destruction of the water supply and which inturn caused 1 million cases of cholera and also led to a famine that has been going on since 2016 and has killed 150,000 or so with another 2 million malnourished children.
And they are now preparing for more intense famine as the global food supply is reducing due to lockdowns and restrictions related to covid.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/202 ... oronavirus
Thus while you are very humanely concerned about controlling covid and the deaths that might have happened there due to covid, they are so not concerned about that. As anyone still standing there after a long ongoing war, failure of the water supply, a cholera epidemic and 4 years of famine will probably be able to fight off covid which is much milder than dealing with those thingths -the older at-risk people have already mostly died from other things.
Rather the concern for them is getting food which somewhat paradoxically is being reduced in supply due to people in other countries worrying about covid. They can deal with some covid in a very young population if it comes back but more importantly, they really need to have some food to eat.
And this was kind of my overall point we can't get disillusioned, depressed or obsessed about a respiratory virus, which humans have never been able to control, and causes death in .1% of the population, many of which were already very close to death because it will distract us from other important things and lead to further significant negative consequences which could have been avoided.