On darker days I have entertained the idea that this is already happening with the current variants.
There may be many contagious individuals that are running around with this thing for days/weeks before any symptoms provoke the need for a test, which would explain the meteoric rise in case numbers. To say definitively that infections are a certain subset of the population requires stagnant or decreasing case numbers. Increasing case numbers implies undertesting (or positive individuals are not quarantining).
In a similar way, to say definitively that certain treatments prevent hospitalization overall requires excess deaths to be either stagnant or decreasing but excess deaths are also up everywhere, so you still need to account somehow for these excess deaths. What would point to many untested, infected individuals suddenly becoming sick after a period of time and not even making it to the hospital?
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branchandroot
Re: Red Death scenario
Date: 2021-11-29 05:34 pm (UTC)There may be many contagious individuals that are running around with this thing for days/weeks before any symptoms provoke the need for a test, which would explain the meteoric rise in case numbers. To say definitively that infections are a certain subset of the population requires stagnant or decreasing case numbers. Increasing case numbers implies undertesting (or positive individuals are not quarantining).
In a similar way, to say definitively that certain treatments prevent hospitalization overall requires excess deaths to be either stagnant or decreasing but excess deaths are also up everywhere, so you still need to account somehow for these excess deaths. What would point to many untested, infected individuals suddenly becoming sick after a period of time and not even making it to the hospital?