10-01-2020, 07:44 AM
(09-30-2020, 10:44 PM)tomh009 Wrote: Yes, outdoor exposure is less risky than indoor, forgot to include that. Sorry.
There is for sure individual variation. But if you look at things at the level of an overall population, be it Waterloo Region, Ontario or Canada, you can take action on any one of the three factors I mentioned, you can't alter the individuals but the three factors will reduce the spread overall with the population mix.
One point the Economist article made (don't know whether you had a chance to read it) is that the second wave looks very bad but it's not actually as bad as the first wave. That's because we are using the confirmed cases as our metric, and the increased testing will increase the number of confirmed cases. As a corollary to that, it will reduce the mortality rate as we will detect more of the existing cases but the number of deaths will not vary. So, that is yet another factor in why the mortality rate is lower now.
I don't think anyone can claim that it is "not as bad"...merely that we don't know if it is worse yet. That being said, there are numerous reason to believe it will be worse, first and foremost because we are not implementing the same precautions.
We, as a society, CHOOSE exactly how bad this will be. There is nothing inherent about the virus that makes the waves better or worse, (or indeed have waves at all) it is our behaviour and choices which determine that. I believe the second wave will be worse, because we are choosing for it to be worse by not implementing the similarly strong precautions that we took the first time (and I say similarly strong, because now that we have a better understanding, we can use more targed, less broad precautions, but we aren't doing that either).