Quote Originally Posted by peter.gryphon View Post
I cannot cite a specific study from memory but I do believe that Wildtype is correct about Covid-19 having a very large burden on the health care system.

IIRC the average time from hospital admission to death for a flu/pneumonia victim was 6 days as opposed to something like 20 days with a Covid victim. Thus the burden of a single Covid patient on hospital resources is in the range of 3X as great as an influenza case.

One of the real problems is the public health establishment and political leadership want to completely ignore out-patient treatment options that reduce hospitalizations and mortality in favour of solutions that enrich the pharmaceutical industry, which of course is a major funder of the public health establishment and politicians. This is why, even if the major media ignore it, there is so much conflict between doctors "on the front lines" and "doctors" in the bureaucracy.
Burden can be of different kinds: economic cost (at large), death, short term disabilities, long term disabilities, unemployment, health system collapse, etc., but also fear, mistrust, anxiety, loneliness, divorces, civic unrest, etc.

There are many papers that give different numbers for different burdens for different countries but I am not an expert. I could provide you with numbers like la Tuque bellow, but I feel the confidence interval is to big at the moment.

BTW, apparently, there is a sharp increase of poaching of rare species in different countries because there are no toursists... (so another kind of unexpected burden, if we extrapolate)