I don’t understand how it all works.
It's literally my day job to track infectious disease and my year has been hell. I spend 40-80 hours a week for the past year and change analyzing death, side effects, compounding issues, associated procedures, comorbidities, and while I have hunches, this damned thing is still throwing me for a loop. I have hundreds of millions of claims data with associated covid data(one case may result in more than one claim for repeated visits), every diagnosis on the claim, every procedure performed, their age/gender demographic, and while there are definitely trends, there are far more outliers than there are with the flu or any other disease I've seen. You expect the outliers to be a very small percent but they're larger than expected. That may be because treatment methods aren't standardized, no vaccine in the early days, or many other reasons. But the point is we just don't have enough data points at this point to know.
I suspect it'll be some years of data before we really understand it, it's just so erratic and unpredictable, it's almost like there's strains within strains that we don't detect. It's done a toll on me mentally because I see so many that statistically it should kill who are fine, but so many who it shouldn't that don't make it. But one thing you can't ignore is the body pile, which is why I've taken additional precautions for my family during this time. Won't kill us to do things a little different until we understand it better.
Personally, I've relaxed myself as all data points to the fact that we have gotten it mostly under control for now. That may change with all these variants. India with their billion people is a prime candidate to produce a variant that is immune to the vaccine. Every case can do it, but the percentage of mutation is low. Enough cases will produce variants, and enough variants and it will mutate t a point where the vaccines aren't effective. So while I am a bit relaxed now, I am watching like a hawk for spikes. We saw last year that it literally exploded almost overnight. A brand new covid variant that is vaccine resistant could spread just as fast if people aren't taking precautions.