> The "excess deaths" surpassed COVID-19 fatalities in those states by a combined 4,563 people. Experts suspect that unconfirmed coronavirus cases could be responsible for some of those deaths, but it might also be related to a shift in other causes of death. For example, some doctors speculate people might be dying from illnesses from which they would normally recover because the pandemic has changed access to health care.
> “Our ER, as well as many others, are seeing far fewer patients because people are scared to come in.”
There are graphs.
This has added to a lot of the confusion and misinformation surrounding coronavirus response, since people are hearing that hospitals and ERs around the country are seeing fewer patients -- dramatically fewer, in some cases -- and conflating that with the coronavirus risk being unexpectedly low, which isn't true.
Not quite true, NYC was over stressed and there is at least one mass grave and are still corpses in refrigerator trucks.
Luckily, social distancing worked better than expected: peak daily US death was reduced to approximately 2,700 rather than approximately 3,000. And the curve was flatten more than expected with the death rate remaining at peak longer.
One can't extrapolate from the success of social distancing to imply that _not_ doing social distance would be less harmful.
>The results of our original experiment turned out to be different than our expectations
To the contrary, the proposed solution worked as expected. The social distancing combined with state-level quick action reduced the severity of the predicted disaster. In addition, people who would normally go to the ER "just in case" did not for fear of contagion. Or because they lost medical insurance. Or because visiting a GP became difficult and so there were fewer referrals. All reducing strain on hospital resources.
Certainly, The predictions of what would happen without out social distancing still stand as the data behind it is unchanged. And if that isn't enough, there is the 10x fatality rate of Sweden vs its neighbors.
Since Sweden dropped from the narrative when it showed serious differences from its neighbors, it hints that criticism of social distancing is either (justifiably) emotional or (unjustifiably) politically. If it were from an honest appraisal by epidemiologists or economist, there would concrete counter projections and remedies rather than imprecise claims about it's success and ambiguous calls as to what a new policy should be.
It is horrible that the US death total exceeds the Vietnam war and that there is serious economic hardship. That is the terrible truth for natural disasters when no plans are in place (let alone actual preparation) and the response is slow. I hope the lesson from this disaster is that we are prepared next time rather than convincing ourselves nothing serious happened.
The Vietnam war had such an impact because the US military went on such an insane spree of war crimes and civilian massacres that America permanently lost its standing as a moral authority gained in WW2. Two million Vietnamese civilians paid the ultimate price for America's geopolitical theorizing, and the disaster was prolonged for an entire decade because the country was too proud to admit it was in over its head. McNamara and then Nixon knew the war was unwinnable, but the US could not appear defeated. And so the atrocities continued. Many in the US realized all of this and became permanently disillusioned with their country.
Apologies for the off-topic rant but this comparison has been making its way through a lot of circles that really should know better. If you find yourself wishing you knew more about this topic, I recommend the Ken Burns documentary The Vietnam War or the book Kill Everything that Moves.
It was a civil war, initiated by the North, in which mostly Vietnamese killed other Vietnamese. The Americans intervening was absolutely a shit-show (and of course colonial history), but for the central point of your rant to stand, you’d need to show fewer Vietnamese would have died without American intervention, and that’s not a simple given.
You should spend some time talking to American Vietnamese with families who were persecuted in the immediate aftermath of the war, or who were lucky enough to escape.
The Vietnamese were largely supportive of Ho Chi Minh and there was supposed to have been a democratic reunification vote, which didn't happen. That's how the civil war started, and North Vietnam would have easily steamrolled the South (since they managed to steamroll both the South and the USA). Most civilian casualties came from horribly targeted anti-insurgency or massive American bombing raids. It's a pretty easy argument there would have been many, many fewer civilian casualties without US involvement.
> It's a pretty easy argument there would have been many, many fewer civilian casualties without US involvement.
The history of Communism in Asia would like a word with you.
Given that communism actually won in Vietnam, we don't even have to work with hypotheticals. There were certainly deaths but nothing to the level of the death toll American military power exacted on the populace.
Regarding the word intervene what I meant is that I believe it is not a good descriptor of what the US did. Makes it sound like some kind of spontaneous humanitarian mission rather than them undemocratically propping up a failing state.
Have you ever heard of the Khmer rouge in Cambodja, and how north Vietnam played a fundamental role establishing it?
IIRC Cambodia is the most bombed country in history.
...in response to the Khmer Rouge's attacks on Vietnam.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian%E2%80%93Vietnamese...
> which was supported by China and the US.
Vietnam was concerned Cambodja's regime was too China-friendly, but the millions being killed under the banner of advancing socialism did not featured as a pressing concern by neither China nor Vietnam.
There were, of course, geopolitical calculations on all sides, which is why the United States and China supported the Khmer Rouge. I don't think moral revulsion alone often leads any government to declare war on another.
No. It was initiated by the South, when it refused (with US support) to participate in a national UN-monitored election, which Ho Chi Minh would likely have won.
Edit: Statement of Eisenhower, from Wikipedia:[0]
> I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly eighty percent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Chief of State Bảo Đại. Indeed, the lack of leadership and drive on the part of Bảo Đại was a factor in the feeling prevalent among Vietnamese that they had nothing to fight for.
Hostilities were initiated by the North in the form of a guerrilla war.
It's crucial to keep in mind that it was the North faction that had been fighting for independence from France. And that the South Faction comprised largely the colonial bureaucracy and Catholics.
I agree with this. But, while this is before my time (my parents' generation), my understanding is US attitudes against the war were partly self interested in the short term: many boomer teenagers and 20somethings didn't want to get sent off to participate in such massacres, and much more they didn't want to die for it. Their parents didn't want them killed either. A lot of people knew somebody who had been killed.
If there had been no conscription there would have been less antiwar sentiment.
A similar scenario played out in the 2000s in Iraq, but without conscription.
But the impact of the Vietnam war on the US was primarily due to the number of casualties, wasn't it?
I mean, you wouldn't see many protests if the US government was sending college kids to southeast Asia to chill and soak in the sun, wouldn't you? Their sons arriving dead or maimed had something to do with it.
And, remember disease models did not just predict unmitigated spread. They absolutely incorporated percentages of social distancing into their models. The original imperial college study predicted that a high income county with around 50% social contact reduction would still exceed hospital capacity by 700%.
Cuomo's New York model that predicted 30,000 additional ventilators absolutely incorporated lockdown measures, if they didn't they have some serious explaining to do.
Of course I still agree a lockdown was needed, and agree the lockdown did about as well as it could. But is there any reason to not revisit data and determine if we could do better?
[0] https://www.newsweek.com/new-york-coronavirus-hospitalizatio... [1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2020/04/13/coronavirus-p... [2] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/04/14/dfc_ceo_t...
You mean Hart Island, which has been used as a mass grave / “potter’s field” for more than a century and already contained over a million deceased?
Certainly New York was hit especially hard, but it’s sensationalist to refer to “mass graves” when it’s in fact a routine thing.
-- NYC has maybe peaked but the rest of the country is still rising.
NYTimes: "“If you just look at the total number of cases, you’re going to miss what’s underneath it,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “It’s not a leveling-off. It’s a painful handoff.”"
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/06/opinion/coron...
Not only that, but as a percentage of population, Sweden's fatality rate is far ahead of that of the USA, and still climbing at a faster rate than America:
https://boogheta.github.io/coronavirus-countries/#deceased&r...
Not sure if that's just Portugal having a weaker healthcare system than Sweden's neighbours or if there's something else at play.
This is inaccurate (at least in implication): this mass grave has been around and in use for 150 years. It's being used more heavily, obviously, but then that's no different than saying "more people than normal are dying in NYC"
I don't know how you can say 'lower than expected'. Many interventions were non-medical, depending on social behaviour (e.g. adhering to social distancing), effectiveness of governance and enforcement, as well as economic and political (e.g. supply of test kits, ventilators). And even then, we were dealing with a new virus, there was limited data about all kinds of variables. For example, if people are intubated twice as long in the US due to high levels of obesity compared to China, you need twice as much ventilator capacity.
Point being, we always had to deal with a very wide confidence interval.
Now combine that with the fact we're looking to predict an exponential number, rather than something linear, and you can get wildly different outcomes. In New York the doubling time began around 2 days. That meant the difference between hospitalising 50k or 100k was a matter of starting social distancing two days later. The difference between 50k and say 1.6 million, was just 10 days. Hospital resources can't expand that fast, at best you can add 30% extra beds and shift all bed-use to dealing with corona with emergency interventions, but you can't just scale 3000%.
That's where the field hospitals came in. Not because it was guaranteed or fully expected to need them, but because there was a good chance, and there was too little information to conclude they wouldn't be necessary.
If anything the US government failed to act to attenuate the expected economic impact that emergency anti-epidemic policies would naturally have on the most vulnerable elements of society.
It's also very ironic, if not hipocritical, to abuse the most vulnerable and victimized elements of society, who have been systematically ignored and sacrificed , to argue against undoing policies aimed at defending society's best interests.
[1] - https://azgovernor.gov/sites/default/files/covidpresentation... [2] - https://www.military.com/daily-news/2020/04/10/armys-seattle...
Deaths lag infections by several weeks. Over 2200 people died yesterday.
Further, we can't just optimize for Covid19 deaths, we have to look at the whole situation, which includes suicides due to shelter-in-place orders, child abuse and other domestic violence, malnutrition due to hunger from unemployment, negative impacts of poverty.
this will certainly be a case study for future generations.
This would be the optimal situation, but it requires at least:
* Widespread testing available to any who need it for any reason;
* Careful, centralized monitoring and resource allocation;
* Plenty of PPE, critical care equipment, and disposable goods;
* A cooperative public willing to follow a constantly shifting set of recommendations.
And the country as a whole has basically none of those things. California is better-resourced and managed (for this particular thing) than other states, so they're gonna give it a shot. The rest of the country is just gambling.
This disease does not cooperate with this kind of response because of the lag time from initial infection to critical illness. Reports on this vary from like 3 days to 20-odd days. Coupled with the disease's high rate of infection, this means that a hospital can go from 50% full to 150% full very quickly. If a state government with an impossibly obedient population set a tripwire at 50% hospital capacity and shut everything down the minute they hit that mark, then they're still going to overflow a couple of weeks later as symptoms progress for those that were infected just before the shut-down.
I endure poverty much better than dead parents and loved ones.
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/arizona-coronavi...
Should we congratulate the uninsured who weather the storm?
- U.S. Gov
I think there's no question that COVID-19 has been a disaster here, but it's going to be heavily debated whether the lockdown saved us or just made things worse on net.
Without regard to the actual effectiveness, the fact that the field hospitals went mostly empty will fuel acrimonious debate about said effectiveness.
Our choices since then have been "economic hardship and misery" or "economic hardship and misery with a spicy side dish of death and suffering". Covid19 has been the leading cause of death in America for a month now [1]. Some time tomorrow, it will have killed a confirmed 80,000 Americans [2] and America has consistently had 1/3rd of the world's critically-ill cases for weeks [ibid]. There is no way we are going to get out of this with less than 100,000 dead.
Amazingly, the same country that had endless investigations into the deaths of two people in Benghazi and went to war over the deaths of 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001 -- subsequently spending $6.4 trillion in war operations [3] -- is finding 100,000 dead to be "pretty good", and the economic cost of mitigating further death to be just a little bit too expensive.
As usual, some of this is explained by political misinformation campaigns that too many people are falling for [4][5][6][7], but still, the same talking points get repeated into forums like this one, even though most Americans would prefer economic pain over a higher death toll for now [8][9][10].
I'm just gobsmacked that the disinformation is taking root so easily, because arguing that can really trivially be reduced to, "I don't think enough people are dying to justify the measures meant to prevent people from dying."
Hopefully states like California that are following more conservative, evidence-based approaches to relaxing restrictions, will relieve some of the tension.
[1]: https://thehill.com/homenews/news/492053-coronavirus-now-lea...
[2]: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
[3]: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/20/us-spent-6point4-trillion-on...
[4]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-the-conservat...
[5]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/04/19/pro-gun...
[6]: https://www.vox.com/2020/4/19/21225195/stay-at-home-protests...
[7]: https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/2020/0...
[8]: https://www.newsweek.com/americans-coronavirus-restrictions-...
[9]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/us/politics/coronavirus-r...
[10]: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/most-americans-think-it...
Also California is reopening since all their predictions turned out to be way off the mark.
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/california/story/2...
I expect we have a few weeks until we have nearly 0 restrictions in place.
> https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/california/story/2....
says nothing like that.
> California recognizes that economic restrictions are causing severe harm and began rolling them back today
But the OP wrote,
> Hopefully states like California that are following more conservative, evidence-based approaches to relaxing restrictions, will relieve some of the tension.
You are both correct: California is rolling back economic restrictions, but they are following a conservative, evidence-based approach to relaxing them. The OP's basic premise, however, is not at all false, and I sincerely hope you don't have the impression that the state is just throwing a switch and going back to "normal." It's not.
Or I should say, we're not. I don't know where you're located, but I'm in California -- the Bay Area, specifically. We don't even have official guidance on how restaurants are going to re-open yet, an the California Restaurant Association -- the business group that represents restaurants, and clearly has an economic motivation to get back to business -- has actively lobbied for the re-opening of their member businesses to happen slowly and very carefully.
I would like nothing more than to be able to start going back to my favorite restaurants and bars. But the reality is that for the last month, the daily number of new Covid-19 cases and of deaths hasn't been materially dropping in the US in the way it has in countries like the UK, Italy, and Germany, which strongly suggests that our collective behavior throughout April remained too relaxed in most states. The paradox of this pandemic is that the looser the restrictions we place on ourselves are, the more economic damage we're likely to face over the long term, not less, because we'll start cycling through repeated outbreaks, being forced to close businesses, districts, and even regions ad hoc, and running a much greater risk of overwhelming hospitals with bursts of new cases virtually all at once in stricken locales.
What I don’t quite understand is how people expect the economy to “just go back to normal”... like, even if you “reopen” everything, ease all restrictions, it’s not like people are goingback to living as usual.. they’re still going to keep by themselves, because that’s an individually sensible decision... are you going to attend a conference, a wedding, a dinner party / restaurant where you’ll be near 100+ people? Of course not, you’ll be making sure you stay healthy! The economic damage will happen and persist, and governments can’t just legislate against that!
Yes, yes, and yes.
As will you.
I remember hearing a story of a solder that sent a single bullet into a pole mounted transformer. The oil leaked out, it over heated and exploded. Power went out to the block, maybe taking connected devices with it.
What will happen as we try to return to normal yet another situation.
> The fallout from such fear has concerned U.S. doctors for weeks while they have tracked a worrying trend: As the pandemic took hold, the number of patients showing up at hospitals with serious cardiovascular emergencies such as strokes and heart attacks has shrunk dramatically.
> Across the U.S., doctors call the drop-off staggering, unlike anything they've seen. And they worry a new wave of patients is headed their way — people who have delayed care and will be sicker and more injured when they finally arrive in emergency rooms.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/05/06/8504549...
It's at this point that the news media needs to look inwards and wonder if they made such a big hysteria over covid that they failed to point out that people should still go to the ER. I bet many of those who died at home had symptoms of heart attacks/strokes, etc, but didn't want to go out of a mistaken sense of magnanimity (I don't want to take the bed of a COVID patient) as well as a false sense that the hospitals were in any danger of being overloaded (they were not, given the steps we took).
It was always a loss-making enterprise, even with centralized distribution.
24 hour news cycles and internet competition isn't a good recipe for in-depth, long-pursuit journalism.
conveniently leaving out that those doing the funding aren't the viewers but advertisers (for most media companies).
If the funding came from viewers - who pay for quality, informative and unbiased journalism, there would be more of it. But people don't want to pay.
I feel like this was never a majority of the viewer or readership.
Instead, in an era of scarcity, BDFLs were able to choose this for them.
They were overloaded in Wuhan, Milan, Madrid and Brussels, and came within a hair of capacity in Paris and New York. What "false sense" are you talking about, exactly? There was real risk. Are you saying that the media reported overloads that didn't exist?
Your argument seems a bit vague to me. You could just as easily argue, with perfectly symmetric evidence, that it's good that "the media" "gave a false sense" of hospital capacity, because it prevented an actual overload of the system. Why is your version better, except that in yours you get to have a more personally pleasing enemy?
Pretty much all criticism of "the media" is like this.
Um... Cuomo said he needed 40k new ventilators to make sure hospitals had all they needed after he instituted a shelter in place order. He needed nowhere near that amount. That is hysteria. I don't understand why this is controversial.
The fact that we were being told to expect Italy/New York levels of hospital overruns ALL OVER the country (hint: field hospitals that hardly got used weren't just deployed in NYC)? And that we're still being told that hospitals ALL OVER the country are in danger of being brought to their knees by re-opening state economies right now? Meanwhile, the nurses that aren't furloughed are making nightly dance videos during their shifts.
Can you cite the specific coverage you're thinking of?
Basically: this seems like a bit much to me. The media warned us of something. We listened. The warning worked. And now you want to attack "the media" because the thing they warned us might happen didn't... because they warned us.
If you have pre-existing conditions, catching COVID is a lot more dangerous than if you don't.
Who typically goes to the hospital for medical treatment?
People with pre-existing conditions.
"I don't want to go to the ER, because I might catch COVID from another patient, or doctor" is a very justifiable fear.
This is just the consequence of the virus spreading to the community - not the consequence of mitigating the spread of the virus through the community.
The mortality risk of undetected/unaddressed heart problems, etc, far supercedes the risk from COVID-19. You could find some limited examples where that's not true but it is overwhelmingly the case.
It is becoming increasingly clear that the level of panic associated with COVID-19 is absolutely divorced from the ground truths.
But it doesn't just affect non-COVID-19 mortality. It may be that our response is even making COVID-19 mortality worse in some cases:
From https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2009787?query=rec...):
"Social distancing, isolation, and reluctance to present to the hospital may contribute to poor outcomes. Two patients in our series delayed calling an ambulance because they were concerned about going to a hospital during the pandemic." (My note: So the irony here is incredible, these weren't just non-COVID-19 patients afraid to come in but _people who actually had life-threatening COVID-19_.)
And from https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0...:
"Third, the COVID-19 epidemic has caused a parallel epidemic of fear, anxiety, and depression. People with mental health conditions could be more substantially influenced by the emotional responses brought on by the COVID-19 epidemic, resulting in relapses or worsening of an already existing mental health condition because of high susceptibility to stress compared with the general population."
and
"Finally, many people with mental health disorders attend regular outpatient visits for evaluations and prescriptions. However, nationwide regulations on travel and quarantine have resulted in these regular visits becoming more difficult and impractical to attend."
No, it's becoming increasingly clear that people are incapable of telling the difference between their personal health[1], and the health of society as a whole.
The risk of COVID to me is low. The risk to society of me going about my daily business as if nothing has happened is high. There are social adjustments that do little to reduce my risk, but decrease overall risk, and unsurprisingly, people who don't understand, or don't care about the difference between the two, push back on them.
And now we get to look forward to a torrent of people who will be complaining that the horse didn't bolt because we closed the barndoor.
[1] You are pointing out a few anecdotes of people not going to the ER when they should. I don't deny that a few people are making that mistake. But if we're going by anecdotes, I can point out a million and one anecdotes of people not taking basic health precautions - that I don't even need to go to a newspaper for - since I can see them out of my window.
This is not a fair characterization. Rather, it could be said that the externalities of suspension of elective surgeries, widespread business closures, widespread social isolation and unprecedented fear (which is certainly disproportionate to the risk, _even in those with comorbidities_), are all factors that those who are parroting the "Stay home!" party line are neglecting.
I don't think it's fair to say that those who argue against the path we've taken are doing so because of their purely personal risk factors. When highly interconnected systems - like the global supply chain - unravel, it's very hard to predict the full ramifications there. It might be good to start with the impact of these lockdowns on the global food supply and the estimates of 100+ million extra cases of starvation. (I generally try to focus on other factors because quite frankly, to flip your rhetorical technique around, I think that many in favor of these lockdowns don't really care too much about how lockdowns impact conditions in third-world countries and thus I largely try to talk about the direct first-world impact).
I don't think those in favor of lockdown are trying to do harm, their intentions are good. But the poor understanding of key concepts such as _what an economy actually is_ is leading to a number of irrational statements being made: for example, the argument that re-opening business is "trading human lives for money". The actual reality is much more nuanced.
While on the contrary, perhaps it's just been in my online interactions, but arguing against lockdown/indefinite containment is consistently characterized as either motivated by self-interest or due to the perceived personal risk being low. In essence, the "you clearly don't care about old peoples' lives" argument.
--
I've been doing a pseudo-experiment where I've been asking acquaintances of mine what they think the overall infection fatality rate of COVID-19 is, and also what they think their personal risk is. Everyone I've talked to has overestimated the mortality risk both to others and to themselves by an order of magnitude. For example, many have told me that they think the infection fatality rate is 2.2% overall, or 4-5%, etc.
In one case a largely healthy young 20-something estimated their personal risk of death at 2%. That's multiple orders of magnitude off.
This pseudo-experiment of mine proves nothing, but it's an interesting insight into what people think. (Many of my social groups are very transparently "liberal"-leaning and disproportionate panic in the US is split on party lines so that's not very surprising).
Pundits advocating for reopening are deliberately conflating those things, as if the ROI on having a movie theater, or a hairdresser open is the same as allowing a tumor removal brain surgery to proceed.
It's not. Nobody's advocating that everything should be closed forever, but there's an enormous space between "Let's figure out how to get people the medical care they need, because elective medical procedures cannot be postponed forever", and "Everything's fine, everyone go back to work".
The fact that you're bringing up the global food supply is testament to this. Most of the food supply disruptions were caused by direct impact of the virus, with food workers getting sick - not overly aggressive closures. Food is an essential service, no government on the planet told food producers, or food logistics workers to stay home. [1] Yet, the re-open folks are pushing hard on the fiction that we're all going to starve to death, because clothing retailers aren't operating. Meanwhile, the reason you can't get ground meat is because 80% of the people working at the local meatpacking plant are sick, because the plant manager refuses to provide PPE, sanitary working conditions, or even to send sick employees home.
[1] There were temporary border closures for migrant agricultural workers in the US, but they were very quickly lifted, once the government realized that Americans don't pick strawberries. Canada never closed itself to TFWs, neither did most of Europe.
How does brain surgery get paid for? Let’s even assume a single payer system for a minute. Where do the tax revenues come from?
Instead, people had to make do with partial information and many people -- believing incorrectly that their local hospitals were overwhelmed and needed them to stay home -- chose to do so.
And have you ever watched local television news? Millions of Americans do every night. It's the worst of the worst, and their over-the-top tactics are a well worn joke. "Is your refrigerator going to kill you and your children? Tune in at eleven to find out, only on FUTV News".
As a scientist I say sometimes that one of the unnoticed victims of SARS-CoV-2 is media reporting. Some newspapers here (Italy) really love gruesome details, to be honest, but they conveniently forget talking about the frequency of said details.
I mean, if you have a respiratory disease that can blow your head off (this is just an absurd example), you prepare differently depending if it happens in 50% of the cases or in 0.5%. This is completely lost in news reporting.
In addition, the news (but sadly, some experts too!) treat SARS-CoV-2 as a magic virus that does everything different from any other known biological entity. While I was initially surprised to hear those cases of meningitis, I then found in the literature that other coronaviruses can infect the central nervous system (e.g. [1]).
It doesn't mean this complication less severe, when it occurs. But it's not a feature of this virus alone.
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncel.2018.0038...
Care to share a link or two? I’m skeptical that any respected news outlets reported that we can’t become immune.
Agreed on local TV news though; it’s a cesspool.
I mean, I don't respect CNN, but I'm sure some people do.
"WHO says no evidence shows that having coronavirus prevents a second infection"
The second paragraph of the article literally quotes a published brief from WHO:
"There is no evidence yet that people who have had Covid-19 will not get a second infection," WHO said in a scientific brief published Friday.
The headline is literally taken from the WHO's actual words. There's a case to be made that these sort of articles need to be more deeply contextualized with respect to how science works and what the implications of findings are (and what they aren't), but that gets into deeper questions about scientific literacy -- not just for journalists, but for their audience -- but it's hard to point at this and say that this reporting is making it look like the WHO was saying something that they weren't.
I would put more blame on the WHO for this than CNN in any case. It’s fair to say the way the WHO reported this was misunderstood, but the WHO themselves tweeted the same type of wording out directly on Twitter.
The mean age of death from c19 is 80, and even in this group they die at a rate of 1%/wk anyway, for which c19 is about as deadly.
This isnt WWII
The background rate of death in this "sickest and weakest" group is already high. C19 is no higher.
Please do some research, there's an article on the BBC with a graph demonstrating this point.
When we talk about flu stats: most people have some immunity to the flu thanks to flu shots (even if they haven't gotten one for this past year) and general herd immunity, which we DO NOT HAVE for this virus, and won't gain without either a vaccine or a few million dead from this thing running rampant.
The stats you're quoting are WITH the level of serious intervention we've had so far, which is why as certain states are reopening, we're starting to see the numbers ticking back up again and looking just as bad if not worse.
I think an uncomfortable stat this coming year will be just how few people will have been reported to died in 2020 of regular flu. It's not saying Covid19 isn't bad in any way to realize that number, will be almost nothing, and that will be suspicious to people going forward for NextTime.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-didnt-wait-fo...
Stop assuming things.
It's hard to make inferences about the world without assumptions.
Compare that to the Coronavirus deaths. The numbers are really close.
Italy isn’t particularly an outlier in terms of Coronavirus severity when you look at their historical flu numbers compared to the rest of Europe. Their Coronavirus deaths follow the same trend as with their flu fatalities. Really nothing surprising in Italy, but the media lost their minds over it.
https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(19)30328-5/ful...
You're presenting what happened in Lombardy as some sort of mass hysteria. Was the healthcare system overwhelmed, or was that a mass hallucination?
There have been 30,000 confirmed CoVID-19 deaths in Italy, which is about double a normal flu season. What do you think that number would have been without any social distancing measures? As I see it, the numbers are not that difficult to estimate. About 70% of people would need to catch CoVID-19 before herd immunity brought R below 1. With an IFR of 0.5%, and a population of 60 million people, that would mean about 200,000 deaths. Is that enough to "lose one's mind over"?
> When has the flu done that?
The flu overwhelms hospitals quite often. For example, the 2017-2018 flu season saw many hospitals around the world setting up tent wards: https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...
* Not enough doctors, nurses, beds and medical supplies to treat all (or even most of) the patients.
* Extremely stark triage decisions. Deciding not to treat patients who would normally be treatable, instead leaving them to die.
* Doctors and nurses working to the limit of exhaustion.
* Normal care essentially stopping. All medical resources being focused on one disease.
* Morgues unable to handle the number of dead.
Finally, double the regular number of flu deaths occurred in just a few weeks, and that was with extreme social distancing measures. Without those measures, the death toll would have been far higher.
You're describing this as some sort of mass hallucination. I don't see how that's a defensible position.
If there was any doubt that you're being disingenuous and purposely deceitful, the fact that you've decided to resort to petty arguments on semantics to desperately avoid facing the facts is enough to clear up that doubt.
Do you think that information is relevant to a comparison?
By mid-February the media as a whole was already raising alarm bells, and the stock market began crashing on February 24 as a result of media coverage of the virus.
To jog our memory, we could look at what people were saying in contemporary February articles... https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/28/trump-chief-of-staff-mulvane...
> “The press was covering their hoax of the day because they thought it would bring down the president,” Mulvaney concluded. “The reason you’re seeing so much attention to [the coronavirus] today is that they think this is going to be what brings down the president. That’s what this is all about.”
In my eyes that define is hysteria.
I've had massive downvotes for saying exactly what you suggested.
My favorite reply comment was, "He was joking." No, actually I wasn't.
But I expected that in advance.
I also remember the take downs of the various antibody studies all pointing to infection being much more widespread than originally thought. As if it was bad news the IFR was going down.
I lack the intelligence to connect the dots but I sincerely feel there's a large bias, if not outright agenda, here to advise prolonging and deepening the economic destruction.
Small detail about the navy ships: they are setup for battlefield injuries. The wards are all open (think what you see on old episodes of MASH) with little to no separation between patients. That is fine for traumatic injuries (earthquakes, fires, war etc) but less than useful for control of infectious disease. The plan was for them to take non-covid patients to relieve hospitals but it never really worked out. The risk of a ship becoming a hotspot should one covid infection slip through into an open ward was too great.
1) Hospitals generally get paid (by someone) for treating patients. So they want to run at 100% capacity, even with covid patients.
2) You can't really just "build an ICU." You can stand up a field hospital that's able to provide similar, degraded services. But it's not going to be the same.
Imagine if someone said "set up a datacenter in a field," and then a customer had a choice to colo their server in a purpose-built DC or your field DC. Which do you think they'd pick?
3) The units that staffed these facilities were heavily augmented by military reserves.
Corpsmen may have non-medical civilian jobs, but what do you think military reserve critical care nurses and doctors do for a living?
If these field hospitals were packed to the brim, all of those people would be locked in place. Possibly while they were needed in their civilian positions, in their home cities (although the military seems to have done a pretty good job about preferentially pulling non-Covid-civilian personnel).
4) Exponential growth with unknown but high R_t. +1 week before we locked down would have looked very different.
... all of that to essentially say that these facilities were designed as surge capacity, in the event they were needed. We intentionally filled up hospitals first.
USD$660M seems like a reasonable price to pay, strictly as insurance, given the very real risk that hospitals would have been overfilled and covid-related mortality would have spiked due to lack of care.
I think this is under-appreciated. In contrast to the $0.6 billion spent on field hospitals, the US spent some $2000 billion on the CARES act to mitigate economic harms of the virus and response to it.
At least some of the reason it didn't treat many patients is that they made it hard to become a patient.
Military hospitals (including ship-based hospitals) have been planning and preparing to deal with biological warfare (i.e., communicable diseases) for many, many decades, and even before that they were well acquainted with communicable diseases. It was not uncommon in the past for communicable diseases to kill more soldiers than died in actual combat.
That is one reason the U.S. Public Health Service is a uniformed service -- so their personnel could operate in war zones without the risk of being shot as spies if they were captured.
besides the deaths-at-home, shouldn't it be considered that the low-impact low-energy lifestyle that is being promoted right now is less strenuous on the body in the short term?
I imagine that the lack of deaths, after deaths-at-home are cancelled from the number, is just seeing a lag time where the lack of physical effort reduces short-term deaths but increases long-term deaths due to lapse in fitness.
Landlords/renters are different, and I don't have a decent suggestion for that.
Morality aside, it seems like a proposition with a poor chance of success to be hounding people for money right now.
I’m a photographer. The website says I’m supposed to report income the week I work, not when I actually receive payment. If someone gives me a deposit for a wedding next year should I count it? Should I be reporting the deposits I got last year when I cover a wedding this year?
I’m allowed to deduct expenses, but they don’t go in to more detail. If I spend more than I make in a week can I carry over the rest of the expense?
It’s pretty stressful just knowing if you’re doing it correctly.
Probably yes. In the UK there is a significant surge in non covid related deaths above historical stats. Bear in mind also the definition of a covid 19 related death is, err, generous in the first place
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/non-covid-deaths-are-als...
Here is something I found interesting:
Spain has a “hard lockdown” too. Their excess mortality has returned to a normal level according to momo: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/
Now I realise that some people that would normally die are not (car accidents etc), but at the same time if the lockdown itself was causing significant mortality you wouldn’t expect the excess mortality to drop to normal levels, would you? You would expect a small offset from 0 unless the savings from car crashes are exactly the same compared to “lockdown deaths” - and if they are, and the lockdown is saving “extra” lives then is it not still worth it?
We have to wait and see for England to see if it falls back to normal or below normal levels.
That's probably inaccurate. I've been following MOMO's graphs, and the yellow-band portions (most recent weeks) grossly underreport and are subject to upward correction. Data points get larger and larger as they age. For example, "Spain Week 11" was pretty small when first reported (in week 12?), was larger the next week, and larger still a week later.
“Imperial College London’s Neil Ferguson has said, as many of two-thirds of 'Covid deaths' would have happened anyway”
Would these deaths have happened in a massive spike? If not, then it isn’t anything like the same and if so, why?
About half of Covid deaths are in nursing homes. The median lifespan after entering a nursing home is 5 months, and the mean is 13 months.
Coronavirus is very infectious, so if it enters a nursing home, it could easily spread and wipe out everyone who was on the brink of dearth, or on a fragile state.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/05/02/would-mo...
Just as a random comparable, the annual risk of getting cancer if you're 35 years old is around 0.1%, and the annual risk of having a heart attack is around 0.5% (higher for men, lower for women). All of those diseases would have similar average lifetime lost as covid, but the risk is continuous, not a once per lifetime occurance.
And the data is only through April 1. I suspect the excess death rates will be higher nationwide from April 1-May 1.
The tables say 2/1/2020 to 5/2/2020 and shows 5 weeks of data for April thru May (the page is updated as-of today, 5/8/2020).
Today (a Friday, I am working on my front porch, and heard sirens about 4 times from 7AM-3PM). Typically, that number would be 5x that. It's been like that since mid-march.
In Australia, significant decreases in STEMI (serious heart attack presentations) although nothing published yet. Everyone wondering what’s going on - going to be some interesting studies coming out after this in terms of population health and additional/reduced morbidity and mortality
Sadly I think this is a partial answer. Working as a paramedic, for all the times I saw people saying “y’know, maybe I don’t really need to go to the ER”, there were also the people who really did need to but were too scared. Be it 90 year olds with severe lacerations or heart attacks, there was a fear that we had to manage and balance.
[1] https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-d...
Whoops - well, nearly the same...
https://scontent-atl3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/95033463_10217...
It's actually such good propaganda, and I think it didn't really manifest fully formed (i.e. no one came up with the full concept) but through an evolutionary process as some was more effective than others. I am fascinated by the viral evolution of these things.
Further, analysis by the Washington Post examined excess death by all causes. It’s way up.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/04/27/cov...
The excess mortality is higher than the already official Covid tracked deaths.
The chart you posted shows a total of just over 20k deaths in all of New York state between March 1st and April 25th, while the link I posted shows 27k deaths in NYC alone between March 11th and April 25th.
Your chart also shows about 4k non-coronavirus deaths, again across the whole state for that period, while the NYC-only stats show more than 10k "Deaths not known to be confirmed or probable COVID-19" in less than that amount of time.
Now repeat with double the population to account for the rest of the state (with lower coronavirus incidence) and another 10 days (about 20% of the time period in question) that had the normal incidence of non-coronavirus deaths.
So, no, nothing about that chart matches up to reality.
11460 confirmed covid-19 deaths 5213 probable but unconfirmed covid 19 deaths 10964 not know to be probable and not confirmed deaths (all non-covid deaths)
Which adds up to 27637 total deaths.
Your graph shows ~ 20000 total deaths. That's significantly different.
Also, the sources for the graph you posted are:
1. https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/mortality.html which as far as I can get it to show, only counts deaths from pneumonia regardless of cause. So I really don't understand why they listed that as a source for the graph as that information isn't displayed.
2. covidtracking.com Which could be the source of their numbers for covid deaths but that leaves no source for their totals.
https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Weekly-Counts-of-Deaths-by-State-a...
In New York, total deaths from heart-related diseases is up, not down, since covid.
I do see some weirdness in other states, but not New York.
(Make sure you stick around for the animated gif, "CDC pneumonia death figures over time", which shows how things change over time.)
https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Weekly-Counts-of-Deaths-by-State-a...
In New York, total deaths from heart-related diseases is up, not down since covid.
I do see some weirdness in other states, but not New York.
The head of a local hospital network has tweeted wondering where all the heart attack and stroke patients went - both in my lightly impacted region and in disaster NYC. Did the rate go down? Or did people just die at home afraid to go to the hospital?
In SF in normal times, over 50% of trauma cases are from car accidents. My completely unscientific theory is that commuting/traffic is way more stressful and physically taxing than people think.
https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/half-of-injuries-treated-at-...