I don’t want to downplay the sadness of the deaths, but I think it is a bit foolish for us to base our number of deaths of off untested patients...
A lot of the labeling occurred because people couldn’t get tested yet presented symptoms that indicated covid. In that situation, you can’t say 100% without a test, yet it’s the reasonable conclusion in a pandemic.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
Other causes of death such as flu can likely also be assumed to be decreased as a side-effect of lockdown
Any effects will be felt on a much longer timeframe.
Most office workers have very sedentary lives anyways, that didn’t become significantly more sedentary when they replaced their drive with a walk to another room and working in an office with working in that room.
Throw in the fact that they are likely cooking more because restaurants and all were shut and not just having lunch delivered to their office, they may even be getting more activity in.
Do people get depressed and die because of a lovkdown? Sure, I got depressed as well. But the numbers show that this issue is far less than the number of people that would die otherwise.
Here's that data for England:
I get why everyone is questioning everything, but there isn't some big conspiracy here. Lots of people died of COVID. Most of them were 80+. You probably don't know any of them if you don't hang out with 80-90 year olds.
We know that traffic fatalities in some areas have risen drastically due to the lockdowns: https://abc7.com/traffic-fatalities-california-highway-patro...
We also know that doctor visits have gone down due to the coronavirus, leading to medical staff being laid off: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/02/8262324...
We also know that hospitals are financially incentivized to diagnose a patient as COVID positive: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/04/24/fac...
And there are German serological studies that suggest a COVID death rate of 0.39%, in contrast with the NYC study that claims a death rate of 1%
Taking this altogether, and we have plenty of wiggle room to suggest that even the excess deaths don't necessarily imply that COVID is extremely deadly.
Traffic fatalities were actually down overall (total numbers), but up per mile driven. In other words, people were driving much less and dying in lower total numbers, but the people who were driving were driving faster and thus a bit more likely to die. That article is poorly written to generate headlines and clicks.
Arguing over a specific IFR is also kind of pointless because the disease is so age and condition dependent. Whether the true overall IFR in a population is 1% or 0.4% doesn't really matter - it's a bad representation of the overall situation. COVID is a disease that kills a very large percentage of 80+ but is quite low risk for younger people. A single number doesn't capture or represent that. Demographic differences between 2 cities could easily cause a large skew in actual IFR.
Hospitals are (possibly) financially incentivized to diagnose COVID in the US. But this is a world-wide disease and no other country has the insane US healthcare system where that would matter.
> Taking this altogether, and we have plenty of wiggle room to suggest that even the excess deaths don't necessarily imply that COVID is extremely deadly.
That's not correct. It's absolutely clear from the numbers across many countries that COVID is extremely deadly if you are 80+ and not deadly at all if you are 15. Make of that what you will. Arguing over IFRs and hospital reimbursement is missing the point. It's simultaneously true that COVID is very deadly for some groups but may not be deadly at all for you and your friends.
There's a good argument to be made over how much of the excess death is due to secondary effects (untreated heart attacks, delayed cancer treatments, etc). But there's no way to arrange the numbers such that COVID doesn't obviously kill a lot of old people. Just look at the death rates in care homes / retirement homes. It was like a plague ravaging them.
2. My overall point is that a certain number of excess deaths are atrributable to the lockdown itself, rather than Covid. IIRC, the total number of reported deaths in NYC from heart disease, heart attacks, cancer, and a whole bunch of other diseases went down drastically; either Covid-19 magically cures all these other ailments, or a bunch of deaths are being mislabelled as Covid-related.
That depends. Some, apparently, are incentivized to do exactly the opposite.
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/legal-regulatory-issue...
Very low risk, but not no risk.
- Total COVID deaths: 28,137
- Deaths, 0-19 years of age: 18
- Deaths, 0-19 years of age, no pre-existing condition: 3
You are definitely going to see individual news reports on those 3 cases because they are exceptional and scary. But you aren't going to see individual news reports on the 25,721 people aged over 60 who died of COVID during the same period.
And keep in mind that not only are the raw numbers astronomically higher for the older age ranges, but those older age ranges are also much smaller populations. So it's even worse than it appears.
For example, 15,020 people aged 80+ died of COVID. But 80+ year olds are only 4.6% of the population in England. Under 18s make up more like 25% of the population but only account for 18 deaths. That's about as close to low risk as you can get without being zero risk.
That’s in the same ballpark. You can expect great precision with these estimations.
On the medium and long term instead it increases mortality, as expected.
Moreover, lockdowns and social distancing also reduced flu deaths.
This means that the total number of deaths attributable ti Covid may in fact be higher than the excess mortality over the average of previous years, although it is difficult to quantity the difference.
I personally am not "fearful" of COVID-19, as are many (most) people I know, so it is clearly possible for the general human.
Personally, my behaviour patterns have changed. I'm more aware of when someone I don't know is near me. When I hear about the vulnerable people in my close community who suddenly have to navigate the world with significantly increased risk, I feel worried for them.
I claimed you can have a pandemic without fear.
USA is very likely to significantly under count deaths from COVID-19.
See: Preliminary Estimate of Excess Mortality During the COVID-19 Outbreak — New York City, March 11–May 2, 2020
I've seen a number of rumours from brothers of friends or friends of brothers, but no actual doctors saying this.
Which isn't to say that Singapore's death rate is an undercount, but that higher testing rates can't explain it.
The fatality rate depends heavily on the demographics of the infected population. IFR of a entirely young demographic would be below 0.01%. IFR of a nursing home would be 3 orders of magnitude higher.
If someone shows me a low IFR I can safely bet that they surely aren’t finding 50% of their cases in their nursing homes.
Conversely, if 50%+ of your cases are in nursing homes, your population IFR is going to look a lot worse than if you had kept that relatively small population safe.
Singapore is militant on testing everyone. This presumably gives a high fidelity on the "true" spread of the virus.
What is also true is that Singapore has been extremely militant on isolating and controlling the virus. Their staff have ample PPE and their hospitals have very successfully isolated covid positive patients. For instance, anyone positive here is quarantined in a govt run facility and cannot return home until testing negative two days in a row. This may have recently relaxed but was true throughout circuit breaker/lockdown. I believe they are also trying to partition covid patients from non covid patients at the hospital level. (eg NCID)
Both anecdotally from frontline doctors, and from reading various news reports, a big problem about the first wave of covid was how the problems can snowball. Hospitals were very easily filled up with sick patients, but worse any existing patients could very easily catch covid. For example cancer patients who are immunocompromised.
So the lethality of the disease is actually a function of its local penetration as more people die if hospitals effectively experience cascading failure.
My understanding is that tipping point is quite fine, this is especially true back in March when everyone was still hoping it wouldn't reach their shores, and hospitals had very limited space for isolating covid patients and for treating patients that required ICU.
While hospitals have been empty I also know that hospitals have become extremely aggressive at not accepting patients. For example, my friend's mother was bedridden for a month but was never seen by a doctor. Meanwhile you have people dying at home and in care homes, so I think "hospitals are empty" doesn't tell the whole picture.
This is false. Even if it were true, you could look to NYC's excess deaths and see a huge surge in them that would correspond to a similar IFR.
This is a common "fact" asserted in these discussions, and it's never backed up with any evidence.
> The soaring death toll has been fueled by the adding of 3,778 people who were not tested for Covid-19 but are presumed to have died from it.
Singapore’s organised approach is clearly going to produce much more reliable statistics than NYs presumption based approach.
Doctor friends tell me it's usually pretty clear when they have a COVID patient.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-york-start-reportin...
> Asked about the numbers Wednesday, Dr. Oxiris Barbot, commissioner of the city Health Department, said the "unfortunate reality is there have been people who have died either directly because of COVID or indirectly because of COVID."
> Barbot said only time would tell what that number really meant. Some deaths, for example, could have been registered as having been caused by heart attacks because people had not yet developed coronavirus symptoms, when they should have been counted as probable COVID-19 victims, she said.
So NY officials state that their recorded death toll should reflect both direct and indirect fatalities, whatever an indirect fatality is supposed to mean, and that a person who dies without Covid symptoms, and who has not tested positive, should be counted as a fatality. So unless they have proof Covid wasn’t a contributing factor in any way, it’s counted, which does actually sound a lot like “ anybody who could have potentially been infected”...
The real scandal is that NY, NJ, CT, MA and a few other states allowed C19 to spread in elderly care facilities and nursing homes. NY and NJ inexplicably _sent COVID patients_ there. As of Jun 2nd, nursing homes are responsible for 40% of all US COVID deaths: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/06/nursing-.... If heads don't roll for this, I don't know if we have justice in this country.
Compare to New York City, where there have been an estimated 17,000 deaths (and even that's probably undercounted, going by some studies of excess deaths compared to previous years), and at the peak there were hundreds of unclaimed bodies per week being buried in mass graves.