Perhaps elderly people often trickle in to ICUs with respiratory issues and as long as it’s flu season no one really notices some more dying 80+ people especially as there was no test for this virus?
My perspective is someone in Seattle that had the worst asthma attack of my adult life a month ago. Literally couldn't breath well enough to talk for about a week with fever several nights. I've now seen my family get all symptoms but the breathing difficulty, fevers included. We can't get tested, as they are still mostly stonewalling. And I would likely be negative, even if I had it, at this point.
So, if I had it, and my family did too, why did I get severely hit, but they did not? Best I can fathom is baseline lung health.
Would love a better hypothesis. Or more tests I can look at.
I accept I might not have had it. And if we start seeing exponential increase in severe cases, I'll fully accept that. Until then, the evidence still looks heavy that I had it.
Bad reasoning?
The "mild cases" in the statistics include people with pneumonia.
A few minutes later: keep in mind that there are ~1 billion colds a year in the US. Covid-19 isn't the only explanation for an illness, and not even the likely one.
So, no, I did not get hit severe in that I didn't die. I'm having a hard time thinking I just had a bad cold. Especially when I have seen all four of my kids get coughs and fevers since...
The closest I have come to this level of sick was a decade ago when I got walking pneumonia. And that was easy comparatively.
I imagine most countries keep track of flu deaths and would have noticed an uptick.
Note also that I'm questioning if we will see an exponential rise in deaths. In large, I don't think that will be seen outside of places with poor lung health, if my hypothesis is right.
My hypothesis is a higher baseline lung health will result in a milder wave of infections. Essentially, it is not young that are getting milder cases, it is people with less damaged lungs.
And no matter how you slice it, the places that have had the most deaths, have by far the worst air quality.
So, my hypothesis is on base lung damage. And is spurred by kids not getting hit. I find it hard to think kids aren't getting sick.
So, my hypothesis centers around trying to give an explanation for why that population isn't impacted by severe cases. Going off how bad it hit me, if that is what hit me, best I have is lung health. And I don't have unhealthy lungs, all told. I do, however, have a distant history of asthma, and I find it plausible it did damage my lungs long ago.
To flip it some. They say even if you survive, you may have lasting lung scarring. What if that preceded the covid?
That doesn't make sense. Covid follows the same exponential curve in all countries. If the US has a bunch of latent infections, but no huge surge in pneumonia, then that would imply there is something special about Americans that keep them from developing the worst symptoms, or something special about American old people that, despite contact with the young silent carriers, they do not develop the disease. There is no reason to believe either of those are true.
They say we are a week or so behind Italy. Italy is experiencing hospital overruns. If the week-behind estimate (based on actual numbers) is overly conservative, then we would have expected to see hospital overruns in the United States from old people with pneumonia. However, we don't have that. Thus, if the week-behind estimate is overly conservative, we are certainly not at the same point as Italy or ahead of Italy, so we can say that we are anywhere from 1 week to 1 day behind Italy which is still a pretty good bound.
The week behind curve on Italy is one to watch. My assertion is that we have had infections hitting here for at least a month. Probably longer. If we don't get the same severe case spike in a week, will everyone just keep upping their models? Because that is what it looks like people are doing.
The US has three times as many ICU beds per capita as Italy. https://web.archive.org/web/20200313034908/https://www.forbe... I don't think it's a coincidence that Germany, which has performed much better than Italy, has almost as many as the US.
Is a question I haven't asked. Do they usually see more pneumonia than places like the states, anyways? Could be a proxy to test my hypothesis.
Could be, but not necessarily because coronavirus and flu target the same pool of people.
Those on risk groups had being first filtered (indirectly killed) by the economic scam. People unable to accurately heat their home in winter for example would suffer more pneumonias and having a logical explanation, nobody would care to search for a new virus among those cases.
Increase in coronavirus kills could be mitigated by other previous conditions and masked with a decrease in flu kills (by previous decrease in the pool of posible flu victims).
On the other hand, the virus appearing in Wuhan market was always of problematic explanation.
One hypothese could be that the market was linked with the labs somehow (origin in the labs). I always though this as a possibility worthing to explore.
... but I'm starting to think that another hypothese could be that Wuhan was not the first location, but one of the few places equiped to identify the virus and understand that was something more than a common cold. Virus taxonomy is really expensive, not much people can do it with new viruses and most hospitals will not care to test for just a strain of a common cold.
But I’m thinking they probably test at least bad cases for almost every common virus so they would have been alarmed by even a few deaths from pneumonia without positive tests. This is why I don’t believe the theory that many were infected long ago.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-nu...