The deal is that we are dealing with the power of large numbers. You can cherry-pick whatever case you want to fit your narrative. It does not mean its relevant information.
Then again, she works in a children's health clinic. I know what vector is probably going to bring COVID into our house.
From my observations, the people who are most flippant about this seem to be boomers and young adults 20-25. I still see groups of young adults on the sidewalks, clearly not roommates, even though our state is in lockdown, and we're right next to a state that's starting to overwhelm their hospitals because of this kind of behavior.
Does she not have another place she can stay? I'm assuming she is aware of the risk to you?
Never met you before, but as a fellow human being that situation sounds very high risk for you.
I'm very glad that none of my dad's five kids boomeranged right now. I had to cancel visiting him. Terrible situation.
Someone once gave me a definition of family... "If you have to go there, they have to let you in".
On the flip side, I think we're all going to get exposed sooner or later, over the course of the next year or so. I'll just get exposed sooner than ideal.
On the plus side, she may be moving entirely to work from home in the near future, as they'll be closing inpatient services at her clinic. On the minus side, her brother just got a job at a grocery store after losing his retail job at the mall (mall closed), so now he's probably an even worse vector than she is.
Distancing arguably should create evolutionary pressure towards a weaker, asymptomatic, more contagious virus. And reckless behavior in the segments of population unaffected by the virus may put evolutionary pressure to make it a stronger, but not as contagious virus.
(an uninformed opinion of a software engineer / researcher)...
This doesn't make sense to me. Distancing reduces number of cases and chances to spread infections, reducing chances for successful mutations.
It seems that instead of having multiple strains you will end up with most resilient strain in the end. But that's probably better as you have to fight a single strain then.
I spoke with my mother recently and we were lamenting how people were completely ignoring the "JUST STAY HOME" guidance. As the call was ending she mentioned how she was about to have her sisters and friends over for wine the next day. To which I replied that she was doing exactly what she was lamenting others doing.
I think most people just assume they are the exception and can be trusted to do this correctly, when in fact the guidance is the way it is explicitly because that is not the case.
Infecting others who have no option to completely isolate or are just plain unlucky. Some of which will have possibly life-long lung damage. And some will die who would have otherwise survived.
Responsible people isolate, because they don't want to harm or worse, kill others.
Personally, I'm more in fear of having some non-coronavirus related emergency and not being to get good healthcare.
Yes, it’s exceedingly rare to see a case like this, but what’s not rare is seeing the examples of people not taking this disease seriously, even some public officials.
Getting people to cooperate with drastic disease mitigation efforts won’t happen if there’s a probability embedded in that headline. People are doing that in their heads already when they think “this can’t happen to me, so let’s all go to the beach today.”
If what you say is true we should have seen trust in the media go up and down a lot over time. In fact it's really only gone down, with one exception - in the USA after Trump got elected trust in the media went up amongst Democrats only. Presumably because they realised the media was completely partisan and in their "tribe". Trust amongst Republicans, which like Democrats had been falling for a long time, completely collapsed at that point.
In most parts of the world it's just been one downward slide.
In these events I don't think the media deserve the blame though. They're not helping but they're not pushing a pre-determined agenda, I think. The evidence that we're in the grip of mass hysteria and not a deadly pandemic is growing enormously every day, and much of that evidence actually is being surfaced in newspaper reports. It's just not affecting the overall narrative yet.
Do you have any evidence to show it’s worse than it ever was?
“Americans love conspiracy theories. Conspiratorial rhetoric in presidential campaigns and its distracting impact on the body politic have been a fixture in American elections from the beginning, but conspiracies flourished in the 1820s and 1830s, when modern-day American political parties developed, and the expansion of white male suffrage increased the nation’s voting base. “
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/conspiracy-theories-a...
Now more and more people get exposed to more than one viewpoint of reality and are beginning to not blindly trust the media. This leads to people actually having to discuss points that previously only had to be stated, for everyone to believe them or at least to not have lots of people disagreeing showing up and having the opportunity to talk with other disagreeing people.
So we get amusing situations like holocaust deniers getting told it's illegal to do so, which of course only strengthens their belief. But rarely is there somebody showing up refuting, since that takes effort.
That leaves us in a post-truth world, where nobody simply can state something and have everyone believe it. Instead everything that gets questioned needs to be discussed, like "Do vaccines cause autism?" or "Are there more than two sexes?". Kind of like the difference between having a King and having democracy.
Personally, I blame the media for being verified liars for the loss of trust in them. Everyone can be wrong on occasion, but it takes a liar to stick to their guns after being proven wrong. I mean, did anyone ever actually believe that a "magic" bullet killed Kennedy?
One of the primary causes of the Spanish-American War was Hearst's newspapers putting outrageous headlines on papers to drive sales.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_of_the_Spanish%E2%8...
I guess you can't measure truth in an absolute sense, but you can measure people's perception of it, and trust in institutions - especially the press - is at all time lows.
I know some who are of the opinion that they could die at any point anyways so they would rather just live life. Some also worry that prolonged quarantines could damage the country and decimate small businesses along with the middle class. For them they would rather take the risk and sacrifice for a better future for their kids. Of course there are others who are self centered jerks, but the point is that there are good arguments on both sides.
Also, with post truth... A lot of people who were, up until this pandemic started, denying basic biological facts. Some of that ideology had even begun to makes its way into the major research and medical schools. That doesn't help with credibility when the same individuals start saying that everyone needs to quarantine.
The same people who were censoring people based on ideology, at times over facts, are now claiming that they are censoring "mis-information". Once again, many people are naturally skeptical. In many ways this is one of the natural result of "post truth" fiction and ideology being favored over facts. We reap what we sew.
so let's keep this in mind before we get in our high horse about people not listening to the media and the government because of this crap. The R0 of the disease is much lower in countries where everyone is wearing face masks of any kind.
Everyone on reading this should Google the fact that that homemade face mask made out of cloth are actually highly effective in reducing the spread of this illness.
I meet doubters all the time who tell me that "home made masks make it worse" when the masks (not the n95 respirators) worn by nurses, that are loose fitting but prevent particles of saliva from entering nose or mouth are generally accepted as helpful.
With proper treatment nearly all of those critical cases will survive. But if the health care system becomes overwhelmed that may no longer be true.
It is trying to sink in the idea that young people are not invincible to COVID-19 and that they need to practice social distancing, if not for the benefit of society as a whole, then for their own self benefit.
Not a per-capita number. Not a percentage of young people - a percentage of sick people. Folks in that wide age bracket are around 30% of the US total population. The old - 15%?
Early US data[1] showed:
* 20% of (COVID-19 patients hospitalized) were age 20-44 years.
* 12% of (COVID-19 patients in ICU) were age 20-44
The same report also tallied result by age group, stating that:
* 14-20% of (COVID-19 patients age 20-44) were hospitalized
* 2-4% of (COVID-19 patients age 20-44) were in ICU
Ranges due to not all data sources reporting hospitalization/ICU status.
To add some weight to your argument, the official stats from italy offer clear data [1]:
- 1.1% of deaths in Italy < 50 years old
- No deaths < 30
- 99% with comorbidities, 75% with at least 2 comorbidities.
[1] https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Report-C...
The hospitalisations of young people all so far appear to be exceptional cases. This is also true of the reports of "fully healthy people". So far every case I'm aware of like that has turned out to be a lie. It implies the lockdowns could be restricted to the elderly and the frail.
In one case in the UK a woman under 40 was admitted to ICU with no pre-existing health conditions. Worrying, right? She'd been taking 8 ibuprofen a day. Ibuprofen suppresses the immune system and 8 per day is a staggeringly high overdose. The maximum dose for an adult is 4 per day so she was killing her immune system completely.
In another case there was a death of a young person in Spain, reported as no pre-existing conditions. After the death he was diagnosed with an unrecognised leukemia.
It's very likely given how extreme the statistical evidence is that basically all such cases have some sort of mitigating factor. Young people who are healthy and not doing stupid things don't seem to die or even get critically ill.
This is just wrong. The numbers are changing all the time, but as of a few days ago, 38% of hospitalized coronavirus patients in the US were between 20 and 54.
What this indicates to me is that Italy was testing only the worst patients. This whole scare to me reeks of sampling bias. We only test the worst patients for covid 19 which ups the mortality rate.
The truth is -- people who are at risk should social distance themselves rather than the general population. We want herd immunity to develop for this disease -- that means having young healthy people be exposed to it.
No one knows what percent of the broader population in Italy have been infected, asymptomatic or otherwise.
We can hope the number is closer to 1 million or 10 million than it is to 100,000. Because you can’t hide the severe and critical cases, a wider incidence means a lower severity. But we have no scientific data on this absolutely crucial statistic.
The only proxy we have is the positive rate for tests that are performed. Recently it was reported that the positive testing rate in NYC was as a high as 28%. This implies that the general population infection incidence is extremely high, e.g. several million cases in NYC. Ideally you would want to see a positive test rate closer to 1-3%.
And exactly as you say: if there is a large population of infected people, the absolute number of people who fit in these small percentage tragedies is actually large.
As far as I know, even 500 years ago it wouldn't have been that difficult to reach age 70 once you've survived your childhood.
But to your point: Someone else is disputing you on this, but I would say even that it's irrelevant what life expectancy was 100 years ago. Today in the present reality we are talking about mostly preventable death. I don't think we should be so arrogant to say that we can prevent misfortune all the time, but we're not talking about inevitability either. We have medical technology and progress for a reason.
This was proven by the response to the polls (especially the FiveThirtyEight one) in the 2016 presidential election, surely?
Fear will only subside long time after fatigue creeps in, but before that no of cases should plateau.
I mean, there are even cases of young people just randomly dying without any visible cause. Yes, not only the elderly can die just like that. No one really pays this any mind either.
There have been reports that young people without other complications are not dying from coronavirus. That's why reports of someone young and healthy dying of COVID are getting attention, because it runs contrary to what has been widely reported.
Sure an individual story of a horrific crash, the pain and suffering is heart wrenching. News outlets love to play that up. Yes, it could also be you, but when you put it into a larger picture it tells a different story.
Then there are the stories of airplane crashes. They get massive coverage yet, statistically, planes are safer than being in a car.
BTW, this isn’t “anecdotal evidence”. This is an actual, verifiable data point.
While this narrative may fit what is perceived as a good cause, do we want it at the expense of truth? Do we want every story to first be questioned, "what are they trying to get us to do by telling us this?"
I’m confused by that, what do you mean? What here is untrue? What is the “truth” that should be reported here? Someone died of COVID, someone who was young and didn’t have other health factors, which is abnormal compared to what we’ve heard about nearly all other cases of COVID death so far.
Nobody claimed this is somehow a huge number of cases, and I think it’s well understood - and not being challenged here — that old people and sick people have much, much higher risk factors for dying of Coronavirus.
But isn’t it worth knowing that the risk distribution does not start at 70 years old, that it starts at 18 and goes up?
possibly
> and didn’t have other health factors
an aunt is saying so
> who was young
the only thing that can be regarded as certain
Those details will be proven true or untrue by more official sources, and probably today. My point was not that I know they're true, it's that they are facts that can be checked. But I have no specific reason to be more skeptical of this report than of any other COVID deaths I've read about, do you?
The big problem surfacing at the moment is deaths being reported as 'caused by covid' when they're in reality deaths that were about to happen anyway, and the victim happened to be infected e.g. cancer sufferers who were already in terminal decline.
There's increasing evidence that the excess death rate - deaths that truly wouldn't have happened if not for COVID - might be nearly zero.
This should already be the standard operating procedure.
You’ve moved the goalposts to say that if it kills even one young person then young people generally are at risk. The claim was never that zero young people have died. Just vanishingly few.
DR. BIRX (March 23, 2020):
"In the mortality data that has been provided to us, there has been no child under 15 that has succumbed to the virus in Europe. There was the one 14-year-old in China. So we still see that there is less severity in children, and so that should be reassuring to the moms and dads out there.
To Generation Z and to my millennial colleagues who have been really at the forefront of many of these responses: Less than 1 percent of all the mortality is less than 50. And so this is, I think, also a very important point.
That doesn’t mean that individuals won’t have severe disease. So still 99 percent of all the mortality coming out of Europe, in general, is over 50, and preexisting conditions. The preexisting condition piece still holds in Italy, with the majority of the mortality having three or more preexisting conditions."
No, that is incorrect. It has nothing to do with the size of the sample.
"Anecdotal evidence is evidence from anecdotes: evidence collected in a casual or informal manner and relying heavily or entirely on personal testimony."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence
"Anecdotal" also means data that is not verifiable. In this case, the data is verifiable even if the news spread via Facebook.
> trying to extrapolate from a narrow sample to draw a broad conclusion. [...] You've moved the goalposts to say that if it kills even one young person then young people are generally at risk.
I did not draw a broad conclusion, I stated clearly in this thread that this is one sample, and old people are at much higher risk. So did the article. You are constructing a straw man argument that doesn't accurately reflect or counter my point of view.
Whether zero people worldwide under 15 have died or 10 people worldwide under 15 have died doesn’t meaningfully change the obvious conclusion, when the number of cases is several hundred thousand.
It seemed like you were saying that one child dying from COVID was relevant because someone claimed zero children died. Anyone claiming literally zero children have died from COVID are uninformed. The fact remains that children almost universally do not die from COVID.