When I was in med school you didn't die because of the flu. People died because they had diabetes or HTA which got some complications like low immunity, a failing kidney and so on.
Did these things change in current medicine?
Did these things change in current medicine?
Then, like all winter time respiratory illness it kills people who have comorbidities that probably wouldn't have killed them without covid-19. The people with moderate but well controlled asthma or diabetes -- the chronic conditions that we don't think of as life-ending.
Then the ICUs start feeling pretty overwhelmed, and the ages of the people dying gets lower, and they have fewer and less severe comorbidities. Maybe only a small percentage of these people die, but covid-19 infects so many people that this small percentage of a very large number ends up being pretty large.
This is the point healthcare systems start building field hospitals in sports halls or convention centres. It's when they requisition ice rinks to act as temporary morgues. They start locking down movement just to try to reduce this very large number of people getting infected.
ICU doctors and nurses are now overwhelmed, and they're improvising PPE out of binbags. They're reusing PPE using weird new sterilisation techniques. Other HCPs have less access to PPE, because it's all been used up. Where they would have had FPP3 and eye-shields they now have a plastic apron and a loop surgical mask.
And they're faced with something they feel like they should be familiar with (pneumonia is pretty common) but which doesn't act like other types of pneumonia. Here's one example, but there are loads more: https://twitter.com/iamyourgasman/status/1241267189048578048
> When I was in med school you didn't die because of the flu.
The real situation is a bit more complicated than that, isn't it? Plenty of people die from flu, and it's the flu that kills them, and we have medical statisticians who can tell us what the excess mortality is each year.
This is simply false.
The most extensive research here, posted in HN yesterday indicated that Corona represents about '1 year of living' worth of risk for individuals.
It's killing a lot of people with 'conditions' who would otherwise live a long time.
All said covid is >7x as deadly as seasonal flu and you have more deaths with no comorbidities.
You have some studies proving this? Because all the studies I have read flu is a lot more dangerous. For all ages.
Every study I've seen the seasonal flu has a case mortality rate that varies form year to year in the close neighborhood of 0.1%, the low estimate of the case mortality rate I've seen for covid-19 is around 1% in countries with functional healthcare systems. The ratio of cases requiring hospitalization is similarly at least an order of magnitude greater for Covid-19, which is also why it poses a danger (already being realized in several parts of the United States, and very much realized, e.g., in Italy) of overwhelming the healthcare system, driving the car mortality rate higher for all conditions, including itself.
We don't annually overwhelm the healthcare system because of the seasonal flu and exhaust ICU capacity and PPE supplies, which should be a clue that whatever you are seeing claiming the flu is worse is not only bullshit, but bullshit that isn't even trying very hard to convince anyone paying even a little bit of attention.
The only data broad enough to predict true cases is Diamond Princess or perhaps Iceland where you've had enormous testing. Even on Diamond Princess, you have 10/712 infections resulting in death which is worse than flu (for this population), but not 10x as bad. Iceland has 2 deaths and 25 hospitalized against 500+ cases 1.5w ago, suggestive of a sub 1% CFR.
Additionally, flu CFR is reduced by targetted vaccination of the most vulnerable people (demographics of who get infected are more likely to survive than general population).
Yes, and COVID-19 would be a lot less bad if we had a broadly effective (even if as imperfect as the season at flu vaccine tends to be) generally available vaccine that would naturally be more likely to be taken by the most vulnerable, but alas we don't, which reinforces the point that COVID-19 is, in the real world, significantly worse than the flu, even if you could construct a counterfactual scenario where that would be less true despite the diseases each retaining their intrinsic traits.
What would change though if that were true is that the calculus could shift away from locking down (SIP) to limited social distancing measures (to reduce r0) and a complete isolation of your most vulnerable populations. Basically, go for some sort of herd immunity if you can keep the herd's IIR below 0.01% or so.
You still have to compare that to the baseline of the demographic. I.e. once you’re over eighty, you have almost a 1% probability to die within the next month.
True absolutely, but not true if you condition on me being fit enough for a cruise today.
10/710 infections on the Diamond Princess died. Would you expect flu to kill that many? (Older population but healthier than average older population).
So what you are seeing in Italy (or Wuhan for that matter) is a symptom of:
1. A 4 month flu season compacted into a month 2. Hospitals collapsing from the load pulling death rate way up. 3. A lack of vaccination (which limits the deaths/year due to flu)
Honestly, we won't know what the case was until a few months from now when broad, randomized seriological tests are run.
And of course lack of vacination is an important factor, but you can't exclude it.
edit: also even if it would kill in percentage the same amount of infected, an higher infection rate will converge to an higher total infected percentage of the population, so an higher absolute number of dead and critically ill.
“The way in which we code deaths in our country is very generous in the sense that all the people who die in hospitals with the coronavirus are deemed to be dying of the coronavirus.”
Flu kills millions people every year