Italy’s coronavirus death toll is far higher than reported
wsj.com
wsj.com
That means many things that might not be lethal if treated quickly and with the best care, for example injuries from a car accident or a heart attack, are now entering a stressed health care system and likely have worse expected outcomes.
Then, all the folks who would normally be secondary concerns and receiving preventative care are now most likely not receiving that care. It's less likely that these develop into death, but could easily turn into serious health complications.
It's important to remember that it's not just covid-19 we're dealing with. It's covid-19 plus all the stuff we'd normally be taking care of. We'll be unwinding this ball of yarn for a long time after addressing the virus itself.
[0] A pretty extreme example is here in Vietnam where I'm "sheltering in place" -- normally an average of two people a day die in traffic accidents in Saigon alone. Traffic has been reduced so much (although there isn't a strict lockdown) that it's apparently down to one person in two weeks. Meanwhile, Covid-19 hasn't directly killed anyone in the whole country (according to official figures).
It does only have country-level data, so some amount of excess mortality in one sub-country region (e.g. Lombardy) can get diluted by the rest of the country, although Lombardy is 1/6 of the population of Italy so significant excess should show up.
https://www.tweedekamer.nl/downloads/document?id=fb38642a-88...
That is not true and it doesn't reduce anything
It's not a few days that change things
Besides, in Lombardy the real pollution problem is due the lack of strong winds and the actual low precipitations
Rain can sometimes dilute them and winds disperse them
Another problem with the perception of reduced pollution is that people think that cars running are the major source of air pollution, while home warming is, so the reduction is also due to the warm season coming.
Cars running major effect is picking up fine dust with their tyres and disperse them into the air
Which increases air pollution but also makes it less persistent
When on the ground it becomes more dangerous in the long term
https://www.wsj.com/articles/japan-sees-silver-lining-to-cor...
But yes there will be a big negative effect due to the lockdown I’m guessing psych majors have their thesis material for the next 5 years easy.
Not all, but the higher the infection, the more the crackdown on quarantine.
Of highest concern are things like childhood asthma, baby accidents (swallowing batteries, etc). Stuff that would need immediate attention in the ER, but might get brushed aside a little too long with serious consequences.
It goes back several years and you can clearly see the last influenza pandemics (2017). It also show the mortality for each member country and of course italy. At the moment there is no increase in mortality there.
They write on their website:
Note concerning COVID-19 related mortality as part of the all-cause mortality figures reported by EuroMOMO
Over the past few days, the EuroMOMO hub has received many questions about the weekly all-cause mortality data and the possible contribution of any COVID-19 related mortality. Some wonder why no increased mortality is observed in the reported mortality figures for the COVID-19 affected countries.
The answer is that increased mortality that may occur primarily at subnational level or within smaller focal areas, and/or concentrated within smaller age groups, may not be detectable at the national level, even more so not in the pooled analysis at European level, given the large total population denominator. Furthermore, there is always a few weeks of delay in death registration and reporting. Hence, the EuroMOMO mortality figures for the most recent weeks must be interpreted with some caution.
Therefore, although increased mortality may not be immediately observable in the EuroMOMO figures, this does not mean that increased mortality does not occur in some areas or in some age groups, including mortality related to COVID-19.
EDIT: I found a non-paywall version of the article on MSN and that's essentially what they're reporting. "Nowhere in Italy has been harder hit than Bergamo, a city of about 120,000 people. In March 2019, 125 people died in the city. This March, 553 people died."
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/italys-coronavirus-deat...
4.5k excess deaths in March, on a total population of 607k.
We know the US has drastically under tested which again results in under reporting.
The reason Britain has an extreme 8% mortality rate on its positive cases, is because they aren't testing properly (and haven't been). They'd already be at 100,000+ cases if they were testing just at the rate the US is. France as another example has such an extreme case mortality rate (7%) in part because they're not testing enough people. Their positive result would be far higher than ~60k right now if they were (and that mortality rate would drop considerably).
One of the reasons Germany's mortality rate is so low, is they're catching a very large number of all positive cases via massive testing. If the US were testing at the rate of Germany, its case mortality rate (which is around 2.3%) would drop by more than 1/2.
This site has done a very good job at bringing together all the available testing data across the states.
> If your symptoms are mild, you should stay at home and monitor your condition. Testing is only offered to patients who are severely ill and need hospitalization.
EDIT: Le Monde has a story up about this. They describe the nursing homes in France as a ‘grey zone’ in terms of the death toll right now - everyone knows there are deaths but they are not included in the official figures yet. The article meantions nursing homes in three regions of France that have had, between them, nearly 1000 deaths attributed to COVID-19 so far. None of these deaths are so far counted in the 4000 ‘official deaths’ reported each evening. The article also notes that there are 7400 nursing homes in France, a number that rises to 10,000 if you count similar structures (hospices, for example). Scary times.
https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2020/04/01/coronaviru...
This is different to the way deaths are normally attributed to a cause, in that every single death of a person who tested positive is recorded as a Covid-19 death regardless of the severity of their Covid-19 symptoms or any other factors. This has an upward pressure on the reported Covid-19 mortality vs. other diseases.
Separately from that, in any country there are of course people dying who were not tested before death and thus were not a confirmed case. They are not recorded as Covid-19 deaths. This has a downward pressure on the reported Covid-19 mortality.
The relative magnitude of the upward pressure and the downward pressure are pretty much unknown at this point.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.corriere.it/politica/20_mar...
It looks like there is overall a lower number, especially for 0-4 year olds. Staying home saves lives beyond covid...?
https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(19)30328-5/ful...
> “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.
> “On re-evaluation by the National Institute of Health, only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88 per cent of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity - many had two or three,” he says.
So while it may be true that many deaths have not been reported, it’s also true that many deaths are misreported.
Source: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...
You think that someone who has COVID-19 asymptomatically, and dies from being crushed by a falling piano should be included in the official death total?
If you applied the same logic to prostate cancer, probably 50%+ of men "die" of prostate cancer.
The coroner is supposed to make these judgements, and it’s not entirely clear how you should aggregate them into a big-number statistic. If you go by official cause of death, nobody dies of a cold in most countries. If you go by a positive test, loads of people do.
Bear in mind what we want here is not some absolute, objective truth which cannot exist anyway - as pointed out in other comments, where do you draw the line with this stuff? If someone is 90 and dies after having tested positive, did they die of a new preventable disease or was it just their time? The distinction can end up being arbitrary.
What people care about is numbers comparable with other diseases so the strength of response can be correctly calibrated. And clearly these numbers are useless for that, especially as flu isn't tracked or reported in the same way.
If someone tests positive to the flu but also have cancer, should be considered a flu victim?