The much-higher, 50% numbers that were being thrown around were obviously overestimated - precisely because it takes a week or two or three for some people to start showing symptoms.
As such, it's incredibly unlikely that the # of real cases is some large multiplier of the number of confirmed cases in any areas that are regularly testing people with flu-like symptoms.
Are you referring to [1]? As far as I know that's the only follow up, but your summary doesn't match their results.
[1] https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.E...
For example?
Many of those hypotheses coincided with claims that the lockdown was unnecessary or excessive.
This is it. The (short-term) financial incentives to opening up the economy are _massive_. Anyone trying to support that will jump all over some weakly supported hypothesis like this.
A hypothetical young healthy man might be quite happy to accept 0.37% of people dying (the vast majority of whom are old and/or near death any way) if it means he doesn't have to put his life on hold for a year and can start dating again. Young males routinely take much higher risks for mating opportunities. I'm honestly surprised at the level of compliance so far, but I doubt it will last.
But death numbers and hospitalization numbers don't lie. Sure, different countries are counting deaths differently, making it hard to compare them to each other, but the trajectories don't lie. And if you look at growth trajectories, no country is experiencing uncontrolled exponential growth at this point: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-daily-deaths-trajec...
If deaths are on a downward trajectory, it means that infections have been on a downward trajectory for weeks. And that's how we can know that it's controlled, without knowing how many have it or have had it, while being asymptomatic.
Except for when they do. Easter just passed and the the trajectories are plotted up to and including today, when Sweden for example is adding deaths to dates two weeks back every day, and the last 5-7 days _ALWAYS_ looks like a downward trajectory. The last little spike there from before easter has grown by 35% since after easter and is still growing daily.
You can't draw conclusions based on the trajectory of the last few days when an absolute majority of cases are added days, and up to weeks after.
And in Sweden's case, if you also look at the number of ICU admissions, they've been flat for weeks, and those numbers have very little lag.
I'm not saying everything is fine, I'm not saying we're over the peak, but I am saying that it's not the case that any country is experiencing uncontrolled exponential growth and is going to turn into a zombie wasteland in a couple of days.
By ignoring the hospitalized/homestuck difference one can have a clearer idea of what is happening. Sadly I don't know of a way to get the data for the whole world.
One interpretation could be that a large number of vulnerable people escaped death from regular ILIs this European season, only to sadly succome to this pandemic.
If you look at the euromomo information for a country it is averaged across all regions, that includes those regions that started lockdown before severe outbreak, so the spike averages down to be small. I.e. you can’t look at the country info and make conclusions about the severity of the disease.
Do you think that a very mild flu season could possibly have made this outbreak worse?
Euromomo [1] has per country breakdown. While some countries are relatively unaffected (yet?), bringing the average down, some, like Italy, Uk, Spain are way beyond the 2017 peak.
As pointed elsethread, possibly because of lockdown, at least in Italy, the worst has been confined to the northen regions (about one fourth of the population but more than half the confirmed cases). If allowed to spread equally everywhere, the numbers would presumably be higher.
[1] https://www.euromomo.eu/outputs/zscore_country_total.html
That will be because you are using 1.1.1.1 for your DNS: archive.org has decided to give a bung IP to CloudFlare just because... (personally I think CloudFlare are doing the right thing here - protecting your privacy - unfortunately archive disagree. I think archive are wrong since DNS is often cached which is much the same).
the current number depends on lockdown measures. We didn't have lockdowns in 2016, and it is likely if we didn't have them now we'd be much worse. You can look at the graph for Sweden which decided to only apply mild measures for a comparison which shows this is much worse than the 16/17 flu.
The rest of the reasoning is still correct, and I have heard it pointed out before, though I believe you meant warmer _winter_ :)
But this isn't necessarily true. You have to look at the total mortality, and the excess mortality. If a country has high corona mortality, but no excess mortality, it means that most people dying from coronavirus are people who normally would have died from something else anyway. And whatever policies that country has have to be good enough.
If a country has high corona mortality and excess mortality, then it's fair to say that that country's policies aren't enough, and it's fair to have the discussion whether you could do more or should do more.
Sweden's ICU admissions number for a particular day usually takes a week or two to settle down.
For instance, here's how the numbers were updated each following day for the number of ICU admissions on the second of April: 42, 42, 43, 46, 47, 49, 48, 49, 49, 49, 49, 52. So it took until the 14. of April for the reporting of the second of April to settle down---and we still don't know if it's going to change again or not.
Source: I copied the numbers from the official site https://www.icuregswe.org/data--resultat/covid-19-i-svensk-i...
As far as I can tell, the official site doesn't record a history of what they reported, so the history is just what I manually copied to a file once a day when I happened to look.
Do I think the lag is crucial? No. But it's unexpected to me.
Seems to discredit the notion that infections are vastly different than modelling.
(0) https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/10/less-than-1-of...
The study, conducted from 1-6 April, tested 1,554 people. It did not involve antibody tests, which can tell whether a person was previously infected and is therefore probably immune. Future studies should involve antibody tests, the government has said, to inform policy as the country starts to reopen shops from 14 April.
Is South Korea still consideered an outlier WRT testing regimes? Not to throw shade on their great efforts in leading the way, but many other countries now have extensive testing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_testing#Virus_testing...
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-testing#testing
I'd be wary of handing out superlatives just yet in any case.
Death numbers are close but still have some uncertainty. New York for example is reporting much higher than usual numbers of people found dead at home. Not clear if they have been tested, if they are victims, or if maybe they had unrelated medical problems but couldn't/wouldn't go to a hospital under these circumstances.
There are many scenarios where people in need of care won’t get it. It’s a vicious cycle and it’s fueling the ignorant rhetoric downplaying the broader issues.
Only 1/3 of those excess deaths were put down to covid.
Well... there is some indication hospital staff are being directed to assume all cases are COVID19 until proven different. Patients that die with presumptive COVID19 are reported as COVID19 deaths.
So agree, numbers don’t lie. But... handling emergencies effectively can lead to problematic numbers.
We see this happening now in the US with unofficial deaths getting lumped into the C19 deaths, some of which may very well have been flu.
What are those?
If someone has cancer and then gets a bad cold and dies, what should the cause of death be? Or what if they fell, etc.?
They also recognize a a contributory cause of death, defined as “a significant condition that unfavourably influences the course of the morbid process and thus contributes to the fatal outcome, but which is not related to the disease or condition directly causing death.”
Because that is what is happening when you take an extremely sick person who finally died and slap a "death by covid-19" label on them.
When influenza deaths are estimated each year, the models assume that a lot of people will die due to the virus but the cause will be recorded as heart failure or pneumonia without etiology. From the perspective of the epidemiologist, they are influenza deaths, even if they were old and frail with bad hearts.
If someone ends up catching pneumonia because their immune system was compromised as a result of immunotherapy, pneumonia was the direct cause of death and the cancer lead up to pneumonia.
The fact that we have to have this argument about basic death statistics is depressing. If you really wanted to play around with the numbers like what you're suggesting, you could easily make it so covid-19 causes zero deaths just by looking far back enough to find a contributing factor. Like age, immune system issues, other injuries, obesity etc.
Or that cancer causes zero deaths...
Don't get me wrong I think it's perfectly valid to use statistics for estimating the impact/IFR but you can't like many people with an agenda pick and choose your counting methods.
When it comes to wearing surgical masks, yes, hospital staff are to assume that everyone's got it because it's pretty annoying to get it from a guy who came in for toenail fungus or a lady who came in for a prenatal screen and then be out of work for 2+ weeks. This is literally what has happened across Italy, China, New York, and other places. It's not like you write down in some electronic medical record "Man comes in with complaint of unattractive toenails. Presumed to be infected with COVID-19 without evidence." That's too damn much work.
On the other hand, when people die, some are being listed as presumed to have COVID-19 even in the absence of a positive test. Here's what the doctor sitting across from me says about how he's directed to fill out death certificates (yes, we're drinking Scotch, but this ought to still be accurate): On death certificates you are supposed to write a primary cause of death and then the interval between death and preceding underlying causes. For instance, if someone dies of ARDS preceded by dry cough, fever, difficulty breathing, you can say that they died of ARDS with presumed COVID-19 infection as an underlying cause. (You're apparently not really supposed to write "cardiac arrest" as a primary cause of death, because by definition, when you die your heart stops... so it's tautological in some sense and thus useless.) Another example: you could write "pneumonia" as primary cause of death, preceded by lung cancer preceded by asthma, and you could check a box for smoking but you couldn't write smoking down as a cause of death.
If you were hit by a bus and died of injuries, but you'd had COVID-19 symptoms beforehand, the certifying physician would need to write down "injuries from being hit by a bus", or rather in medicalese, "motor vehicle accident, pedestrian (ICD-10-CM subfamily V04)" [1]. COVID-19 in that case is not a cause of death, and that rando legislator from Minnesota who claims it is has a reading comprehension problem. My mom who works in the death certificate department will definitely be checking anything he signed.....
Why not only write down confirmed COVID-19 cases? Because, for instance, at the hospital at which the physician across from me works (in the COVID clinic, in fact), they serve about 100,000 patients but are allotted 25 rapid COVID tests a day. Since each patient needs two tests because of the high false-negative rate, that's 12 rapid-tested patients a day. Wowza. Yeah, let's use that on the guy who walked into the ER and got intubated within 20 minutes. Why bother?
Anyhow, interested to hear about your experiences.
[1] https://www.icd10data.com/ICD10CM/Codes/V00-Y99/V00-V09/V04-
My brother and I discussed this at length.
He claims (and I have no reason to doubt) that New York has 5x the usual death rate right now. About 2x the usual death rate is clearly COVID-19, another 1x is probably COVID-19 but not tested, another 1x is unclear and the rest are people who likely would have died anyways.
An example of that unclear bucket are people dying from heart attacks. COVID-19 stresses the heart which can cause that. However thanks to COVID-19, EMTs have moved to "Do not do CPR and if we cannot revive, do not take to the hospital." This procedure makes sense because CPR on a COVID-19 patient sprays the whole room with COVID-19. And taking someone with it to a hospital likely will cause them to get it, and it is particularly bad in people with heart problems.
However it also means that heart attacks have a higher likelihood of killing you than usually.
So..people die of heart attacks. Is that heart attack attributable to COVID-19? Is it fatal just because COVID-19 has overwhelmed the health system? We don't know and aren't trying to find out because knowing isn't the priority in a world where our health care system is stretched to the breaking point. All we really know is that people are dying.
They most certainly do lie. I know people who work in a particular police department, and they have been exercising a policy of not testing people they find dead. Situations like somebody found dead at home in bed, perhaps some blood that looks like it’s been coughed onto a pillow. Whoever’s in charge of policy wants the numbers lower, so they don’t do a test, and the death is recorded as something non-Covid related. Conversely you have NY who recently decided to declare all cases of death where Covid could have been a plausible cause as Covid-19 deaths. Not only are death statistics reliant on methodology and testing policies, but they are equally as open to manipulation by political actors as the infection statistics are.
This isn’t unique to this situation either. These kinds of statistics are manipulated all the time in lots of different situations. For example you could never smoke a cigarette in your life, but if you manage to die of lung cancer, there’s a reasonably good chance you’ll be recorded in smoking statistics. Then you have things that are even more nebulous, like trying to figure out how many people died as a result of the Chernobyl accident. Lots of different people will try to answer that one for you, and the gap between the lower estimates and the higher estimates is enormous.
If you look at the mortality figures from the UK (published by the ONS) you can clearly see a peak, compared to the average range for that week over the last (10?) years.
That peak matches the shape of the numbers of victims of covid (the number is higher because nursing homes are horribly affected)
Testing large numbers of self selecting population means you can’t draw any conclusions.
(Veneto, Gangelt, Telluride, Iceland, the Diamond Princess, the Theodore Roosevelt)
We really need a cheap and easy test. Probably won't happen for many months. So far only endless promises and lies.
Compare that to some states in the US, where it's a full 30% positive rate, and it's obvious the testing there isn't sufficient.
How does that follow? The asymptomatic people won't self-select to be tested.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell-mediated_immunity
Basically this other arm tells infected cells to kill themselves, and they comply.
https://spectator.us/covid-antibody-test-german-town-shows-1...
Please note that the reporting on Sweden from outside Sweden is completely bananas. The idea of how Sweden is handling the pandemic, alongside cherry-picked data, is being used to argue for whatever lockdown theory people seem to have.
The facts though are that Sweden is not an outlier in any way shape or form. Compared to other European countries, Sweden is boringly in the middle of the pack, and showing the same trajectories as every other country. Swedes are working from home, isolating themselves, going out less, traveling less, staying home from school, closing non-essential businesses, and washing their hands just like everyone else.
Universities and high schools have been closed for almost a month now, that's pretty much the same timeline as most other countries. Elementary schools are not closed, but they're very empty, most kids are staying home.
The reasoning behind this is that elementary schools function as babysitters, and this frees up adults in essential occupations so that they can go to work normally, instead of having to stay at home with their kids. There's also starting to appear evidence that kids might not be a serious disease vector, contrary to pretty much everyone's gut feeling.
And this is what I mean by the reporting being bananas. It's very easy to look at the fact that "schools are open" and assume it's business as usual in Sweden. It absolutely isn't.
It's also pretty funny that you linked an article from The Guardian, which breathlessly exclaims that Sweden has a death rate that's twice that of Denmark. Yeah, ok, but the death rate in the UK is twice that of Sweden. Pot meet kettle. If Sweden is doing twice as good as the UK, who the fuck are people in the UK to criticize Sweden's actions? It's as if a Swedish newspaper would criticize Denmark for having twice the death rate of Finland. It's absurd.
The reporting is bananas. It's agenda-driven, not fact-driven.
This is intriguing. Any source where I can dig up further?
"Professor Russell Viner (UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health and President of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health) said, "We know from previous studies that school closures are likely to have the greatest effect if the virus has low transmissibility and attack rates are higher in children. This is the opposite of COVID-19.""
So what gives? Shouldn't Sweden be a complete outlier with a much higher number of fatal cases? It compares negatively to Norway, sure but it has much better results than a lot more similar countries too. How is that possible? We are absolutely starting to move the goalposts if we went from predicting spanish flu mortality rates without a lockdown to a slightly higher death count per capita compared to a few neighbors but a much better one compared to a lot more.
Also, I don't know why people assume Sweden simply has had the virus later than everyone else and that's why they haven't been hit as hard yet. There's no basis for that, it's not like travel routes are slow and it still takes weeks to spread a disease. There's no reason to assume that when Belgium or Germany got the virus, Sweden was just magically spared for a few more weeks. We should've been seeing an impossible to miss outlier numbers from Sweden by now and the complete opposite is happening .
Testing criteria between countries are so different that it is very hard to make any comparison. About the only number I trust is all cause deaths and even that is laggy.
[0]: https://www.nybc.org/donate-blood/covid-19-and-blood-donatio...