https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/27/upshot/corona...
> The recent death count reached six times the normal number of deaths for the city at this time of year, a surge in deaths much larger than what could be attributed to normal seasonal variations from influenza, heart disease or other more common causes.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...
> These numbers undermine the notion that many people who have died from the virus may soon have died anyway. In Paris, more than twice the usual number of people have died each day, far more than the peak of a bad flu season. In New York City, the number has spiked to six times the normal amount.
I'm betting that in the next few years the death rate will drastically fall because the only people left will be really healthy.
If everybody died this year, then next year's death rate will be zero! That's not a good thing.
If you are relatively young and completely healthy, you spend a month in the hospital; get onto a ventilator for weeks requiring heavy sedation; lose your ability to walk, talk, feed yourself and brush your teeth; have to relearn how to swallow; maybe suffer a collapsed lung and upon release if you're lucky are confined to a wheelchair and physical therapy unable to take care of yourself, your loved ones, and return to your job.
Death is not the only negative outcome of this disease. "Recovery" from corona is sometimes the beginning of a long and slow struggle. I'm looking forward to any analysis on the economic cost of this.
Well over half the country ticks one of those boxes.
70% of Americans are either obese or overweight.
Obviously there is a huge amount of individual variation but most people can take steps to improve their individual odds of survival.
This is known as mortality displacement or the harvesting effect. We won't actually know whether this was a significant factor until we see future all-cause mortality statistics.
Is coronavirus the black swan event or is our reaction to coronavirus the black swan event. It's hard to say.
Looking at all cause mortality excess deaths between Sweden and lockdown countries, it's hard to say:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...
One question I'm also curious about is if in the years following the coronavirus, will we see negative excess deaths relative to previous seasonal averages because of the excess deaths right now.
I wouldn't personally know where to start on getting the data, but you can likely tease this out by evaluating populations with already limited access to healthcare - uninsured, low-income folks with $13k deductibles, etc.
Have you considered getting your dad an Apple Watch, so he can do his EKGs at home and send to a doc? Not as effective as a twelve-lead, but maybe it'd help at least somewhat?
I do know the single-lead EKG has some limitations, but they may not be relevant to your dad's particular scenario. Worth a conversation with the doctor, I suspect.
(I would not necessarily trust the 24/7 LED-based rate monitoring.)
Of those that do, a very high proportion are extremely old, i.e. they died with the disease rather than of it.
If you take that into account the lockdown kills far more healthy people than COVID.
It seems to me that lock-down is very unlikely to be the thing that is killing people.
The British numbers are public and speak for themselves. ER attendance halved. Cardiac patients halved. People stopped going to hospitals when they needed to - luckily Germany avoided socialised healthcare and hospitals are just seen as normal companies.
As for Italy, there have been similar problems there with elderly homes in particular and hospitals struggling with staffing sure to lockdowns and isolation.
Ultimately this is the same virus everywhere. It doesn't look like it though. So differences in national performances are telling us a lot of important things about how governments have reacted.
"Can You Die from Fear? The Baskerville Effect"
https://www.drmirkin.com/histories-and-mysteries/the-baskerv...
For instance the UK is doing worse than most other countries in Europe but currently there are quite a few years within my life with similar death numbers by this point in the year: http://inproportion2.talkigy.com/
Or look at the graphs for Europe: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/
There are some countries where it's higher than the flu seasons in the past 4 years. But there are other countries where it's equal or lower.
Overall weekly mortality in the EuroMOMO reporting countries peaked at approx 2x that of 2016, approx 20k deaths per week more. Given the large populations of these countries this is a tiny change. To put that in perspective 20k people is 0.03% of the British population alone, but you'd also need to include all the other countries to get the real percentage.
In other words, it’s likely we are undercounting deaths caused by COVID by a factor of 1.5 to 2 in places which are actually properly tracking COVID deaths.
shutting down half the hospital when there is no need to for example
Incidentally there is also a lot of data out there suggesting that the virus can travel through the air a pretty reasonable distance, and it's likely to be breezy on the beach.
In any case, why would a bureaucrat want to go out of their way to close hospitals if there wasn't a good reason? Who benefits from that? Literally no one. It's only a reasonable idea because of the outbreak. The only people you see closing hospitals on purpose are vulture capitalists.
Politicians benefit from that. The current situation is no different than "No one ever got fired for hiring IBM". In this case "hiring IBM" is a surrogate for doing whatever your voting base believes in. In blue states, the majority believes in shutting things down aggressively, so politicians do. In red states, the majority thinks we should keep things open, so politicians do.
Politicians by and large in this crisis aren't responding to what experts say, they are responding to their own self interest. This is super easy to spot by seeing what experts are saying or what evidence is raised that they summarily dismiss because it contradicts what their constituency desires.
Like I said there is absolutely no evidence that you could get infected while in an open environment, moreover plenty of evidence that being outside is greatly beneficial to health and well being.
Now I am asking you the same question you asked me: "why would a bureaucrat want to go out of their way to close a beach if there wasn't a good reason?"
The answer is simple as unpleasant, they don't understand what they are doing.
Closing the beaches is frankly idiotic, but postponing elective surgery isn't. It's not wise to go in for a breast enlargement when an epidemic is on the move. With an appendicitis, on the other hand, you don't have a choice.
We have many different ways of counting deaths. We either count the people who had a test; or we count death certificates; or we do surveillance to see what respiratory illnesses are circulating and how many people are searching google for flu-like symptoms and how many people are attending primary care and ED for flu-like symptoms.
(and which ever method we pick, if we pick the same method for covid-19 we see many more deaths)
It's obvious just from comparing the numbers in the article to the ones in the comment I'm replying to that lack of testing has a much, much bigger effect on confirmed flu numbers than confirmed Covid-19 ones - confirmed Covid-19 deaths are at 2/3 to 1/2 of excess deaths, whereas confirmed flu is at 1/4 to 1/8th of estimated flu deaths, and the flu estimate does more work to exclude unrelated deaths than just counting raw excess deaths would. The supposedly apples-to-apples comparisons in the article looks to be even less directly comparable than the apples-to-oranges one it's rejecting.
https://www.ft.com/content/6bd88b7d-3386-4543-b2e9-0d5c6fac8...
By the way, most countries' local COVID peak is either in April or still to come; it's not really winter deaths.
One caveat; in many countries, death reporting is pretty slow and data from the last couple of weeks shouldn't be considered particularly reliable.
It only covers Europe but effects of Covid-19 are easy to see. For example during the peak, about 85,000 Europeans were dying per week as opposed to the normal range of 50-55K.
I don't know of a source for non-European countries unfortunately.
Until there is an international cooperation to standardize how Covid19 deaths are counted, these type of numbers are all we have for international and historic comparison.
- Covid w/o a shutdown
- Overall deaths from lockdown w/o Covid
Neither number can ever do more than guess at and fight at which statistical model lies less.
It's a "look at the spikes" illustration in the spot in an article a big photo would typically go.
The first year you see an airborne transmissible disease is likely to be the worst regardless of the disease. The big problem I see is that we're comparing the common flu in its herd immunity steady state to the coronavirus in its first year.
Once coronavirus settles into its steady state, we will be able to compare it to the flu, apples to apples.
That being said, assuming the flu and coronavirus at steady state is approximately comparable, would it justified to react to the flu in its first year the same way we're reacting to the coronavirus in its first year? If we know there will be a modest spike in the first year that mostly claims the infirm and becoming endemic is unavoidable, is it worth doing the damage we're doing to the economy.
That this is going to become endemic and likely reach steady state in a year or two (possibly longer depending on how long we retard reaching that point with lockdowns varying from geography to geography) is at this point a foregone conclusion because not every country has the natural borders of New Zealand and can completely kill this off. It will bounce back and forth between the northern and southern hemisphere indefinitely at this point until herd immunity.
The people arguing for waiting for a vaccine simply don't understand how long that likely to take. It's an unreasonable expectation to keep the world shut down until a vaccine is available as it will cause far more damage than the virus is liable to cause.