This holiday season is going to be a real test since we won’t have a vaccine by Novemberish. No ones going to fly out to holiday hotspots, or travel for Thanksgiving.
Vaccine or bust basically.
Vaccine or bust basically.
I feel like I have a higher chance of dying driving down the street. Am I being ignorant?
Not, it's called 'optimism bias' [1]
You don't even know if it's 3.5K deaths _due to_ COVID in the first place. The way US counts the deaths from this is "unique" in that if someone had COVID when they died, but they did not die _from_ COVID, they're still counted as a COVID death. That's why countries like Russia with much less formidable healthcare systems have "lower" fatality ratios. They're counting those who died _because of_ COVID, not _with_ it.
Why are we counting our deaths like this? I genuinely do not have a rational explanation, assuming there is one.
And soon you won't even know if the number of cases is accurate either, since CDC has put out guidance that there is a chance of false positives in newer tests if you had common cold. Which most people have _several times a year_.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/lab/resources/anti...
Quote: "Some tests may exhibit cross-reactivity with other coronaviruses, such as those that cause the common cold."
This situation is extremely complex and we simply don’t have the tools and resources to deal with it effectively.
While the former overestimates, the latter underestimates. I dont have any reference to prove it, but my gut feeling tells me that the latter is probably even further away from the true number than the former. In any case, they are absolutely not comparable.
There are still a bunch of people who die and don't get attributed, and there are people who die because there's a pandemic on and they don't get healthcare as a result, either because there isn't capacity or to avoid infection.
The way US counts the deaths from this is "unique"
in that if someone had COVID when they died, but
they did not die _from_ COVID, they're still counted
as a COVID death
In a literal sense the only actual cause of death ever is a cessation of cardiovascular function.
You don't die "from" AIDS. You die from pnuemonia, malnutrition, opportunistic infections that attack your weakened immune system, etc.
You don't even die directly "from" cancer. The tumors on your pancreas don't directly kill you in the sense that stepping on a landmine directly kills you.
That's why countries like Russia with much less formidable
healthcare systems have "lower" fatality ratios. They're
counting those who died _because of_ COVID, not _with_ it.
Your odds of dying from disease during any given month are pretty low. If you get COVID-19 and die, the overwhelming probability is that.... yes, it was COVID-19.
While not a perfect method of accounting it is assuredly more accurate than assuming the opposite, which is what countries like Russia are apparently doing.
If a person has cancer (or hepatitis, or psoriasis, or dementia, or whatever) for two years, and then they contract COVID-19 and die the next week, it certainly may have been the cancer that did them in, but it was almost certainly the COVID-19 that put them over the edge. In reality, a number of factors did them in, but if you had to pick one it would be their acute bout with COVID-19 that proved the deciding factor.
Even if you had stage 4 cancer and would die in a week anyway?
Then there's the issue of excess deaths caused by _not going to the doctor_ because you can't do "elective" procedures like stents and such, or just because you're afraid of getting infected. You can die of cardiovascular (or other) disease this way, and if you had e.g. asymptomatic covid (like most people who have it) you'd be counted as a COVID death then.
Even if you had stage 4 cancer and would die
in a week anyway?
But now, consider: most people are not in the absolutely final, terminal phase of a deadly illness.
To what percentage of dead COVID-19 sufferers would a situation like that possibly apply?
A very tiny one, surely. That is why tallying COVID-19 deaths in this manner is acceptable and accurate.
It perhaps introduces a small amount of error, but is superior to Russia's method (which sounds like outright denial of reality) and the error % introduced is in any event, is at least an order of magnitude (if not two) smaller than that posed by the number of undiagnosed COVID-19 cases.
It normalizes against external factors, such as poor testing infrastructure or (in some countries) government pressure to keep the numbers low.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/04/16/tracking...
Causation is difficult. Obviously the answer is somewhere in the middle. I just hope that in the coming years, researchers are permitted and incentived to analyze the numbers in detail.
Look at states, or regions in other countries, that were under lockdown even though they did not (yet) have high numbers of COVID infections.
Hospitals in these places also cancelled elective surgeries, and people avoided going doctors. But there was no excess mortality.
Read that again. Seems implausible AF.
This is provably the case, since the average death rate is very steady year on year, yet shot up this year. People are dying in droves from something, and if not COVID then what do you propose? Hell, in reality the US and other countries are underreporting their figures, because there's still a whole tonne of unexplained deaths above the COVID numbers and no other explanation as to why those deaths have occurred.
See the following for further explanation.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...
I think it’s reasonable to wonder that, though.
There's a common trend of mixing up the fatality percentage and the odds of dying to this. You seem to be falling into that confusion. A mortality rate of 2.3% doesnt mean you have a 2.3% chance of dying to it. If you're elderly and/or have a preexisting respiratory condition, then you have a much higher likelihood of something going very wrong. The younger and healthier you are, the lower the likelihood is that your health will be severely impacted.
That's why young healthy people such as myself (25, regular exercise, no preexisting conditions) need to be more worried about other people. It isn't about my health, it's about theirs.
This is not a factual statement. America is skewing younger with more complications than Europe.
While it is always a good idea to think about others, the young aren't as immune to this as they think they are.
Or, as I crudely put it to one youngster: You use condoms, right? Well, Covid statistically is more dangerous and more contagious than anything a condom protects against. Wear a mask, wash your hands, and keep your distance.
Considering all the suffering going on in the world? No, not at all.
There was a huge overreaction to 9/11 in the US which caused much more suffering than the event itself.
I’m quasi American and I have always hated the people who worked in those towers. The primary business of financialization is to rob the masses of their wealth / pensions. They are a well dressed and well behaved parasitical class.
Osama Bin Laden’s stated intention was to drag the US in to a quagmire and the US obliged.
Despite what MMT people may believe, the US will now have to get used to being a much poorer country. That adjustment will not be easy.
It's a bit like the stats for dying driving. It doesn't include people who survive but lose their legs or can't function independently anymore. In both cases think of the affected percentage which is so much higher.
However, this isn't the real problem. Unlike most illnesses this one has a very long incubation time (like 1-2 weeks) unlike the flu where you get sick in a day or so. This means you can be walking around making people ill and spreading the disease even though you're totally fine. (Which is why walking around with out a mask isn't healthy for other people)
So the real issue isn't you getting sick and dying but the fact that you're spreading the illness to 20+ other people and making the problem so much worse. All these sick people will eventually effect you (as they already have) overwhelming health and social services.