We really do need to address what constitutes a proper Covid death. So long as there are people who die from unrelated causes, while happening to have Covid, being marked as a Covid death, there will be a lot of people skeptical of the statistics.
This amounts to a baseless conspiracy theory against doctors that accurately understand and record the cause of death. Blunt trauma in a car accident is not being recorded as covid.
""If you were in hospice and had already been given a few weeks to live, and then you also were found to have COVID, that would be counted as a COVID death. It means technically even if you died of a clear alternate cause, but you had COVID at the same time, it's still listed as a COVID death. So, everyone who's listed as a COVID death doesn't mean that that was the cause of the death, but they had COVID at the time of the death." Dr. Ezike outlined." -- Dr. Ngozi Ezike, Director of Illinois Department of Public Health
Poor definitions enable people to present the data differently depending on their biases and agendas. We should want to prevent that not by grounds of "you're crazy," but by making the definitions non-interpretable.
There have been a lot of excess deaths in 2020. It seems reasonable to guess those people died of either COVID-19 or our response to COVID-19 (eg reluctance to seek medical treatment). None of these mortality statistics are perfect, but given the fairly short window of a mild COVID-19 infection, it seems pretty reasonable as a first approximation to assume that if they had it when they died, they died from it. There might be some cases where this is wrong (died of severe trauma during a car wreck in which they were a passenger rather than a driver) or questionable (the hospice case) but how much do those really affect the overall numbers?
[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/ct-dataviz-corona...
Edit: Maybe hospice is the best translation for särskilt boende.
According to one investigation [1] among people who died outside of hospitals 15% died directly from covid, 70% had other comorbidities, and 15% died from something else while they had covid.
[0] https://gupea.ub.gu.se/bitstream/2077/40037/1/gupea_2077_400...
[1] https://lakartidningen.se/aktuellt/nyheter/2020/08/covid-19-...
It seems reasonable to create a statistical analysis based on years of expected life lost -- but that still doesn't mean people aren't dying from Covid19.
Aside, slightly tangential: Back in Feb/March BMJ had some controversy about UK government hiding excess Winter deaths in flu statistics. The implication being that the gov were taking more deaths over Winter and saying it was flu when in fact the deaths were more related to poverty (no heating, little food). Next thing we know people are saying Covid19 want a problem because it wasn't even as bad as flu (though at the time is was killing far more people as a proportion of those infected). Lies and statistics, and all that.
I don't think this is what they're saying. I think the point is that those people's actual times of death weren't far enough from their expected times of death given their preexisting conditions to be able to confidently say that they died of Covid, rather than just having died with it. In other words, that there's a good chance they would have died at the exact same time even without Covid.
Presumably you think doctors have always been lying about cause of death? What do you think their motivation for that is?
They still died of CoVID-19. A lot of people have heart disease, or diabetes, or are overweight, or have any number of other conditions. If they get CoVID-19 and die, you can't just write that off because they were overweight.
If you look at the official statistics for the whole country right now, 26% of all dead where 90 years or older, and 41% 80-89 years old. Most of them weren't just a bit out of shape, they were already sick.
If I were a betting man, based on these numbers, I'd put my money on excess mortality once everything's been tallied, at least in that county.
[1] https://www.scb.se/en/About-us/news-and-press-releases/exces...
Also, I doubt the amount of people suffering from broken legs are really skewing those Covid numbers. Most people sick enough to require hospitalization while also infected with Covid will have much higher risks of Covid-related symptoms as well.
You'd be surprised. Around 1/7th of the covid hospitalizations in Denmark[0] are hospitalized for "other reasons" - where covid is not the primary factor - I'd say that is significant.
[0] - https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/indland/braekket-ben-fylder-i-cent... (link only in danish, sorry)
We have multiple standards for each country (if not smaller governmental units) and the standards have changed, the testing has changed, etc. Statisticians will be decades puzzling it all out.
It's really only excess mortality we can count on right now.
> It does appear to the case, however, that a motorcyclist who was killed in a traffic accident also tested positive for COVID-19, and was initially listed among Florida’s COVID-19-related deaths. But officials from the Florida Department of Health said that person has since been removed from the count.
I can't read the paywall'd Telegraph article but I think this [2] is the same:
> The ONS looked at nearly 4,000 deaths during March in England and Wales where coronavirus was mentioned on the death certificate. In 91% of cases the individuals had other health problems. The most common was heart disease, followed by dementia and respiratory illness. On average, people dying also had roughly three other health conditions.
So basically -- people's other health problems cause them to be more severely affected by a respiratory disease that has also been shown to affect the heart and brain [3]. That seems like an intuitive result, and the study backs it up.
> It's really only excess mortality we can count on right now.
The excess mortality will certainly show the bigger impact in the long term, but to imply COVID-19 death numbers are being artificially inflated or so grossly inaccurate that they're useless is irrational.
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/florida-motorcyclist-covid...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/health-52308783
[3] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...
Someone stated that vehicular accidents are not being reported as COVID-19; I found a counterpoint. And I do not doubt that it is one of many. That is all.
It's science. Questioning the easy numbers is what you're supposed to do. You tear and kick at something that is "known" until you get sick of it and move on to something else. Similarly, we have just oodles of confounding factors for our statistics here and we should be acutely aware of it at every step. This is not a thing that rests.
Are you sure car accidents are not recorded as Covid, because I've read claims to the otherwise several times. It may not matter what the doctors think, if there are policies in place, or financial incentives (extra money for treatment of Covid patients).
You will never have precise statistics, however, excess mortality for all causes more or less matches Covid deaths, so the numbers are roughly correct.
Worth noting that there are indirect effects. For instance because of the overworked health system, some completely unrelated diseases may not be treated as well, causing extra deaths. On the other hand, lockdowns may lower the risk of accident, transmission of other diseases, and even the nasty effect of pollution.
But the general idea is that these deaths are real.
On the other hand, isolation leads to depression and suicide. Less sport and fresh air, to lower health.
This doesn't follow. It just means that the number of falsely-claimed Covid deaths is roughly equal to the number of deaths caused by the lockdowns, not that either of those numbers are small.
Excess deaths in the United States were at 299K as of October 15. What’s your explanation for this, if it isn’t Covid?
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6942e2.htm?s_cid=mm...
But after lockdowns were instituted, deaths levels became stable or decreased, despite your claim that the lockdown deaths were the actual cause of the catastrophe.
Schroedinger's Covid-19 :-)
I'm confused. Lockdown happened first, and the plateau of deaths happened second.
So how could anyone, in good faith, argue that lockdown death numbers are somehow similar to Covid-19 death numbers?
You don't have the data. And these things are already quantified and tracked. And no, it doesn't work like you say.
Anyway, have a great day and believe what you want to believe :-)
I haven't seen anyone here, and certainly not josephcbible, make absurdly absolute claims that Covid hasn't killed _anyone_. I'm sure Covid has been a factor in the deaths of many people.
Deaths, as reported, peaked in the spring. Epidemiologists have a name for an entirely mainstream explanation of what happened. They call it a "harvesting effect." I agree that the name is unsavory. It refers to a disease quickly culling the weak in a population.
The majority of the excess mortality has accumulated since spring, _after_ the country went into forced lockdown. There is no reason to default to the belief, as you seem to be doing, that Covid has continued killing masses and masses of people. Certainly not compared to the much more salient explanatory force of the massive, nationwide lockdowns.
Go see these things:
https://www.youtube.com/user/potholer54/videos
For example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzh6HwN0gbw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzh6HwN0gbw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAB43K2gtOk
Your comment is not backed by anything, there are statistics for types of deaths and there is almost 0 (ZERO!) support for lockdowns causing this many deaths.
How do you think you're smarter than all the world's governments, combined? Are you a qualified scientist or just Random Joe on the internet? If you're the latter, you might want to re-think your viewpoint.
PS: I'm definitely waiting for one of these moments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079, but it's unlikely :-)
PPS: I'm not going to reply to these threads anymore, as people who are replying to them are either cynical or emotional or both. You just don't have the numbers to back up your claims.
The portion sizes [0] and food served in bars and restaurants in the US are not healthy. Generally, home cooking is associated with consuming fewer calories and improve certain health outcomes [1].
[0] https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2017/03/29/portion-sizes [1] https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/home-cooking-good-for-yo...
If it turns out that what people cook at home is even less healthy than food in restaurants, that is a horrible thing, and we should definitely start teaching cooking at schools, regardless of Covid.
I mean, restaurants have all the incentives to cook food that is tastier or cheaper at the expense of health. Simply using less sugar and salt at home, and adding some fresh vegetables to each meal, should already result in healthier diet even if you are a beginner at cooking. But yeah, I can imagine that many people are below the level of beginner.
???
Now if we'd go so far as to assume that people consume the same amount of alcohol at home, then staying home is a net negative for health. I don't actually know how alcohol consumption developed during lockdown, so I don't know whether there is any merit to that line of argument. But I see how it can be made.
Not say it is all those things but some attempt to rule out other factors unique to 2020.
Source: official mortality statistics. https://www.scb.se/om-scb/nyheter-och-pressmeddelanden/overd...
People argue that increases in death could also be attributed to suicide, deteriorating health from mental hardship of stress and quarantine, and people not seeking medical treatment they need because they are scared of covid or because they cannot afford it with so much unemployment.
I think the last one holds some water. I know of one person in my hometown who chose not to go to the hospital because he was scared of covid and ended up dying of a heart attack.
Yes, COVID has killed a _lot_ of people, but so has the response to COVID. We focused all resources on one enemy while other allies of Death stalked in the back door.
Also, in the case of Vietnam, only 14% of their population is over 55 years old, whereas 29% of the USA is over 55 (and 31% of Belgium, another hard hit country). Seeing as this disease hits people over 55 the hardest (and is barely noticed in those under 30), it is no wonder Vietnam is seeing less of an issue here.
It seems age demographics _could_ have more correlation with outcomes than any government intervention. That of course doesn't explain Vietnam entirely. Also keep in mind, Vietnam has only administered 12,000 test per 1 million people, whereas the USA has administered 492,000 per 1 million.
The bank shot demographic explanations are just more distracting BS, the obvious lesson is suppress the virus!
We need to understand better why Vietnam is seeing such positive results but saying you know why for certain is disingenuous
People want to raise doubts about the effectiveness of their suppression by implying that they have not achieved suppression but rather their younger population means they are not suffering deaths as a result. This we can say with a lot of confidence is not the case because their demographic advantages are not that great and other nations with similar demographics have not been as successful.
We do in fact need to understand their success, that is why it is so important to avoid dismissing their success with demographic excuses!
Actually let me list what I think, since you seem interested enough in my opinion to spelunk my comment history:
- COVID-19 is a dangerous infection. The degree of risk and severity is directly correlated to age.
- For those below ~30 years old, the infection is between as to much less dangerous than some strains of influenza.
- Between 30-60, the infection is appreciably more dangerous than the flu, but not severely so
- Over 60 the infection is far more dangerous than the flu, and extreme precautions are warranted
- The projections of disease modelers were incredibly off the mark early on, by orders of magnitude. The models are better today.
- The fatality rate was grossly overestimated. Early in the pandemic, we had numbers around 1-3% IFR (not CFR). This was also off by an order of magnitude. Real IFR will end up around .3-.5%. Deadly than the flu, but again with the burden on older people
- Most public health measures we are deploying were created for pandemic influenza. They do not necessarily apply in the same ways to pandemic coronaviruses.
- Masks clearly work to reduce the spread of infections. Not mandating masks is a terrible idea, and governments who have avoided it thus far will be judged harshly
- Influenza has around a 15-20% asymptomatic rate. Coronavirus has twice that. This causes huge problems for contact tracing though it is clearly not impossible
- We over-focused on surface spread and panicked people into disinfecting everything, while ignoring aerosol spread
- We over-focused on spread between strangers and in public, and downplayed the real risk, which is spread within families and those who live in close quarters
- This alone caused imbalanced risk assessments for people. Eating at a restaurant with proper distancing and ventilation IS safer than having an indoor neighborhood block party without masks.
- Lockdowns require an exit strategy that is something beyond "more lockdowns".
- Lockdowns are a great public health strategy if they are incredibly short lived and adhered to
- It was clear in March that the only way out of the pandemic was immunity, be it natural or vaccine enhanced. Lockdowns should have been thrown out the window at that time
- The goal posts were constantly moved from curve flattening to deaths to raw case counts
- Metrics for reopening should have been clear from the start and based entirely upon hospital capacity
- Ignoring the impacts of the lockdown is close-minded thinking that has and will continue to cost lives
- Essentially, we knew by April at the latest that eradication was no longer a possibility, and that we should have switched from eradication to mitigation
- Mitigation would include targeted restrictions based upon age risk
- Mitigation also requires acceptance that cases will increase and deaths will occur, but the goal is to reduce those, we can't aim for elimination. The cost is too great and the odds are too low
- Public health officials shot themselves in the foot several times throughout the pandemic
- While I understand why masks were downplayed originally, that was a terrible mistake. Saying "masks work, but we need them for our medical heroes" or some shit would have been better
- Maybe that would have made masks "cool" instead of a political signaling tool (again, I 100% support mask mandates)
- Outside spread was confused by the support of the civil rights protests in the Spring. We knew then and continue to know that outside spread is very unlikely and that the protests were safe. But at the same time we were shaming people at the beach. Both were safe, and to declare one safer than the other based upon the ontology of the events was a terrible mistake
- The media spread fear and panic before it was warranted. Constant updates on death counts outside of context was a dangerous game.
- Related, most locations locked down too early. Locking down prior to community spread is a waste of resources and good will.
- As said above, lockdowns needs to be applied carefully. Too soon and you blow all good will as time goes on. Too late and you may make it worse by forcing people indoors
- Locking down before community spread exists had the effect of costing states and people millions up millions of dollars with little helpful impact
- The pandemic became a political tool for the left and the right, both wielding it to the extremes. The left was virtually arguing that this was apocalyptic, the right was saying it was the flu. Both are clearly wrong, and the extremism caused public trust to tank as both arguments were easily falsifiable. Once this occurred, early in March, we lost any chance of actually combating the virus in a smart, sustainable way.
Again, anyone who was paying attention would have known that the lockdown strategy would need to extend until there is a vaccine. Nothing would materially change month to month as the lockdowns dragged on. The "just two more weeks" crowd caused a ton of fatigue in people who were earnestly wanting to help stop the pandemic. We needed leadership from the beginning explaining the tradeoffs. Explaining that lockdowns would need to continue intermittently until there was a vaccine. We needed honest leaders telling us clearly that lockdowns do not protect you forever, and once the lockdown ends you are as vulnerable as ever.
Both of those mistakes led to people, again, distrusting the public health officials. We were told we needed to lockdown to stop the spread, and we did so. And then people kept getting sick and dying. Because it was sold as a panacea to the pandemic, when that turned out to not be the case people thought, "fool me once shame on you..." and gave the good ol' middle finger to the public health officials. Again, I don't agree with this attitude but I understand it. It is frustrating to lose your job in the name of safety only to see everyone still die.
Celebrating Europe all summer long when it was so obvious to anyone who thought about it that another wave was coming was shortsighted. We spent all summer saying "if only we could be more like them!" in the United Stats, only to see them end up in the same situation as us in the Fall. Now people are saying, "so you advocated for strict Euro-style lockdowns, and they are in the same boat now.."
Today, lockdowns almost make sense. We have a clear exit strategy with a vaccine around the corner. Except, we already burned all resources and good will locking down too early.
I am not a crazy COVID denier. I am a realist who understands data and human nature.
The fact of the matter is that we have plenty of evidence from around the world that suppression is possible and practical and doesn't cost nearly as much as the economic costs of letting the virus run rampant. Pretending that demographics is important in the success of Vietnam when Japan has the worst demographics in the world next to maybe Italy is.. well.. you know the word I would be reaching for!
The arguments about "blowing goodwill" are mostly overturned by the evidence that we actually have of high compliance in very restrictive regimes. "We can't impose China-style lockdowns" is immediately undermined by the Australian lockdowns that were both politically bold (in the face of domestic political resistance from federal politicians!) and extreme but very effective and enjoyed popular support.. in the home country of the owner of the leading anti-lockdown propagandist of the world! (Not to mention Italy & France imposing lockdowns for extended periods that were never approached in scale anywhere in the US and were not a problem.)
Both-sides-ism is silly. If at this point you can't concede that the "left" (if you accept that framing) was mostly right you are not paying attention to the results. In the "blue" jurisdictions that are struggling the issues arise from popular "business-friendly" Democrats undermining health advice. One side of the US political spectrum is wildly irresponsible and the other is not, don't pretend otherwise.
> "Metrics for reopening should have been clear from the start and based entirely upon hospital capacity" I mean, sure, but that is a condemnation of your earlier positions as expressed then in real time, right? This sort of ties into your assessment of the media, it doesn't really have anything to do with your opinions about the virus or appropriate responses.
If you think the situation in "Europe" right at this moment is the same as "the US" it seems like you might be misinformed. Finland and Norway are in a much different position than France and Belgium, who are in a different position than the Czech Republic. But all of them are in a better position than Iowa, South Dakota, and North Dakota. The idea that starting a 2nd or 3rd wave from a lower base is a bad idea seems kind of deranged.
I think you think of yourself as a realist but there is lots of evidence that you have underestimated what is possible as well as the capacity of human nature to do what's right. The information is out there, just look at it.
ETA: "- Mitigation would include targeted restrictions based upon age risk" We've got mountains of evidence that letting the virus run in younger populations endangers older people, that just doesn't work.
I didn't pretend that demographics is important. Demographics _is_ important. I didn't mean to say it was the _only_ factor. My main point was to demonstrate that nobody has convincingly rejected the null hypothesis in any of these response models. My point was that I can posit a reasonable theory that there is correlation between age demographics and COVID deaths/known cases. You (rightly) pointed out a country that has terrible demographics for my theory did fine. The key here is that _both can be true_. Everyone seems to be looking for a panacea when, thus far, one simply does not exist. The lockdown approach has contradictions as well, so if you profusely reject my demographic argument, you can't strongly hold on to lockdowns. We are talking about a disease, that while a relatively "normal" coronavirus, is still novel. And we are comparing responses across nations with wildly different cultures, densities, demographics, health care systems, travel levels, living situations and access to testing. My point is that maybe it was _just_ lockdowns that helped Vietnam. And may it wasn't just the lack of lockdowns that hurt the United States. We need to consider all explanations. And for the record, I do consider lockdowns a valuable tool at times!
Regarding the good will argument. Again you pointed at one location with one culture to imply that it would be widely supported elsewhere. While culturally Australia is probably closer to the United States than any other nation, there are still very key differences. The Australia lookdowns are really interesting for that reason though, that it is culturally similar to the United States. But, and I may be wrong, the lockdowns were limited to Victoria, and were not applied blanketly across their nation. This is not in contradiction to my beliefs. I have posted in the past about the idea that my state locked down _too soon_ before there was community spread. Essentially, we locked down when things were bad in New York. A lot of the opposition to lockdowns in the United States is the blanket approach in which they are applied. Counties with zero of few cases are locked down with the same vigor as metropolitan areas where cases are exploding. People rightly wonder why they can't go to work when the outbreak is across the state. I have always thought very targeted lockdowns would be a reasonable approach.
Furthermore, your points regarding Italy and France supporting lockdowns is rather interesting as well. First, both are far more collectivist than the United States in general. This isn't good or bad, it is a different culture that approaches problems in a different way. It just so happens that viewing the whole as or more important than the individual lends itself to restrictions in the benefit of the whole. The United States traditionally indexes on the individual above the whole (argument being that each individual adds to the whole, so the effect is the same). I am not here to argue individualism vs. collectivism but I will say that the issue is more complex than "Americans don't believe in science" (this may be a straw man, I don't think you've made that argument, but I tangented myself). The other point is that as lockdowns eased, cases rose. So what does that tell us? Two things...
First, it tells us that lockdowns do suppress spread (no shit). You keep people from interacting, and diseases spread through interaction are reduced. Abstinence is also the best way to prevent HIV. It is a truism that lockdowns reduce spread. And I would never argue against that (my argument is that it isn't _just_ lockdowns). But more importantly, it tells us that lockdowns must be maintained in order to continue to reduce spread. The "anti-lockdown" argument is that the time period required to actually _prevent_ deaths (not delay) is too long. It is effectively until 60%+ of the community have received a vaccine (this is ignoring heterogeneity in mixing and travel). A two-week lockdown is absolutely pointless unless at the end of those two weeks everyone is vaccinated. A two-week lockdown just delays the spread.
Now you may be saying, "Mr. salmon30salmon, the goal is not to prevent infection but to reduce strain on hospitals" and I would respond, great! I agree! It is important, even critical, to ensure hospitals are not strained. So why is _that_ not a metric we are chasing? I get the delay, 7-12 days from being infected to being hospitalized, so by the time hospitals are full you are rightly fucked as the next 7-12 days worth of people come in. But as shitty as our models have been, they are somewhat accurate in that timeframe. I support a lockdown for localities where the local hospital is nearing capacity. That makes sense.
Which brings me to the third (maybe final? this is stream of consciousness so we will see) argument. By which metrics are you saying Iowa is worse off than any European country. Let us look at the data, the source of truth in times of madness. All of my data will be from either worldometer or the Bing Covid dashboard.
Iowa:
- There are currently 84,772 active cases (or 27,345 per M)
- Deaths per 1M population: 666
- Tests per 1M population: 359,387
- Cases per 1M population (identified): 62,970
- Positive Test Rate: 17%
- Population of Iowa: 3.1 Million
- Total Case Projection (using a 10x median from Nature[1]: 620,970 * 3.1 = 1.925 Million cases
- Death Projection for ACTIVE identified cases (84,772) (lets take the best best IFR of .6%) = 508
- IFR based on projections: (666 * 3.1) + 508 / 1.925 Million = .13%
- IFR based solely on identified cases: 1%
France:
- There are currently 1,891,592 active cases (or 29,101 per 1M)
- Deaths per 1M population: 792
- Tests per 1M population: 296,031
- Cases per 1M population (identified): 31,935
- Positive Test Rate: 10%
- Population of France: 65.3 Million
- Total Case Projection (using a 10x median from Nature[1]: 31,935 * 65.3 = 19.24 Million cases
- Death Projection for active identified cases (lets take the best best IFR of .6%) = 11,349
- IFR based on projections: (792 * 65.3) + 11,349 / 19.24 Million = .32%
- IFR based solely on identified cases: 2.4%
This was all napkin math, so it may be wrong. But between those two, who is fairing better? I would rather live in Iowa, if my only decision point was COVID risk. Iowa has tested more people (35% of their population!). Thus, more cases have been identified. So based solely on cases, Iowa is doing worse. Now it wasn't fair to apply the 10x to both France and Iowa. Iowa has probably identified more than 10% of their cases due to heavier testing. But that doesn't make it any better for France. That would increase the IFR for Iowa most likely, but not three fold to .32%. Even the identified case IFR is worse for France with 2.4% vs 1%. Even with 5x unidentified Iowa beats France with an IFR of .27%
If I were a decision maker, I would emulate Iowa (limited lockdowns if any, masks encouraged, less dense cities). But this is against my thesis, that one size does not fit all. France is more dense in her cities, has more multi-generational living etc. What works (or didn't work) for France won't work for Iowa. That is why I argue against blanket lockdowns
<3 Salmon30Salmon
A quick search seems to indicate that the authorities in Iowa are keeping exact data private. Whether to hide reality or avoid causing a panic, I can strongly say I am against keeping that data private.
And to be consistent, perhaps Des Moines should be locked down but Ottumwa not. But without the data I've not the slightest clue.
Whereas in the past I made more reckless proclamations about lockdowns and responses, I am trying to retrain my instincts for bluster and provide only what I have strong evidence or data to support.
Not for nothing, but new cases seem to have peaked in Iowa and are now trending downwards, so that is good news!
Comparing excess deaths between US and Sweden is maybe a bit more bulletproof. If — at the end of this — Sweden has fewer excess deaths than the US, then their response was in some measures more effective than ours. But there’s so much going on, we still won’t know for certain for quite a while.
Here is a chart of excess deaths: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
The problem with arguments like these, is for America at least, why does the number of people who have a fear of medical care trend so closely with number of cases?
I predict that a few months later, a popular answer will be "they were actually killed by the vaccine".
(Bookmarking this comment so that I can keep linking it when this actually happens.)
I've heard this argument before but it's never made sense to me. If you have AIDS, it's not the AIDS that kills you, it's the fact that AIDS weakened your immune system to the point that something else can kill you. But to say that AIDS wasn't paramount to killing the victim is just wrong. Seems to me like COVID is a similar situation...
Edit, source: https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/smittskydd-beredskap/utb...
In the link "Ingång för Chrome, Edge, Safari, Firefox m.fl." it says:
> Statistiken visar antalet personer med bekräftad covid-19 som avlidit, oavsett dödsorsak.
Translated:
> The stats shows the number of deaths with confirmed Covid-19, regardless of cause of death.
The most common of which is simply old age. Certainly covid causes death in some people, that's indisputable. But If you catch it in your last 2 weeks while you're on your death bed anyway, it's not really clear that covid even accelerated it.
The death die with covid more often not only because it probably accelerates some old peoples' deaths, but because this very population is undergoing its end-of-life process anyway, and are going to die whether or not they have it.
Okay, but what's unique about COVID where we're supposed to discount that? Surely we care about a murderer who kills an elderly person.
> and are going to die whether or not they have it.
This is true for all people and causes of death.
I'm not sure what you're saying here. If a murder kills someone, the murder was the direct cause of death and we count it as murder. If you die of old age while having covid, it is not necessarily covid that is the killer, so it's not clear that it should necessarily be counted as the killer in all old-age cases.
> and are going to die whether or not they have it
Yes but... you understand I'm talking about the specific case of actually being on your deathbed, right?
That's not what it is though. If you put poison in someone's food, and they die before they eat it, you didn't murder them.
At https://www.socialstyrelsen.se/statistik-och-data/statistik/... they do calculate the difference:
> Av dessa har 90 procent (5 514 av 6 128) laboratoriebekräftad covid-19 enligt Folkhälsomyndighetens databas över smittade.
90% are due to Covid 19. 10% not.
Edit: I misunderstood, tsimionescu has corrected me, thanks!
> "Of these, 90 percent (5,514 out of 6,128) have laboratory-confirmed covid-19 according to the Swedish Public Health Agency's database of infected people."
That is 90% of:
> The statistics show the deceased where the underlying cause of death was covid-19, according to the cause of death certificates received by the National Board of Health and Welfare.
So in 10% of cases, the doctors were sure enough that the cause of death was Covid19 to write a legal document certifying it, even though they didn't order laboratory work to confirm with 100% certainty. This could mean many things, from medical malpractice (doctor lied on a legal document) to simple common sense (patient is husband of person with confirmed case, died of clear Covid19 symptoms).
But there is no way to read that 10% number as meaning what you claimed. In fact, if a person were hit by a car, confirmed Covid19 positive, died of their wounds on their way to hospital, and got a death certificate claiming they died of Covid19, they would be part of 90% number, NOT part of the 10% number.
Also, do you imagine this is different for Influenza deaths or TB deaths? If anything, Covid-19 deaths are much more accurately counted than deaths from any other major disease, which are often just estimates.
Which is why I think excess mortality seems like the best high-level number to look at.
Does anyone know where to find a dataset like this?
During the worst of the HIV epidemic, we saw people in their 30s dying left and right. Malaria kills mostly young children.
All lives are valuable and worth fighting for, but it does seem that these losses are fundamentally worse than COVID. If we would count healthy years of life lost, rather than raw number of deaths, I think that would be more apparent.
Old people still have a right to a free and healthy life.
When I lost my sister-in-law due to an unknown brain tumor at 28, it was a catastrophic event from which her entirely family has never recovered.
To say that these deaths are equivalent doesn’t seem right to me, even though I agree we should do everything we can to preserve healthy lifespan for everyone, young and old.
When I lost my grandmother in her late 70s the day we were visiting for her birthday, to a sudden heart-attack, all my family could feel was the hollowness left behind by her absence, and thoughts of all the life events she would miss, things unsaid and so on.
A new disease with unpredictable long-term effects, that kills at least twice as many people as the flu despite unprecedented preventive measures is bound to cause more alarm.
Remember that regions hit early and unprepared were carting dead people by the truck load, most notably in Northern Italy. If we didn't have lockdowns and other measures, that would have continued and escalated all over the world - we would have probably easily had 10 million or more dead just this year if we had treated this just like a flu.
Over what timeframe? Novel viruses come but once per century, flu kills consistently year after year after year, always mutating to escape eradication... and the flu deaths pile up to astronomical heights over the decades
Only a relatively small percentage of Americans have gotten infected with SARS-CoV-2 yet. Without vaccination, in the space of a few years at most, CoVID-19 will kill as many people as flu does in many decades.
Masks are something we will hopefully have learned to wear forever during the cold season, as they will have a measurable impact on deaths not just from seasonal Covid, but from seasonal flu as well. I believe that the majority of the population will internalize this simple hygienic practice from now on, which would be one silver lining for this pandemic. People in East Asia have learned this habit some time ago, and it has served them well.
I disagree. I just think the humans most severely vulnerable to the flu died off during the first few waves. Consider small pox. It was a novel virus for the Native Americans, who had no "natural herd immunity" and they got eviscerated by small pox. Colonists, despite not having vaccines, and despite still being able to get small pox, were not eviscerated since the virus wasn't able to spread and/or kill as well due to their natural immune systems.
What do you call this if not "natural herd immunity"? If you kill off all the weak and vulnerable, leaving only survivors and survivors' offspring who are virus-resistant... then you now have "natural herd immunity".
What you're describing is simply a disease running its course and killing everyone who is not naturally immune/resistant or not strong enough to survive despite being sick. There is no herd immunity aspect. At best you could call it natural selection.
Also, if you get Covid and you end up with permanently damaged health, as it is documented time and again, would you keep your skepticism?
What will you say if somebody tells you that you anyway had some precondition, even if you weren't aware?
And are you aware how big percentage of the U.S. population has one or more risk factors?
I'm not talking about the case where a person's prospects are that they'll live for quite some time. I'm talking about the case where somebody is already essentially on their death bed for cancer, for heart problems, for fatal car injuries or shootings, or even other viruses, who are going to die imminently anyway.
Are you additionally claiming that this makes up some significant percentage of total covid deaths? Like, if 2% of the deaths due to covid are indeed people who were going to die anyway, but may or may not have died a week earlier due to covid, well
1. They may have died a week earlier due to covid. Whose place is it to judge that? (there are measures that try to take into account loss of livable years, but they agree that Covid is pretty terrible)
2. Who cares if the estimate is off by a few percent?
So concern about this overcounting is predicated on an assumption that some significant number of people are on death's door already, and that basically only those people are dying of covid.
Most covid-deaths are of people under 85 years old, and even an 85 year old has a life expectancy of 6 years though, so that seems unlikely.
Now that doesn't mean we should entirely downplay the risk here, but there are alternative solutions that can allow us to take care of the vast majority of people who are seriously at risk from COVID-19 without absolutely ruining the economy and harming the majority of people's way of life in a manner that may very well be irreparable for a decade, if not longer.
First, you're (I believe) misquoting the length-of-stay in non-hospice LTC facilities as life expectancy. There's a few reasons that's wrong and a significant underestimate. Most LTC patients leave and live a few years beyond the end of their stay in other facilities (hospice, or more intense care facilities). Additionally, some patients leave because they're healthy (I assume you go to a care facility because you have a broken hip, or something, but leave once you're healed). These patients have, as a group, significantly shorter stays, so the median stay length among terminal inhabitants is actually longer.
But let's assume you're correct. In fact let's go further and say that those people's lives are irrelevant, or unavoidable losses, because they were going to die soon anyway. In fact, let's assume the same for everyone over the age of 75 (who I presume make up the vast majority of the LTC deaths as well). They were close to death anyway, and Covid just got them there a little faster.
We're still left with more than 93000 deaths and counting. Deaths that can't be blamed on long term care facilities, or even age. Deaths in people who might have lived for 30+ more years in many cases.
Certainly nursing homes and the very elderly may deserve special and additional protections, but claiming that because old, frail, and colocated people are highly impacted that we could relax is a disservice to all of the not-old, not-frail, and not-colocated people who still may need protection.
And I think you're vastly exaggerating the impact, both on the economy, and on the way of life, that a well managed set of guidelines have. Mask mandates + closure of certain non-essential businesses + restrictions on others means that relatively few things shut down. Certainly some do, your mall and movie theater may have trouble, but grocery stores and restaraunts can and are surviving and adapting (and imo the changes to enable urban outdoor dining that are happening in SF, Chicago, and other cities aren't a change that should be repaired, they should be embraced).
We can accurately project case numbers to hospitalizations and then to deaths as a rough approximation. Who frankly cares if the exact number of COVID deaths are being recorded properly when much of the western world is running out of hospital capacity.
Really, who cares? Don't quibble over bullshit, move on to stuff that matters.
You clearly have a connection to the Internet so you must know this, I am not sure what you are on about here.
Nonessential surgeries were brought back in after the 1st wave didn't develop in the size and strength expected and are now getting pushed back or cancelled because this wave is overwhelming the system.
But you can just read the news and see that this is what is happening so I don't understand why you are asking it in the first place. (The risk of permanent hospital closures & bankruptcies in the USA was about losing revenue from certain type of procedures because of COVID risks, but that's a separate issue that has little to do with this.)
So again, why do you need to quibble over rounding errors in cause of death paperwork when the hospitals are filling up or full? Why? What's the point?
They ignore the overwhelming "excess deaths" number and pretend that unless a person had COVID and COVID alone listed, with no co-morbidity, it doesn't count, and therefore 99+% of COVID deaths aren't COVID at all.
This is, of course, not true, as the excess deaths numbers clearly demonstrate. If anything, we're under-counting COVID.
This is comically illustrated by the examples being used... Hit by a bus? Hospice patients with weeks to live?
The truth is that the typical comorbidities, that have a noticeable effect on the actual total number of deaths, are things like obesity, hyptertension, and diabetes... Things that literally will not kill an otherwise healthy adult in the same time period as COVID-19.
Are they even testing dead people for covid?
Or, are you saying someone was hit by a bus, gets/has covid and ultimately dies? If that's the case, I would assume the doctors know what they are doing and would list the ultimate cause of death properly, which covid may have aggravated. What if they would have survived their bus injuries if it was not for covid?
Regardless, this hair splitting doesn't matter because it's a very small portion of all cases that end up in an odd case like the above.
Mortality increase (compared to the average of last n years) seems like the only good measure of Covid impact.
Because this is the first time that these sorts of stats have been used to curtail everyone's freedom so much.
We know this because we have seen how things have unfolded in places like Northern Italy and Iran - the hospital system is quickly overwhelmed, and then people start dying by the dozens in each hospital, because they simply can't get any kind of care anymore.
Another possible interpretation of this is that lockdowns don't really help much.
> We know this because we have seen how things have unfolded in places like Northern Italy and Iran
I thought those places did have lockdowns.
Famously, the Iranian health minister was on TV announcing that the country doesn't need to take special Covid19 measure while visibly sweating because of the fever caused by his Covid19 infection.
If you want positive proof that lockdowns work, the absolute best example is Vietnam: a tiny country of 100 million people which has experienced 1123 total infections so far, with 37 deaths.