I don’t write the headlines for newspapers. Also the data is that hospitalizations are going up.
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I don’t write the headlines for newspapers. Also the data is that hospitalizations are going up.
Please try to locate your elementary school math teacher, so that you can study the basics again. Oh, make sure this time you don’t throw out your brains during the study.
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Who care about the company. The employees are getting personally affected on a financial level
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Poor employees have to find new jobs.
I'm seeing a pattern. A whole lot of personal attacks and very little substantive argumentation directed towards the actual content of the point(s) I have made. Well done.
I think they were just trying to point out the error in your math. If the death rate was truly only 0.05% that would mean with the (current) 128,000 deaths in the USA, 256 million people would've had to have been infected already to come up with a death rate of 0.05%. I think we can all agree that 78% of the population of the USA hasn't already had COVID-19.
We can also agree that if 256M people did get it, 12.2M wouldn't be dead.
It's at least somewhat likely over 25M or more have gotten it, making the death rate 10X less than the media keeps pounding endlessly.
Totally, the reported cases is definitely lower than the actual cases, we just don't know by how much. Reported cases would be biased towards people who have more severe symptoms, whereas most individuals who have only minor symptoms and especially those who are asymptomatic are probably not tested.
That said stats are pointing to a mortality rate of less than 0.1% for people under 40, slowly increasing to a mortality rate of close to 30% for those over 80. With that in mind taking appropriate precautions to protect the vulnerable seems prudent. I would think if people would consistently wear masks in indoor public spaces and take physical distancing (outside a small social group) more seriously shutting down retail shops wouldn't be necessary.
Like I have said before, the rate of 0.05% was something that I miss remembered and is actually closer to 0.07-0.09%. (Still many margins smaller than what is reported). Secondly, your response assumes that the 130k death toll that has been reported is actually accurate.. You realise that everyone who has died, who had contracted COVID has been reported as a COVID death even though something else could've been the actual cause of it. Little to no investigation is done into each death. Those in charge of drafting up the death certificates do not even have to have positive COVID test results in order to classify a death as a COVID death. That's the problem here. There are already several countries that have experienced a similar pattern, where they have reported that the actual number of COVID deaths do no add up when you take into consideration of historical death figures.
All we really need to know at this point are these things:
1. Are positivity rates and hospitalizations going up? The answer is yes.
2. Are there excess deaths over a normal year? The answer is yes.
3. Have other countries, like Canada for instance, handled this situation better? The answer is yes.
4. Is Apple closing stores in an areas with rising outbreaks prudent? The answer is yes.
All of those, the answers are yes.
You are not looking at the nuances in any of the points you made.
1. Do hospitalisation rates go up during a bad flu season for example? Yes they do. Just like they did here.
2. To carry on from point 1 above, if there are more flu hospitalisations, then it follows that there will also be more deaths. So yes, there will be excess deaths, also in a flu season. I am not insinuating that Flu is as bad as COVID FYI.
3. This is perhaps the most complex problem to unravel and the one that needs the most attention with regards to nuances. Every country on the planet are so vastly different from each other in terms of land mass, population, cultures, cultural habits, societal norms, climates etc that makes this a multivariate and very complex thing to understand. I'm certainly not going to be able to sit here and pretend that I am able to compare how Canada's corona figures lineup with those of the US, because it is quite simply put, impossible.
4. I don't really care if Apple closes their stores or not. It's not really pertinent to the current discussion that I am having with people here. (despite the heading of the article)
US debt to GDP is in the reasonable range, particularly given the power of the US economy. Japan's debt to GDP is more than double the US, as an example.
Nepal's debt is 30% of GDP, but you wouldn't make the argument Nepal is a better country than the US, right?
It really doesn't matter, but as I said, for a country with the GDP of the US, it's totally reasonable.
1. The flu season is over
2. Deaths from an average Flu outbreak are factored in to the excess death statistics.
3. There are parameters that are easy to compare and others that are not so much. Ultimately, medicine is not politics and we can make comparisons. The WHO exists to standardize reporting on diseases (this includes non-infections stuff, like cancer) so the comparison is easier. It's odd that you consider numbers comparable when it supports your point (Qatar and Singapore), but not when we are trying to compare Western nations.
Statement 1: COVID is similar to a bad Flu strain but we don’t make this much fuss about the Flu.
1. SARS-CoV-2 is 4x more contagious than the Flu.
Statement 2: but COVID’s mortality rate is severely inflated because the confirmed cases only represent 10% of all cases.
COVID remains at least 4 times deadlier than the worst Flu of the decade even if aggressive adjustments are made for asymptomatic cases. There are also data to suggest that symptomatic COVID cases may be a clinically more relevant benchmark of mortality:
Summary: COVID is >4x more contagious, and >4x likely to cause death than the Flu. Public health measures are essential to avert catastrophe.
1. SARS-CoV-2 is 4x more contagious than the Flu.
- R0 is the number that denotes the expected new cases generated by a single case. R0 is not a biological constant for a pathogen as it is also affected by other factors such as environmental conditions and the behavior of the infected population.
- The Flu strain associated with outbreak of the decade (2018) had an R0 1.53.
- SARS-CoV-2 had an estimated R0 of 6.4 in New York State before lockdown.
- States doing well with their public health interventions pushed COVID’s R0 to <1.0.
For COVID:
- USA at the present has 129,601 deaths for 2,830,856 confirmed cases. This makes the mortality of confirmed cases 4.58%
- Canada has 8,732 deaths for 107,136 cases. This makes the mortality of confirmed cases 8.15%.
- The UK has 44,283 deaths for 286,412 cases. This is 15.46% mortality rate of confirmed cases
- Switzerland has 1,965 deaths for 32,198 cases. 6.2% mortality rate for confirmed cases.
For the Flu (2017-18 season):
- In the USA, the CDC reported an estimate of 44,802,629 symptomatic cases of FLU, 808,129 hospitalizations involving the Flu and 61,099 deaths. That is a 1.8% hospitalization rate, and a 0.14% death rate.
Statement 2: but COVID’s mortality rate is severely inflated because the confirmed cases only represent 10% of all cases.
COVID remains at least 4 times deadlier than the worst Flu of the decade even if aggressive adjustments are made for asymptomatic cases. There are also data to suggest that symptomatic COVID cases may be a clinically more relevant benchmark of mortality:
- While there is indeed preliminary American data to suggest ~10X higher prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies than confirmed cases and similar is suggested by Swiss data. there is also preliminary data to suggest weaker and shorter immunity amongst those who undergo asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection. Therefore,
A) we might be further underestimating the number of those exposed to the disease.
B) those who had asymptomatic COVID may possibly return to the pool of susceptible hosts within months.
- Assuming immunity lasting >12 months, New York City’s adjusted COVID mortality rate will be 22,610/(221K*12) = 0.85%. This number is 0.53% for Switzerland.
- There is also data to suggest that for each confirmed Flu case there is 3 seropositive one. Thus, adjusting for asymptomatic Flu cases as well, Flu’s mortality rate could be as low as 0.035%. Thus the mortality numbers for NYC may be 24x, and for Switzerland may be 15x.
Summary: COVID is >4x more contagious, and >4x likely to cause death than the Flu. Public health measures are essential to avert catastrophe.
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There are a couple of things my post didn't address because I lost the patience to fetch my references but.
Statement: COVID is only killing the old:
Unlike the Flu that has a U-shaped mortality curve with peaks affecting the very young and very old, COVID has low mortality in the young, and very high mortality in the old. However, those 50-64 are already in a high-risk group and they represent a significant proportion of the workforce.
(note a lot of the drop in the mortality is due to lag in data accumulation and processing and not actual drops in death rate).
Statement: There is a perverse incentive to overreport COVID deaths
There are clear guidelines on how to report COVID deaths. The system is set up to capture as many cases as possible, whereas there are ways to improve the signal-to-noise ratio in the data, such as evaluating definite cases, or correcting for the average death rate of the reported timeframe. The data captures very sharp rises in death rates in those aged older than 55. There is very subtle increase in deaths in the group aged 35-54, but keep it in mind that staying home for these folks likely reduces accidental deaths that produce some offset.
(Again the lag in data processing produces an artificial drop in mortality in the month of June).
To be continued.
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The original poster who I was responding to said something along the lines of, "these are the things we should be looking at <lists out all 4 questions>, are all the answers the those questions? Yes". Insinuating that if the answers to those questions are all "yes", then all of the measures taken are justified.
1. You missed my point. What I meant was that when there is a Flu season there will be an increase in hospitalisations.
2. I am not talking about how current Flu deaths coincide with COVID deaths. I am merely making the point that it is a fairly normal phenomenon that Flu causes a spike in deaths and hospitalisations.
3. I think you're being slightly naive to say that medicine isn't political, of course at the core it isn't, however once you start looking at the higher ranked officials of medical institutions and those advising governments, it is very much politicised. I see your point about me comparing to Qatar and Singapore and you may well have a point that I am biased. However I would argue that these countries have shown to have completed some of the most sophisticated and widespread testing for the disease which one can argue yields the most accurate and realistic results. You could also argue that those results are not comparable to the west for those varying factors that I mentioned earlier, but yeah you might have a valid point.
I got it. My points were:
1. Flu seasons happen annually, thus even if death rates increase during the flu season compared to the rest of the year, if you compare weekly or monthly death rates, the average flu season's spikes are factored in.
2. Since the flu season was already winding down when COVID hit North America, and it is now totally over so we need not to worry about Flu cases confounding our equations (until the fall).
3. What academia taught me is that we can politicize anything in the world. But as long as you don't venture into abstract concepts like poverty, you can still get biologically objective study end points (like the seroprevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies). Public health also remains one of these common good issues on a page with world peace and stuff like that, this is why I have an extra layer of irritation when the WHO is blamed for this mess.
Now Qatar has a huge migrant worker population who are healthier than average, young (i.e. aged 18-49) and have suboptimally dense housing. There also have plenty of resources for testing (and they didn't botch it). They may have also "repatriated" those testing positive, so if they died they wouldn't affect Qatar's death rates. Singapore has a similar situation, but may have had less questionable practices, but I hope you get what I'm saying. If these people die in India, or Nepal for example, their death will not add to Qatar's or Singapore's numbers.
Now death rates may vary between nations and one of the primary sources of higher death rates like in Canada, are testing practices. Yet, regardless of testing practices, most Western nations have a mortality rate between 2 and 8% with confirmed cases. It's probably on the higher end if you restrict to the symptomatic, and on the lower end if you are more inclusive. Largely, you're still measuring the same phenomenon. A mortality rate going above 10% for example tells you more about healthcare systems being overflooded, which happened in Italy, Belgium, the UK, or in Hubei. The Chinese did report much lower mortality rates in provinces that initiated early lockdowns. That was the first evidence on how well quarantines work against this disease.
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Here's a pretty good overview on preliminary data regarding the debate, whether:
- We may be underestimating the prevalence of people already exposed to SARS-CoV-2 based on antibody measurements
- Not having antibodies may not be the end of the world, but we are a lot less proficient at determining immunity based on T-cells