I don't think we're reporting in sufficient detail to comply with the worldometer format re recoveries and serious/critical cases. Basically, you can ignore those two columns in the UK stats.
Also I'm inclined to be cautious about weekend figures; there may be under-reporting because of staff absences or other staff priorities.
I don't think we're reporting in sufficient detail to comply with the worldometer format re recoveries and serious/critical cases. Basically, you can ignore those two columns in the UK stats.
Also I'm inclined to be cautious about weekend figures; there may be under-reporting because of staff absences or other staff priorities.
I think worldometer is not getting sufficient data from its reporting sources. I know that in the US our sources are more likely to report the admitting and death statistics than the recovery and discharge statistics.'
Masks are of mixed benefit. (Almost) anything is going to be better than nothing, a cloth mask might allow a particle to get through, but it will reduce the number of particles. The biggest disadvantage to permeable masks is that wet severely reduces their limited efficacy as the water become a more efficient carrier. And wet they will get.
IMO, the biggest advantage to everyone wearing masks is reduced transmission from people who are infected, but do not realise it.
I think it relates to how they are used. You potentially get virus on the inside of the mask - from you if you are infected - and on the outside, from other people. But at some point you take the mask off, so firstly you need to do that before it is so saturated as to be useless and secondly you need to do that in such away as not to transfer virus to your facial orifices, and in such a way as not to transfer virus to shared surfaces.
Medical staff are trained and monitored in how they don and doff ppe - the general public are not. This could make a big difference to what impact mask wearing by the general public has. Likewise, if mask wearing causes the public to take other risks then the net benefit may be offset by the consequences of that.
E.g. I have a mask so I go to visit my elderly mum - but I wore it to the supermarket this morning, came home took it off briefly went to the loo washed my hands, pick up the mask soiled from the virus I’ve breathed out - my hands are now contaminated with virus but I am unaware of this. I go to my mothers house, she opens door, I don’t touch her or the front door, but I walk through to the kitchen - opening the kitchen door with my virus contaminated hands on the way, and then I wash my hands because I am trying to be careful.
I got to the sitting room to sit two metres away from mum and chat. She goes to the kitchen to get a cup of tea - carefully doesn’t offer me one because I can’t take my mask off - but gets virus on her hands from the kitchen door handle. Sips tea, wipes hand on lip, catches virus.
I go home, 5 days later she’s ill - I don’t realise she caught it from me.
But if I didn’t have a mask, I wouldn’t have gone to visit her.
That's the argument of the WHO who are now advocating some form of mouth covering - cloth over the mouth intercepts aerosols and water droplets breathed out by someone who is infected (but, unaware of this - if you suspect you're infected then you should still remain at home), this reduces the number of virus particles in the atmosphere around someone and slows them down (ie: reduces the range they can manage to travel). Still not as good as staying home, but better than nothing. It doesn't need surgical masks, anything will do - a scarf or handkerchief, but remember that once finished with you wash it properly before reuse.
I continue to be on the page of avoid contact. Not letting a mask delude you into taking risks you wouldn't take with out a mask.
I don't know if the effect has a name. We saw when upgraded hockey helmets (ice and skates hockey) that serious injuries to necks and heads actually increased for young players. The same effect shown for bicycle helmets for risk taking children on bicycles.
Back to toilet paper. A few years ago, my village was snowed in. Not very snowed in, not Canada or northern states in the USA snowed in. Probably going to be snowed in for a few days snowed in. In our small supermarket, the shelves of bread, milk and toilet paper were bare.
Until recently, I have used this as an example of some sort of stupidity. How many homes would have got to the "I'm going to need to buy loo roll in the next few days, better get it now" stage just at that time? Not that many, I would have thought.
And now I see the same thing again. And I had to join in a bit, as I am hosting someone who needs several trips to the loo a day, involving rather more paper than I use. I had already been stockpiling whenever the supermarket had the loo rolls on offer, so I knew how long what I had would last. And I knew that TPTB were talking months, not weeks.
I still think the snowfall people were not sensible, though.
And when it gets to women snatching rolls from the trolleys of old men when they already have several packs in theirs, there is something seriously wrong.
I think worldometer is not getting sufficient data from its reporting sources. I know that in the US our sources are more likely to report the admitting and death statistics than the recovery and discharge statistics.'
The checking I've done suggests that worldometer and Johns Hopkins are using the same government sources for their raw data. So their figures are as good as their sources. I'm not sure there can be anything more reliable at this stage, though I've little doubt that some sources are more credible than others.
Governments need accurate figures to advise both their hospital supply actions and their restrictions on human movements. Whether they are all prepared to make all the data available is another question.
Excuse me expressing my frustration a bit--I know we are all in the same boat.
This past week my wife and I watched a story about the development of the Salk Vaccine. Let me just say his testing would not meet today's standards. He basically ran three tests. The first test was on developmentally disabled. His second test was on orphans (in homes) and his third test was on 2.4 million kids. From the timeline line in the story, it appears that I could have been part of that batch. When it was proven that the third test did reduce polio, they went full bore to produce the vaccine through quite a few companies.
Compare to this situation. They have completed the second phase for a coronavirus vaccine in Seattle. It seems that it has produced a significant amount of antibodies and now they are going to a third stage in which it is used in about 60,000 people with half in a control group. They are still saying production is 12 to 18 months away.
Did they really do this with the Ebola vaccine? I think they found one that produced anitbodies and moved it out to the affected areas within just a few months.
Considering the seriousness of this pandemic, I ask, why go to such a small third stage and move to a much wider distribution like say go after the hottest spots first and then move on out in concentric circles?
I am at the point where I say "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead."
Gramps49 non-expert speculation but I would think the different case fatality rates makes a big difference here in terms of risk & reward from an inadequately tested treatment if it potentially has significant side effects in a minority of patients. Most people who got Ebola without treatment died the vast majority of people infected with Covid-19 survive. I can't remember all the facts but think there was an example of a vaccine produced in the 50s or 60s that theoretically should have helped patients but resulted in their immune systems over reacting when the virus came along and actually made things worse. I would guess a treatment that was effective for seriously ill patients would need less testing, but vaccines would be given to people with no illness and antivirals often work best in the early stages before anyone knows whether the person is going to be badly affected or not so if they are not very safe the cure would be worse than the covid.
Spot on, Bullfinch. If corners can be cut safely, they will be. But the risk-reward balance is very different to Ebola.
Given the significant increase in those hospitalised, the effective and rapid testing of possible remedies looks the best place for some judicious corner-cutting. But the issues aren't straightforward there either. Side effects, dose sizes, implications for other pre-existing conditions etc, these all take time to resolve via testing.
I can't work out whether that's bad news (more people have died than was thought) good (if morbid) news (if a death rate of x% is assumed, well, those unrecorded deaths mean more of x% have already died, thus slightly improving the odds for the rest of us), or just further proof that no country is telling the whole story.
(By the way, I know prisons hate inmates committing suicide on the premises, and do their utmost to get them to hospital or at least on the way there before doing so, otherwise it messes up their annual reports).
The French dimension. The latest note on the worldometer site says this.
on April 3 the French Government reported 17,827 additional cases and 532 additional deaths from nursing homes that had not been reported previously. On April 2, it had reported 884 additional deaths.
I found some online evidence that independent researchers believed that there were indeed deaths in nursing homes of untested patients which were reasonably attributable to COVID-19. Perhaps the government has changed its counting standards? Not sure, but the April 4 death figures follow the trend of April 2 and April 3 figures in being significantly higher than previous trends would indicate.
Plus I have a feeling that similar arguments may be made about the UK stats.
A: we stopped getting funding after SARS, MERS, Ebola. You give athletes $1.5 million a month salary, biologists $3500 a month, graduate students $1000 a month or no funding at all, go ask Cristiano Ronaldo to go find you a vaccine.
(Substitute your favourite banker, corporate CEO, rock star, actor, rich politico for athletes as you wish.)
I'm beginning to think that death isn't the only, and may not actually the main, issue with this pandemic. Not in simple numbers, anyway.
There is the problem that for every death, many people have been kept alive by ICUs and ventilators. This takes a lot of resources. All the social distancing and whatnot may be less about reducing the total numbers of infections which will ultimately occur and more about ensuring that we can deal with them as they occur.
Lives will be saved more by our being able to treat the savable patients rather our being able to stop people catching it.
This is why the "most of the people who die would have died anyway by now" is a red herring; restricting deaths to this group as far as possible would constitute an achievement. But then we'll get "all that restriction and there were hardly any excess deaths" grumped at us.
All the social distancing and whatnot may be less about reducing the total numbers of infections which will ultimately occur and more about ensuring that we can deal with them as they occur.
This has been explicitly stated by health authorities in this country. It's what "flattening the curve" means.
I'm beginning to think that death isn't the only, and may not actually the main, issue with this pandemic. Not in simple numbers, anyway.
There is the problem that for every death, many people have been kept alive by ICUs and ventilators. This takes a lot of resources. All the social distancing and whatnot may be less about reducing the total numbers of infections which will ultimately occur and more about ensuring that we can deal with them as they occur.
Lives will be saved more by our being able to treat the savable patients rather our being able to stop people catching it.
This is why the "most of the people who die would have died anyway by now" is a red herring; restricting deaths to this group as far as possible would constitute an achievement. But then we'll get "all that restriction and there were hardly any excess deaths" grumped at us.
There is a dilemma to flattening the curve. The flatter the curve, the fewer people seriously ill and the fewer deaths. The fewer people seriously ill ofr dead, the less impetus to find a cure/preventative and to modify our behaviours permanently.
We have plenty of history of real pandemics, limited pandemics and potential pandemics and yet we are here: unprepared, unorganised and struggling to cope.
The numbers look bad, but right now most people are not infected. I do not personally know anyone with the virus and that is across multiple countries. It would be easy for people in the same situation to just let this slide away after all is said and done.
I'm beginning to think that death isn't the only, and may not actually the main, issue with this pandemic. Not in simple numbers, anyway.
There is the problem that for every death, many people have been kept alive by ICUs and ventilators. This takes a lot of resources. All the social distancing and whatnot may be less about reducing the total numbers of infections which will ultimately occur and more about ensuring that we can deal with them as they occur.
Lives will be saved more by our being able to treat the savable patients rather our being able to stop people catching it.
This is why the "most of the people who die would have died anyway by now" is a red herring; restricting deaths to this group as far as possible would constitute an achievement. But then we'll get "all that restriction and there were hardly any excess deaths" grumped at us.
There is a dilemma to flattening the curve. The flatter the curve, the fewer people seriously ill and the fewer deaths. The fewer people seriously ill ofr dead, the less impetus to find a cure/preventative and to modify our behaviours permanently.
I don't think that follows. A flatter curve means fewer people infected at any particular time, and fewer people seriously ill at any one time means they can receive better care and are less likely to die. But, to flatten the curve we need to maintain severe restrictions for longer with significant economic and social impacts - and those impacts will provide an impetus to develop a cure and vaccine, even if thousands of dead isn't impetus enough.
I'm beginning to think that death isn't the only, and may not actually the main, issue with this pandemic. Not in simple numbers, anyway.
There is the problem that for every death, many people have been kept alive by ICUs and ventilators. This takes a lot of resources. All the social distancing and whatnot may be less about reducing the total numbers of infections which will ultimately occur and more about ensuring that we can deal with them as they occur.
Lives will be saved more by our being able to treat the savable patients rather our being able to stop people catching it.
This is why the "most of the people who die would have died anyway by now" is a red herring; restricting deaths to this group as far as possible would constitute an achievement. But then we'll get "all that restriction and there were hardly any excess deaths" grumped at us.
There is a dilemma to flattening the curve. The flatter the curve, the fewer people seriously ill and the fewer deaths. The fewer people seriously ill ofr dead, the less impetus to find a cure/preventative and to modify our behaviours permanently.
I don't think that follows. A flatter curve means fewer people infected at any particular time, and fewer people seriously ill at any one time means they can receive better care and are less likely to die. But, to flatten the curve we need to maintain severe restrictions for longer with significant economic and social impacts - and those impacts will provide an impetus to develop a cure and vaccine, even if thousands of dead isn't impetus enough.
During the crises, I think you have a point. However, if the cure/treatment is not found within that time, the impetus will fade. I base this on behaviours exhibited by people over time.
Lives will be saved more by our being able to treat the savable patients rather our being able to stop people catching it.
I hope I read that wrong. There is an old saying: an ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure.
Are you saying we should give up on the social distancing and stay at home programs and just let the virus run rapid?
How do you know who is savable? While it seems children may be able to endure the virus, there have indeed been quite a few young adults in their 20's and 30's die from this disease so I could not say young people may be more savable than middle-age people. Are you saying the senior citizens should be prepared to die? Well, bub, I am 71; and, though I have been close to death several times, I am not prepared to die at this time. I think I have a lot of life still left in me.
Listened to the BBC’s Coronavirus newscast podcast - they had a palliative care specialist on. Which is not an encouraging sign in itself.
However, what she had to say was worth hearing - essentially information about the process of dying.
Saying that in this situation, medication is used to control the sensation of breathlessness - and effectively what happens is people feel more and more tired, sleep more and more often, and for longer, and eventually do not regain consciousness. Also, that if you are on a ventilator you would be sedated and unconscious - unaware of what is happening.
So the catastrophic image we may have in our head, often unspoken, of dying whilst having a striving trauma of conscious suffocation akin to to drowning is highly unlikely to be the experience of death for those whose pass away from Covid-19.
List of countries with at least 5,000 known COVID-19 cases.
United States - 311,635 (288,356 / 14,825 / 8,454)
Spain - 126,168 (80,002 / 34,219 / 11,947)
Italy - 124,632 (88,274 / 20,996 / 15,362)
Germany - 96,092 (68,248 / 26,400 / 1,444)
France - 89,953 (66,955 / 15,438 / 7,560)
China - 81,669 (1,376 / 76,964 / 3,329) 4.1%
Iran - 55,743 (32,555 / 19,736 / 3,452)
United Kingdom - 41,903 (37,455 / 135 / 4,313)
Turkey - 23,934 (22,647 / 786 / 501)
Switzerland - 20,505 (13,424 / 6,415 / 666)
Belgium - 18,431 (13,901 / 3,247 / 1,283)
Netherlands - 16,627 (14,726 / 250 / 1,651)
Canada - 13,912 (11,086 / 2,595 / 231)
Austria - 11,781 (9,088 / 2,507 / 186)
Portugal - 10,524 (10,183 / 75 / 266)
Brazil - 10,360 (9,788 / 127 / 445)
South Korea - 10,237 (3,591 / 6,463 / 183)
Israel - 7,851 (7,380 / 427 / 44)
Sweden - 6,443 (5,865 / 205 / 373)
Australia - 5,635 (5,016 / 585 / 34)
Norway - 5,550 (5,456 / 32 / 62)
The listings are in the format:
X. Country - [# of known cases] ([active] / [recovered] / [dead]) [%fatality rate]
Fatality rates are only listed for countries where the number of resolved cases (recovered + dead) exceeds the number of known active cases by a ratio of at least 2:1. Italics indicate authoritarian countries whose official statistics are suspect. Other country's statistics are suspect if their testing regimes are substandard.
If American states were treated as individual countries thirteen of them would be on that list. New York would be ranked between Italy and Germany.
Lives will be saved more by our being able to treat the savable patients rather our being able to stop people catching it.
I hope I read that wrong. There is an old saying: an ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure.
Are you saying we should give up on the social distancing and stay at home programs and just let the virus run rapid?
How do you know who is savable? While it seems children may be able to endure the virus, there have indeed been quite a few young adults in their 20's and 30's die from this disease so I could not say young people may be more savable than middle-age people. Are you saying the senior citizens should be prepared to die? Well, bub, I am 71; and, though I have been close to death several times, I am not prepared to die at this time. I think I have a lot of life still left in me.
Please tell me I read what you wrote wrong.
Entirely wrong. I'm saying the lockdown is essential to prevent the virus spreading so quickly that it overwhelms the health service and people who would survive with treatment then die.
Slow it down and everyone with it can be treated. I do however accept that there are some people who will still die even with the best treatment. We only find out who they were after they die despite our best efforts.
I'm not suggesting triaging who is saveable and should be treated; that's what we'd be forced into without social distancing etc.
It's the right wing death cult that is recommending no lockdown, fill the morgues. I wonder if they've thought this through, with people dying en masse. As per Karl, spot on. Flatten the bulge, so it's manageable. So many people now saying we are near the peak. Hopefully.
Interesting traffic light solution to the lockdown suggested by Lyons and Ormerod, summarized by Larry Elliott in the Guardian, who doesn't seem to give a link. Red would mean a few shops reopen, Amber would allow car journeys, and restaurants to open, green would allow sport, church, etc. No idea if this would work, but no doubt the number crunchers are crunching it. One problem is that results would take weeks to show up.
There is a difference between deaths from covid and deaths with covid. Consider a man who, with the best possible medical care, is rapidly going downhill with congestive heart failure. The day before he dies he tests positive for covid. It is misleading to classify this as a death caused by covid. It is a death with covid.
Weeks ago I saw a graph which showed the relationship between covid deaths in Italy and pre-existing serious medical conditions. Five serious conditions were listed. Two of them were heart disease and lung disease. I don't remember the other three. Less than five percent of those who died had none of these conditions. The great majority had at least two.
This clarifies the question of who is most at risk and in need of protection. We are not all equally vulnerable.
But to separate out the vulnerable and keep them safe, would be a huge logistical problem, if everybody else is swanning about. OK, they stay at home, then what?
But to separate out the vulnerable and keep them safe, would be a huge logistical problem, if everybody else is swanning about. OK, they stay at home, then what?
To protect the most vulnerable you'd need to keep them isolated.
But, the vast majority (almost by definition) are needing medical care. So, how do you make sure those who are coming into their homes or hospital wards aren't infected? Well, they need to be isolated as well, but they have families and it's a big ask to tell all workers in hospitals, care homes, workers visiting the sick at home etc to isolate themselves entirely from their families and the rest of society. Then, of course, you need to make sure all those people who come into hospital from a car accident, or whatever, have also been in isolation for a couple of weeks before their accident ...
You end up that the only way to protect the most vulnerable is something almost indistinguishable from what we have now got in place.
Moo - do you know if the preexisting conditions analysed were only ones considered serious or did they include common conditions that might ordinarily appear minor to sufferers? There is a huge difference between someone having a pre-existing condition that means they have a short time left to live anyway and say slightly elevated blood pressure or asthma which in ordinary circumstances make little difference to someone's everyday life when well controlled and where other risk factors are minimised. Does Asthma for instance count as lung disease in these definitions as about 10% of the UK population has it and it's just as common in the youngest demographic? (and amongst the fittest demographic the percentage in Olympic athletes is similar to the general population...) or are they only referring to things like CPD?
@Bullfinch, The CDC is saying the highest risk are elderly people with pretty much any serious underlying health condition and anyone of any age with one of these:
Chronic lung disease or moderate to severe asthma
Serious heart conditions
Conditions that can cause a person to be immunocompromised, including cancer treatment, smoking, bone marrow or organ transplantation, immune deficiencies, poorly controlled HIV or AIDS, and prolonged use of corticosteroids and other immune weakening medications.
Severe obesity (body mass index [BMI] of 40 or higher)
Diabetes
Chronic kidney disease and who are undergoing dialysis
Liver disease
And while they call BMI 40+ "severe", there are a hell of a lot of people in that category who are otherwise healthy and living normal, if somewhat sedentary, lives.
Moo - do you know if the preexisting conditions analysed were only ones considered serious or did they include common conditions that might ordinarily appear minor to sufferers?
<snip>
.. or are they only referring to things like CPD?
They were referring to things like CPD--conditions that require close constant medical supervision. It's no accident that so many people who have died were in nursing homes. They were already in such bad shape that they could not take care of themselves.
And while they call BMI 40+ "severe", there are a hell of a lot of people in that category who are otherwise healthy and living normal, if somewhat sedentary, lives.
It effects respiration and risks around intubation, for the same reasons it puts you at risk of sleep apnea, they are not fat shaming with this - there are specific elevated risks.
Moo - do you know if the preexisting conditions analysed were only ones considered serious or did they include common conditions that might ordinarily appear minor to sufferers?
<snip>
.. or are they only referring to things like CPD?
They were referring to things like CPD--conditions that require close constant medical supervision. It's no accident that so many people who have died were in nursing homes. They were already in such bad shape that they could not take care of themselves.
Working medical staff are dying in Europe - they must have been relatively fit and healthy to start with.
Working medical staff are dying in Europe - they must have been relatively fit and healthy to start with.
I think they were fit and healthy to begin with, but repeated close exposure to the virus, combined with severe fatigue and probably lack of a healthy diet during the emergency weakened them. Moreover, the study I cited showed that a small number of cases had no underlying chronic problems. I suspect many of these cases involved medical staff.
And while they call BMI 40+ "severe", there are a hell of a lot of people in that category who are otherwise healthy and living normal, if somewhat sedentary, lives.
It effects respiration and risks around intubation, for the same reasons it puts you at risk of sleep apnea, they are not fat shaming with this - there are specific elevated risks.
Sorry to be unclear. I'm not disputing the risk, just highlighting that "underlying health condition" can be something utterly common and non-debilitating under normal circumstances. When people use uhc as a way to make the death rate seem better it's like they're implying such folk were even odds to keel over this year anyway, and need wheeling around with an oxygen cylinder.
I'd be interested to see how many people are covered by the "underlying health conditions". If it's less than 10% of the UK adult population I'd be surprised.
Moo - do you know if the preexisting conditions analysed were only ones considered serious or did they include common conditions that might ordinarily appear minor to sufferers?
<snip>
.. or are they only referring to things like CPD?
They were referring to things like CPD--conditions that require close constant medical supervision. It's no accident that so many people who have died were in nursing homes. They were already in such bad shape that they could not take care of themselves.
Working medical staff are dying in Europe - they must have been relatively fit and healthy to start with.
Another factor, I understand, is 'viral load'. That is, what size of a dose you get, or how much exposed you are to the virus, which is probably what is often most affecting the staff working at hospitals who catch it.
You also need to remember there's a reporting bias. The media are more likely to report on the deaths of those who are deemed more newsworthy - and someone who's been treating people with Covid-19 automatically falls into that category. If there were two equally fit and healthy 45 year olds who die of covid-19, one's a nurse and the other works in an office you know which one will be reported on.
Can we isolate ourselves correlated with age and other health condition related risk? Can the young, those with low risk get back to 'normal'?
Estimates of severity of coronavirus cases in Britain
a) Age group
b) % symptomatic cases requiring hospital
c) % hospitalised cases requiring critical care
d) Infection Fatality Ratio
a.....................b...............c.........d.....
..0 to 9...……..0.1%...…...5%.....0.002%
10 to 19.........0.3%........5%.....0.006%
20 to 29...…..1.2%...…....5%.....0.03%
30 to 39.......3.2%...…....5%.....0.08%
40 to 49.......4.9%......6.3%.....0.15%
50 to 59.....10.2%.....12.2%.....0.60%
60 to 69.....16.6%.....27.4%.....2.2%
70 to 79.....24.3%.....43.2%.....5.1%
80+.............27.3%.....70.9%.....9.3%
Those numbers would still completely overwhelm the hospitals' capacity to cope - and then every hospitalisation case would rapidly become a fatal case.
Moo - do you know if the preexisting conditions analysed were only ones considered serious or did they include common conditions that might ordinarily appear minor to sufferers?
<snip>
.. or are they only referring to things like CPD?
They were referring to things like CPD--conditions that require close constant medical supervision. It's no accident that so many people who have died were in nursing homes. They were already in such bad shape that they could not take care of themselves.
Working medical staff are dying in Europe - they must have been relatively fit and healthy to start with.
Another factor, I understand, is 'viral load'. That is, what size of a dose you get, or how much exposed you are to the virus, which is probably what is often most affecting the staff working at hospitals who catch it.
Now I’d vaguely heard about this, and find it odd. So I can understand you are more likely to catch it in the first place - because repeated exposure.
But I don’t get the viral load thing, I suppose I’d conceptualised it as a thing you catch or don’t - and then the rest of the process is about the fight between the replicating virus and your immune system response. In the same way you are pregnant, or not.
Those numbers would still completely overwhelm the hospitals' capacity to cope - and then every hospitalisation case would rapidly become a fatal case.
It also assumes herd immunity in the young, and then at some point, the old and vulnerable are liberated into open society, with no repercussions. There are an awful lot of ifs here.
Taking courage from international appreciation of South Africa's tough stance on lockdown. And it is a scary and potentially abusive stance. The BBC report.
Comments
Also I'm inclined to be cautious about weekend figures; there may be under-reporting because of staff absences or other staff priorities.
I think worldometer is not getting sufficient data from its reporting sources. I know that in the US our sources are more likely to report the admitting and death statistics than the recovery and discharge statistics.'
IMO, the biggest advantage to everyone wearing masks is reduced transmission from people who are infected, but do not realise it.
Well-written and worthy of repeated reading.
I continue to be on the page of avoid contact. Not letting a mask delude you into taking risks you wouldn't take with out a mask.
I don't know if the effect has a name. We saw when upgraded hockey helmets (ice and skates hockey) that serious injuries to necks and heads actually increased for young players. The same effect shown for bicycle helmets for risk taking children on bicycles.
Until recently, I have used this as an example of some sort of stupidity. How many homes would have got to the "I'm going to need to buy loo roll in the next few days, better get it now" stage just at that time? Not that many, I would have thought.
And now I see the same thing again. And I had to join in a bit, as I am hosting someone who needs several trips to the loo a day, involving rather more paper than I use. I had already been stockpiling whenever the supermarket had the loo rolls on offer, so I knew how long what I had would last. And I knew that TPTB were talking months, not weeks.
I still think the snowfall people were not sensible, though.
And when it gets to women snatching rolls from the trolleys of old men when they already have several packs in theirs, there is something seriously wrong.
Governments need accurate figures to advise both their hospital supply actions and their restrictions on human movements. Whether they are all prepared to make all the data available is another question.
This past week my wife and I watched a story about the development of the Salk Vaccine. Let me just say his testing would not meet today's standards. He basically ran three tests. The first test was on developmentally disabled. His second test was on orphans (in homes) and his third test was on 2.4 million kids. From the timeline line in the story, it appears that I could have been part of that batch. When it was proven that the third test did reduce polio, they went full bore to produce the vaccine through quite a few companies.
Compare to this situation. They have completed the second phase for a coronavirus vaccine in Seattle. It seems that it has produced a significant amount of antibodies and now they are going to a third stage in which it is used in about 60,000 people with half in a control group. They are still saying production is 12 to 18 months away.
Did they really do this with the Ebola vaccine? I think they found one that produced anitbodies and moved it out to the affected areas within just a few months.
Considering the seriousness of this pandemic, I ask, why go to such a small third stage and move to a much wider distribution like say go after the hottest spots first and then move on out in concentric circles?
I am at the point where I say "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead."
Like I said, exuse my rant.
Given the significant increase in those hospitalised, the effective and rapid testing of possible remedies looks the best place for some judicious corner-cutting. But the issues aren't straightforward there either. Side effects, dose sizes, implications for other pre-existing conditions etc, these all take time to resolve via testing.
Risk assessment is never straightforward.
The French dimension. The latest note on the worldometer site says this.
I found some online evidence that independent researchers believed that there were indeed deaths in nursing homes of untested patients which were reasonably attributable to COVID-19. Perhaps the government has changed its counting standards? Not sure, but the April 4 death figures follow the trend of April 2 and April 3 figures in being significantly higher than previous trends would indicate.
Plus I have a feeling that similar arguments may be made about the UK stats.
A: we stopped getting funding after SARS, MERS, Ebola. You give athletes $1.5 million a month salary, biologists $3500 a month, graduate students $1000 a month or no funding at all, go ask Cristiano Ronaldo to go find you a vaccine.
(Substitute your favourite banker, corporate CEO, rock star, actor, rich politico for athletes as you wish.)
There is the problem that for every death, many people have been kept alive by ICUs and ventilators. This takes a lot of resources. All the social distancing and whatnot may be less about reducing the total numbers of infections which will ultimately occur and more about ensuring that we can deal with them as they occur.
Lives will be saved more by our being able to treat the savable patients rather our being able to stop people catching it.
This is why the "most of the people who die would have died anyway by now" is a red herring; restricting deaths to this group as far as possible would constitute an achievement. But then we'll get "all that restriction and there were hardly any excess deaths" grumped at us.
This has been explicitly stated by health authorities in this country. It's what "flattening the curve" means.
We have plenty of history of real pandemics, limited pandemics and potential pandemics and yet we are here: unprepared, unorganised and struggling to cope.
The numbers look bad, but right now most people are not infected. I do not personally know anyone with the virus and that is across multiple countries. It would be easy for people in the same situation to just let this slide away after all is said and done.
You wrote:
I hope I read that wrong. There is an old saying: an ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure.
Are you saying we should give up on the social distancing and stay at home programs and just let the virus run rapid?
How do you know who is savable? While it seems children may be able to endure the virus, there have indeed been quite a few young adults in their 20's and 30's die from this disease so I could not say young people may be more savable than middle-age people. Are you saying the senior citizens should be prepared to die? Well, bub, I am 71; and, though I have been close to death several times, I am not prepared to die at this time. I think I have a lot of life still left in me.
Please tell me I read what you wrote wrong.
This Doublethink post has meant so much to me and my son. We are sleeping again!
So I'm bringing it forward for any who might have missed it.
The listings are in the format:
X. Country - [# of known cases] ([active] / [recovered] / [dead]) [%fatality rate]
Fatality rates are only listed for countries where the number of resolved cases (recovered + dead) exceeds the number of known active cases by a ratio of at least 2:1. Italics indicate authoritarian countries whose official statistics are suspect. Other country's statistics are suspect if their testing regimes are substandard.
If American states were treated as individual countries thirteen of them would be on that list. New York would be ranked between Italy and Germany.
No countries have joined the list since the last compilation.
Entirely wrong. I'm saying the lockdown is essential to prevent the virus spreading so quickly that it overwhelms the health service and people who would survive with treatment then die.
Slow it down and everyone with it can be treated. I do however accept that there are some people who will still die even with the best treatment. We only find out who they were after they die despite our best efforts.
I'm not suggesting triaging who is saveable and should be treated; that's what we'd be forced into without social distancing etc.
Weeks ago I saw a graph which showed the relationship between covid deaths in Italy and pre-existing serious medical conditions. Five serious conditions were listed. Two of them were heart disease and lung disease. I don't remember the other three. Less than five percent of those who died had none of these conditions. The great majority had at least two.
This clarifies the question of who is most at risk and in need of protection. We are not all equally vulnerable.
But, the vast majority (almost by definition) are needing medical care. So, how do you make sure those who are coming into their homes or hospital wards aren't infected? Well, they need to be isolated as well, but they have families and it's a big ask to tell all workers in hospitals, care homes, workers visiting the sick at home etc to isolate themselves entirely from their families and the rest of society. Then, of course, you need to make sure all those people who come into hospital from a car accident, or whatever, have also been in isolation for a couple of weeks before their accident ...
You end up that the only way to protect the most vulnerable is something almost indistinguishable from what we have now got in place.
Chronic lung disease or moderate to severe asthma
Serious heart conditions
Conditions that can cause a person to be immunocompromised, including cancer treatment, smoking, bone marrow or organ transplantation, immune deficiencies, poorly controlled HIV or AIDS, and prolonged use of corticosteroids and other immune weakening medications.
Severe obesity (body mass index [BMI] of 40 or higher)
Diabetes
Chronic kidney disease and who are undergoing dialysis
Liver disease
They were referring to things like CPD--conditions that require close constant medical supervision. It's no accident that so many people who have died were in nursing homes. They were already in such bad shape that they could not take care of themselves.
It effects respiration and risks around intubation, for the same reasons it puts you at risk of sleep apnea, they are not fat shaming with this - there are specific elevated risks.
Working medical staff are dying in Europe - they must have been relatively fit and healthy to start with.
I think they were fit and healthy to begin with, but repeated close exposure to the virus, combined with severe fatigue and probably lack of a healthy diet during the emergency weakened them. Moreover, the study I cited showed that a small number of cases had no underlying chronic problems. I suspect many of these cases involved medical staff.
Sorry to be unclear. I'm not disputing the risk, just highlighting that "underlying health condition" can be something utterly common and non-debilitating under normal circumstances. When people use uhc as a way to make the death rate seem better it's like they're implying such folk were even odds to keel over this year anyway, and need wheeling around with an oxygen cylinder.
I'd be interested to see how many people are covered by the "underlying health conditions". If it's less than 10% of the UK adult population I'd be surprised.
Another factor, I understand, is 'viral load'. That is, what size of a dose you get, or how much exposed you are to the virus, which is probably what is often most affecting the staff working at hospitals who catch it.
Estimates of severity of coronavirus cases in Britain
a) Age group
b) % symptomatic cases requiring hospital
c) % hospitalised cases requiring critical care
d) Infection Fatality Ratio
a.....................b...............c.........d.....
..0 to 9...……..0.1%...…...5%.....0.002%
10 to 19.........0.3%........5%.....0.006%
20 to 29...…..1.2%...…....5%.....0.03%
30 to 39.......3.2%...…....5%.....0.08%
40 to 49.......4.9%......6.3%.....0.15%
50 to 59.....10.2%.....12.2%.....0.60%
60 to 69.....16.6%.....27.4%.....2.2%
70 to 79.....24.3%.....43.2%.....5.1%
80+.............27.3%.....70.9%.....9.3%
SOURCE: IMPERIAL COLLEGE
Now I’d vaguely heard about this, and find it odd. So I can understand you are more likely to catch it in the first place - because repeated exposure.
But I don’t get the viral load thing, I suppose I’d conceptualised it as a thing you catch or don’t - and then the rest of the process is about the fight between the replicating virus and your immune system response. In the same way you are pregnant, or not.
It also assumes herd immunity in the young, and then at some point, the old and vulnerable are liberated into open society, with no repercussions. There are an awful lot of ifs here.
What will be the mortality rate caused by the economics of another two years of blanket lock down?