The way I was taught Maths, the mean, median and mode are different types of average and neither one of them is the ‘average’ used without qualification, or it varies with the intent of the speaker. I appreciate language is often used differently, but I can assure you I understand the difference.
In any case, it makes no difference to the point. It is as absurd to say the average person has 9.995 fingers as it is to say the average healthy person has some scarily high number % chance of dying of Covid.
Depends how many people are used to make up the average.
There is a difference between the average person and the average number of fingers a person has. In the first you have to ask, who is the average person.
This is a trick often used by spin doctors to avoid later problems.
Do you know of any families with 2.4 children. If not they cannot be the average family?
gallois wrote:
There is a difference between the average person and the average number of fingers a person has. In the first you have to ask, who is the average person.
Fundamentally it depends on the meaning of the speaker. We can debate the language used all day, but it makes no sense at all to say that the ‘average person’ has 9.995 fingers. It may be technically true, but it is not useful.
I guess the main point is that mean, mode, and median can be useful descriptions of a group of people.
They lose their usefulness, (and even definition for the median?), when you talk about groups of one, and they may tell you little about individual members of larger groups.
Yesterday night Swiss TV showed a quite disturbing piece about what is actually going on in Swiss hospitals and ICU’s. Almost all people there are unvaccinated. They are taking up space which people waiting for cancer, heart and other operations should be using, some of those will probably not get the care they need in time to prevent their diseases to become deadly too.
The hospitals shown say very clearly that they have had vaccinated people in the ICU, but only for a short time and very rarely, whereas the unvaccinated take up space between 3-4 weeks, some more. The usual average in an ICU is 3 days. Some have converted operating theaters into additional ICU places, which were filled up the same day they were created.
Those docs and nurses expressed extreme frustration about the fact that this crisis is entirely home made, that is every single guy there on long term ICU could have prevented this by getting vaccinated. They fully expect having to use “triage” within the next several days, that is deciding whose chances warrant care and whose not. Several docs said it will be the low point of their career having to do that outside of a war or catastrophic accident setting.
The personell there also said that overtime, cancelled rest and vaccation times are taking overhand in such a manner that quite a lot of them are in distinct risk of burning out on the job. It has been known that since the crisis started, quite a few personell has had to resign over total mental and physical exhaustion.
Docs have been pleading with the government to finally impose stricter regulations to bring down the numbers or to start imposing G2, which has been shown to get more people to vaccinate. It won’t matter for this xmas though any more.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Yesterday night Swiss TV showed a quite disturbing piece about what is actually going on in Swiss hospitals and ICU’s. 99% of all people there are unvaccinated. They are taking up space which people waiting for cancer, heart and other operations should be using, some of those will probably not get the care they need in time to prevent their diseases to become deadly too
99% is unbelievable. No other country reported such a high number. In my humble opinion, it sounds more like propaganda.
Valentin wrote:
99% is unbelievable. No other country reported such a high number. In my humble opinion, it sounds more like propaganda.
I think the term they used was “all but for very few exceptions”. The 99% was my interpretation of this. I changed it.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
start imposing G2
MD, I’ve seen you use terms such as G2 in a number of posts now. But I can’t find a definition of what they mean and they don’t seem to be used in the media (at least not here).
Could you either describe what you mean instead of using these terms, or point to somewhere that we can read a definition of what you mean by them.
Sorry. This is a term used here widely but I just realize it is based on German. So it makes no sense at all to use it here. My apologies.
For the record:
G3 means: Vaccinated, Recovered, Tested
G2 means: Vaccinated or recovered
G1 means: Vaccinated.
It is based on “Geimpft” (vaccinated), “Genesen” (recovered) or “Getestet” (tested).
The Covid Certificate here is based on G3, very recently however it is possible to display G2 and G3 onto the certificate for checks.
Quite a lot of restaurants, clubs, e.t.c. demand G2 now. It is expected that G2 will become obligatory for a lot more things in a few days.
G1 is not in use anywhere officially I believe.
In Norway about 90% (above 18?) are vaccinated. About 60% of the corona sick persons in the hospitals are unvaccinated. According to fast head calculus, not being vaccinated increases the risk for hospitalization by a factor of roughly 6. It’s a lot, but not all that much either. If the risk is tiny to start with (you are 40-50 and in good health), then tiny times 6 is still tiny.
I would think that unvaccinated people will wait considerably longer to contact hospital when they get sick compared with vaccinated people (much less hypocondriacs). The real number is probably much higher than 6. But this also means that vaccinated people go to hospital even if they don’t really need to. Maybe none of those 40% vaccinated really needed to go to hospital? while those 60% unvaccinated really did.
