Either you accept the official numbers from China, or you don’t (which is perfectly reasonable) and then you have to ask what you should trust from there.
We can also try looking close to home.
You get unprecedent measures when it touches decision makers, who ever expected Canada to be one of the first countries to shutdown the borders? There is not an assembly or parliament where few don’t have it, so that give an idea of the scale of infection and this is now taken seriously outside politic playing
The number of deaths is not the only variable here and it should not matter, but I can guarantee you 100% infected and 0.1% fatality rate does resonates a lot more than 10% infected and 1% fatality rate or 1% infected and 10% fatality rate, and all have the same “excess of mortality”
So what you would call hysteria is not “some 1% people are dying” but more “I have 1% chance of dying”, scale of infection in 2 months is nowhere near SARS1, H1N1, MERS, so one can understand the lockdown measures before taking further bets
Cobalt wrote:
Give it another three weeks, we’ll talk about it then.
And those deaths, if they happen, will they be from the virus or from the disastrous, suicidal measures being enacted? How will you know?
Ibra wrote:
scale of infection in 2 months is nowhere near SARS1, H1N1, MERS,
Which we only find out because of the speed of the testing?
Because being locked at home does not make people end up in hospitals with pneumonia.
.. break, break ..
The good news is – there is clearly something going on that slows the spread earlier than one would expect. For example,
death rates are decreasing in many cases, and seem to have nothing to do with lockdowns, which in any case will have a delay of several weeks before they show up in death statistics. And whether “with” or “of” does not matter here – something is going that is common to all countries, and it may well be that there is a much larger proportion of the population which has been infected and recovered without any or mild symptoms (best case); or yet to develop them (worst case, unlikely).
This is clearer to see if you look at individual regions:
BTW – these graphs are from the excellent coverage of the FT (which were the first in the mainstream press to produce sensible visualisations, i.e., semi-log graphs and calibration by using a sensible origin for each country). It is no longer behind their “paywall” here.
hmng wrote:
and then you have to ask what you should trust from there.
Probably things noticed by outside observers, certainly I’m wary of anything the communist party produces.
I have tried to get a broad steer on what seems to be going on in China rather than closer to home as they’re many weeks ahead of what is going on and have far higher numbers which you would think would help with statistical significance.
The difficulty with looking closer to home seems to be that if you wait to see very significant issues then you’ve left the proverbial barn door wide open.
I’m certainly open to seeing what the data seems to indicate from more honest countries.
I think this one is going fast compared to the others, no data to support my claim, just opinion from personal observation on my contacts
I hope I am staying within the guidelines if I say that your assertion that there are no excessive deaths due to Covid-19 is so wrong as to be silly.
Let’s take one example – Lombardy. It has a population of 10 million people, 5,000 people have died of pneumonia while being diagnosed with Covid-19 in the last 30 days. In a normal month, one would expect around 10,000 people to die per month (around 0.1% of the population), so there are 50% more deaths than average, and while I have no idea how many of the 10,000 people who die have pneumonia, I am pretty certain that it isn’t half of them.
And since you want the sources – Lombardy death rate: https://www.statista.com/statistics/568083/death-rate-in-italy-by-region/ is 1% per year, Lombardy population is 10 million, and 5,400 of them died of/with Covid-19
I am afraid you are in denial, you are behaving like somebody who is falling past the 45th floor after jumping off a 50 floor building and saying “so far, so good, why worry, I don’t need a parachute”
This is a nice visualisation. Different axes, and time is presented via animation. A pity they don’t appear to have recent data
Ibra wrote:
I think this one is going fast compared to the others, no data to support my claim, just opinion from personal observation on my contacts
Hey, thanks for such a straight answer!
Cobalt wrote:
Because being locked at home does not make people end up in hospitals with pneumonia.
I’m not that sure it is healthy to stay locked up… And with regular, non urgent medical procedures being cancelled, and all the other factors.
Off_Field wrote:
Probably things noticed by outside observers, certainly I’m wary of anything the communist party produces.
Yes, good point. I certainly would do the same. Not sure if this particular article brings any good evidence.
That article mentions the number of urns seen are double the number of deaths and speculates on further deliveries. Can you read that much into preparing for a bigger number of deaths given all the panic?
