Even he is changing his story, slowly. From the March 27 update “According to the latest data published by the Italian Ministry of Health, overall mortality is now significantly higher in all age groups over 65 years of age, after having been below average due to the mild winter. Until March 14, overall mortality was still below the flu season of 2016/2017, but may have already exceeded it in the meantime.”
no shit, Sherlock.
He makes two fundamental mistakes: (1) he uses a national average at a point where the outbreaks are localised clusters. Lombardy accounts for >80% of all Covid-19 deaths in Italy with 16% of the population; and (2) he makes too much out of the “comorbidities”. One of them is “Hypertension” with 73% of all cases reported to have that. While that is a long-term killer, and certainly will increase the chance of death when severely ill, it is hardly the pimary cause when your lungs are slowly disintegrating from the virus. Another one is “Heart Failure”. I am pretty certain that they did not have that before they caught Covid-19, but instead it was reported that the patient died of heart failure in connection with pneumonia.
However, I share your and other’s unease at the scale of the measures taken. Until we have fixed the testing issue and know how many mild cases there are, we don’t know when this will stop naturally, but there is some indication that it slows down already
Italy numbers are clearly outlier and one need more care to extrapolate on these for other places but there is a real health crisis out there even with 1/50 of those deaths
South Korea numbers are reliable but I still see the deaths/infected numbers to be really scary, I can’t imagine any developped country coping with possibility of it’s half population getting infected next month, it will go guns & toillet paper (fun picture from the US)
Ibra wrote:
Italy numbers are clearly outlier and one need more care to extrapolate on these for other places but there is a real health crisis out there even with 1/50 of those deaths
Ok, what exactly will stop the other regions such as London, Paris, New York etc etc to go the same way as Lombardy?
Outliers exist in a random distribution, if Covid-19 would spontaneously develop in people there would be clusters and one would expect a poisson distribution if it comes to the number of deaths in populations. Some diseases like cancer and heart disease are like that [in a reasonable homogeneous population], there will be one or two place with a seemingly inexplicably high number of cases, many times the average.
But it isn’t random – once a community has it, it follows its inexorable path until the replication rate drops below one.
Ibra wrote:
but there is a real health crisis out there even with 1/50 of those deaths
Yes but in the vast majority of published data it is a fact that these patients may/would have died anyway. Sad, but true. I actually spoke to my wife this evening and said that I was unaware of the daily global death rate. Simply, I did not appreciate that 10 people drop off the grid a second. That is extremely sobering but it is a part of life that none of us can get out of.
Almost every media announcement is another death, or horror apocalyptic catastrophe, but all had underlying health issues. The major concern now is this a media/politico global frenzy that is being used to mask some other issues. Financial Depression, immigration, Italy/Spain (Club Med) bailouts, etc etc. Pick your most plausible theory.
On Friday evening on the BBC press conference with Gove, Stevens stated when questioned that there were 50 NHS hospitals in England sitting fully staffed and empty awaiting the ‘flood’.What is going on?
Our Chief Medical Officer told the Scottish Parliament on Friday that she full expected in the next week 65,000 confirmed cases of infection. Scotland alone!
I have sent her an e mail also questioning her…..
We are not even testing in Scotland. It is the worst case of fear mongering particularly when 30% of Scottish children live in abject poverty, our drug death rate was 1167 in 2018, and in 2019 was 3.5 times the English and European rate.
Knife crime in London 2019 has killed more than DIRECT Covid 19 has in the UK.
Sorry there is a lot more complication to this. Is anybody talking about the MARTIAL LAW we are under at the moment?
A totally broken economy?
Kids starving?
A set of the most Draconian laws, that outstrips the Patriot Act, we are now under and have ever seen?.
Are you all aware that consent has been stripped from almost every individual and that it now takes just one health official, with one doctor approval to section you under the Mental Health Act.
Our prisons are under siege from the inside.
There is looting and break in’s as we speak in Glasgow? Everything in Glasgow City Centre boarded up and closed?
Meanwhile 3 of the Cabinet have tested positive with mild symptoms and a cough. And of course they will not return until April 21st.
Sorry but I do think that perhaps we should be looking behind the nice graphs, and taking a long hard look and think about what is actually going o here>
Sorry but I had to add. My son works part time Pizza delivery. He has just called his Mum.
The public are queuing up outside right now, shouting and fighting in the queue. Two youths have just walked up to the queue carrying 2 televisions and asking would someone buy them?
Meanwhile my wifes friend called earlier. Her son has Stage 4 cancer. His treatment and operation has been cancelled, due Corona Virus epidemic. The kid is hyper.
Yes, well done 2020 and the decisions that are being made.
There’s a link in this page:
I wonder why the treatment was cancelled when most hospitals around the UK do have plenty of spare beds, right now?
As for the rest, that’s a common enough scene in the UK and probably much of Europe. I’ve been offered TVs (by so called “Irish gypsies”) on a 1 minute walk between my office and my car, loads of times. They get really aggressive, too. One can see the “lower end” of society anywhere.
Give it a couple of weeks and then we will see if we have proper mayhem, or something lesser.
Thanks kwlf.
It’s true that we are enjoying the calm before the storm in some parts of the UK, but there is a lot of busyness with walls being torn down and areas repurposed. Ventilation engineers are roaming the corridors. We are doing some cancer surgery and also emergency surgery, but nothing else. I obviously can’t comment on the son who needs surgery except to say that it sounds an awful situation.
Until a few days ago there was a fair amount of discussion on the doctors’ forum about the situation in London, but people working there don’t seem to be contributing much to the forum any more.
Peter wrote:
I wonder why the treatment was cancelled when most hospitals around the UK do have plenty of spare beds, right now?
There is a hell of a lot of it at the moment. They are giving the reason…. Corono Virus pandemic and they need to keep beds for the ‘’coming wave’’.
Doctors up here have been told as of Friday not to speak to media. Right now the UK death toll, Corono related deaths, sits at 1019.
The point I am attempting to make, probably badly is that IF, and I appreciate a big IF, we find out retrospectively that this has been totally overplayed, politically motivated, driving the media, then all of them need to be held to account. This of course will never happen because they have written into the new Coronovirus Bill that not one of them can be held to account, nor liability, for deaths/incidents due cancelled NHS treatment. Everything I have seen and read, appreciated the majority have differing views, tells me that this is at worst, no different from a normal expected Global virus related morbidity rate.
I have not one clue, nor could offer any plausible explanation for the current situation other than we are in an episode of Black Mirror and in a wonderful Vivarium.
Took the dog for a quick walk, three buses passed me, all empty. Like Zombie Nation..quite bizarre
