Some of the fatalities after “recovery” were where covid was contributory cause: eg. there’s been quite a lot more stroke deaths. Really, excess deaths is the number to look at rather than particular diagnoses to get a feel of what effect it has had.
On the other hand, the stroke and heart attack deaths a month after “recovery” were people who were at death’s door in any case – COVID might have pushed them over the edge, but they weren’t long for this world in any case. Perhaps we will see that excess deaths is a negative number later on in the year.
At risk of sounding like an apologist, I suspect the statistics will have been processed like that as a matter of expedience. Somebody will have lists of patient numbers of people who have died and lists of test results linked to those numbers. Comparing the two on a computer is simple and cheap and safe and quick and doesn’t involve dealing with mountains of COVID contaminated hospital notes or waiting weeks for death certificates to be processed. It will give you reasonable results quickly, which is what was needed at the time. Obviously it will give a silly answer in the long term, but we aren’t in the long term yet.
So the question is what proportion of results are being misattributed to COVID. Is it loads, or just a few?
Statistically I’d expect the majority of deaths in people who have had COVID to be COVID related at this point in time. e.g. if you are a man aged 75-84 you have a 1/60 chance of dying in a given 3 month period . If you are 65-74 then it is 1/160. If you feel sick enough to get a COVID test then die, then the likelihood that you died of COVID rather than something else are going to be quite high. This will have been particularly true in the outset when COVID tests were strictly rationed. It will be becoming less true with time and increased availability of COVID tests.
A statistician ought to be able to bracket the error you might expect due to misattribution of cause of death, and you could audit a proportion of deaths to make sure you weren’t too far out. I would be surprised if they haven’t done either of these things. Also that there will be COVID deaths that have been missed so the error goes in both directions.
ch.ess wrote:
The hospitals in Houston expect to run out of ICU space by July 4th.A very bad timing…
I just read a newspaper article about Hospitals in Houston dated July14 by the Texas Tribune. Just wanted to see how right the above prediction was. So far not very. But after reading it and knowing that refrigerator trucks were NOT parked outside hospitals but rather Nursing homes which were overwhelmed by the edicts of one of the most idiotic governors of NY state which we have had in living memory. That paper is producing misinformation and fostering fear. American free press is at it again. Remember the Main! Weapons of Mass Destruction! Gulf of Tonkin Incident! Ad nauseum!
If Trump loses the virus will be conquered the day after the US elections.
kwlf wrote:
At risk of sounding like an apologist, I suspect the statistics will have been processed like that as a matter of expedience.
Yes we have expediency in the US. Hospitals are paid thousands of $ if someone dies from COVID and even more if they had been ventilated. So a lot of expediency is occurring. Take for instance the 25 yr old (I believe that was his age) who was in a motorcycle accident and died. His death was listed as a result of COVID. Just one example of expediency. Trust me when you incentivize and then politicize a disease whatever number you get is all fudge work. It’s just common sense.
The great debate that is now occurring in the US is to whether to reopen the schools in 6 weeks. The teachers who are getting paid and who are mostly democrats say no way, it’s too dangerous. Even though it has been shown through studies that kids are not spreaders and dont get the disease with any degree of severity. European schools are mostly open or opening. Amazing how Americans think they are such hot shits that only they count. They never look outside their borders for anything. If there is a study done abroad, they need to do a parallel study of their own.
C210_Flyer wrote:
it has been shown through studies that kids are not spreaders
Please cite these studies. There is no evidence at the moment that children could not pass on the virus.
kwlf wrote:
A quick search for “beer straw mask” shows that thousands of people have cut holes in their masks so they can use straws!
Way ahead of the game early March JFK Terminal. Wearing Mask demanded by daughter who listens to CDC and Dr Fauci. I needed a beer break while waiting for my flight.
Just one example of expediency.
Expediency has it’s time and place. Remember all those flat graphs showing no excess mortality for several weeks after the onset of the pandemic in Europe, due to the lag in collating death certificates? That’s not information you can use for decision making in the midst of an outbreak.
It will take a huge amount of time and work to get robust estimates of how much mortality the pandemic has caused, and how much of it is directly due to COVID and how much indirectly (e.g. mental ill health or people ignoring chest pain).
Mortality by the way not being limited to people dying from the virus immediately, but also from long term effects. My partner in the firm has been suffering from very severe to extreme headache since he has had CoVid-19 in mid-May. Doctors have been trying to find out why and not been able to, until now. Turns out the virus somehow affects the enzyme process that turns ammoniac acid into urea, so he suffers from very high levels of ammoniac in his blood, comparable to people suffering from liver cirrhosis. These high ammoniac levels affect the brain, as in his case, but also the heart, kidneys, and many other organs. It is being treated now, but may also serve as an example for effects of the virus in the human body doctors and virologists are only slowly beginning to understand.
So, it may be that we never really know the real mortality rate of that bug.
Interesting. I’ve yet to meet anybody, or hear of anybody I have ever previously met, who has had this Illness.
I did recently hear of a family my wife knows getting infected, two adults, a child and a baby all tested positive (I’ve never met them but it’s the closest I’ve come to the virus so far) Apparently the baby showed no symptoms, the small child recovered completely in two days and the adults recovered in about a week.
EuroFlyer wrote:
Turns out the virus somehow affects the enzyme process that turns ammoniac acid into urea, so he suffers from very high levels of ammoniac in his blood, comparable to people suffering from liver cirrhosis.
This “somehow” is mysterious as many things with this, which brings back an idea I’ve tried to convey here a few months ago. That is that the focus of the experts on this specific virus alone is too narrow and mainly due to a test being available. What if Sars-CoV-2 (I’ll call it C here) were relatively benign by itself, but in combination with pathogen “X” and/or “Y” develops these severe consequences we see sometimes and which are actually called COVID-19. Where “X” and “Y” could also be harmless by themselves, and spread by the same vectors as C, or differently. Only in combination would they be harmful, maybe because X and Y take advantage of some metabolism changes caused by C.
This hypothesis could explain some things which are in my opinion still unexplained, e.g. why many people report getting multiple phases of illness, and why different countries seem to fare so differently. Also why different people are impacted so vastly differently. Meaning that those that have had “X” before and whose immune system learnt to fight it may be better off than those that haven’t seen X, when they get C. And maybe “Y” being harder to spread but if you have Y plus C then you get really ill.
Point being, someone should build a database of 1000 mild cases and 1000 severe cases, then examine every possible pathogen and antibody and whatnot that there is in both populations and correlation test the hell out of that database. It’s been done for other factors like blood groups, medications taken, demographic factors etc., but I don’t know if anyone thought to do it on other microorganisms. This of course would be harder to examine if there is a temporal component, i.e. if you’ve had X before, but no longer, then C will be mild later.
If it worked, we might not have to wait for a Sars-CoV-2 vaccine but should focus on combating “X” or “Y”…
