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Corona / Covid-19 Virus - General Discussion (politics go to the Off Topic / Politics thread)

Malibuflyer wrote:

Interesting! Where can one find data on that? Just asking because the broadly available data on daily new confirmed infections shows a completely different trend (constant on high level in April and May and even increasing since June)

(Edit: Ok – Found it – interesting indeed)

This is just another example of how difficult it is to compare different countries as you have to know what’s behind the indicators.

A week ago Sweden was briefly on a WHO list of European countries with uncontrolled spread of the disease because of the increase in testing which obviously led to more reported cases. There was even a case reported in Sweden where two persons who died in a traffic accident were included in the Covid-19 death statistics because they had been diagnosed with Covid-19 a few weeks earlier. Of course such obvious overreporting is unusual, but again it shows the difficulty with getting figures right in real time.

ESKC (Uppsala/Sundbro), Sweden

Airborne_Again wrote:

This is just another example of how difficult it is to compare different countries as you have to know what’s behind the indicators.

That has always been true throughout this pandemic. I came across this graph for Slovenia, who seem to have discovered a miracle cure between May 17 and May 18:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/slovenia/

Or the UK where some local area numbers have gone up 10x to 100x

Those numbers were always suspiciously low. They have just chucked in numbers from the past; “key workers” etc. Probably, tomorrow’s data will be a lot lower.

This might be useful for knowing where one doesn’t want to be going

but it isn’t because they aren’t releasing any detail e.g. is it mostly in care homes, etc. Maybe somebody will do an FOIA request but it will likely be resisted due to GDPR, so it will have to be appealed (just like happened with CAA infringement pilot-busting data) and by the time it comes out this will all be over, next year sometime…

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Airborne_Again wrote:

This is just another example of how difficult it is to compare different countries as you have to know what’s behind the indicat

Yes, but Sweden case is not so easy – and yes, some of the reporting in all countries include questionable cases but in the grand scheme of things 2 fatalities in a traffic accident that were wrongly counted don’t change the needle.

Sweden has 500 deaths per million citizens so far – that puts them in the top 5 globally – even beyond USA and Brazil and very close to Italian numbers. Switzerland is at half of that number and Germany at 1/5.

It’s a good thing that deaths go down – but it’s also a consequence of some people being more in danger than others: Although everyone seems always to be talking about that one perfectly healthy 30 year old that got killed it is a fact that elderly people and people with significant respiratory conditions are much more in danger. At some point in time all people who could die from Covid will have died.

Germany

Rwy20 wrote:

I came across this graph for Slovenia, who seem to have discovered a miracle cure

No – it’s just the expression of the fact that Slovenia has introduced extremely har measures in first half of April that factually cut down the new infection rate very close to zero – and the vast majority of people that got infected before that are cured by mid May – the steep increase is just an expression of the fact that a certain time (typically 3-4 weeks but depends on the country) after positive test you are “declared” cured if you are symptom free.

Germany

Peter wrote:

This is because the virus spread varies dramatically according to population density (as the primary factor), and according to other factors such as ethnic vulnerability (which itself correlates with factors such as living and eating in large family groups, high density living in poor areas, etc).

That will be a factor, but looking at Texas, where I live – since Texas said “f*** it, let’s abandon all social distancing, lockdown measures etc and just let it rip through the population” now has a significantly higher infection rate than the UK had at its peak. The UK is not only smaller physically, but has over double the population. The cities in Texas are not dense – Houston is a huge spread out sprawl, with a lot of very rich people, and hardly any public transport but Harris County currently has a higher infection rate than London did at its peak (where everyone lives cheek to jowl and packs into crowded tube trains and buses).

All the ICUs in Harris County are now full, patients are being sent to Galveston, and they will likely be full by the July 4th fireworks – and remember this is a hospital system you can only use if you’re insured or rich.

Last Edited by alioth at 03 Jul 09:44
Andreas IOM

Higher obesity perhaps – even higher than even the UK? I know, hard to believe, but I think the US really does have that.

And anybody working in the hospitals will tell you the ICUs are full of mostly obese people. They never say that when they report that they have “lots of young people without pre-existing conditions” because you cannot say that on national media (get accused of “fat-shaming”).

The US does have free medical care for the poor. They are not just left to die, etc, despite what Europeans are constantly told.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

But they then do get presented with a crippling medical bill, even if they take you at the ER. (It’s not so much the very poor who have nothing to lose and will just round file a medical bill – it’s the “just about managing” who have bad insurance and will be bankrupted by the smallest medical bill, which tends to run into at least thousands. This discourages these people from even showing up.)

In any case, the obesity rate isn’t sufficiently higher to explain it. If obesity rate explained it, literally 100% of Texans would be obese, and they are not.

Last Edited by alioth at 03 Jul 09:57
Andreas IOM

There will be a vaccine in the UK on the shoulder of Christmas (hopefully wide shoulders) and life will progress until the next time. The politicians are relying on it, and hopefully will not be disappointed, never mind the rest of us.

Peter wrote:

“lots of young people without pre-existing conditions”

There was one article I saw recently on the CNN mobile app. There was a picture of a quite obese young man. The caption read “Fit, healthy teenager with no pre-existing conditions succumbs to Coronavirus” :rolleyes:

LKTB->EGBJ, United Kingdom
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