The one that is most difficult politically in the UK is being overweight.
One can get medical about it and use the word ‘obesity’ but that doesn’t cover it. Plenty of people here might not be technically obese (or they might be and not realise it or not want to acknowledge it) but are just ‘quite fat’ with a poor diet and zero execise – which massively increases your risk of many things, severe Covid-19 included.
Back in the first wave the Guardian ran a piece with portrait photographs of all the ‘front-line heroes’ (docs, nurses and hospital staff) who had died of Covid-19 up to that point. What was immediately noticeable, but of course could not be commented on, was that they were nearly all quite fat. The media described them as ‘healthy’ – i.e. none had severe pre-existing medical conditions, but of course the term ‘healthy’ is relative.
LFHNflightstudent wrote:
121k deaths annually vs 78K COVID deaths in 15 months
LFHNflightstudent wrote:
No complaints about these irresponsible people clogging up our hospitals btw
Because they don’t. The comparison is like comparing apples with shades of blue.
Of 100k, around three people die every day. Around 13% of these deaths are smoking related. (using the figures you provided, 121k deaths are around 150 per 100k of the German population per year. Or around 0.4 per day)
Peak Covid deaths per day per 100k (7-day rolling average) were around 1 in Germany [and in the EU on average], nearly 2 in the UK, 2.5 in Hungary and almost 3 in Portugal… with heavy suppression measures in place to prevent worse.
While nobody knows what the real case-fatality ratio is (because there will be many undetected cases, especially in the younger) it is in the order of 1% (currently measured at around 2%, but this is probably too high).
So both case fatality estimates and actual evidence points to Covid being around 10x as bad as smoking (which secondary smoker deaths notwithstanding is mostly self-inflicted), and of the magnitude of the total deaths in a year.
skydriller wrote:
@Silvaire Your link goes on to say “you must stay at home for 7 days and then need a test with negative result” which is a quarantine, if not a govt controlled “hotel”… and then “there is currently a ban on foreign nationals from entering the country” and this is their I’m talking about
What you are describing in relation to quarantine is a Federal CDC guideline (“the CDC’s guidelines for international travel are as follows”) a recommendation by a federal panel that does nothing but make recommendations. It’s similar to ICAO or our President saying that he hopes small groups may be able to gather by July 4th… while makes everybody smile because the laws that actually govern this are on a state level, some states have been completely wide open for months and so on. Just theater, because the federal government is almost irrelevant in this situation.
There is no quarantine on incoming visitors to the US but yes, there are restrictions on who can come and if arriving by air (not land), they are required to present a recent negative CV-19 test result. Also, an employer can require employees to follow CDC guidelines while you are on their property, meaning they can restrict your ability to work after foreign travel.
While I’m scribbling, the situation with Mexico is also a bit ambiguous: the current agreement for land border crossings is bilateral, and on paper while requiring no testing etc, it restricts incoming crossings by foreigners to those that are “essential”. In practice that means the US does that as written (with no restrictions however on returning US residents regardless of reason for travel) while Mexico is actually trying to encourage tourism, does not restrict or stop incoming cars etc at all, but signed the bilateral agreement to maintain the optics of equal political and economic stature with the US.
Graham wrote:
The one that is most difficult politically in the UK is being overweight.
Here some real-world data (US-based). Quite interesting to play with it.
Obese people (the dark grey line) are MASSIVELY more likely to be hospitalised, given low hospitalisation rates of the young the vast majority of horpitalised below 40 will be obese (unless I misinterpret the data).
It does not show up as a major risk factor for death, but given the low number of deaths in that age band this would not be visible. Strangely enough, it appears not to be a factor in deaths of the elderly.
The picture is not different for women, but at a lower overall hospitalisation and fatality rate.
As a now age 80 male, who received the AstraZeneca first dose, I found this statement in the Icelandic Review Online comforting.
“While a link has been found between rare instances of blood clots and the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, such instances are limited to women under 60, the Chief Epidemiologist stated.”
And here are the other risk factors.
Just eyeballing it, it looks like obesity is not on that list because the ones that are are worse… but that omits the one one crucial factor mentioned by @Graham, that there will be a LOT more obese people in the sample than, say, people with COPD or chronic liver disease, so when calibrating by number of occurrences it may well be the highest factor.
LFHNflightstudent wrote:
Or am I discriminating then
Discrimination just means making a difference – and therefore you surely discriminate.
Even if so many dreaming communists pretend the opposite: Discrimination itself is neither bad nor avoidable. The question is not if we want to discriminate for age, sex, etc. the question is merely which discrimination is unwanted, which is accepted and which is wanted/necessary.
Maoraigh wrote:
“While a link has been found between rare instances of blood clots and the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, such instances are limited to women under 60, the Chief Epidemiologist stated.”
This is correct. The software in the 5G-enabled vaccine particles links to the electronic patient record of the relevant country and does a check against the current date. If the days since birth exceeds 21,855 then the clotting subroutine is disabled.
:-)
LFHNflightstudent wrote:
these irresponsible people clogging up our hospitals btw.
Actually not really!
If you die with lung cancer at the age of 65 the odds are high that you in total spent much days in hospital and much less days of professional care settings than if you die for another reason at the age of 95 (most likely after 5+ years of dementia/alzheimers/etc. if you are male).
It depends on many factors (esp. the treatment guidelines for the different stages of COPD) obviously, but for most developed countries smoking actually reduces the total expected lifetime healthcare burden.
Silvaire wrote:
What you are describing in relation to quarantine is a Federal CDC guideline (“the CDC’s guidelines for international travel are as follows”) a recommendation by a federal panel that does nothing but make recommendations.
Not anymore, or not much longer. See executive order dated 21 January.
It sets out the government policy as
It is the policy of my Administration that, to the extent feasible, travelers seeking to enter the United States from a foreign country shall be: […] required to comply with other applicable CDC guidelines concerning international travel, including recommended periods of self-quarantine or self-isolation after entry into the United States.
And then sets out who has to go about implementing it.
I don’t believe the policy statement itself has the force of law (the order is addressed primarily to the administration to implement this policy), but the direction is clear.
