Here’s an interesting factoid from SoCal, (LA County, to be precise) quoting the L.A. Times:
Officials also confirmed an additional 128 cases of coronavirus infection, bringing the county’s total to 662. Of those, 42% are in people ages 18 to 40, and 39% are in people 41 to 65.
My take on that is that the older generation are taking the self-isolation orders much more serious than the young ones. TV images from last weekend around the parks and beaches of L.A. (now all closed) confirm that.
PS: LA County has approx 10 million inhabitants
hmng wrote:
The director of the Italian Civil Protection Service makes the point that the numbers being reported are with the virus and not from the virus
Isn’t that already factored in the virus 7% mortality rate for Italy, there is no such thing as “conditional fatality” or “excess fatality”?
The only splits tends to be by age and sex, not sure if you can go very granular than that unless we have 100k data points
Say you catch COVID19 at +80yo and you die in 3 weeks, do you really think it is a natural death for other non-related respiratory diseases?
But you could be right after 5 years where we will be able to get a statistical link between usual number of deaths and those from corona virus, for now all what matters for thinking about the impact of the virus in Italy going forward is 7% fatality rate
Even as a skeptical thinking initially this is a “passing new flu”, as early data had time lag noise but things now are getting more clear than weeks ago, we should start to give it more seriousness as behind the scenes for “worst-case scenarios on pandemic parameters” mortuary spaces are now getting arranged all over the place in Italy, France, Spain, UK, US…
23 Italian doctors lost, and numbers still climbing.
ISTR reports that at least 2 of them were under 40 yrs with no underlying conditions.
From that point forward I totally binned my thoughts that this was just a strong flu, that I was sure to overcome.
OK, we have debated this many times before. If there is a massive uptick in deaths and most people who die are infected, I do not think it makes sense to say that they died with the virus rather than of the virus. Perhaps it does on a death certificate, but not epidemiologically.
We had teaching on resuscitation (chest compressions) today and the message was ’Don’t’. Even if a patient comes in with a myocardial infarction, in the midst of a pandemic the reason they had the infarction is statistically likely to be increased physiological stress due to the viral infection. What would you put on the death certificate? In Britain, both things. But it would be wrong to neglect COVID if present.
Other than 20 or 30-somethings with fractured ankles, I very rarely see patients without comorbidities. It is true that there are a lot of very frail elderly folk whom we medics torture far too much, but there are also a lot of people who tick all the boxes (diabetes, hypertension, COPD) who have ticked all these boxes for many years and are likely to do so for many years to come. From what I gather, the disease isn’t just picking off the moribund.
Maoraigh wrote:
PS. Did people starve to death in their homes in China?
As much as you can trust any information from China it seems so, I can’t remember exactly where I first read it, but I’ve seen it mentioned a few times from people who keep a keen eye on China. A quick search came up with these
opinion piece referencing a couple of incidents
Let me lighten this up a little:
The above is probably not subject to dispute 
kwlf wrote:
hospitals in many countries are being overwhelmed by an outbreak of COVID19
Worth stepping back and taking a view on what needs to happen to overwhelm a hospital.
In the context of a pandemic, on a sheer number-of-cases basis, not actually that much. The average hospital is geared up to deal with the level of demand it usually sees, plus a bit. It has certain pieces of equipment and certain personnel that, based on how many they have, limit its capacity to deal with a large volume of cases presenting with much the same thing, i.e. there are only so many ICU beds, only so many ventilators, etc in a given hospital. Once the numbers of patients exceeds the availability of what you need to treat them, you are overwhelmed. You can have a crisis management plan, sure, but ultimately it comes down to how much space, kit and people you have. It is a logic problem rather than a technical/medical issue. No hospital sits there during normal times with 500 spare ventilators and 500 docs and nurses doing nothing just in case.
GA_Pete wrote:
From that point forward I totally binned my thoughts that this was just a strong flu, that I was sure to overcome.
So any thoughts on what this may be? I have stated numerous times we require facts. I am reading reports on Post Mortem from New York that ‘’lung chrystilisation’ is a key feature in the dead from Covid 19. Quotes that they (The pathologists) have never witnessed anything like this.
We have been told by authority – mild flu like virus and symptoms. What if it is actually some form of very dangerous bio weapon that ‘’got out’’.
That would explain the lack of fact, the confusion and 1/3rd of the Global population in house arrest.If we have been lied too then frankly that is totally and utterly inexcusable.
kwlf wrote:
Other than 20 or 30-somethings with fractured ankles, I very rarely see patients without comorbidities. It is true that there are a lot of very frail elderly folk whom we medics torture far too much, but there are also a lot of people who tick all the boxes (diabetes, hypertension, COPD) who have ticked all these boxes for many years and are likely to do so for many years to come.
This is an excellent observation, kwlf. For sure it is not just picking off the moribund, but it is picking off those who are just not in very good shape. The media reported a few days ago that an ‘otherwise fit and healthy’ nurse was fighting for her life having contracted Covid-19. I suppose it depends on your definition of fit and healthy: there were pictures of her published, she was noticeably overweight, and I would place a wager that her cardiorespiratory fitness was not up to much.
It may be helpful or not, and politically palatable or not, but I’ve often felt there are two camps that Brits fall into in terms of their interactions with the health service. On the one hand you have generally fit and healthy people who very rarely interact with the health service, and when they do it is because of random one-off events such as a skiing injury, childbirth, or perhaps cancer later in life. On the other hand you have people for whom interaction with the health service is a fundamental and constant part of their lives – as you say they ‘tick all the boxes’. I think (I may be wrong) that it is mostly the latter group who are hospitalised with Covid-19.
It is politically unacceptable these days, at least in the UK, to tell the population to sort out their lifestyles and thus reduce their vulnerability to stuff like this. My parents are in good health but both in their mid-70s so now totally confined to barracks. Fortunately they have a resistance-trainer bicycle at home, so they are spending some time improving their cardiorespiratory fitness. In the event that they contract the virus, having a better baseline lung performance surely stands you in better stead. I am surprised there is not more noise about this, but as I said it doesn’t do these days to tell the UK population to make better lifestyle choices.
Saying a lot of this stuff is considered borderline offensive these days, but I tend to favour objectivity over sensitivity when trying to make logical deductions about what’s going on.
BeechBaby wrote:
Quotes that they (The pathologists) have never witnessed anything like this.
You have to be careful of media dramitisation.
Quite probably it was the extent of the lung crystallisation and the sheer volume of cases that the pathologists were referring to when the said they’d never witnessed anything like it, not the very fact that there was lung crystallisation. The media report the statement out of context because it makes it sound more dramatic.
A bit like the fact that the accident report into N264DB refers to an overspeed condition in an uncontrolled dive during the last moments of the flight, and some of the worst parts of the UK media reported this as “the pilot was flying too fast”.
Context is everything ;-)
