191–200 of 438 posts
So it’s just a coincidence that Dr. Li Wenliang, who was 34, died and he only had a 0.2% chance of dying? I find this too much of a coincidence. There is no way these numbers can be correct.
My tinfoil hat wonders if he actually died from other causes.
I'm currently living and working in China and I've be inundated with many rumours and hearsay from Chinese people to ex-pats living here about the virus.
I've heard a rumour where the virus has had a greater impact on people of Asian descent rather than Caucasians and Africans due to genetic differences. Has there been any proof or confirmation of this? I've seen obnoxious ex-pats walking around Shanghai without masks claiming that they'll be fine because it's Asians that need to be worried about the virus.
The general issue with this measure of mortality (dead/(infected + dead)) is that you're assuming that the infected won't die. In a disease that is exponentially growing, a better approximation of evaluating your survival chances is to look at the death to recovery rate (dead / (recovered + dead)). Based on the available data [1], we are closer to 7.8% than 2% mortality, which is closer to the final mortality rate of…
Re the higher death rates in the chinese province, I thought it was due to people not showing up to hospital when having milder symptoms, but I watched an interview of a french doctor who suggested it is rather because of the lack of medical infrastructures in that region, to which the chinese remediated by building these spectacular field hospitals.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems like the larger correlation in deaths is related to societal status - farmers, laborers, and retirees have much higher death rates.
Farmers — likely crappy rural healthcare. Retirees — obviously age-skewed.
Hypothesis: If you're a rural / non-urban farmer, under quarantine and travel restrictions, you don't go to a hospital unless you're already very sick.
One of the real challenges here is in separating data artefacts from ground truth. Testing, surveillance, self-presentation, doctor-lobbying (by the patient or family) can all influence that.
This makes all data already somewhat suspect, before any overt manipulations are considered (and makes those manipulations all the more toxic to a full understanding).
And of course, there are numerous other factors. Farmers may well have poorer overall health (nutrition, behavioural risk factors (smoking, drink), preexisting conditions, latent or opportunistic infection, etc., etc.). All of which I'm very openly speculating on -- these are hypotheses which would have to be demonstrated through clinical assessment or systematic observation.
Note that "systematic" and "complete" aren't the same -- if you are following a defensible sampling method, then 100% coverage isn't necessary. But you'd want to capture samples from other populations.
The overall prevalence of COVID-19 within even Wuhan City and Hubei Province is still low, based on assessed cases (clinical symptoms or the more accurate PCR genetic screen for the SARS-nCoV-2 virus), still under 1%. Which means that population sampling would be unlikely to detect many cases without something on the order of many hundreds, possibly thousands, of samples. You're looking for an accurate central-tendency descriptor of a ~1:100 event.
Knowing what the actual exposure rate has been would be useful. Whether it's sufficiently useful to come up with a comprehensive large-scale sampling methodology is another question. Note that it's not merely the sampling size, but the selection and successful measurement from each of the selected individuals for sampling which is necessary.
(I've some statistics background, and some healthcare background. Enough to know basics of sampling, error, and bias. Epidemiological public health monitoring is beyond my pay grade however.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There seems to be many cases of young patients dying in Iran. Either because there are way more cases than being officially reported or (hopefully not) the virus has mutated to affect the young more, or both. They could easily have had an undiagnosed underlying condition that made them more susceptible to complications. This is to be expected in places like Iran with severe limitations in their healthcare system. I…
Is it just me or is your comment really insensitive? I would think that about half of world has no better healthcare system than Iran.
\* I should say this is anecdata, based on comments by several Iranian friends and acquaintances.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There seems to be many cases of young patients dying in Iran. Either because there are way more cases than being officially reported or (hopefully not) the virus has mutated to affect the young more, or both. They could easily have had an undiagnosed underlying condition that made them more susceptible to complications. This is to be expected in places like Iran with severe limitations in their healthcare system. I…
Is it just me or is your comment really insensitive? I would think that about half of world has no better healthcare system than Iran.
The general issue with this measure of mortality (dead/(infected + dead)) is that you're assuming that the infected won't die. In a disease that is exponentially growing, a better approximation of evaluating your survival chances is to look at the death to recovery rate (dead / (recovered + dead)). Based on the available data [1], we are closer to 7.8% than 2% mortality, which is closer to the final mortality rate of…
I do have one question and I'm asking this seriously, not to start an argument or to attack someone. I also saw this here in a lot of the posts about covid-19. We have numbers, but every time people tend to ignore them or say we should not trust the numbers, take them with a grain of salt, "I think this is way worse, it's going to get way worse" and so on. It's like there is this thirst for disaster or some global dr…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There seems to be many cases of young patients dying in Iran. Either because there are way more cases than being officially reported or (hopefully not) the virus has mutated to affect the young more, or both. They could easily have had an undiagnosed underlying condition that made them more susceptible to complications. This is to be expected in places like Iran with severe limitations in their healthcare system. I…
Is it just me or is your comment really insensitive? I would think that about half of world has no better healthcare system than Iran.
Like he said, severe limitations.