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Coronavirus patients start to overwhelm US hospitals

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Re: Coronavirus patients start to overwhelm US hospitals

#311

Post by CountSessine »

oivey wrote: post #304
thu2111 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to know fatality rates you need a controlled population. South Korea isn't that, its level of testing isn't even much higher than Switzerlands at this point. There are only two known populations in which everyone was forced to be tested and their movement was limited, which thus makes up a controlled study: the Diamond Princess and the town of Vo in Italy. In both cases the fatality rate is much less than…

The Diamond Princess’s population is also small, extremely poorly represents the general population, and happened in a setting unrepresentative of the rest of the world. Passenger age is just about the only factor that would drive the mortality and infection rates up, everything else lowers it. As a model the Diamond Princess should probably be treated more as the floor rather than anything representing the average.

everything else lowers it

What are these everything else’s? By far the best predictor of patient mortality has been age. What else is it about the Diamond Princess population that would come even close, even in sum, to the predictive power of their age?

Re: Coronavirus patients start to overwhelm US hospitals

#312

Post by cycomanic »

rimliu wrote: post #125
DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on how they (the anecdotes, I assume) erode trust?

Simply: by telling lies. If we tell people 3 in 100 will die, and after the fact it turns out that 3 in 1000 died, next time, when it will be more serious nobody will believe.

So you are proposing the solution to not do anything so the projections become true, so next time you will take it serious?

The problem with your way of arguing is that one can not win. If they say "if we don't do anything there will be 3 in 100 people dying" and they do something, you say they lied. If they don't do anything, you will ask "why have they not done anything! They are incompetent or malicious"

Re: Coronavirus patients start to overwhelm US hospitals

#313

Post by cycomanic »

dboreham wrote: post #167
landryraccoon wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the huge failures of the government is that we still don't have any push for ubiquitous testing. South Korea's aggressive testing for the virus is a key factor in their success in suppressing the epidemic.

Assuming you're talking about the US, I think this situation exposes a not well known fact that the federal government doesn't really control the inside of the country. The response has to come at the state and local level, which it is, slowly. e.g. : https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/03/coronavi... Here in our county in rural Montana (based on info from the local medical establishment, who I know fair…

Actually that's not true in this case. I believe it was the CDC who said only use our test. I'm not from the States but I believe the CDC is a federal agency isn't it?

Re: Coronavirus patients start to overwhelm US hospitals

#314

Post by ceejayoz »

dominotw wrote: post #237
TomMckenny wrote: post #122

Judging from the comments, explaining the severity of the epidemic is now politically charged. Epidemiologists and the medical field have made it clear we are _under_ reacting. But apparently some politicians want to down play the problem and their obfuscation is echoed in every corner of the web with great zeal and again drowning out reality. It's like the climate change denial phenomenon but at high speed.

> But apparently some politicians want to down play the problem and their obfuscation is echoed in every corner of the web with great zeal and again drowning out reality. Yes obviously they take the main blame. but also others. From Jan, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/29/opinion/coronavirus-panic... > China’s response appears to be driven by political considerations more than epidemiological ones. The government has…

"We don't know how well a large-scale quarantine of an entire heavily populated region will work" isn't a conspiracy theory. It turned out to work, but that wasn't a certainty back then. (You're also linking an op-ed piece.)

Re: Coronavirus patients start to overwhelm US hospitals

#315

Post by js2 »

mrb wrote: post #284
js2 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coronavirus is serious. Also, get your flu shot. I don't understand why this is even remotely controversial.

I suppose his point is that the coronavirus overwhelms hospitals much, much more seriously than the flu does.

All the more reason to get your flu shot to reduce the chance that you end up in the hospital using valuable space needed for Coronavirus patients.

I'm not minimizing Coronavirus. I'm trying to leverage the attention people are paying to it to emphasize the importance of vaccination.

Re: Coronavirus patients start to overwhelm US hospitals

#316

Post by cycomanic »

rootusrootus wrote: post #286
TYPE_FASTER wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

59k deaths out of 54 million infections is a 0.1% fatality rate. While the average fatality rate for COVID19 using global statistics is around 4%, let's use South Korea as an example because they have been testing much more frequently than other countries. The South Korea fatality rate is about 1%, so we'd see 540k fatalities in the US for similar infection rates. Also, initial R0 transmission statistics for COVID19…

> using global statistics Let's keep it real, the flu infection rate given by the CDC is hindsight knowledge. The real time "global statistics" for COVID19 are with vastly restricted testing. There's not really a valid comparison to be made at this point.

Exactly everyone who is quoting numbers for flu deaths needs to realise these are estimates based on the statistics of how deaths vary year to year, i. e. looking at how many more people died in a flu year compared to other years (simplified). Most people actually don't die of the flu itself but secondary infections (the number of deaths linked directlybto the flu are orders of magnitude lower). Corona directly kills people.

The other thing to remember is the lag in the calculations, the people dying now are the ones who were admitted to hospital a week ago.

Re: Coronavirus patients start to overwhelm US hospitals

#317

Post by dominotw »

ceejayoz wrote: post #314
dominotw wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But apparently some politicians want to down play the problem and their obfuscation is echoed in every corner of the web with great zeal and again drowning out reality. Yes obviously they take the main blame. but also others. From Jan, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/29/opinion/coronavirus-panic... > China’s response appears to be driven by political considerations more than epidemiological ones. The government has…

"We don't know how well a large-scale quarantine of an entire heavily populated region will work" isn't a conspiracy theory. It turned out to work, but that wasn't a certainty back then. (You're also linking an op-ed piece.)

> China’s response appears to be driven by political considerations more than epidemiological ones.

I was referring to this.

Author isn't interpreting it as "we don't know".

Re: Coronavirus patients start to overwhelm US hospitals

#318

Post by dwild »

thu2111 wrote: post #288
TYPE_FASTER wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

59k deaths out of 54 million infections is a 0.1% fatality rate. While the average fatality rate for COVID19 using global statistics is around 4%, let's use South Korea as an example because they have been testing much more frequently than other countries. The South Korea fatality rate is about 1%, so we'd see 540k fatalities in the US for similar infection rates. Also, initial R0 transmission statistics for COVID19…

If you want to know fatality rates you need a controlled population. South Korea isn't that, its level of testing isn't even much higher than Switzerlands at this point. There are only two known populations in which everyone was forced to be tested and their movement was limited, which thus makes up a controlled study: the Diamond Princess and the town of Vo in Italy. In both cases the fatality rate is much less than…

> In fact in Vo it was zero.

Isn't it a bit disingenuous to use a city with 89 cases as being statistically significant?

Re: Coronavirus patients start to overwhelm US hospitals

#319

Post by dwild »

d0mine wrote: post #98
happytoexplain wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. Too often this comparison is made to establish the ridiculous inverse argument: We don't take the flu very seriously, so we shouldn't take Corona very seriously.

Why Covid-19 is worse than the flu, in one chart https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2020/3/18/21184992/co...

He isn't saying Covid-19 isn't worse than the flu, he is saying that many people consider the flu not important, which meant that they would just as easily consider Covid-19 as unimportant, because the flu was the closest reference they had.

Re: Coronavirus patients start to overwhelm US hospitals

#320

Post by dreen »

slazaro wrote: post #253
dreen wrote: post #24

Judging by the history of most pandemics, I am currently more worried about the capacity of morgues than hospitals. Maybe this one will be different though.

Really? You're more worried about lifeless atoms piling up than actual humans dying?

Yes. Because heaps of those lifeless atoms decomposing in the streets become vectors of many awful diseases. That was the case with most pandemics we've had to deal with so far.
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