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Age, Sex, Existing Conditions of Covid-19 Cases and Deaths

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Re: Age, Sex, Existing Conditions of Covid-19 Cases and Deaths

#311

Post by Loughla »

LarryDarrell wrote: post #228
Loughla wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's this weird social media thirst for this to become the next spanish flu. My family (midwest conservatives) fall into one of two camps: 1. This was sent by Jesus and is a prelude to the rapture, literally. 2. The spanish flu happened 100 years ago, and 100 is a big round number, so this is going to do the same things. It's very strange and surreal around the home town right now. Many elderly are openly embracin…

My own personal opinion is that the Great Recession and it's repercussions (inequality, deaths of despair, the hallowing out of middle American economies, the opioid crises, Flint water crises, etc) over last 10+ years have really ramped up a zeitgeist of inevitable doom. I don't really blame anyone in the Midwest for being full of doom and gloom, because for the most part that's all they have known for the last deca…

I would agree with that. During the last election cycle (and already this one), the one thing the polls consistently got wrong was just how pissed "Joe-Midwest Average Voter" is that his life is much worse than his parents' were at the same age.

When people online and in the news express how they just don't understand why people still support Trump, it's because they're not trying to understand. If all you care about is disrupting as much of the system as possible and pissing people off as much as possible, you're getting exactly what you wanted.

Re: Age, Sex, Existing Conditions of Covid-19 Cases and Deaths

#312

Post by epmaybe »

oefrha wrote: post #66
epmaybe wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it helps point out that there is probably an underreporting and selection bias in the cases of coronavirus that get reported, precisely because healthy patients with coronavirus probably won't go to the hospital, and if they do they just treat for a pneumonia without doing coronavirus testing (what's the indication to make the cost worthwhile?).

> what's the indication to make the cost worthwhile? That sentence doesn’t quite parse, but in China COVID-19 is treated for free whereas for regular pneumonia you have to pay whatever out of pocket cost after insurance coverage.

I meant that in a healthy patient with good access to health care, who presumably would not suffer tremendously from COVID-19, and be treated the same regardless of whether they had that or influenza, why get testing? It's a bit more complicated than that, but that's the gist. In the US, at least, I doubt that the cost of care would change whether or not it is COVID-19 vs influenza pneumonia versus bacterial pneumonia.

Re: Age, Sex, Existing Conditions of Covid-19 Cases and Deaths

#313

Post by jmiskovic »

99052882514569 wrote: post #195
jmiskovic wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's you. That half the world has no better healthcare system than Iran is a sad reflection on the state of healthcare in world, not an implication that Iran's dilapidated and overstretched healthcare system\* is a good one. Combine that with their authoritarian government with zero communications skills and no credibility due to being habitual liars, and we should place no stock in their reassurances/projections, an…

I'm not defending Iran's healthcare system. The info I was able to dig up places it as above average, which means that more than 50% of world population will be affected just as bad or worse. Dismissing Iran's data point as not useful takes a specific viewpoint that I consider not empathic enough for my tastes, but everyone is free to disagree.

Re: Age, Sex, Existing Conditions of Covid-19 Cases and Deaths

#314

Post by _ea1k »

mns wrote: post #141
nik_s wrote: post #57

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…

The most bizarre thing to me is that people are taking the numbers with a grain of salt and assuming this means the real numbers are worse.

Deaths are terrible, but they are also really easy to count. Hospitalizations are terrible, but they are only marginally harder to count correctly. Most of the difficulty is that there is some evidence of undercounting at this stage, but it isn't very strong.

Non-hospitalizations of untested citizens with matching symptoms are practically impossible to count accurately.

Each step leads to more error, but these errors may actually imply reduced severity rather than greater severity. Its bad, to be sure, but seriously, there is too much public panic in the air right now.

Re: Age, Sex, Existing Conditions of Covid-19 Cases and Deaths

#315

Post by [deleted] »

drcode wrote: post #274
learc83 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you said cruise ships skew much older than the general population, so this tells us very little about the actual mortality rate. All 4 people who died were in their 80s.

However, we're also talking about older people who were healthy enough to travel on a cruise, a large number of people over 80 wouldn't do this.

[deleted]

Re: Age, Sex, Existing Conditions of Covid-19 Cases and Deaths

#316

Post by unethical_ban »

Loughla wrote: post #183
ableal wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few days ago I looked up the numbers for the 1918 flu - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu - world population: 1800 million - infected: 500 million - dead: 50 million I did not know it had been that bad.

There's this weird social media thirst for this to become the next spanish flu. My family (midwest conservatives) fall into one of two camps: 1. This was sent by Jesus and is a prelude to the rapture, literally. 2. The spanish flu happened 100 years ago, and 100 is a big round number, so this is going to do the same things. It's very strange and surreal around the home town right now. Many elderly are openly embracin…

It is kind of interesting. Well, the fundamentalist Christian part is expected; there is a very creepy number of people who expect and welcome the Rapture (knowing full well many of their friends aren't along for the ride).

As for the rest of the world, I think catastrophe is a spectacle and people like to "live in interesting times". Take a NASCAR crash and multiply it by 10,000,000, you know.

Re: Age, Sex, Existing Conditions of Covid-19 Cases and Deaths

#317

Post by dredmorbius »

AndrewThrowaway wrote: post #144
bart_spoon wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the aspect of the disease that is so interesting to me. With many diseases, like the flu, the most at risk are the elderly and the very young. But barely 1% of infections in China are children younger than 10, and 0 deaths.

Can it be that smoking plays big part in this? As this also explains gender statistics.

Looking at the numbers from Wei-jie Guan et al (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.06.20020974v...):

nonsmokers = 927 cases, 793 non-severe, 134 severe

exsmokers = 21 cases, 12 non-severe, 9 severe

smokers = 137 cases, 108 non-severe, 29 severe

That gives:

nonsmokers: 14% severe cases of presented

ex-smokers: 43% severe cases of presented

smokers: 21% severe cases of presented

The low number of ex-smokers as well as other factors (did they quit because of advanced smoking-related diseases, etc.?) makes that number hard to interpret.

But smoking carries a normalised average 40% increased risk of severe cases.

    100 * (21-14)/((21 + 14)/2) = 40

Re: Age, Sex, Existing Conditions of Covid-19 Cases and Deaths

#318

Post by doitLP »

AndrewThrowaway wrote: post #144
bart_spoon wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the aspect of the disease that is so interesting to me. With many diseases, like the flu, the most at risk are the elderly and the very young. But barely 1% of infections in China are children younger than 10, and 0 deaths.

Can it be that smoking plays big part in this? As this also explains gender statistics.

Or length of time exposed to air pollution, where smoking habit increases the likelihood of mortality?

Re: Age, Sex, Existing Conditions of Covid-19 Cases and Deaths

#319

Post by dredmorbius »

AndrewThrowaway wrote: post #160
oefrha wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An early preprint from the team of China’s leading expert Zhong Nanshan tagged smokers and non-smokers among the 1099 cases they analyzed. 85.4% supposedly never smoked, with 14.5% of those cases severe. So it’s not like non-smokers are very much immune. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.06.20020974v... https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.06.20020974v...

I would say that it really dismisses smoking as a big factor then.

I wouldn't: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22435408

Re: Age, Sex, Existing Conditions of Covid-19 Cases and Deaths

#320

Post by marcosdumay »

mns wrote: post #141
nik_s wrote: post #57

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…

> 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

Well, the numbers are very wrong. That's known. There are plenty of large factors with unknown impacts pushing the numbers both ways.

But there are about as many people saying "it's not that large a problem" as there are saying "this is way worse"... What is just natural when we don't have reliable numbers.

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