371–380 of 410 posts
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https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se... 80+ age category has a 21.9% death rate in confirmed cases.
Of those in that group what % had a pre-existing condition? That is, is it age or age + illness? My sense is it's the latter.
I noticed something else that might be an interesting correlation: available "acute" hospital beds. I don't have time to do the full correlation, but here's the data: https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=30183 Select "Curative (acute) care beds" Scroll down to the Per 1000 population. Italy: 2.62 Korea (assuming South): 7.14 The list of countries in that table is a good bit shorter than the countries fighting Co…
They're just normal hospital beds.
example, the netherlands have a total of around 1300 ICU beds (source https://healthmanagement.org/c/icu/issuearticle/organisation...).
the number there is 50k ... which is indeed about the amount of normal beds excluding ICU and other few specific beds.
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>>"The real answer is simply that the number of tests is not equal to the number of cases." I think you are right, but, assuming all the deaths are reported, the obvious implication is that the mortality rate is a lot lower than 3% If fact, looking to Germany, I would say that it's around 0.2, 0.3 % That would be the good news, the bad news is that it's extremely contagious, probably because nobody is immune to this…
I think the current most credible estimate is 0.8%-1%. That's what the UK government has been planning for, for example.
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I thought that actual fatality rate is always higher than measured in case of exponentially growing pandemics. Just imagine the case where it takes 20 days for people to die. Your calculations of fatality rate this early in the disease would be conservative.
A far bigger factor in a disease like this, where 80%+ of people have mild illness, is all the people that were never recorded as cases because their symptoms were too mild or were non-existent. People want to use CFR as a measure of how worried they should be, or as some kind of comparison between countries, and it's totally inappropriate for either purpose.
The statistics always seem to go up no matter what kind of interpretation.
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Italy has not yet reached the limit for ICU beds, whatever it is. People dying here is still within capacity, for now.
That disagrees with all the information that has been coming out of Italy for the last three days . Perhaps because hospitals there (and in general) are always running at 80-100% capacity, so it didn't take much for the extra COVID-19 cases to max them out.
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Geopolitics has seen massive impact since then. For example, the rise of ISIS is a direct descendant of the Iraq war which is a direct consequence of corrupt and criminal decision making by the Bush/Cheney admin in response to 9/11. Debatable if the Arab Spring would have occurred without it, as the Middle East might have been much more stable.
Sure but the comment I responded to wasn't about geopolitics but daily life changes.
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As a UK citizen I am honestly terrified by my governments response and actions. In years to come I fear it’s going to be the textbook example of exactly how not to manage these types of situations.
I thought that - but then I watched today's press conference with the chief scientific adviser and chief medical adviser. They made some very good cases for not locking stuff down just yet. Primarily you need to consider the behaviour of people. This is going to go on for a while no matter what we do and if we lockdown people now, by the time we hit the peak they will be ready to give up and go outside again. We need…
Boris Johnson looked very tired, but actually - and I can’t believe I think this - did a good job yesterday.
I was thinking after — they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
Many people seem to want draconian measures now, judging from the WhatsApp photos going around.
Then there’s the markets etc etc who want stability etc.
The “any fever or persistent cough = self isolate” was a good call i think.
It takes a lot of untested sick people - potential cases - out of circulation before all hell breaks loose.
It buys time with minimum disruption - many people might take the time off sick anyway if they’re already ill.
Also buys time to implement infra. and org. planning.
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A large number of South Korea infections are even younger due to how it spread. Another possibility is that Italy doesn't have a handle on who is or isn't infected so what they report are the obvious infections, who tend to be older.
>Another possibility is that Italy doesn't have a handle on who is or isn't infected so what they report are the obvious infections, who tend to be older. This is very likely the case, as can be seen in the positive test outcome rates. 16.7% in Italy vs. 3.6% in South Korea Italy has run around 60k tests. South Korea are testing around 15k people/day and have tested 234k people in total. They've even setup drive-thro…
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I thought that - but then I watched today's press conference with the chief scientific adviser and chief medical adviser. They made some very good cases for not locking stuff down just yet. Primarily you need to consider the behaviour of people. This is going to go on for a while no matter what we do and if we lockdown people now, by the time we hit the peak they will be ready to give up and go outside again. We need…
> We need to save the drastic measures for the peak. If you only act when you hit the peak, any measures will be moot. Countries need to act now to reduce that peak and flatten the curve. But sure, why not letting thousands of Atletico supporters into Liverpool, while Madrid has 1k+ cases. Was it also a "drastic measure" to play a football match behind closed doors?
> "Also, because the vast majority of people get a mild illness, to build up some kind of herd immunity so more people are immune to this disease and we reduce the transmission.”
They’re not acting only when the peak hits. They’re staging the response.
More serious measures come in as the number of transmission go up. And that’s all about managing the resources of the NHS over a long period of time.
Introduce lockdown now, sure, you delay the peak. But you don’t spread it out over a longer time period. People will stop caring and start ignoring advice.
The timing is critical.
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IMHO one consequence will be death of neoliberalism (started with Reagan/Thatcher but going philosophically to Hayek and Friedman). It is quite likely that U.S. will nationalize health care as a response to this crisis. But more broadly, the idea that government is a useless economic actor and shouldn't dictate economic policy will become laughable in the response to the crisis.
> It is quite likely that U.S. will nationalize health care as a response to this crisis. If you think half the country infected with a virus and a million deaths is enough to topple a several hundred billion dollar insurance racket that has endured for over half a century exploiting health and wellbeing for profit... I wish we would get single payer out of this, but the plague of greed in medicine is way too deep to…