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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

#411

Post by SgtBastard »

scarmig wrote: post #294
ekianjo wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spot on. Medical facilities are not up to support in times of widespread epidemics. Which means most people would not get any treatment and you should expect mortality rate to increase over time as it becomes more widespread.

You can see this in provincial level mortality rates: at low infection concentrations, it's a more deadly than flu but nothing insane. But once resources are swamped (e.g. in Hubei), the mortality jumps an order of magnitude.

Thank you. I have this constant argument with those that want to shut borders and blow up our economy as a result: that if you break the stats down on Hubei vs everywhere else, it’s a very different picture of the virulence and mortality rates.

Hubei’s mortality rate for literally everything at the moment would expected to be higher than anywhere else given how stretched their resources are.

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

#412

Post by scarmig »

coolspot wrote: post #359
jimhi wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you move to Hubei? I have been in Shanghai through this entire thing and have an extremely hard time believing you saw any corpses ferried out of your apartment complex. 94% of the reported deaths are in Hubei - what city are you in exactly?

My mining through his comments shows he is from Beijing [0]. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22149446

Broadly speaking, I was trapped in a lower tier city for a couple weeks after LNY, which is where I saw two corpses removed from my apartment complex. Not in Hubei. Recently allowed to travel back to Beijing.

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

#413

Post by austhrow743 »

SgtBastard wrote: post #411
scarmig wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can see this in provincial level mortality rates: at low infection concentrations, it's a more deadly than flu but nothing insane. But once resources are swamped (e.g. in Hubei), the mortality jumps an order of magnitude.

Thank you. I have this constant argument with those that want to shut borders and blow up our economy as a result: that if you break the stats down on Hubei vs everywhere else, it’s a very different picture of the virulence and mortality rates. Hubei’s mortality rate for literally everything at the moment would expected to be higher than anywhere else given how stretched their resources are.

I don't understand. How is the mortality rate being worse when resources are stretched thin a point in favour of not shutting borders?

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

#414

Post by learc83 »

palmstroem wrote: post #400
learc83 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a response I wrote earlier to that. After he said that someone else from the WHO contradicted him. "The claim was quickly challenged by an infectious diseases expert who serves on a committee that advises the WHO’s health emergencies program. Gary Kobinger, director of the Infectious Disease Research Center at Laval University in Quebec, said it would be highly unusual for there not to be mild or symptom-free…

He gives more detailed numbers about Guandong: at the height of the epidemic, they performed 320000 tests, of which less than 0.5% were positive, which means that they missed less than 200 cases. In other words, Aylward thinks the Chinese numbers are basically correct. Even though of course not all cases are detected, we are not looking at magnitudes more undetected cases driving up the infections in the background.

>320000 tests, of which less than 0.5% were positive, which means that they missed less than 200 cases

That doesn't follow from your premise and it doesn't match what he said.

"Of 320,000 tests performed, just under 0.5% were positive for the virus at the peak of transmission there, he said — which suggests that only 1 case out of 200 was being missed."

And even based on what he said the conclusion he's drawing doesn't follow either. From other sources the 320,000 was from a community sample. Guangdong has a population of 113 million, a 0.5% infection rate is over half a million people.

Even assuming it's not a random community sample, and it's from people who self selected, so the infection rate is much higher than the general population, there is still room for an order of magnitude more mild cases than are showing up in official numbers.

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

#415

Post by heavyset_go »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #254
mns wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 problem is in the healthcare capacities. I live in a country with ~2mio people. If you're patient zero here, you get a comfy private room, your own bed, 5 doctors, 10 nurses, whole research teams, respirators, priority with all the tests, examinations, etc. Same for patient 1, 2, 3. If 200k people get infected (10% of population), and only 10% of those need extra medical care, that's 20.000 people. We don't have…

That "10 day hospital" is the field hospital equivalent of a school gym.

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

#416

Post by heavyset_go »

yibg wrote: post #361
partiallypro wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the polar opposite view, China is not transparent with their numbers, and their response is hamfisted because they aren't competent and a lot of it is theater (typical of communist regimes.) It is possible that in many years more people will die from cancer from their irresponsible spraying than the actual virus. Western countries are also traditionally cleaner, and things like "gutter grease" aren't common. I…

They may not be transparent with their numbers, and certainly weren’t in the early days, but what about their response has been not competent? And what does gutter grease have to do with this virus or containment?

They actively tried to cover it up and waited until it was too late to take action, and they're engaging in a lot of sterility theater.

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

#417

Post by heavyset_go »

billfruit wrote: post #202
nik_s wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If my original post gave off the impression of being conspiracy-theory-driven, I want to apologize, because that wasn't the intent. My original post aimed at clarifying that death rates in exponentially spreading diseases that have a lag between infection and possible recovery and death is a tricky topic, and that the numbers generally reported seem to not take this nuance into account. I think collecting accurate da…

Yet your post seemed to hint at willful manipulation of data, which isn't something for which there is reliable concrete evidence for, and which in my view is adding to the paranoia. The line of thinking for eg:, Chinese numbers are untrustworthy, WHO numbers are untrustworthy etc, is very frequently echoed by the western press, and even here in HN.

They lied about their numbers during the SARS outbreak.

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

#418

Post by mercer »

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…

I think that it's possible, but unlikely, that this will 'blow over' and turn out to be a tempest in a teacup.

But I also think that it is extremely worrying that this 'HN/internet hysteria' has so rapidly become part of the national conversation. Just yesterday we (NL) had a prime-time broadcast about this.

The way I see it, it doesn't matter whether the facts align with the response. Clearly this is treated as more than just another virus, this will have effects on our global economy and compounded by a general sense of unease about there not being some big recession, it's going to have effects and they will suck.

Practically speaking, it means that I stock up on shit so at the very best I don't need to wait in line for things.

More hypothetically speaking, I'm thinking of our economy collapsing to some extent, because either it was due to anyways, or because it will because of a pandemic, or because it will because of everyone thinking there's a pandemic even when it's not that bad and is not a cause for panic.

We're in panic mode, and I'm surprised and worried that this is not just an 'internet thing'.

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

#419

Post by sobani »

hcknwscommenter wrote: post #408
hcknwscommenter wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"letting warmer temperatures do their work" The likelihood that warmer temperatures per se will have any affect on COVID-19 transmission, morbidity, or mortality is close to zero.

I guess this comment has garnered some negative reactions from people. I have yet to read/hear/come across a plausible explanation regarding how the warmer temperature will actually curtail transmission or improve health outcomes. Is there an actual theory here or are people just paraphrasing our genius President's semi-coherent remarks regarding same.

For the same reason(s) the common flu is more prevalent in the winter. Wikipedia has some proposed explanations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flu_season#Cause.
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