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> Perhaps elderly people often trickle in to ICUs with respiratory issues and as long as it’s flu season no one really notices some more dying 80+ people especi

> Perhaps elderly people often trickle in to ICUs with respiratory issues and as long as it’s flu season no one really notices some more dying 80+ people especially as there was no test for this virus? I imagine most countries keep track of flu deaths and would have noticed an uptick.

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
I want to make it absolutely clear that I am not minimizing the coronavirus here, but the statistics would be lost in the noise. If known statistics are an order of magnitude too low, and there have actually been 800 deaths in the US instead of 80, that's still only about 3% of the total flu deaths this season. And flu seasons vary in intensity by a lot more than 3%.
- pvaldes 7y ago
  The real problem is the concentration of number of cases in a big peak in a narrow space of time, so many people that should not die will die anyway by exhaustion of resources. Physicians will need to decide who to let die and who is treated and lives. This is what they are trying to improve when asking people not to go out for a couple of weeks
  - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    Yes, again, I'm not minimizing anything or saying coronavirus isn't a problem. I'm only explaining why statistics wouldn't currently detect a bunch of unknown cases.
- taeric 7y ago
  This is my line of thinking, too. And I second your point of not trying to minimize it, but there appears compelling evidence this is already hit. Trying to determine what I could watch to get more or less confidence in this view.
  - tunesmith 7y ago
    https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1238310251679461377 https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1238310251679461377 perhaps?
    - taeric 7y ago
      I'm not good at reading Twitter threads. Will dedicate some time to it this evening. Note also that I'm questioning if we will see an exponential rise in deaths. In large, I don't think that will be seen outside of places with poor lung health, if my hypothesis is right.
  - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    As I mentioned downthread, Iran is the country to watch for me. It's pretty clear that their infection is uncontrolled, and Rouhani claims that new infections have peaked. Now that we know the Bay Area is going on lockdown, I intend to drop coronavirus off my newsfeed for a few days and tune back in to see if he was right.
    - taeric 7y ago
      That really is just the country to watch for bad baseline health country getting it. My hypothesis is a higher baseline lung health will result in a milder wave of infections. Essentially, it is not young that are getting milder cases, it is people with less damaged lungs. And no matter how you slice it, the places that have had the most deaths, have by far the worst air quality.
      - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
        Iran has pretty good baseline health. It's not amazing, but it's much closer to the US than the US is to Japan or Singapore. (And Italy is very healthy, one of the healthiest countries in the world in most rankings.)
        taeric 7y ago
- usrusr 7y ago
  No way to have the statistics get lost in the noise for a prolonged time and then suddenly switch to strong exponential growth that totally buries a developed medical system. If the ratio of sub-noticeable to noticeable cases was so much bigger, by the time you'd reach Lombardy-grade hospital influx the growth rate would already be shrinking from saturation. A virus that shows the infection rate documented by serious cases in hard-hit regions is unable to spread slowly in an unaware and unimmunized population.
  - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    Exponential growth is very good at getting lost in the noise for a prolonged time until suddenly it's not. Toy numbers: If you have 20K cases today with a 6 day doubling time, the first case was 84 days ago but 99% of the cases are new this month. (And in some sense this must have happened - everyone agrees there are a significant number of undetected cases, the only question is how many.)
- tathougies 7y ago
  Thank you for a cohesive answer. Yes, but if this is true and the number dead is not enough to even catch our attention when compared to flu dead, it would seem these economic and societal measures being undertaken are way out of proportion. In reality, if America were suffering a major pneumonia outbreak like Italy, we would be out of ventilators and deciding who dies. That is clearly not the case here, so we can rest assured that we are certainly behind Italy.
  - taeric 7y ago
    But my question is if we will see the same levels as Italy. Just glancing at their air quality, I couldn't go there without extra inhalers. Is that making them more susceptible to lung illness? Is a question I haven't asked. Do they usually see more pneumonia than places like the states, anyways? Could be a proxy to test my hypothesis.
taeric 7y ago
ILI has seen a marked increase for the past couple of months. Deaths aren't going up, necessarily, but it is sad how many deaths flu and pneumonia cause each year, already.
pvaldes 7y ago
> would have noticed an uptick. Could be, but not necessarily because coronavirus and flu target the same pool of people. Those on risk groups had being first filtered (indirectly killed) by the economic scam. People unable to accurately heat their home in winter for example would suffer more pneumonias and having a logical explanation, nobody would care to search for a new virus among those cases. Increase in coronavirus kills could be mitigated by other previous conditions and masked with a decrease in flu kills (by previous decrease in the pool of posible flu victims). On the other hand, the virus appearing in Wuhan market was always of problematic explanation. One hypothese could be that the market was linked with the labs somehow (origin in the labs). I always though this as a possibility worthing to explore. ... but I'm starting to think that another hypothese could be that Wuhan was not the first location, but one of the few places equiped to identify the virus and understand that was something more than a common cold. Virus taxonomy is really expensive, not much people can do it with new viruses and most hospitals will not care to test for just a strain of a common cold.
taeric 7y ago
Also, keep in mind I'm proposing it is not elderly, that is the risk factor. It is lung health. I challenge that most places do not have the concentration of poor lung health to compare with where the serious cases have been.
alkonaut 7y ago
Early in the flu season (nov/dec) as this would be, I imagine it’s still uncertain how bad the season will be, so it might just look like a bad year. But I’m thinking they probably test at least bad cases for almost every common virus so they would have been alarmed by even a few deaths from pneumonia without positive tests. This is why I don’t believe the theory that many were infected long ago.
- taeric 7y ago
  It too a nursing home in Seattle losing thirteen residents for them to test. So, there's more than just a few. And again, my hypothesis is that it isn't just elderly, but more exposed lung damage. Which, simple age is a good indicator for poorer lung health. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-nursinghome/seattle-area-nursing-home-unable-to-test-65-workers-with-covid-19-symptoms-idUSKBN20X01R https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-nu...

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago

I want to make it absolutely clear that I am not minimizing the coronavirus here, but the statistics would be lost in the noise. If known statistics are an order of magnitude too low, and there have actually been 800 deaths in the US instead of 80, that's still only about 3% of the total flu deaths this season. And flu seasons vary in intensity by a lot more than 3%.

pvaldes 7y ago
The real problem is the concentration of number of cases in a big peak in a narrow space of time, so many people that should not die will die anyway by exhaustion of resources. Physicians will need to decide who to let die and who is treated and lives. This is what they are trying to improve when asking people not to go out for a couple of weeks
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  Yes, again, I'm not minimizing anything or saying coronavirus isn't a problem. I'm only explaining why statistics wouldn't currently detect a bunch of unknown cases.
taeric 7y ago
This is my line of thinking, too. And I second your point of not trying to minimize it, but there appears compelling evidence this is already hit. Trying to determine what I could watch to get more or less confidence in this view.
- tunesmith 7y ago
  https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1238310251679461377 https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1238310251679461377 perhaps?
  - taeric 7y ago
    I'm not good at reading Twitter threads. Will dedicate some time to it this evening. Note also that I'm questioning if we will see an exponential rise in deaths. In large, I don't think that will be seen outside of places with poor lung health, if my hypothesis is right.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  As I mentioned downthread, Iran is the country to watch for me. It's pretty clear that their infection is uncontrolled, and Rouhani claims that new infections have peaked. Now that we know the Bay Area is going on lockdown, I intend to drop coronavirus off my newsfeed for a few days and tune back in to see if he was right.
  - taeric 7y ago
    That really is just the country to watch for bad baseline health country getting it. My hypothesis is a higher baseline lung health will result in a milder wave of infections. Essentially, it is not young that are getting milder cases, it is people with less damaged lungs. And no matter how you slice it, the places that have had the most deaths, have by far the worst air quality.
    - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
      Iran has pretty good baseline health. It's not amazing, but it's much closer to the US than the US is to Japan or Singapore. (And Italy is very healthy, one of the healthiest countries in the world in most rankings.)
      - taeric 7y ago
usrusr 7y ago
No way to have the statistics get lost in the noise for a prolonged time and then suddenly switch to strong exponential growth that totally buries a developed medical system. If the ratio of sub-noticeable to noticeable cases was so much bigger, by the time you'd reach Lombardy-grade hospital influx the growth rate would already be shrinking from saturation. A virus that shows the infection rate documented by serious cases in hard-hit regions is unable to spread slowly in an unaware and unimmunized population.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  Exponential growth is very good at getting lost in the noise for a prolonged time until suddenly it's not. Toy numbers: If you have 20K cases today with a 6 day doubling time, the first case was 84 days ago but 99% of the cases are new this month. (And in some sense this must have happened - everyone agrees there are a significant number of undetected cases, the only question is how many.)
tathougies 7y ago
Thank you for a cohesive answer. Yes, but if this is true and the number dead is not enough to even catch our attention when compared to flu dead, it would seem these economic and societal measures being undertaken are way out of proportion. In reality, if America were suffering a major pneumonia outbreak like Italy, we would be out of ventilators and deciding who dies. That is clearly not the case here, so we can rest assured that we are certainly behind Italy.
- taeric 7y ago
  But my question is if we will see the same levels as Italy. Just glancing at their air quality, I couldn't go there without extra inhalers. Is that making them more susceptible to lung illness? Is a question I haven't asked. Do they usually see more pneumonia than places like the states, anyways? Could be a proxy to test my hypothesis.

taeric 7y ago

ILI has seen a marked increase for the past couple of months. Deaths aren't going up, necessarily, but it is sad how many deaths flu and pneumonia cause each year, already.

pvaldes 7y ago

> would have noticed an uptick. Could be, but not necessarily because coronavirus and flu target the same pool of people. Those on risk groups had being first filtered (indirectly killed) by the economic scam. People unable to accurately heat their home in winter for example would suffer more pneumonias and having a logical explanation, nobody would care to search for a new virus among those cases. Increase in coronavirus kills could be mitigated by other previous conditions and masked with a decrease in flu kills (by previous decrease in the pool of posible flu victims). On the other hand, the virus appearing in Wuhan market was always of problematic explanation. One hypothese could be that the market was linked with the labs somehow (origin in the labs). I always though this as a possibility worthing to explore. ... but I'm starting to think that another hypothese could be that Wuhan was not the first location, but one of the few places equiped to identify the virus and understand that was something more than a common cold. Virus taxonomy is really expensive, not much people can do it with new viruses and most hospitals will not care to test for just a strain of a common cold.

taeric 7y ago

Also, keep in mind I'm proposing it is not elderly, that is the risk factor. It is lung health. I challenge that most places do not have the concentration of poor lung health to compare with where the serious cases have been.

alkonaut 7y ago

Early in the flu season (nov/dec) as this would be, I imagine it’s still uncertain how bad the season will be, so it might just look like a bad year. But I’m thinking they probably test at least bad cases for almost every common virus so they would have been alarmed by even a few deaths from pneumonia without positive tests. This is why I don’t believe the theory that many were infected long ago.

taeric 7y ago
It too a nursing home in Seattle losing thirteen residents for them to test. So, there's more than just a few. And again, my hypothesis is that it isn't just elderly, but more exposed lung damage. Which, simple age is a good indicator for poorer lung health. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-nursinghome/seattle-area-nursing-home-unable-to-test-65-workers-with-covid-19-symptoms-idUSKBN20X01R https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-nu...