5 ms·

Report on the characteristics of Covid-19 positive deceased patients in Italy [pdf]

51 points by Cantbekhan 7y ago

Cantbekhan 7y ago
It's unfortunately not yet translated but I think the graphs and tables are clear enough and can easily be translated by Google Translate. Personally my surprise is that it seems half of those deceased people did not receive any kind of antiviral therapy.
- topynate 7y ago
  Possible explanations for the absence of antiviral therapy: lack of availability, reluctance to prescribe untested treatment (all antiviral treatments are currently experimental), some of the antivirals actually work really well and a lot of the people who got them are missing from this study because they recovered. I hope it's the latter.
pseudolus 7y ago
Some excerpts (courtesy of Google translate): The mean age of deceased and positive COVID-19 patients is 79.5 years (median 80.5, range 31-103, RangeInterQuartile - IQR 74.3-85.9). There are 601 women (30.0%). The figure 1 shows that the median age of patients COVID-19 positive deaths is more than 15 years higher than that of patients who contracted the infection (median age: patients who died 80.5 years - patients with infection 63 years). The Figure 2 shows the number of deaths by age group. Women who died after contracting COVID-19 infection they are older than men (median ages: women 83.7 - men 79.5) The Figure 4 shows the therapies administered in patients who died COVID-19 positive during hospitalization. ThereAntibiotic therapy was the most widely used (83% of cases), least used antiviral (52%), most rarely steroid therapy (27%). The common use of antibiotic therapy can be explained by presence of super infections or is compatible with initiation of empirical therapy in patients with pneumonia, pending laboratory confirmation of COVID-19. In 25 cases (14.9%) all 3 therapies were used. The figure 5 shows, for the patients who died positive COVID-19, the median time in days, who spend from onset of symptoms to death (8 days), from onset of symptoms to hospitalization (4 days) and from hospitalization to death (4 days). The time elapsed from hospitalization to death was 1 day longer in those who were transferred to resuscitation than those who did not they were transferred (5 days against 4 days). To date (17 March), 17 COVID-19 positive patients have died under the age of 50. In particular,5 of these had fewer than 40 and were all male people aged between 31 and i39 years with serious pre-existing pathologies (cardiovascular, renal, psychiatric pathologies, diabetes, obesity).
- rumanator 7y ago
  Thank you for your summary. It was very informative.
- becausecombi 7y ago
  huh, no one else has mentioned this, am I interpreting this wrong? If 30% of deceased positives are female, then 70% are male? That's quite a big difference!
  - derision 7y ago
    this is highly anecdotal, but my family is from a small town in italy, population of ~1500, and the men are way less healthy from a lifestyle perspective - lots of drinking, smoking, hard manual labor without lung protection, etc etc, while the women mostly stay home handling home duties and socializing
    - huffmsa 7y ago
      I think prior lung damage is going to shake out as the number one prior factor in the likelihood of severe infection and probability of death.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
  - becausecombi 7y ago
    Okay, Italy's numbers are not too far off from China's. CCDC Data shows that out of 44,672 confirmed cases, 63.8% of deaths were Male, 36.2% female. [1] 1. http://weekly.chinacdc.cn/en/article/id/e53946e2-c6c4-41e9-9a9b-fea8db1a8f51 http://weekly.chinacdc.cn/en/article/id/e53946e2-c6c4-41e9-9...
- huffmsa 7y ago
  Will make an unsubstantiated conjecture that men are dying younger and at a higher rate because they've experienced more prior lung damage during their work and smoking habits. Particularly in northern Italy, which is heavily industrialized.
jasimmohdk 7y ago
Does anyone has a translated version of of this?
- ytgh76 7y ago
  https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Infografica_19marzo%20ENG.pdf https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Infograf...
gregoriol 7y ago
There is a summary of this by Bloomberg news: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-those-who-died-from-virus-had-other-illness-italy-says https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-tho...
kayoone 7y ago
Doesn't the median age of 60 years for positively diagnosed patients suggest a huge number of non-detected cases?
- dede4metal 7y ago
  Indeed. They only test who is really really ill
- pmorici 7y ago
  Depends on the median age of the population. Italy skews older.
- dakrisht 7y ago
  Probably tens of thousands of undiagnosed, asymptomatic. Aka super carriers. The virus is smart and has evolved from an evolutionary standpoint. Infect younger and asymptomatic patients with the goal of spreading and infecting as many as possible. Eventually, the more infected, the more that will die. The young are just carrier pigeons and don’t even know it.
  - laGrenouille 7y ago
    > The virus is smart and has evolved from an evolutionary standpoint. Infect younger and asymptomatic patients with the goal of spreading and infecting as many as possible. I think you are giving a bit too much agency to the virus. It has evolved in such a way that optimises for further spreading for sure, but I do not think it has a sneaky strategy to use young people as attack vectors. What's more likely is that it has evolved to replicate and spread within the human population, while not acting so fast as to kill most people. The problem is that replicating at a rate that doesn't kill most people will kill some of the oldest and sickest within a population.
    - ram1981 7y ago
      Another important insight is that Viruses, and germs in general, try to evolve and adapt inside the host. They don’t gain if they end up killing the host because that ends them too. Not to sound apocalyptic but I think their holy grail is something like what the machines do to humans in the movie Matrix
emayljames 7y ago
https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&nv=1&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=auto&sp=nmt4&tl=en&u=https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Report-COVID-2019_17_marzo-v2.pdf&usg=ALkJrhhtAr5nOIYSlTRIwXfaWvyLmI0o8Q https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&...
Arnt 7y ago
I found page 3 most remarkable: 48% of those who die of covid-19 in Italy also suffer from three or more other diseases (or did recently), and 99.2% suffer from one or more.
- dakrisht 7y ago
  Right. 75% suffer from 2 or more. And 99% suffer from 1. Not good for the US given the high obesity / diabetes rates here.
- circlefavshape 7y ago
  What counts as a co-morbidity? Obesity seems fairly ... well, trivial. I have high (total) cholesterol. Does that count? Constipation? Itchy spot on the back of my knee?
  - Arnt 7y ago
    There's a table in the PDF, you can read it.
  - andruby 7y ago
    The co-morbidities reported here are mentioned in the report (in Italian). Translated by Google: diseases N % Ischemic heart disease 117 33.0 Atrial fibrillation 87 24.5 Stroke 34 9.6 Hypertension 270 76.1 Diabetes mellitus 126 35.5 Dementia 24 6.8 COPD 47 13.2 Active cancer in the past 5 years 72 20.3 Chronic liver disease 11 3.1 Chronic renal failure 64 18.0 Hypertension and Diabetes seems very prevalent in older people. Especially in western countries like the US.
    - jeltz 7y ago
      Maybe it is just correlation between old age and hypertension, but I find it interesting how ACE2 which the coronavirus uses as its entry point into cells is also part of regulating blood pressure.
- randcraw 7y ago
  A very high fraction of folks past age 75 have one or more of these diseases. Before concluding that they contribute, the next question should be, how many people in that population at that age have ZERO comorbid diseases? Likely, it's very few. So these comorbidities may actually have little causal role leading to mortality. We can't know from just this data. Until we learn more, we can't conclude 1) that comorbidities were causal, or 2) WHICH comorbidity really matters.
dakrisht 7y ago
Some interesting data here. - Mean age of 79.5 sheds light on Italy’s extremely high fatality rates; in essence, it’s the (very) elderly that are dying due to complications from viral pneumonia. Which begs the next question... Why are they overwhelmingly treating patients with antibiotics in cases of viral pneumonia and not antivirals (Remdesivir)/ chloroquine? Sure, these are “experimental” therapies but decent data out of China/South Korea shows these therapies work. Perhaps they found out too late? - The younger fatalities (17) show multiple, serious co-morbidities and smoking is not listed; an assumption can be made a fair amount of these younger patients smoke. But again, an assumption. - Almost 50% of patients showed 3 or more co-morbidities - this is high and important to note. 25% of patients showed 2 co-morbidities. Roughly 75% of patients had 2 or more co-morbidities (!). - Sample size (2003) is good given their current 3,500 fatality numbers. Not a medical doctor but a few things I’m struggling to figure out: - How did so many elderly get infected? Did the disease simply spread in close quarters where many elderly live? Elderly folks aren’t necessarily out and about drinking espresso and touching surfaces yet alone having younger asymptomatic carriers cough on them. I wonder if Italy is similar to a Kirkland, Washington situation. High density of elderly folks spreading infection. It’s obvious that SARS-Cov-2 is highly, highly contagious but it’s interesting how we’re seeing these somewhat “bomb” explosions of infection: Wuhan > Daegu > Kirkland > Lombardy > NYC next. Sure, quarantine works but the rate of new infection stays rather localized and then just annihilates everyone around it. Perhaps it’s a viral load issue; viral load increases exponentially the more we have infected. Why you see doctors and nurses infected / critical and dying even with full PPE. Let’s hope the Italians figure out a way to get this curve to fall of ASAP. Hoping they have a similar effect to Wuhan’s curve and just drop down rather than flatten.
- nostrebored 7y ago
  > Elderly folks aren’t necessarily out and about drinking espresso and touching surfaces yet alone having younger asymptomatic carriers cough on them. From what I understand about Italian culture, they kind of are. Older Italians seem to have much stronger social lives than in the US.
  - dakrisht 7y ago
gvjddbnvdrbv 7y ago
This is encouraging for healthy youngsters BUT age and health are also the criteria for receiving treatment in Italy at the moment. As the epidemic grows the categories of people that get ventilation decrease and the deaths will get younger and healthier.
- xenonite 7y ago
  Even if a youngster as a higher change of survival, there are serious effects reported. Fibrosis (damage of the lung tissue) lasts for much longer (over 4 weeks) than it is known in any typical flu. And what happens after 4 weeks is still totally unclear. As we don't know yet of the long term effects, please don't take that lightly!
  - dakrisht 7y ago
    Source for this comment? All pneumonia’s have decreased lung function post-infection and require therapy to retain full or close to full lung function. Curious where you’re getting this info from
    - xenonite 7y ago
      Sure, thank you for asking. My source is an interview in the first German state TV station (ARD). I am sorry that I can't provide you with an English source. If you understand German, please watch https://youtu.be/IHF0IDtW6LA?t=882 https://youtu.be/IHF0IDtW6LA?t=882 from minute 14:42. As a second source, I found a written report on the TV talk here, for which you may use, e.g., deepl.com to translate it: https://www.express.de/news/promi-und-show/corona-talk-spd-politiker-wagt-bei--maischberger--drastische-prognose-zum-wochenende-36440162 https://www.express.de/news/promi-und-show/corona-talk-spd-p...
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
k__ 7y ago
How many were so sick that they would have died anyway? I read that they were testing dead people and the theory was, their count was so high because they would add people to it that would have died anyway but just happen to be infected right before their death. Edit: I think this is an interesting question. Why do Italy, France and Spain have such high death ratios? Are they measuring more than needed or are the others measuring not enough?
- gambiting 7y ago
  Right, but you need to establish the cause of death and it's kind of important. Like for example my father was fighting cancer for 8 years before he died, but when he passed away the hospital wrote that he died of "cardiac arrest", since his heart just couldn't go anymore. So in some statistic somewhere he will exist as a person who died of heart problems, not someone who died because of cancer. That's not right either I don't think.
  - bart_spoon 7y ago
    This is a problem with counting diabetes deaths as well. We have evidence to believe that people with diabetes are much more likely to get heart disease or cancer, which is what they usually die from. There's lots of debate on if mortality due to diabetes is underestimated for the same reasons.
- vladvasiliu 7y ago
  I can only speak for France, where I live, but the situation is possibly the same in Spain and Italy. Over here they only test people who are "very sick", in other words people who need medical attention. They are not testing people with no or "mild" symptoms. Basically this means if you don't feel like you're about to die, you're not tested and therefore you're not counted. So to answer your question, they're actually not measuring enough.
  - k__ 7y ago
    In Germany they also only test people who have specific symptoms AND contact to high risk people/places.
ramblerman 7y ago
Summarizing the deaths, by age distribution is quite telling (page 4): - no deaths under 30 - Less than 1% of deaths under 50 - less than 4% of deaths under 60 - 87% of deaths above 70 This disease is incredibly dangerous for our elderly, and isolating them to prevent infection should be our top priority.
- Grue3 7y ago
  That's because Italy's hospitals are overcrowded and very old patients are simply not treated at all. It's a vicious circle because they're thought being less likely to survive, are denied treatment, which makes them even less likely to survive.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - ramblerman 7y ago
    Triage is unfortunately applied in some hospitals, especially around Bergamo. But you would need to provide some data to make the claim that the stats are skewed this much purely because all elderly are just cast away. Given the vast majority of hospital cases are actually the elderly. Finally, proper ethical triage never looks at how long a patient is expected to live after their recovery as a condition.
    - bart_spoon 7y ago
      > Finally, proper ethical triage never looks at how long a patient is expected to live after their recovery as a condition. But it does look at chances of survival, which for this particular disease looks very closely correlated with how long a patient is expected to live after their recovery.
rezeroed 7y ago
Confirms that this is a disease of the elderly and unwell, and everyone else should be getting on as normal.
- mkl 7y ago
  This is about deaths, not cases. If everyone else tries to get on as normal then the virus will spread like wildfire among them and the elderly and unwell will quickly become infected.
  - rezeroed 7y ago
    Isolate the elderly and unwell, let the virus spread among the rest.
    - mkl 7y ago
      How could you possibly isolate 10s of millions of people who are thoroughly mixed in with the rest of society? Many of them live with or are dependent on the younger healthier people. Even if the isolation were possible, letting the virus spread like that would overwhelm the health system and push the death rate way up.
      - rezeroed 7y ago
        The same way they're doing it now.

51 points by Cantbekhan 7y ago

It's unfortunately not yet translated but I think the graphs and tables are clear enough and can easily be translated by Google Translate. Personally my surprise is that it seems half of those deceased people did not receive any kind of antiviral therapy.

topynate 7y ago
Possible explanations for the absence of antiviral therapy: lack of availability, reluctance to prescribe untested treatment (all antiviral treatments are currently experimental), some of the antivirals actually work really well and a lot of the people who got them are missing from this study because they recovered. I hope it's the latter.

pseudolus 7y ago

Some excerpts (courtesy of Google translate): The mean age of deceased and positive COVID-19 patients is 79.5 years (median 80.5, range 31-103, RangeInterQuartile - IQR 74.3-85.9). There are 601 women (30.0%). The figure 1 shows that the median age of patients COVID-19 positive deaths is more than 15 years higher than that of patients who contracted the infection (median age: patients who died 80.5 years - patients with infection 63 years). The Figure 2 shows the number of deaths by age group. Women who died after contracting COVID-19 infection they are older than men (median ages: women 83.7 - men 79.5) The Figure 4 shows the therapies administered in patients who died COVID-19 positive during hospitalization. ThereAntibiotic therapy was the most widely used (83% of cases), least used antiviral (52%), most rarely steroid therapy (27%). The common use of antibiotic therapy can be explained by presence of super infections or is compatible with initiation of empirical therapy in patients with pneumonia, pending laboratory confirmation of COVID-19. In 25 cases (14.9%) all 3 therapies were used. The figure 5 shows, for the patients who died positive COVID-19, the median time in days, who spend from onset of symptoms to death (8 days), from onset of symptoms to hospitalization (4 days) and from hospitalization to death (4 days). The time elapsed from hospitalization to death was 1 day longer in those who were transferred to resuscitation than those who did not they were transferred (5 days against 4 days). To date (17 March), 17 COVID-19 positive patients have died under the age of 50. In particular,5 of these had fewer than 40 and were all male people aged between 31 and i39 years with serious pre-existing pathologies (cardiovascular, renal, psychiatric pathologies, diabetes, obesity).

rumanator 7y ago
Thank you for your summary. It was very informative.
becausecombi 7y ago
huh, no one else has mentioned this, am I interpreting this wrong? If 30% of deceased positives are female, then 70% are male? That's quite a big difference!
- derision 7y ago
  this is highly anecdotal, but my family is from a small town in italy, population of ~1500, and the men are way less healthy from a lifestyle perspective - lots of drinking, smoking, hard manual labor without lung protection, etc etc, while the women mostly stay home handling home duties and socializing
  - huffmsa 7y ago
    I think prior lung damage is going to shake out as the number one prior factor in the likelihood of severe infection and probability of death.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- becausecombi 7y ago
  Okay, Italy's numbers are not too far off from China's. CCDC Data shows that out of 44,672 confirmed cases, 63.8% of deaths were Male, 36.2% female. [1] 1. http://weekly.chinacdc.cn/en/article/id/e53946e2-c6c4-41e9-9a9b-fea8db1a8f51 http://weekly.chinacdc.cn/en/article/id/e53946e2-c6c4-41e9-9...
huffmsa 7y ago
Will make an unsubstantiated conjecture that men are dying younger and at a higher rate because they've experienced more prior lung damage during their work and smoking habits. Particularly in northern Italy, which is heavily industrialized.

jasimmohdk 7y ago

Does anyone has a translated version of of this?

ytgh76 7y ago
https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Infografica_19marzo%20ENG.pdf https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Infograf...

gregoriol 7y ago

There is a summary of this by Bloomberg news: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-those-who-died-from-virus-had-other-illness-italy-says https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-tho...

kayoone 7y ago

Doesn't the median age of 60 years for positively diagnosed patients suggest a huge number of non-detected cases?

dede4metal 7y ago
Indeed. They only test who is really really ill
pmorici 7y ago
Depends on the median age of the population. Italy skews older.
dakrisht 7y ago
Probably tens of thousands of undiagnosed, asymptomatic. Aka super carriers. The virus is smart and has evolved from an evolutionary standpoint. Infect younger and asymptomatic patients with the goal of spreading and infecting as many as possible. Eventually, the more infected, the more that will die. The young are just carrier pigeons and don’t even know it.
- laGrenouille 7y ago
  > The virus is smart and has evolved from an evolutionary standpoint. Infect younger and asymptomatic patients with the goal of spreading and infecting as many as possible. I think you are giving a bit too much agency to the virus. It has evolved in such a way that optimises for further spreading for sure, but I do not think it has a sneaky strategy to use young people as attack vectors. What's more likely is that it has evolved to replicate and spread within the human population, while not acting so fast as to kill most people. The problem is that replicating at a rate that doesn't kill most people will kill some of the oldest and sickest within a population.
  - ram1981 7y ago
    Another important insight is that Viruses, and germs in general, try to evolve and adapt inside the host. They don’t gain if they end up killing the host because that ends them too. Not to sound apocalyptic but I think their holy grail is something like what the machines do to humans in the movie Matrix

emayljames 7y ago

https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&nv=1&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=auto&sp=nmt4&tl=en&u=https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Report-COVID-2019_17_marzo-v2.pdf&usg=ALkJrhhtAr5nOIYSlTRIwXfaWvyLmI0o8Q https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&...

Arnt 7y ago

I found page 3 most remarkable: 48% of those who die of covid-19 in Italy also suffer from three or more other diseases (or did recently), and 99.2% suffer from one or more.

dakrisht 7y ago
Right. 75% suffer from 2 or more. And 99% suffer from 1. Not good for the US given the high obesity / diabetes rates here.
circlefavshape 7y ago
What counts as a co-morbidity? Obesity seems fairly ... well, trivial. I have high (total) cholesterol. Does that count? Constipation? Itchy spot on the back of my knee?
- Arnt 7y ago
  There's a table in the PDF, you can read it.
- andruby 7y ago
  The co-morbidities reported here are mentioned in the report (in Italian). Translated by Google: diseases N % Ischemic heart disease 117 33.0 Atrial fibrillation 87 24.5 Stroke 34 9.6 Hypertension 270 76.1 Diabetes mellitus 126 35.5 Dementia 24 6.8 COPD 47 13.2 Active cancer in the past 5 years 72 20.3 Chronic liver disease 11 3.1 Chronic renal failure 64 18.0 Hypertension and Diabetes seems very prevalent in older people. Especially in western countries like the US.
  - jeltz 7y ago
    Maybe it is just correlation between old age and hypertension, but I find it interesting how ACE2 which the coronavirus uses as its entry point into cells is also part of regulating blood pressure.
randcraw 7y ago
A very high fraction of folks past age 75 have one or more of these diseases. Before concluding that they contribute, the next question should be, how many people in that population at that age have ZERO comorbid diseases? Likely, it's very few. So these comorbidities may actually have little causal role leading to mortality. We can't know from just this data. Until we learn more, we can't conclude 1) that comorbidities were causal, or 2) WHICH comorbidity really matters.

dakrisht 7y ago

Some interesting data here. - Mean age of 79.5 sheds light on Italy’s extremely high fatality rates; in essence, it’s the (very) elderly that are dying due to complications from viral pneumonia. Which begs the next question... Why are they overwhelmingly treating patients with antibiotics in cases of viral pneumonia and not antivirals (Remdesivir)/ chloroquine? Sure, these are “experimental” therapies but decent data out of China/South Korea shows these therapies work. Perhaps they found out too late? - The younger fatalities (17) show multiple, serious co-morbidities and smoking is not listed; an assumption can be made a fair amount of these younger patients smoke. But again, an assumption. - Almost 50% of patients showed 3 or more co-morbidities - this is high and important to note. 25% of patients showed 2 co-morbidities. Roughly 75% of patients had 2 or more co-morbidities (!). - Sample size (2003) is good given their current 3,500 fatality numbers. Not a medical doctor but a few things I’m struggling to figure out: - How did so many elderly get infected? Did the disease simply spread in close quarters where many elderly live? Elderly folks aren’t necessarily out and about drinking espresso and touching surfaces yet alone having younger asymptomatic carriers cough on them. I wonder if Italy is similar to a Kirkland, Washington situation. High density of elderly folks spreading infection. It’s obvious that SARS-Cov-2 is highly, highly contagious but it’s interesting how we’re seeing these somewhat “bomb” explosions of infection: Wuhan > Daegu > Kirkland > Lombardy > NYC next. Sure, quarantine works but the rate of new infection stays rather localized and then just annihilates everyone around it. Perhaps it’s a viral load issue; viral load increases exponentially the more we have infected. Why you see doctors and nurses infected / critical and dying even with full PPE. Let’s hope the Italians figure out a way to get this curve to fall of ASAP. Hoping they have a similar effect to Wuhan’s curve and just drop down rather than flatten.

nostrebored 7y ago
> Elderly folks aren’t necessarily out and about drinking espresso and touching surfaces yet alone having younger asymptomatic carriers cough on them. From what I understand about Italian culture, they kind of are. Older Italians seem to have much stronger social lives than in the US.
- dakrisht 7y ago

gvjddbnvdrbv 7y ago

This is encouraging for healthy youngsters BUT age and health are also the criteria for receiving treatment in Italy at the moment. As the epidemic grows the categories of people that get ventilation decrease and the deaths will get younger and healthier.

xenonite 7y ago
Even if a youngster as a higher change of survival, there are serious effects reported. Fibrosis (damage of the lung tissue) lasts for much longer (over 4 weeks) than it is known in any typical flu. And what happens after 4 weeks is still totally unclear. As we don't know yet of the long term effects, please don't take that lightly!
- dakrisht 7y ago
  Source for this comment? All pneumonia’s have decreased lung function post-infection and require therapy to retain full or close to full lung function. Curious where you’re getting this info from
  - xenonite 7y ago
    Sure, thank you for asking. My source is an interview in the first German state TV station (ARD). I am sorry that I can't provide you with an English source. If you understand German, please watch https://youtu.be/IHF0IDtW6LA?t=882 https://youtu.be/IHF0IDtW6LA?t=882 from minute 14:42. As a second source, I found a written report on the TV talk here, for which you may use, e.g., deepl.com to translate it: https://www.express.de/news/promi-und-show/corona-talk-spd-politiker-wagt-bei--maischberger--drastische-prognose-zum-wochenende-36440162 https://www.express.de/news/promi-und-show/corona-talk-spd-p...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

k__ 7y ago

How many were so sick that they would have died anyway? I read that they were testing dead people and the theory was, their count was so high because they would add people to it that would have died anyway but just happen to be infected right before their death. Edit: I think this is an interesting question. Why do Italy, France and Spain have such high death ratios? Are they measuring more than needed or are the others measuring not enough?

gambiting 7y ago
Right, but you need to establish the cause of death and it's kind of important. Like for example my father was fighting cancer for 8 years before he died, but when he passed away the hospital wrote that he died of "cardiac arrest", since his heart just couldn't go anymore. So in some statistic somewhere he will exist as a person who died of heart problems, not someone who died because of cancer. That's not right either I don't think.
- bart_spoon 7y ago
  This is a problem with counting diabetes deaths as well. We have evidence to believe that people with diabetes are much more likely to get heart disease or cancer, which is what they usually die from. There's lots of debate on if mortality due to diabetes is underestimated for the same reasons.
vladvasiliu 7y ago
I can only speak for France, where I live, but the situation is possibly the same in Spain and Italy. Over here they only test people who are "very sick", in other words people who need medical attention. They are not testing people with no or "mild" symptoms. Basically this means if you don't feel like you're about to die, you're not tested and therefore you're not counted. So to answer your question, they're actually not measuring enough.
- k__ 7y ago
  In Germany they also only test people who have specific symptoms AND contact to high risk people/places.

ramblerman 7y ago

Summarizing the deaths, by age distribution is quite telling (page 4): - no deaths under 30 - Less than 1% of deaths under 50 - less than 4% of deaths under 60 - 87% of deaths above 70 This disease is incredibly dangerous for our elderly, and isolating them to prevent infection should be our top priority.

Grue3 7y ago
That's because Italy's hospitals are overcrowded and very old patients are simply not treated at all. It's a vicious circle because they're thought being less likely to survive, are denied treatment, which makes them even less likely to survive.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ramblerman 7y ago
  Triage is unfortunately applied in some hospitals, especially around Bergamo. But you would need to provide some data to make the claim that the stats are skewed this much purely because all elderly are just cast away. Given the vast majority of hospital cases are actually the elderly. Finally, proper ethical triage never looks at how long a patient is expected to live after their recovery as a condition.
  - bart_spoon 7y ago
    > Finally, proper ethical triage never looks at how long a patient is expected to live after their recovery as a condition. But it does look at chances of survival, which for this particular disease looks very closely correlated with how long a patient is expected to live after their recovery.

rezeroed 7y ago

Confirms that this is a disease of the elderly and unwell, and everyone else should be getting on as normal.

mkl 7y ago
This is about deaths, not cases. If everyone else tries to get on as normal then the virus will spread like wildfire among them and the elderly and unwell will quickly become infected.
- rezeroed 7y ago
  Isolate the elderly and unwell, let the virus spread among the rest.
  - mkl 7y ago
    How could you possibly isolate 10s of millions of people who are thoroughly mixed in with the rest of society? Many of them live with or are dependent on the younger healthier people. Even if the isolation were possible, letting the virus spread like that would overwhelm the health system and push the death rate way up.
    - rezeroed 7y ago
      The same way they're doing it now.