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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
by 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 agoRight. 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 agoWhat 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 agoThere's a table in the PDF, you can read it.
- andruby 7y agoThe 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 agoMaybe 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 agoA 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.
- ithkuil 7y agothere is also the possibility that the comorbidities are indeed causal but we can't do anything about it since most elderly people would have them anyway, and hence besides being an interesting fact it's effectively indistinguishable from a pure statistical age correlation.
- raxxorrax 7y agoMost people might have some conditions that just haven't been diagnosed yet. Some people are obese, diabetic smokers with high blood pressure that still have a more robust cardiovascular system to someone living perfectly healthy. Certainly not the rule, but not impossible. My physics and sports teacher dropped dead with 30-something from an aneurysm. We know the probable risk factors, but you could probably just say they were in poor general health.
- Arnt 7y agoThe risk factors they count are named in the PDF. They're not "all diseases known to man", they're "cancer in the past five years" etc. Which might not be an optimal selection of things to count. It's not obvious that a small cancer three years ago ought to be counted and a bigger one six years ago not? But it's what they counted.
- pezo1919 7y ago"My physics and sports teacher dropped dead with 30-something from an aneurysm" Just for clarification: did he have covid19?
- raxxorrax 7y agoNo, that happened a decade ago.