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Note that I never said this was "just a flu". The baseline mortality rate in Italy is about 50,000 deaths per month, and that's averaged over the year -- it's

Note that I never said this was "just a flu". The baseline mortality rate in Italy is about 50,000 deaths per month, and that's averaged over the year -- it's considerably higher from November to April. The concern should be about additional deaths, not the raw numbers of "how many people died after testing positive for Covid-19" -- which, it's worth noting, is the metric being measured here, not "deaths exclusively caused by Covid-19". We don't treat any other respiratory illness this way. If we applied the same logic to other respiratory illnesses (flu appears to be a trigger word these days, but it's the big one!) then a very large number of deaths we currently attribute to other things (cancer & heart disease to name two huge ones) would suddenly become "flu deaths". (edited: I had an extra zero on the baseline mortality rate due to a calculation error)

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
gadders 7y ago
This is the same as in the UK currently. If you have, say, terminal cancer but it is a dose of flu that finally kills you, the death is recorded as due to cancer. If you have terminal cancer but you die due to Corona, then it is listed as Corona that kills you [1] "But there’s another, potentially even more serious problem: the way that deaths are recorded. If someone dies of a respiratory infection in the UK, the specific cause of the infection is not usually recorded, unless the illness is a rare ‘notifiable disease’. So the vast majority of respiratory deaths in the UK are recorded as bronchopneumonia, pneumonia, old age or a similar designation. We don’t really test for flu, or other seasonal infections. If the patient has, say, cancer, motor neurone disease or another serious disease, this will be recorded as the cause of death, even if the final illness was a respiratory infection. This means UK certifications normally under-record deaths due to respiratory infections. Now look at what has happened since the emergence of Covid-19. The list of notifiable diseases has been updated. This list — as well as containing smallpox (which has been extinct for many years) and conditions such as anthrax, brucellosis, plague and rabies (which most UK doctors will never see in their entire careers) — has now been amended to include Covid-19. But not flu. That means every positive test for Covid-19 must be notified, in a way that it just would not be for flu or most other infections." [1] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/The-evidence-on-Covid-19-is-not-as-clear-as-we-think https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/The-evidence-on-Covid-19...
- bad_user 7y ago
  > "If you have terminal cancer but you die due to Corona, then it is listed as Corona that kills you [1]" If you die because you have Covid-2019 and your lungs get filled with liquid, then it's definitely Covid-2019 that kills you, not the cancer. And how many people have terminal cancer right now? I find this narrative particularly dangerous, because the chronic diseases that have been associated with Covid-2019 mortality, like cardiovascular disease or diabetes, are very much manageable with proper treatment. Yet the narrative is that these people are dying anyway, even if they might be having decades of productive life in them. So the narrative is not only inhumane, it's also bullshit.
  - gadders 7y ago
    I think you are missing the point. I'm not saying "Those people would have died anyway" I'm saying that you can't tell if COVID-19 is more deadly than the flu in a reliable way because mortality is being recorded differently for other infections such as the flu.
  - thu2111 7y ago
    If you die because you have Covid-2019 and your lungs get filled with liquid, then it's definitely Covid-2019 that kills you, not the cancer But the stats don't track if you died because "your lungs get filled with liquid". They only track if you die and the virus was present in a PCR test. I find this narrative particularly dangerous And yet you failed to understand it properly. It's faulty and facile reasoning like yours that is leading Twitter to delete tweets by elected national leaders; they think they're much smarter than they really are.
bad_user 7y ago
Diabetes, high blood pressure, respiratory illnesses, etc, these are illnesses that can be managed with proper treatment and the people dying right now could easily have decades left of productive life in them. There's also another confounder, which is that the restrictions themselves are helping to keep other diseases in check. Air pollution in large cities for example has significantly gone down. Seasonal flu infections have gone down as well. Any kind of comparison you're trying to make right now is apples versus oranges. Also every prediction for Covid-2019 came true and 10,000 deaths in a single month may not seem high for Italy — even if the medics and nurses crying out of exhaustion should make you think that the shit has hit the fan — but that number could easily go to 50,000 or 100,000 per month, not to mention the young that may not die, but may suffer from respiratory illness for months or years afterwards. And as I said, mortality rate isn't everything that counts, a 10% hospitalization rate cripples the medical system and is a clusterfuck for our economy anyway.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

gadders 7y ago

This is the same as in the UK currently. If you have, say, terminal cancer but it is a dose of flu that finally kills you, the death is recorded as due to cancer. If you have terminal cancer but you die due to Corona, then it is listed as Corona that kills you [1] "But there’s another, potentially even more serious problem: the way that deaths are recorded. If someone dies of a respiratory infection in the UK, the specific cause of the infection is not usually recorded, unless the illness is a rare ‘notifiable disease’. So the vast majority of respiratory deaths in the UK are recorded as bronchopneumonia, pneumonia, old age or a similar designation. We don’t really test for flu, or other seasonal infections. If the patient has, say, cancer, motor neurone disease or another serious disease, this will be recorded as the cause of death, even if the final illness was a respiratory infection. This means UK certifications normally under-record deaths due to respiratory infections. Now look at what has happened since the emergence of Covid-19. The list of notifiable diseases has been updated. This list — as well as containing smallpox (which has been extinct for many years) and conditions such as anthrax, brucellosis, plague and rabies (which most UK doctors will never see in their entire careers) — has now been amended to include Covid-19. But not flu. That means every positive test for Covid-19 must be notified, in a way that it just would not be for flu or most other infections." [1] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/The-evidence-on-Covid-19-is-not-as-clear-as-we-think https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/The-evidence-on-Covid-19...

bad_user 7y ago
> "If you have terminal cancer but you die due to Corona, then it is listed as Corona that kills you [1]" If you die because you have Covid-2019 and your lungs get filled with liquid, then it's definitely Covid-2019 that kills you, not the cancer. And how many people have terminal cancer right now? I find this narrative particularly dangerous, because the chronic diseases that have been associated with Covid-2019 mortality, like cardiovascular disease or diabetes, are very much manageable with proper treatment. Yet the narrative is that these people are dying anyway, even if they might be having decades of productive life in them. So the narrative is not only inhumane, it's also bullshit.
- gadders 7y ago
  I think you are missing the point. I'm not saying "Those people would have died anyway" I'm saying that you can't tell if COVID-19 is more deadly than the flu in a reliable way because mortality is being recorded differently for other infections such as the flu.
- thu2111 7y ago
  If you die because you have Covid-2019 and your lungs get filled with liquid, then it's definitely Covid-2019 that kills you, not the cancer But the stats don't track if you died because "your lungs get filled with liquid". They only track if you die and the virus was present in a PCR test. I find this narrative particularly dangerous And yet you failed to understand it properly. It's faulty and facile reasoning like yours that is leading Twitter to delete tweets by elected national leaders; they think they're much smarter than they really are.

bad_user 7y ago

Diabetes, high blood pressure, respiratory illnesses, etc, these are illnesses that can be managed with proper treatment and the people dying right now could easily have decades left of productive life in them. There's also another confounder, which is that the restrictions themselves are helping to keep other diseases in check. Air pollution in large cities for example has significantly gone down. Seasonal flu infections have gone down as well. Any kind of comparison you're trying to make right now is apples versus oranges. Also every prediction for Covid-2019 came true and 10,000 deaths in a single month may not seem high for Italy — even if the medics and nurses crying out of exhaustion should make you think that the shit has hit the fan — but that number could easily go to 50,000 or 100,000 per month, not to mention the young that may not die, but may suffer from respiratory illness for months or years afterwards. And as I said, mortality rate isn't everything that counts, a 10% hospitalization rate cripples the medical system and is a clusterfuck for our economy anyway.