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As nearly all deaths are in the over-65 age bracket, reducing them significantly (to account for of/with confusion) just means it isn't especially dangerous to

As nearly all deaths are in the over-65 age bracket, reducing them significantly (to account for of/with confusion) just means it isn't especially dangerous to anyone regardless of age, relative to other risks. It thus doesn't undercut my point - that students may well be rather upset about this given that there are many risks involved for lecturers in just driving to the lecture theatre in the first place, for instance. It's all about relative risks. Hence the pertinence of the question: do Cambridge academics plan to also stop going into labs and doing research? Or just (in effect) stop teaching.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> As nearly all deaths are in the over-65 age bracket They aren't. ~80% isn't “nearly all”. > reducing them significantly (to account for of/with confusion) just means it isn't especially dangerous to anyone regardless of age No, it doesn't. If the deaths in that group were 50% overcounted due to if/with (ignoring that all the serious analysis suggest official death counts are under, not over, counts), and 25% in all other groups, it'd still be dangerous (with 55% of the death count) and much less focussed on the over-65 category (8:3 over/under-65 instead of 4:1)
- thu2111 6y ago
  The numbers I've seen are different: more like 90% over and more importantly, something like 80%-90% of cases with confounding co-morbidities (the original Italian figure was something like 12% of people with no co-morbidities). I mean I think you need to review the data because your argument is just strange. Look at the EuroMOMO data for instance: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ In the 16-64 age group excess death per week went up by a total of about 1000 more excess deaths for multiple European countries aggregated than e.g. the flu season of 2017 or 2018. The total population in these graphs is over 100 million so this is practically meaningless, it's not a sign of any kind of danger. The numbers don't start getting (relatively) big until the 65+ age group, and even then, they're still not big relative to the actual population sizes in question. Only prior flu seasons. That's excess death. W.R.T. deaths coded as COVID there's also the somewhat newer problem of nonsensical COVID death reports, caused by repeatedly relaxed standards for reporting. At first you needed to have clearly died of the disease. Then anyone who tested positive and died was reported as a COVID death, leading to stories of "COVID deaths" of people with terminal leukemia, alcohol poisoning, etc. That's the of/with issue we're discussing. Then the standards were relaxed again to allow mere suspicion of COVID to be reported as a COVID death. This has been happening around the world, e.g. in France: https://covidinfos.net/covid19/deces-dus-au-covid-19-le-nombre-officiel-de-morts-en-france-est-il-surestime/502/ https://covidinfos.net/covid19/deces-dus-au-covid-19-le-nomb... "a positive case in a residence immediately transforms all of the people in the residence into "confirmed cases", which will therefore be counted in COVID-19 statistics .... if a resident (or an employee) coughs, all the occupants of the residence become “possible cases”, and are counted in COVID-19 statistics." In the USA it's even worse - hospitals started being paid more money if deaths were coded that way; at a time when they badly need the money. So the numbers here are really quite meaningless but what we can say, is that neither Cambridge staff nor students are in any great danger from this, unless they are really quite old but by then of course, many different diseases and problems are a danger to them and simply tripping on the steps of the lecture hall could also create a dangerous situation. So they would need to be quite careful even in normal times.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> As nearly all deaths are in the over-65 age bracket They aren't. ~80% isn't “nearly all”. > reducing them significantly (to account for of/with confusion) just means it isn't especially dangerous to anyone regardless of age No, it doesn't. If the deaths in that group were 50% overcounted due to if/with (ignoring that all the serious analysis suggest official death counts are under, not over, counts), and 25% in all other groups, it'd still be dangerous (with 55% of the death count) and much less focussed on the over-65 category (8:3 over/under-65 instead of 4:1)

thu2111 6y ago
The numbers I've seen are different: more like 90% over and more importantly, something like 80%-90% of cases with confounding co-morbidities (the original Italian figure was something like 12% of people with no co-morbidities). I mean I think you need to review the data because your argument is just strange. Look at the EuroMOMO data for instance: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ In the 16-64 age group excess death per week went up by a total of about 1000 more excess deaths for multiple European countries aggregated than e.g. the flu season of 2017 or 2018. The total population in these graphs is over 100 million so this is practically meaningless, it's not a sign of any kind of danger. The numbers don't start getting (relatively) big until the 65+ age group, and even then, they're still not big relative to the actual population sizes in question. Only prior flu seasons. That's excess death. W.R.T. deaths coded as COVID there's also the somewhat newer problem of nonsensical COVID death reports, caused by repeatedly relaxed standards for reporting. At first you needed to have clearly died of the disease. Then anyone who tested positive and died was reported as a COVID death, leading to stories of "COVID deaths" of people with terminal leukemia, alcohol poisoning, etc. That's the of/with issue we're discussing. Then the standards were relaxed again to allow mere suspicion of COVID to be reported as a COVID death. This has been happening around the world, e.g. in France: https://covidinfos.net/covid19/deces-dus-au-covid-19-le-nombre-officiel-de-morts-en-france-est-il-surestime/502/ https://covidinfos.net/covid19/deces-dus-au-covid-19-le-nomb... "a positive case in a residence immediately transforms all of the people in the residence into "confirmed cases", which will therefore be counted in COVID-19 statistics .... if a resident (or an employee) coughs, all the occupants of the residence become “possible cases”, and are counted in COVID-19 statistics." In the USA it's even worse - hospitals started being paid more money if deaths were coded that way; at a time when they badly need the money. So the numbers here are really quite meaningless but what we can say, is that neither Cambridge staff nor students are in any great danger from this, unless they are really quite old but by then of course, many different diseases and problems are a danger to them and simply tripping on the steps of the lecture hall could also create a dangerous situation. So they would need to be quite careful even in normal times.