12 ms·

This might be a rant, but it would be awesome if these new findings lead to laws that required doctors to give accurate cause of death for people that also test

This might be a rant, but it would be awesome if these new findings lead to laws that required doctors to give accurate cause of death for people that also test positive for COVID. At least in Italy, doctors were pressured to put "COVID" as cause of death of people that were given 10 days to live because of cancer and other diseases, but also tested positive. Newspapers went as far as saying that a policeman that was shot by a colleague by accident and had been on a coma for 3 months was the country's youngest COVID victim, because allegedly he tested positive (of course, they failed to mention he had been shot and in a coma, other journalists exposed that lie). From what I read and understood, since in the US hospitals get reimbursed by number of patients doctors came out saying that they were pressured to put "COVID" as cause of death even without testing, just because it was presumed to be COVID because the symptoms matched. Unfortunately, politicians want power and businesses want to make money—and other people have their own agenda. This pandemic and been spun out of proportion by people that gain from it, at the expense of workers and most importantly small businesses, and at the advantage of China (and perhaps Amazon)—who are the only ones who are actually making money. I wish the world was less corrupt—or at least people that are given positions of power in good faith.

pjc50 6y ago
Citation for the shot police officer's name? People seem to have chosen bad faith attack media and elected bad faith leaders. That's why the US, UK, and Brazil are doing particularly badly.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- snovv_crash 6y ago
  > That's why the US, UK, and Brazil are doing particularly badly. And Russia.
  - kmlx 6y ago
    And Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Sweden, Turkey, Iran, etc etc Does anyone know of any large country that managed to: - not lockdown - keep the disease under control ?
    - ekianjo 6y ago
      Japan maybe but it's unclear why at this stage.
      - bleuedejapan 6y ago
        One important aspect is that in Japan, there were no huge clusters in old folks homes. There are many others, but this is one of the most important.
      - newsbinator 6y ago
        Naively, could a factor be that in Japan wearing masks all the time was already normal practice, long before this pandemic?
        asiachick 6y ago
        No, people did not wear masks "all the time" nor did even "most" people wear masks. Go to any image search. Find images before February. (Search Hardly a mask in sight. They are common enough no one finds them strange but they weren't remotely the norm either. https://www.google.com/search?q=tokyo+crowded+before:2019-12-31&source=lnms&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=tokyo+crowded+before:2019-12... https://www.google.com/search?q=tokyo+station+crowded+before:2019-12-31&source=lnms&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=tokyo+station+crowded+before...
        newsbinator 6y ago
        By "all the time", I mean take any given adult in Tokyo and there's a good chance they have experience wearing a mask for a couple days every year. In Japan it's not only the immunocompromised or healthcare workers who have ever donned a mask: it's nearly everybody. You'd be hard-pressed to ride the metro and not see a handful of mask-wearers on any given Tuesday in recent years. Whereas in countries like the United States you'd rarely see masks outside of a serious medical setting, and you wouldn't be able to buy masks for a dollar at literally every corner shop within 100 meters of your home.
  - yariik 6y ago
    How did you arrive to this conclusion? A significant number of ill people is only in Moscow and a couple of other cities, and they are doing good if you compare them to other cities in the world with the same population.
    - danesparza 6y ago
      This line of thought sounds exactly how the US got into such bad shape with this virus. "Oh, it's just in the cities" Until it's not.
      - throwaway894345 6y ago
        I haven’t kept in touch recently, but for a long time NY alone was responsible for 50% of the total cases and deaths, presumably overwhelmingly driven by the NYC metro. If you ignore that outlier, is the US in dramatically worse shape than other countries? How bad is the spread in rural America?
        morelisp 6y ago
        Since at least a few weeks ago when it hit meat processing plants in the plains, extremely bad.
        throwaway894345 6y ago
        I’m from a town that was profiled by CNN and others for having an outbreak in a meat plant. Things seem quite a lot better there than in the larger city where I now live. The impact outside of the meat plant seems minimal. Not sure how it is elsewhere, but my feeling is that the meat packing plant issue overblown.
        dragonwriter 6y ago
        > The impact outside of the meat plant seems minimal. COVID-19 has a significant incubation period and a large number of infections are asymptomatic and even with moderate symptoms people often won't qualify for the limited testing being done. The upshot being that unless there is a nexus with another highly-tested subcommunity in the same community, an outbreak that occurs rapidly and is detected in one subcommunity (in which impacts might be visible sooner through testing) that is disproportionately tested will take several weeks before it has significant visible impacts in the broader community. And by the time it does, it will be impossible to contain. But those broader impacts are pretty much inevitable unless the those exposed to the outbreak were strictly quarantined from the broader community.
- black_puppydog 6y ago
  Yeah, seems like forming a national (or at least regional) consensus around basic facts like "this is dangerous and so we should really self-enforce some sort of social distancing" seems to be the main discriminating factor. Who'd have thought that being distracted with pointless discussions about what the weather was and where a shooting did or did not happen could be detrimental to your nation's (mental) health? <shrug>
- fwn 6y ago
  > People seem to have chosen bad faith attack media and elected bad faith leaders. That's why the US, UK, and Brazil are doing particularly badly. This is something we tend to assume somewhat intuitively, but I'd love to see some actual research on it. The relationship between weakened trust in media and a societies pandemic response performance is not a trivial research question. I wouldn't even necessarily trust the premise that overall trust declined. Could as well be perception or based on publisher selection. ... and that didn't jet include seriously operationalizing or discussing the nebulous "bad faith leaders" term or their relationship to pandemic response performance.
- nkkollaw 6y ago
  Sure, here it is: https://www.ilrestodelcarlino.it/bologna/cronaca/muore-di-covid-a-30-anni-%C3%A8-la-vittima-pi%C3%B9-giovane-1.5146701 https://www.ilrestodelcarlino.it/bologna/cronaca/muore-di-co... (this is the first result on Google, but it was all over the news). Title of the article: "Muore di Covid a 30 anni: è la vittima più giovane", which translates into "30-year-old dies of Covid, he's the youngest victim yet". Article starts with: "Dying younger than 30 for Coronavirus: a cruel fate, that of Michele Grauso, 29-year-old financier (he would have turned thirty in August)." Second paragraph, finally mentions the small detail that he had also been shot in the head and had been in a coma for 2 years: "He was hospitalized in a vegetative state in a private facility here in the city. A coma from which he had never come out since a partner in 2017 shot him in the head by mistake..." On TV, most news channels didn't even mention the coma. The family actually complained and it came out. Not sure if news want to be sensationalistic for clicks, or because they directly get paid to keep the level of panic high by whoever makes money from the emergency (which is many, many people in Italy). Probably both.
  - atentaten 6y ago
    There is no doubt fear mongering about this topic exists in the media. This shouldn't be surprising. The death coding is surprising, at least to me. This idea of coding deaths in this way is not limited to Italy, but is happening in many countries including the U.S. Dr. Deborah Brix replied to a reporter asking questions about death coding methods by saying that the U.S. was using liberal methods. In this article Professor Walter Riaccardi (scientific adviser to Italy’s minister of health), complains about such coding methods: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/have-many-coronavirus-patients-died-italy/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...
  - pjc50 6y ago
    So he'd been alive for two years in a coma? And presumably "stable"? And then contracts coronavirus and dies? It does sound like he'd have still been alive if he'd not contracted the virus.
    - nkkollaw 6y ago
DanBC 6y ago
> This might be a rant, but it would be awesome if these new findings lead to laws that required doctors to give accurate cause of death for people that also test positive for COVID. In England that law already exists. It's called the Coroners and Justice Act. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2009/25/contents http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2009/25/contents You want to read about the reforms which arose out of the Shipman and Mid Staffs scandals (the Shipman Inquiry and the Francis Inquiry). You can read about those here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/changes-to-the-death-certification-process/an-overview-of-the-death-certification-reforms https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/changes-to-the-de...
- kmlx 6y ago
  Yes, in England there is no such thing as dying from old age. But this is still considered an official reason in Italy for example.
- iso947 6y ago
  There are three level of excess deaths in E+W Those that are defiantly covid Those that mention covid on the certificate Those in excess of level of normal deaths over last 5 years That puts covid deaths at between 40k and 70k. With an IFR across the country of between 1 and 2% based on the latest antibody tests. That’s disastrous and we can only hope that either the most vulnerable have been disproportionately exposed or the antibody tests are massively overreading false negatives.
  - jansan 6y ago
    Doesn't the third level also include those who died from the side effects caused by the lockdown?
    - iso947 6y ago
      Yes, hence the large gap in death estimation
- nkkollaw 6y ago

pjc50 6y ago

Citation for the shot police officer's name? People seem to have chosen bad faith attack media and elected bad faith leaders. That's why the US, UK, and Brazil are doing particularly badly.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
snovv_crash 6y ago
> That's why the US, UK, and Brazil are doing particularly badly. And Russia.
- kmlx 6y ago
  And Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Sweden, Turkey, Iran, etc etc Does anyone know of any large country that managed to: - not lockdown - keep the disease under control ?
  - ekianjo 6y ago
    Japan maybe but it's unclear why at this stage.
    - bleuedejapan 6y ago
      One important aspect is that in Japan, there were no huge clusters in old folks homes. There are many others, but this is one of the most important.
    - newsbinator 6y ago
      Naively, could a factor be that in Japan wearing masks all the time was already normal practice, long before this pandemic?
      - asiachick 6y ago
        No, people did not wear masks "all the time" nor did even "most" people wear masks. Go to any image search. Find images before February. (Search Hardly a mask in sight. They are common enough no one finds them strange but they weren't remotely the norm either. https://www.google.com/search?q=tokyo+crowded+before:2019-12-31&source=lnms&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=tokyo+crowded+before:2019-12... https://www.google.com/search?q=tokyo+station+crowded+before:2019-12-31&source=lnms&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=tokyo+station+crowded+before...
        newsbinator 6y ago
        By "all the time", I mean take any given adult in Tokyo and there's a good chance they have experience wearing a mask for a couple days every year. In Japan it's not only the immunocompromised or healthcare workers who have ever donned a mask: it's nearly everybody. You'd be hard-pressed to ride the metro and not see a handful of mask-wearers on any given Tuesday in recent years. Whereas in countries like the United States you'd rarely see masks outside of a serious medical setting, and you wouldn't be able to buy masks for a dollar at literally every corner shop within 100 meters of your home.
- yariik 6y ago
  How did you arrive to this conclusion? A significant number of ill people is only in Moscow and a couple of other cities, and they are doing good if you compare them to other cities in the world with the same population.
  - danesparza 6y ago
    This line of thought sounds exactly how the US got into such bad shape with this virus. "Oh, it's just in the cities" Until it's not.
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      I haven’t kept in touch recently, but for a long time NY alone was responsible for 50% of the total cases and deaths, presumably overwhelmingly driven by the NYC metro. If you ignore that outlier, is the US in dramatically worse shape than other countries? How bad is the spread in rural America?
      - morelisp 6y ago
        Since at least a few weeks ago when it hit meat processing plants in the plains, extremely bad.
        throwaway894345 6y ago
        I’m from a town that was profiled by CNN and others for having an outbreak in a meat plant. Things seem quite a lot better there than in the larger city where I now live. The impact outside of the meat plant seems minimal. Not sure how it is elsewhere, but my feeling is that the meat packing plant issue overblown.
        dragonwriter 6y ago
        > The impact outside of the meat plant seems minimal. COVID-19 has a significant incubation period and a large number of infections are asymptomatic and even with moderate symptoms people often won't qualify for the limited testing being done. The upshot being that unless there is a nexus with another highly-tested subcommunity in the same community, an outbreak that occurs rapidly and is detected in one subcommunity (in which impacts might be visible sooner through testing) that is disproportionately tested will take several weeks before it has significant visible impacts in the broader community. And by the time it does, it will be impossible to contain. But those broader impacts are pretty much inevitable unless the those exposed to the outbreak were strictly quarantined from the broader community.
black_puppydog 6y ago
Yeah, seems like forming a national (or at least regional) consensus around basic facts like "this is dangerous and so we should really self-enforce some sort of social distancing" seems to be the main discriminating factor. Who'd have thought that being distracted with pointless discussions about what the weather was and where a shooting did or did not happen could be detrimental to your nation's (mental) health? <shrug>
fwn 6y ago
> People seem to have chosen bad faith attack media and elected bad faith leaders. That's why the US, UK, and Brazil are doing particularly badly. This is something we tend to assume somewhat intuitively, but I'd love to see some actual research on it. The relationship between weakened trust in media and a societies pandemic response performance is not a trivial research question. I wouldn't even necessarily trust the premise that overall trust declined. Could as well be perception or based on publisher selection. ... and that didn't jet include seriously operationalizing or discussing the nebulous "bad faith leaders" term or their relationship to pandemic response performance.
nkkollaw 6y ago
Sure, here it is: https://www.ilrestodelcarlino.it/bologna/cronaca/muore-di-covid-a-30-anni-%C3%A8-la-vittima-pi%C3%B9-giovane-1.5146701 https://www.ilrestodelcarlino.it/bologna/cronaca/muore-di-co... (this is the first result on Google, but it was all over the news). Title of the article: "Muore di Covid a 30 anni: è la vittima più giovane", which translates into "30-year-old dies of Covid, he's the youngest victim yet". Article starts with: "Dying younger than 30 for Coronavirus: a cruel fate, that of Michele Grauso, 29-year-old financier (he would have turned thirty in August)." Second paragraph, finally mentions the small detail that he had also been shot in the head and had been in a coma for 2 years: "He was hospitalized in a vegetative state in a private facility here in the city. A coma from which he had never come out since a partner in 2017 shot him in the head by mistake..." On TV, most news channels didn't even mention the coma. The family actually complained and it came out. Not sure if news want to be sensationalistic for clicks, or because they directly get paid to keep the level of panic high by whoever makes money from the emergency (which is many, many people in Italy). Probably both.
- atentaten 6y ago
  There is no doubt fear mongering about this topic exists in the media. This shouldn't be surprising. The death coding is surprising, at least to me. This idea of coding deaths in this way is not limited to Italy, but is happening in many countries including the U.S. Dr. Deborah Brix replied to a reporter asking questions about death coding methods by saying that the U.S. was using liberal methods. In this article Professor Walter Riaccardi (scientific adviser to Italy’s minister of health), complains about such coding methods: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/have-many-coronavirus-patients-died-italy/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...
- pjc50 6y ago
  So he'd been alive for two years in a coma? And presumably "stable"? And then contracts coronavirus and dies? It does sound like he'd have still been alive if he'd not contracted the virus.
  - nkkollaw 6y ago

DanBC 6y ago

> This might be a rant, but it would be awesome if these new findings lead to laws that required doctors to give accurate cause of death for people that also test positive for COVID. In England that law already exists. It's called the Coroners and Justice Act. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2009/25/contents http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2009/25/contents You want to read about the reforms which arose out of the Shipman and Mid Staffs scandals (the Shipman Inquiry and the Francis Inquiry). You can read about those here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/changes-to-the-death-certification-process/an-overview-of-the-death-certification-reforms https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/changes-to-the-de...

kmlx 6y ago
Yes, in England there is no such thing as dying from old age. But this is still considered an official reason in Italy for example.
iso947 6y ago
There are three level of excess deaths in E+W Those that are defiantly covid Those that mention covid on the certificate Those in excess of level of normal deaths over last 5 years That puts covid deaths at between 40k and 70k. With an IFR across the country of between 1 and 2% based on the latest antibody tests. That’s disastrous and we can only hope that either the most vulnerable have been disproportionately exposed or the antibody tests are massively overreading false negatives.
- jansan 6y ago
  Doesn't the third level also include those who died from the side effects caused by the lockdown?
  - iso947 6y ago
    Yes, hence the large gap in death estimation
nkkollaw 6y ago