7 ms·
The coronavirus pandemic isn’t ending – it’s surging
- _bxg1 6y agoI'd be curious to know how and whether the death rate has changed over time. We've learned a whole lot since the "first wave", including the fact that it doesn't seem to really be a respiratory illness at all, but some kind of autoimmune/blood illness. Have the resulting changes to treatment had a measurable impact on survivability yet?
- sjg007 6y agoCovid-19 is a respiratory illness. It has other systemic effects though.
- mr_toad 6y agoIt can be a respiratory illness and an immune response. It’s not without precedent; influenza can cause a hyperactive immune response that damages the lungs. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4711683/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4711683/
- sjg007 6y agoCytokines are a response to the illness.
- rurban 6y agoNot even that, the virus itself is no illness. Cykotine causes the main illness, the dead cells in the lungs and elsewhere, which might cause bacterial infections. Of which you eventually die. The virus is just a dirty little unknown virus causing the immunosystem to overreact. In some cases. In most cases not.
- sjg007 6y agoThe virus kills cells.
- rurban 6y agoI've read only about 90% of all COVID-19 papers and I might have missed that one, which says that the virus itself kills cells, but the overwhelming data says the cytokinestorm kills infected cells. The virus is just an annoyance causing the immune system to run amok.
- jsf01 6y agoIt’s difficult to calculate an exact death rate. For one, there’s limited testing. Without being able to test the entire population, a whole range of biases can skew the rate dramatically. The large number of asymptomatic cases that never go reported may be an indication that the reported mortality rate is too high. On the other hand, it’s likely many deaths due to COVID-19 have gone unreported. See, for example, the spike in overall deaths in Lombardy in Q1 2020 compared to prior years and how it exceeded the official COVID-19 death tally for that region by something like 4x. Then there’s the question of what deaths to attribute to the disease. If a drug overdose patient died because they couldn’t get access to a ventilator, would you include that in your death rate? You couldn’t if you were tracking the mortality rate of the disease to the people it infected, yet there are significant such cases of deaths that would not have occurred had this pandemic never begun. Those numbers won’t be captured in a naive calculation either. That being said, I’ve found a good summary of some statistics on this page, which you may find helpful. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-rate/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-...
- _bxg1 6y agoI'm aware of all the complications with getting a precise number, I'm more just wondering if there's been a rough - or even anecdotal - improvement in outcomes for people who do end up in the hospital
- jsf01 6y agoYes. From that linked website, among cases that had an outcome (recovered/died), deaths in April were around 20%. Today, around 10%.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> We've learned a whole lot since the "first wave", We're still in the first wave.
- ashtonkem 6y agoIt’s interesting to see the slowly growing disconnect between what public officials are saying and how individual citizens are feeling. I live in Los Angeles. Officially, we are open for business. Personally our response was “haha, fuck off”. My office is still closed with no timetable to re-open, and a significant number of my colleagues and personal friends are utterly bewildered at the idea of returning to normal operations. The general consensus among my group was “I’m not quite sure what it’ll take to make me comfortable returning to bars, but it’s not this”
- Trasmatta 6y agoI imagine this is very regional. People here in Utah seem to have largely gone back to life as normal. Anecdotally, I've seen mask usage go way down in the last couple weeks. Meanwhile, our cases have started sharply increasing.
- ashtonkem 6y agoIt might even be more specific than regional, I’m sure there are different clusters of people with different views. There is one colleague of mine, who I’m sure has a whole social circle that agrees with him, that has long maintained that America should take the Sweden model. I’m sure he does not feel the public/personal gap that I do.
- sneeze-slayer 6y agoI've heard a lot of conservative voices calling for this too. The only problem is that the US is far from Sweden--no universal health care, no guaranteed sick leave, and no real safety net for workers. It would seem that if the US wanted to take the "hands-off" model, it would need to first implement these things.
- Trasmatta 6y agoA lot of places in the US are basically implementing the Sweden model already, but accidentally rather than intentionally. Which I think is a big mistake.
- xhkkffbf 6y agoThe case count, though, doesn't tell us much because the cases come from testing. More testing mean more positives. The most important thing is whether the ICUs are being overwhelmed .
- Buttons840 6y agoHow do you know the test count increased? In Utah the rate of new cases has increased but the testing rate has slightly decreased.
- xhkkffbf 6y agohttps://twitter.com/AlexBerenson/status/1271135876379299848 https://twitter.com/AlexBerenson/status/1271135876379299848
- nonamenoslogan 6y agoWell if it was on Twitter, it has to be true.
- xhkkffbf 6y agoNo. But if you bother to read deeper, you'll find that he's done an excellent job of reporting on the topic. He's a former NYT reporter with great skills in writing succinctly about a difficult topic. If you invest the money in his book -- it was #2 on Amazon last week -- you'll find all of the deeper bibliographic citations that I know you'll spend the weekend double checking.
- Buttons840 6y agoI see nothing in that Twitter thread to support the idea that increased case counts are due to increased testing. Again, my state has both reduced testing and increased counts.
- xhkkffbf 6y ago
- thehappypm 6y agoIf you read the article, you’ll see that basically the virus is now surging outside of the developed world and into South Asia and South America. The West is still stuck with it, some areas definitely surging, but it’s hardly surging on the whole.
- DeonPenny 6y agoI feel like this is a result of lying in government. People made a contract to bend the curve and quickly it turned into tyranny. That contract then turned into eliminating the disease all together. Also we know more now about who getting sick and whose dying so of course the same decisions wouldn't be made.
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- KCUOJJQJ 6y agoI think the public must get the message that there was no terror virus. This will let the idea terror virus disappear. People who are having the idea will have to realize that have been taken in by charlatans. This won't feel nice.