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I'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'
by _bxg1 6y ago
I'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.