12 ms·

I became numb to news like this because it doesn't seem to have any reflection in the reality around me. The numbers are supposed to be huge yet hospitals are n

I became numb to news like this because it doesn't seem to have any reflection in the reality around me. The numbers are supposed to be huge yet hospitals are nearly empty and no one I asked knows anyone who was infected. The 80x number looks like science fiction to me.

crooked-v 6y ago
Well, that obviously depends on where 'around you' is. Compare to New York City, where there have been an estimated 17,000 deaths (and even that's probably undercounted, going by some studies of excess deaths compared to previous years), and at the peak there were hundreds of unclaimed bodies per week being buried in mass graves.
- adamhearn 6y ago
  This is completely anecdotal, but my good friend’s brother is an ER doctor. He said the hospital required them to label the cause of death for all patients in the hospital as covid if there was as much as one symptom. I don’t want to downplay the sadness of the deaths, but I think it is a bit foolish for us to base our number of deaths of off untested patients...
  - azinman2 6y ago
    Except you can see the excess total deaths compared to previous years and how well it correlates and is otherwise unexplained [1]. A lot of the labeling occurred because people couldn’t get tested yet presented symptoms that indicated covid. In that situation, you can’t say 100% without a test, yet it’s the reasonable conclusion in a pandemic. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
    - verylittlemeat 6y ago
      Something worth keeping in mind is how many fewer people died of other causes compared to previous years [1]. Yes, the data will show an excess number of people died versus previous years but I believe the parent comment is saying we should pay close attention to what the cause of death really means in terms of age and comorbidity. [1] https://i.imgur.com/HfaMhcK.jpg https://i.imgur.com/HfaMhcK.jpg
      - SifJar 6y ago
        One further thing to bear in mind here is that some causes of death can be expected to be decreased on account of lockdowns e.g. accidents - less people out and about, less people driving etc. will naturally lead to less accidents. Of course on the flip side, more people stuck at home & using the time to do renovation work etc. could lead to an increase in e.g. power tool related accidents. Other causes of death such as flu can likely also be assumed to be decreased as a side-effect of lockdown
        leereeves 6y ago
        Contrariwise, people are avoiding treatment for other illnesses for fear of catching COVID in a hospital. Many people are depressed or even suicidal. And people are less active, which aggravates other health problems. All of these factors could increase the number of deaths.
        kolinko 6y ago
        If it was significant in comparison, we would not see a sharp drop in deaths after the lockdowns. Do people get depressed and die because of a lovkdown? Sure, I got depressed as well. But the numbers show that this issue is far less than the number of people that would die otherwise.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        addicted 6y ago
        3 months of lower activity is not killing people in those 3 months. Any effects will be felt on a much longer timeframe. Most office workers have very sedentary lives anyways, that didn’t become significantly more sedentary when they replaced their drive with a walk to another room and working in an office with working in that room. Throw in the fact that they are likely cooking more because restaurants and all were shut and not just having lunch delivered to their office, they may even be getting more activity in.
    - zaroth 6y ago
      Curious if we know specifically what caused the tens of thousands of excess deaths that showed up around January 2018? Was that a particularly bad flu season?
  - pjc50 6y ago
    The most reliable number is "excess deaths", since that's hard to fake even if it's not specific.
  - unlikelymordant 6y ago
    You can just look at the all cause excess deaths and see that the number of people that have died so far this year is much higher than previous years in New York. So whether you agree that person A died from covid or not, there were many more deaths due to something.
    - jakeogh 6y ago
      What is the effect of fear? Cortisol spikes and avoiding going to the doctor for what would normally be a good reason need to be researched.
      - majewsky 6y ago
        That is something worth researching, but even then, it's still justifiable to count a death by fear as a death by pandemic, given that it wouldn't have happened without the pandemic.
        fastball 6y ago
        You can have a pandemic without fear though.
        vertex-four 6y ago
        Really? Has there ever been one? Or is the fear a natural human response to an invisible, omnipresent killer?
        fastball 6y ago
        Well, I guess I should say you can have a pandemic without a fear-mongering news media that significantly exacerbates it. I personally am not "fearful" of COVID-19, as are many (most) people I know, so it is clearly possible for the general human.
        vertex-four 6y ago
  - Isinlor 6y ago
    Based on excess deaths - the difference between how many deaths from all causes would you exec and how many were reported - USA is very likely under counting deaths. Also all case mortality coincide very well with reports of COVID-19 cases. USA is very likely to significantly under count deaths from COVID-19. See: Preliminary Estimate of Excess Mortality During the COVID-19 Outbreak — New York City, March 11–May 2, 2020 https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6919e5.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6919e5.htm
  - ageitgey 6y ago
    How you label the deaths is not that big of a deal in the larger scale. If you want to know the true toll of the epidemic, just look at this year's deaths vs. an average of previous years. It's simple and transparent. Here's that data for England: https://imgur.com/sxoolBX https://imgur.com/sxoolBX I get why everyone is questioning everything, but there isn't some big conspiracy here. Lots of people died of COVID. Most of them were 80+. You probably don't know any of them if you don't hang out with 80-90 year olds.
    - ddxxdd 6y ago
      But then we get to the question of whether those deaths were caused by COVID or other causes. We know that traffic fatalities in some areas have risen drastically due to the lockdowns: https://abc7.com/traffic-fatalities-california-highway-patrol-speeding-covid-19/6198603/ https://abc7.com/traffic-fatalities-california-highway-patro... We also know that doctor visits have gone down due to the coronavirus, leading to medical staff being laid off: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/02/826232423/covid-19-hits-some-health-care-workers-with-pay-cuts-and-layoffs https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/02/8262324... We also know that hospitals are financially incentivized to diagnose a patient as COVID positive: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/04/24/fact-check-medicare-hospitals-paid-more-covid-19-patients-coronavirus/3000638001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/04/24/fac... And there are German serological studies that suggest a COVID death rate of 0.39%, in contrast with the NYC study that claims a death rate of 1% Taking this altogether, and we have plenty of wiggle room to suggest that even the excess deaths don't necessarily imply that COVID is extremely deadly.
      - ageitgey 6y ago
        You are conflating a lot of different things. Traffic fatalities were actually down overall (total numbers), but up per mile driven. In other words, people were driving much less and dying in lower total numbers, but the people who were driving were driving faster and thus a bit more likely to die. That article is poorly written to generate headlines and clicks. Arguing over a specific IFR is also kind of pointless because the disease is so age and condition dependent. Whether the true overall IFR in a population is 1% or 0.4% doesn't really matter - it's a bad representation of the overall situation. COVID is a disease that kills a very large percentage of 80+ but is quite low risk for younger people. A single number doesn't capture or represent that. Demographic differences between 2 cities could easily cause a large skew in actual IFR. Hospitals are (possibly) financially incentivized to diagnose COVID in the US. But this is a world-wide disease and no other country has the insane US healthcare system where that would matter. > Taking this altogether, and we have plenty of wiggle room to suggest that even the excess deaths don't necessarily imply that COVID is extremely deadly. That's not correct. It's absolutely clear from the numbers across many countries that COVID is extremely deadly if you are 80+ and not deadly at all if you are 15. Make of that what you will. Arguing over IFRs and hospital reimbursement is missing the point. It's simultaneously true that COVID is very deadly for some groups but may not be deadly at all for you and your friends. There's a good argument to be made over how much of the excess death is due to secondary effects (untreated heart attacks, delayed cancer treatments, etc). But there's no way to arrange the numbers such that COVID doesn't obviously kill a lot of old people. Just look at the death rates in care homes / retirement homes. It was like a plague ravaging them.
  - globular-toast 6y ago
    Similarly, several people I know have self-diagnosed themselves with COVID-19 due to just one symptom. In some cases the symptoms have disappeared the next day. In many cases the people are the "usual suspects" who seem to get ill several times a year anyway. I'm not aware of a single person who has definitely had COVID-19.
  - deleted 6y ago
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  - mcv 6y ago
    I also read that in Florida, the number of COVID-19 deaths is fairly low. Instead, the death rate from regular pneumonia is sky-rocketing.
  - chimprich 6y ago
    > my good friend’s brother is an ER doctor I've seen a number of rumours from brothers of friends or friends of brothers, but no actual doctors saying this.
- AmericanChopper 6y ago
  Singapore has had a death rate of 0.06%, with ~42k cases. The main difference between them and the rest of the world has been how much they test. New York has more hospital beds per 1,000 than Singapore does for instance. There’s no other factor that could possibly explain the death rates being off by more than 3 orders of magnitude between those two places.
  - scarmig 6y ago
    That doesn't explain it, though: the number of NYC deaths so far is 0.2% of its population. Assuming 100% of NYC is infected, that's a floor of 0.2% IFR. No amount of under testing can explain that. Which isn't to say that Singapore's death rate is an undercount, but that higher testing rates can't explain it.
    - zaroth 6y ago
      I think the mistake that many people keep making is trying to nail down a single IFR. There isn’t one. The fatality rate depends heavily on the demographics of the infected population. IFR of a entirely young demographic would be below 0.01%. IFR of a nursing home would be 3 orders of magnitude higher. If someone shows me a low IFR I can safely bet that they surely aren’t finding 50% of their cases in their nursing homes. Conversely, if 50%+ of your cases are in nursing homes, your population IFR is going to look a lot worse than if you had kept that relatively small population safe.
    - crooked-v 6y ago
      The difference with Singapore probably has more to do with how (a) face mask wearing was and still is compulsory for everyone at all times outside of their homes (the fine for not doing so is the equivalent of $210 USD), and (b) every single government-run community center in the city had free reusable face masks available for months for anyone who didn't already have one.
    - AmericanChopper 6y ago
      Singapore’s actual death rate is also a much more reliable number than New York’s. The NY criteria for recording a Covid death has been pretty much anybody who could have potentially been infected at their time of death. There are some other confounding factors too, like SG infections being primarily among young people, and NY state discharging Covid patients to nursing homes. But none of that explains the monumental difference in death rates between SG and pretty much the entire rest of the world. The virus is certainly far less deadly than most reported statistics would have you believe.
- deathgrips 6y ago
  It's not a given that people keep dying at the same rate year after year.
- m0zg 6y ago
  Unclaimed bodies have been buried in "mass graves" in NY for many years. It's just it didn't occur to anyone to film this from a drone before to drive clicks and outrage. The real scandal is that NY, NJ, CT, MA and a few other states allowed C19 to spread in elderly care facilities and nursing homes. NY and NJ inexplicably _sent COVID patients_ there. As of Jun 2nd, nursing homes are responsible for 40% of all US COVID deaths: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/06/nursing-homes-site-40-us-covid-19-deaths https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/06/nursing-.... If heads don't roll for this, I don't know if we have justice in this country.
  - jacobush 6y ago
    Same for Sweden.
    - m0zg 6y ago
      The death rate per million in NY and NJ is almost _three times_ that of Sweden.
  - Shivetya 6y ago
    This article [0] says over 4,500 covid-19 patients were sent to nursing homes in NY yet Cuomo pretty much has dodged liability for it, he is still pretty much is a press darling. [0]https://apnews.com/5ebc0ad45b73a899efa81f098330204c https://apnews.com/5ebc0ad45b73a899efa81f098330204c
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
chrisco255 6y ago
This is number of infections not number of hospitalizations. This study implies the disease is orders of magnitude less deadly than we thought.
- cynusx 6y ago
  I'm actually annoyed we still don't know the exact death rate of the virus. I am not sure if it would be that unethical to call up volunteers that reflect the general population to establish the real death rate. (even less so if you reward them economically) If it is orders of magnitude less deadly then that should have enormous policy implications.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    Diseases unfortunately don't have a real death rate; the death rate of diseases tends to vary widely between populations for inscrutable reasons. Even if we had a study determining an 0.3% death rate among a statistically representative sample, we couldn't make policy under the assumption it's below 0.5% and couldn't be absolutely certain it's not 1%.
    - anoncake 6y ago
      Yes, we could and should make policy under the best data available even if we'd prefer better ones.
      - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
        I don't think that's true. It's very dangerous to make epidemic policy without accounting for model uncertainty, because by the time your model's clearly and unambiguously falsified it may be too late to deal with it.
        anoncake 6y ago
        No, not at all. Of course the model may underestimate the lethality, but it may also overestimate it so it evens out.
puranjay 6y ago
That depends entirely on where you are and what time you started looking. Three weeks ago if you'd asked me I would have said the same things as you. Since then, cases in my city have started increasing drastically. And now, I have at least two people I know who've tested positive.
pjc50 6y ago
Odd, I know a number of people who've had serious symptoms and a friend of a friend was Scotland's longest hospitalised case (well over a month). Fortunately nobody I know has died but some are reporting lingering symptoms.
fredzel 6y ago
In Poland there has been an outbreak among miners in multiple coal mines. 98% of them are reported to be asymptomatic and those are people often working in hazardous conditions.
draw_down 6y ago
Yeah, nobody around here (my house) has it.
xlii 6y ago
Isn't this the exactly case, though? It's not about how infectious it is, but how severe. Early reports said that 90% or more [1] people develop symptoms and that the average death rate is 3.5% (with some outlets even suggesting 10%...). If we divide those estimates by 10 we're getting 9% of symptoms and 0.35% lethality. While I won't argue for 80 as being the number that's almost 2 degrees of magnitude. That would mean that 0.9% people have symptoms and 0.035% has severe case. This is on par of 2009 Flu pandemic and 3 times more than regular seasonal flu. Now, I have no idea how reputable source is or how trustworthy this exact article is but that's one of the perspectives that were present since almost the beginning of pandemics. Note: Since I don't really gather articles those might be low quality republishes [1]: https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/covid-19-symptoms-typically-appear-5-days-after-infection/ar-BB11311P https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/covid-19-symptoms-t... [2]: https://www.theblaze.com/news/german-study-shows-coronavirus-mortality-rate-five-times-lower-than-widely-reported-numbers https://www.theblaze.com/news/german-study-shows-coronavirus...
- deathgrips 6y ago
  There wasn't a consensus back in February that covid19 was the black plague. Even though we didn't have the data to justify shutdowns, governments everywhere shutdown businesses because politicians won't personally feel the pain of job loss.
  - crooked-v 6y ago
    > Even though we didn't have the data to justify shutdowns 0.2% of the entire population of New York City died over the course of a few months, even with a full lockdown in place.
    - DuskStar 6y ago
      Which is either evidence in favor of lockdowns or evidence that the lockdown was useless - one of the two.
  - int_19h 6y ago
    We had data to justify shutdowns on the basis of a possible (i.e. consistent with the data that we had) worst case scenario. Doing nothing while waiting for more data to narrow down is itself a risky choice.
ageitgey 6y ago
People want this thing to be over, so there's a desire to find reasons to believe that we are further along than we thought. Combined with this being a novel disease that no one fully understands, there's a lot of room for those theories to develop. The current best science answer to how many people remain susceptible to infection is "nobody really knows but our best guess is not to assume the best case without better evidence so act like the worst case". But one thing that is easy to explain is your point about not knowing anyone who was infected: - At the peak of this epidemic in hard-hit places like the UK, something like only 1 in 400 people are known to have been infected at a time. - Many younger people (as much as 70%) show absolutely no symptoms when they are infected. - The disease is astronomically worse for elderly people. One study said that for young person, getting COVID was as risky as going for a ~200 mile car drive but as a 90 year old it was as risky as flying a WWII bomber mission. Nearly everyone who is dying is 70+ and mostly 80+. Obviously some younger people do die, but the numbers are much, much lower. We are talking 10s of people total under 40 in most countries. So unless you are hanging out with a social circle of 80-90 year olds, you actually aren't very likely know anyone directly affected! But that doesn't mean tons of people weren't dying. They just aren't the people you would know. It's a different social circle.
- chosenbreed37 6y ago
  > - The disease is astronomically worse for elderly people. One study said that for young person, getting COVID was as risky as going for a ~200 mile car drive but as a 90 year old it was as risky as flying a WWII bomber mission Interesting comparison. So here we're talking about the risk of dying from Covid-19. What about the risk of becoming seriously ill? What I'm curious is about is the percentage of people (younger or otherwise) who either develop no symptoms or develop symptoms so mild as to not be attributed to the virus. Do such people exist?
  - lol768 6y ago
    There's also not enough discussion about what happens after recovery. I was pretty ill in March (and, to a lesser extent, in April), which necessitated some time off work. Testing availability in my country was useless at the time, so I have no formal confirmation as to what it actually was. The govt also intervened, preventing my order of a private sector antibody test being fulfilled, so who knows. The experience after recovery for me, though, was anything but straightforward and I really struggled with lasting fatigue, breathlessness and just general exhaustion. I was only able to work half-days for a decent chunk of time. I still don't feel 100% now. My GP thinks it was likely Covid-19 and offered a diagnosis of post-viral fatigue after some tests. I'm 23. Statistically, this should have barely affected folks in my age group. It's not an isolated case: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-53056785 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-she...
micmil 6y ago
My sister's friend is a nurse in Houston. Her hospital is one of the largest in Harris County and over the past month has gone from having one floor dedicated to Covid-19 patients to FOUR entire floors solely for Covid patients. Shit is real, and will only get worse because complete fucking morons that can't see beyond their own little bubble think that just because things aren't completely screwed in their world, they aren't screwed elsewhere. Just wear your fucking mask, stay the fuck inside unless absolutely necessary, and hope to holy fuck that you're not surrounded by people as stupid as your post makes you sound.
pvaldes 6y ago
Definitely it can happen. Some time ago I have to deal with a particularly annoying disease. Thousands of healthy animals dying in mass overnight by asphyxia. A few hours before they where perfectly healthy. First asymptomatic, then mostly asymptomatic, then just a mild symptoms and then massive strike and death. Covid reminds me a lot to that time.
pengaru 6y ago
> The numbers are supposed to be huge yet hospitals are nearly empty Oh? Our local hospital recently had to take overflow from a neighboring county.
- mcv 6y ago
  It depends on where you live of course. Some countries seem to have the spread of the virus well under control. Others don't. I live in Netherland; at the height of the crisis here, Germany has to take some of our ICU cases. Now we regularly have days without any COVID-19 deaths at all, and number of cases is dropping rapidly while testing is finally increasing.
rvp-x 6y ago
I know a lot of people who had COVID-19. I suspect I know mostly people who are healthier and young, so they don't get seriously ill.
misja111 6y ago
It's the curse of the media. Infection rate might be only a few percent, death rate no more than a percent of that, but if you follow the media you get the feeling that we are in the middle of a new bubonic plague. This is the same phenomenon that makes people to be more scared of flying than to take the car even though the latter is far more dangerous.
technothrasher 6y ago
no one I asked knows anyone who was infected I had this same experience early on, but now I get a reasonable hit rate asking people. I personally know about four people who had it, and probably about 10% of people I talk to know a similar number of people. More like 80% know somebody who knows somebody, but that data is less reliable.
CydeWeys 6y ago
This article is talking about several months ago, back when our testing infrastructure was severely limited. What's that got to do with now? The hospitals were absolutely overflowing back then and the daily death count was staggering. But the strict lockdowns worked and we got it under control. Now the virus is spreading rapidly again and if it continues uncontained we will end up back in that hospitals overflowing and staggering death tolls situation again in a few weeks in the worst-hit states of Arizona, South Carolina, Arkansas, Florida, Utah, and Texas.

crooked-v 6y ago

Well, that obviously depends on where 'around you' is. Compare to New York City, where there have been an estimated 17,000 deaths (and even that's probably undercounted, going by some studies of excess deaths compared to previous years), and at the peak there were hundreds of unclaimed bodies per week being buried in mass graves.

adamhearn 6y ago
This is completely anecdotal, but my good friend’s brother is an ER doctor. He said the hospital required them to label the cause of death for all patients in the hospital as covid if there was as much as one symptom. I don’t want to downplay the sadness of the deaths, but I think it is a bit foolish for us to base our number of deaths of off untested patients...
- azinman2 6y ago
  Except you can see the excess total deaths compared to previous years and how well it correlates and is otherwise unexplained [1]. A lot of the labeling occurred because people couldn’t get tested yet presented symptoms that indicated covid. In that situation, you can’t say 100% without a test, yet it’s the reasonable conclusion in a pandemic. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
  - verylittlemeat 6y ago
    Something worth keeping in mind is how many fewer people died of other causes compared to previous years [1]. Yes, the data will show an excess number of people died versus previous years but I believe the parent comment is saying we should pay close attention to what the cause of death really means in terms of age and comorbidity. [1] https://i.imgur.com/HfaMhcK.jpg https://i.imgur.com/HfaMhcK.jpg
    - SifJar 6y ago
      One further thing to bear in mind here is that some causes of death can be expected to be decreased on account of lockdowns e.g. accidents - less people out and about, less people driving etc. will naturally lead to less accidents. Of course on the flip side, more people stuck at home & using the time to do renovation work etc. could lead to an increase in e.g. power tool related accidents. Other causes of death such as flu can likely also be assumed to be decreased as a side-effect of lockdown
      - leereeves 6y ago
        Contrariwise, people are avoiding treatment for other illnesses for fear of catching COVID in a hospital. Many people are depressed or even suicidal. And people are less active, which aggravates other health problems. All of these factors could increase the number of deaths.
        kolinko 6y ago
        If it was significant in comparison, we would not see a sharp drop in deaths after the lockdowns. Do people get depressed and die because of a lovkdown? Sure, I got depressed as well. But the numbers show that this issue is far less than the number of people that would die otherwise.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        addicted 6y ago
        3 months of lower activity is not killing people in those 3 months. Any effects will be felt on a much longer timeframe. Most office workers have very sedentary lives anyways, that didn’t become significantly more sedentary when they replaced their drive with a walk to another room and working in an office with working in that room. Throw in the fact that they are likely cooking more because restaurants and all were shut and not just having lunch delivered to their office, they may even be getting more activity in.
  - zaroth 6y ago
    Curious if we know specifically what caused the tens of thousands of excess deaths that showed up around January 2018? Was that a particularly bad flu season?
- pjc50 6y ago
  The most reliable number is "excess deaths", since that's hard to fake even if it's not specific.
- unlikelymordant 6y ago
  You can just look at the all cause excess deaths and see that the number of people that have died so far this year is much higher than previous years in New York. So whether you agree that person A died from covid or not, there were many more deaths due to something.
  - jakeogh 6y ago
    What is the effect of fear? Cortisol spikes and avoiding going to the doctor for what would normally be a good reason need to be researched.
    - majewsky 6y ago
      That is something worth researching, but even then, it's still justifiable to count a death by fear as a death by pandemic, given that it wouldn't have happened without the pandemic.
      - fastball 6y ago
        You can have a pandemic without fear though.
        vertex-four 6y ago
        Really? Has there ever been one? Or is the fear a natural human response to an invisible, omnipresent killer?
        fastball 6y ago
        Well, I guess I should say you can have a pandemic without a fear-mongering news media that significantly exacerbates it. I personally am not "fearful" of COVID-19, as are many (most) people I know, so it is clearly possible for the general human.
        vertex-four 6y ago
- Isinlor 6y ago
  Based on excess deaths - the difference between how many deaths from all causes would you exec and how many were reported - USA is very likely under counting deaths. Also all case mortality coincide very well with reports of COVID-19 cases. USA is very likely to significantly under count deaths from COVID-19. See: Preliminary Estimate of Excess Mortality During the COVID-19 Outbreak — New York City, March 11–May 2, 2020 https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6919e5.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6919e5.htm
- ageitgey 6y ago
  How you label the deaths is not that big of a deal in the larger scale. If you want to know the true toll of the epidemic, just look at this year's deaths vs. an average of previous years. It's simple and transparent. Here's that data for England: https://imgur.com/sxoolBX https://imgur.com/sxoolBX I get why everyone is questioning everything, but there isn't some big conspiracy here. Lots of people died of COVID. Most of them were 80+. You probably don't know any of them if you don't hang out with 80-90 year olds.
  - ddxxdd 6y ago
    But then we get to the question of whether those deaths were caused by COVID or other causes. We know that traffic fatalities in some areas have risen drastically due to the lockdowns: https://abc7.com/traffic-fatalities-california-highway-patrol-speeding-covid-19/6198603/ https://abc7.com/traffic-fatalities-california-highway-patro... We also know that doctor visits have gone down due to the coronavirus, leading to medical staff being laid off: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/02/826232423/covid-19-hits-some-health-care-workers-with-pay-cuts-and-layoffs https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/02/8262324... We also know that hospitals are financially incentivized to diagnose a patient as COVID positive: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/04/24/fact-check-medicare-hospitals-paid-more-covid-19-patients-coronavirus/3000638001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/04/24/fac... And there are German serological studies that suggest a COVID death rate of 0.39%, in contrast with the NYC study that claims a death rate of 1% Taking this altogether, and we have plenty of wiggle room to suggest that even the excess deaths don't necessarily imply that COVID is extremely deadly.
    - ageitgey 6y ago
      You are conflating a lot of different things. Traffic fatalities were actually down overall (total numbers), but up per mile driven. In other words, people were driving much less and dying in lower total numbers, but the people who were driving were driving faster and thus a bit more likely to die. That article is poorly written to generate headlines and clicks. Arguing over a specific IFR is also kind of pointless because the disease is so age and condition dependent. Whether the true overall IFR in a population is 1% or 0.4% doesn't really matter - it's a bad representation of the overall situation. COVID is a disease that kills a very large percentage of 80+ but is quite low risk for younger people. A single number doesn't capture or represent that. Demographic differences between 2 cities could easily cause a large skew in actual IFR. Hospitals are (possibly) financially incentivized to diagnose COVID in the US. But this is a world-wide disease and no other country has the insane US healthcare system where that would matter. > Taking this altogether, and we have plenty of wiggle room to suggest that even the excess deaths don't necessarily imply that COVID is extremely deadly. That's not correct. It's absolutely clear from the numbers across many countries that COVID is extremely deadly if you are 80+ and not deadly at all if you are 15. Make of that what you will. Arguing over IFRs and hospital reimbursement is missing the point. It's simultaneously true that COVID is very deadly for some groups but may not be deadly at all for you and your friends. There's a good argument to be made over how much of the excess death is due to secondary effects (untreated heart attacks, delayed cancer treatments, etc). But there's no way to arrange the numbers such that COVID doesn't obviously kill a lot of old people. Just look at the death rates in care homes / retirement homes. It was like a plague ravaging them.
- globular-toast 6y ago
  Similarly, several people I know have self-diagnosed themselves with COVID-19 due to just one symptom. In some cases the symptoms have disappeared the next day. In many cases the people are the "usual suspects" who seem to get ill several times a year anyway. I'm not aware of a single person who has definitely had COVID-19.
- deleted 6y ago
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- mcv 6y ago
  I also read that in Florida, the number of COVID-19 deaths is fairly low. Instead, the death rate from regular pneumonia is sky-rocketing.
- chimprich 6y ago
  > my good friend’s brother is an ER doctor I've seen a number of rumours from brothers of friends or friends of brothers, but no actual doctors saying this.
AmericanChopper 6y ago
Singapore has had a death rate of 0.06%, with ~42k cases. The main difference between them and the rest of the world has been how much they test. New York has more hospital beds per 1,000 than Singapore does for instance. There’s no other factor that could possibly explain the death rates being off by more than 3 orders of magnitude between those two places.
- scarmig 6y ago
  That doesn't explain it, though: the number of NYC deaths so far is 0.2% of its population. Assuming 100% of NYC is infected, that's a floor of 0.2% IFR. No amount of under testing can explain that. Which isn't to say that Singapore's death rate is an undercount, but that higher testing rates can't explain it.
  - zaroth 6y ago
    I think the mistake that many people keep making is trying to nail down a single IFR. There isn’t one. The fatality rate depends heavily on the demographics of the infected population. IFR of a entirely young demographic would be below 0.01%. IFR of a nursing home would be 3 orders of magnitude higher. If someone shows me a low IFR I can safely bet that they surely aren’t finding 50% of their cases in their nursing homes. Conversely, if 50%+ of your cases are in nursing homes, your population IFR is going to look a lot worse than if you had kept that relatively small population safe.
  - crooked-v 6y ago
    The difference with Singapore probably has more to do with how (a) face mask wearing was and still is compulsory for everyone at all times outside of their homes (the fine for not doing so is the equivalent of $210 USD), and (b) every single government-run community center in the city had free reusable face masks available for months for anyone who didn't already have one.
  - AmericanChopper 6y ago
    Singapore’s actual death rate is also a much more reliable number than New York’s. The NY criteria for recording a Covid death has been pretty much anybody who could have potentially been infected at their time of death. There are some other confounding factors too, like SG infections being primarily among young people, and NY state discharging Covid patients to nursing homes. But none of that explains the monumental difference in death rates between SG and pretty much the entire rest of the world. The virus is certainly far less deadly than most reported statistics would have you believe.
deathgrips 6y ago
It's not a given that people keep dying at the same rate year after year.
m0zg 6y ago
Unclaimed bodies have been buried in "mass graves" in NY for many years. It's just it didn't occur to anyone to film this from a drone before to drive clicks and outrage. The real scandal is that NY, NJ, CT, MA and a few other states allowed C19 to spread in elderly care facilities and nursing homes. NY and NJ inexplicably _sent COVID patients_ there. As of Jun 2nd, nursing homes are responsible for 40% of all US COVID deaths: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/06/nursing-homes-site-40-us-covid-19-deaths https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/06/nursing-.... If heads don't roll for this, I don't know if we have justice in this country.
- jacobush 6y ago
  Same for Sweden.
  - m0zg 6y ago
    The death rate per million in NY and NJ is almost _three times_ that of Sweden.
- Shivetya 6y ago
  This article [0] says over 4,500 covid-19 patients were sent to nursing homes in NY yet Cuomo pretty much has dodged liability for it, he is still pretty much is a press darling. [0]https://apnews.com/5ebc0ad45b73a899efa81f098330204c https://apnews.com/5ebc0ad45b73a899efa81f098330204c
- deleted 6y ago
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chrisco255 6y ago

This is number of infections not number of hospitalizations. This study implies the disease is orders of magnitude less deadly than we thought.

cynusx 6y ago
I'm actually annoyed we still don't know the exact death rate of the virus. I am not sure if it would be that unethical to call up volunteers that reflect the general population to establish the real death rate. (even less so if you reward them economically) If it is orders of magnitude less deadly then that should have enormous policy implications.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  Diseases unfortunately don't have a real death rate; the death rate of diseases tends to vary widely between populations for inscrutable reasons. Even if we had a study determining an 0.3% death rate among a statistically representative sample, we couldn't make policy under the assumption it's below 0.5% and couldn't be absolutely certain it's not 1%.
  - anoncake 6y ago
    Yes, we could and should make policy under the best data available even if we'd prefer better ones.
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      I don't think that's true. It's very dangerous to make epidemic policy without accounting for model uncertainty, because by the time your model's clearly and unambiguously falsified it may be too late to deal with it.
      - anoncake 6y ago
        No, not at all. Of course the model may underestimate the lethality, but it may also overestimate it so it evens out.

puranjay 6y ago

That depends entirely on where you are and what time you started looking. Three weeks ago if you'd asked me I would have said the same things as you. Since then, cases in my city have started increasing drastically. And now, I have at least two people I know who've tested positive.

pjc50 6y ago

Odd, I know a number of people who've had serious symptoms and a friend of a friend was Scotland's longest hospitalised case (well over a month). Fortunately nobody I know has died but some are reporting lingering symptoms.

fredzel 6y ago

In Poland there has been an outbreak among miners in multiple coal mines. 98% of them are reported to be asymptomatic and those are people often working in hazardous conditions.

draw_down 6y ago

Yeah, nobody around here (my house) has it.

xlii 6y ago

Isn't this the exactly case, though? It's not about how infectious it is, but how severe. Early reports said that 90% or more [1] people develop symptoms and that the average death rate is 3.5% (with some outlets even suggesting 10%...). If we divide those estimates by 10 we're getting 9% of symptoms and 0.35% lethality. While I won't argue for 80 as being the number that's almost 2 degrees of magnitude. That would mean that 0.9% people have symptoms and 0.035% has severe case. This is on par of 2009 Flu pandemic and 3 times more than regular seasonal flu. Now, I have no idea how reputable source is or how trustworthy this exact article is but that's one of the perspectives that were present since almost the beginning of pandemics. Note: Since I don't really gather articles those might be low quality republishes [1]: https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/covid-19-symptoms-typically-appear-5-days-after-infection/ar-BB11311P https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/covid-19-symptoms-t... [2]: https://www.theblaze.com/news/german-study-shows-coronavirus-mortality-rate-five-times-lower-than-widely-reported-numbers https://www.theblaze.com/news/german-study-shows-coronavirus...

deathgrips 6y ago
There wasn't a consensus back in February that covid19 was the black plague. Even though we didn't have the data to justify shutdowns, governments everywhere shutdown businesses because politicians won't personally feel the pain of job loss.
- crooked-v 6y ago
  > Even though we didn't have the data to justify shutdowns 0.2% of the entire population of New York City died over the course of a few months, even with a full lockdown in place.
  - DuskStar 6y ago
    Which is either evidence in favor of lockdowns or evidence that the lockdown was useless - one of the two.
- int_19h 6y ago
  We had data to justify shutdowns on the basis of a possible (i.e. consistent with the data that we had) worst case scenario. Doing nothing while waiting for more data to narrow down is itself a risky choice.

ageitgey 6y ago

People want this thing to be over, so there's a desire to find reasons to believe that we are further along than we thought. Combined with this being a novel disease that no one fully understands, there's a lot of room for those theories to develop. The current best science answer to how many people remain susceptible to infection is "nobody really knows but our best guess is not to assume the best case without better evidence so act like the worst case". But one thing that is easy to explain is your point about not knowing anyone who was infected: - At the peak of this epidemic in hard-hit places like the UK, something like only 1 in 400 people are known to have been infected at a time. - Many younger people (as much as 70%) show absolutely no symptoms when they are infected. - The disease is astronomically worse for elderly people. One study said that for young person, getting COVID was as risky as going for a ~200 mile car drive but as a 90 year old it was as risky as flying a WWII bomber mission. Nearly everyone who is dying is 70+ and mostly 80+. Obviously some younger people do die, but the numbers are much, much lower. We are talking 10s of people total under 40 in most countries. So unless you are hanging out with a social circle of 80-90 year olds, you actually aren't very likely know anyone directly affected! But that doesn't mean tons of people weren't dying. They just aren't the people you would know. It's a different social circle.

chosenbreed37 6y ago
> - The disease is astronomically worse for elderly people. One study said that for young person, getting COVID was as risky as going for a ~200 mile car drive but as a 90 year old it was as risky as flying a WWII bomber mission Interesting comparison. So here we're talking about the risk of dying from Covid-19. What about the risk of becoming seriously ill? What I'm curious is about is the percentage of people (younger or otherwise) who either develop no symptoms or develop symptoms so mild as to not be attributed to the virus. Do such people exist?
- lol768 6y ago
  There's also not enough discussion about what happens after recovery. I was pretty ill in March (and, to a lesser extent, in April), which necessitated some time off work. Testing availability in my country was useless at the time, so I have no formal confirmation as to what it actually was. The govt also intervened, preventing my order of a private sector antibody test being fulfilled, so who knows. The experience after recovery for me, though, was anything but straightforward and I really struggled with lasting fatigue, breathlessness and just general exhaustion. I was only able to work half-days for a decent chunk of time. I still don't feel 100% now. My GP thinks it was likely Covid-19 and offered a diagnosis of post-viral fatigue after some tests. I'm 23. Statistically, this should have barely affected folks in my age group. It's not an isolated case: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-53056785 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-she...

micmil 6y ago

My sister's friend is a nurse in Houston. Her hospital is one of the largest in Harris County and over the past month has gone from having one floor dedicated to Covid-19 patients to FOUR entire floors solely for Covid patients. Shit is real, and will only get worse because complete fucking morons that can't see beyond their own little bubble think that just because things aren't completely screwed in their world, they aren't screwed elsewhere. Just wear your fucking mask, stay the fuck inside unless absolutely necessary, and hope to holy fuck that you're not surrounded by people as stupid as your post makes you sound.

pvaldes 6y ago

Definitely it can happen. Some time ago I have to deal with a particularly annoying disease. Thousands of healthy animals dying in mass overnight by asphyxia. A few hours before they where perfectly healthy. First asymptomatic, then mostly asymptomatic, then just a mild symptoms and then massive strike and death. Covid reminds me a lot to that time.

pengaru 6y ago

> The numbers are supposed to be huge yet hospitals are nearly empty Oh? Our local hospital recently had to take overflow from a neighboring county.

mcv 6y ago
It depends on where you live of course. Some countries seem to have the spread of the virus well under control. Others don't. I live in Netherland; at the height of the crisis here, Germany has to take some of our ICU cases. Now we regularly have days without any COVID-19 deaths at all, and number of cases is dropping rapidly while testing is finally increasing.

rvp-x 6y ago

I know a lot of people who had COVID-19. I suspect I know mostly people who are healthier and young, so they don't get seriously ill.

misja111 6y ago

It's the curse of the media. Infection rate might be only a few percent, death rate no more than a percent of that, but if you follow the media you get the feeling that we are in the middle of a new bubonic plague. This is the same phenomenon that makes people to be more scared of flying than to take the car even though the latter is far more dangerous.

technothrasher 6y ago

no one I asked knows anyone who was infected I had this same experience early on, but now I get a reasonable hit rate asking people. I personally know about four people who had it, and probably about 10% of people I talk to know a similar number of people. More like 80% know somebody who knows somebody, but that data is less reliable.

CydeWeys 6y ago

This article is talking about several months ago, back when our testing infrastructure was severely limited. What's that got to do with now? The hospitals were absolutely overflowing back then and the daily death count was staggering. But the strict lockdowns worked and we got it under control. Now the virus is spreading rapidly again and if it continues uncontained we will end up back in that hospitals overflowing and staggering death tolls situation again in a few weeks in the worst-hit states of Arizona, South Carolina, Arkansas, Florida, Utah, and Texas.