6 ms·

14 deaths in UK so far, ICU and deaths are a lagging indicator.

by make_it_sure 5y ago

thehappypm 5y ago
14 total is very low, the UK was averaging over 100 deaths per day in October.
walterbell 5y ago
Would be good to see category percentages for UK cases.
listless 5y ago
Because of COVID or with COVID when they died? Why is it so damn difficult to figure out what’s really happening? I’ve read about 10 stories today all telling me I should be very worried about Omicron and not a single one has any data.
- Barrin92 5y ago
  because it's a relatively new strain and it's hard to figure out to what degree previous infection plays a role. A lot of people may have had covid without ever knowing it.
  - landemva 5y ago
    'A lot of people may have had covid without ever knowing it.' If a lot of people had it and were ok, why the continued mask hysteria? It is beginning to seem like people don't want to move on.
    - brazzy 5y ago
      Because even if a lot of people are OK and only a few die, those "few" still add up to hundreds of thousands dead people, when the entire population gets infected. Which sure sounds like a good reason to get hysterical. To say nothing of the issue of a catastrophically overtaxed health system and what side effects that will have.
      - argiopetech 5y ago
        From the top-down, metrics focused perspective, I agree. From an individual, bottom-up perspective, most people don't have a high risk of death from COVID. The majority will avoid spreading any disease to others, usually by self-enforced quarantine. Some individuals will die, but all of us will die of something some day and we should come up peace with that. The only top-down mitigation to death of a specific cause is legislation. For an endemic disease, legislation to avoid the spread of that disease must necessarily approach tyranny. I've addressed the overtaxing if the health system I'm reply to a sibling. It is unclear to me that any overtax if the health system (which is, from what I can glean from the CDC limited, in the US, to a few states) is due to COVID directly rather than institutional responses to COVID.
        spookthesunset 5y ago
        > rather than institutional responses to COVID I bet you a lot of fake internet money that when the fire is out and cooler heads prevail, most of the overtax was institutional responses to COVID. We won't be able to know how true this actually is until years (perhaps decades) after this all calms down. There is simply too much pressure to maintain the current narrative and do true root cause analysis.
    - dragontamer 5y ago
      My local clinic is so overbooked with work, that I had to come in before they opened and stand in line. Even though I was in line before they even opened, it took me 2 hours to get some basic care (just a TDAP booster, wooping cough, for reasons completely unrelated to COVID19). Yeah, there was a line long before I got there. This is a major story because all across the country, our health care system has been stretched to its limits. We had a nursing shortage before COVID19 started, but this pandemic has only made our nurses and doctors even _MORE_ overworked than expected, as they deal with case-after-case of COVID19.
      - argiopetech 5y ago
        How much of that is due to changes in procedure (additional cleaning, more involved check-in, etc.?) How much of that is due to healthcare workers leaving the local area (e.g., for incredibly lucrative travel nursing positions) or the industry generally (due to burnout, unemployment incentives, vaccine refusal, etc.?) Finally, how much of the current situation is due to the "catch-up" effect of people who were unable or unwilling to have sub-optimal diagnosed in the midst of the 2020 hysteria and are now seeking treatment for more and more serious conditions? There is much more at play here than the disease itself. Government, media, and institutions should be held to account for their role in exacerbating the situation.
        dragontamer 5y ago
        A month ago, I had no problem getting a flu shot. Walk in, got the shot and left. Like 5 minutes. This past week, COVID-19 cases are triple what they used to be and flu cases are doubled in my county. It doesn't take a genius to figure out the problem. Same clinic, same staff, just one month apart with a sudden COVID and Flu surge. It was even the same nurse who administered the two shots. ----- And the receptionist said, sorry for the wait, we've had an explosion of COVID-19 cases. EDIT: "Overrun" was the receptionist's word actually. But you get the gist.
        argiopetech 5y ago
        Fair enough. Out of curiosity, do you live in one of the areas the CDC lists as having a high COVID-related ICU bed occupancy? https://www.cdc.gov/nhsn/covid19/report-patient-impact.html https://www.cdc.gov/nhsn/covid19/report-patient-impact.html
    - taurath 5y ago
      Masks help slow it and keep it more manageable. If everyone in a country attended a giant “get covid” rally in their neighborhood many hundreds of thousand or maybe millions would die as the hospital system would be overwhelmed despite omicron appearing to be less likely to require hospitalization. Right now the hospitalization number is already too high, and is putting massive strain on nurses. When Ventilators and ICU beds run out people die that normally wouldn’t. It’s not so much mask hysteria as hysteria of a large number of people refusing to protect themselves or their communities from the virus or spreading it. It would not be a problem if unvaccinated people simply agreed to not be treated by a hospital when they get covid. That will never happen. So wear a mask to slow the spread.
      - zerocount 5y ago
        The whole 'hospitals are overwhelmed' thing is getting old now. A few do get overwhelmed, but everything seems to work out and you don't hear any more about it. So enough with the fear mongering, if you're not high risk, go get Covid and be done with it. Oh, and we're not refusing to protect ourselves. Our bodies already do that, it's called an immune system and when I caught Covid all the little immune workers showed up and took care of business. You don't need the vaccine unless you're high risk. And another thing, before vaccines the hospitals and their staff were doing just fine without the vaccine, yet some were fired later for not taking it. It's insanity and it's profit and politically driven hysteria. Masks keep us from spitting on eachother. They help.
        mattzito 5y ago
        A healthy-as-a-horse family friend caught Covid (unvaccinated because he didn’t believe Covid was a real thing), no risk factors other than being in his 50s, and died on a ventilator. Probably would have died anyway, but in his case he died because the ICU staff was overworked during a local wave and his vent tube clogged and no one noticed. Now his (also anti-vaccine) widow is considering suing the hospital for malpractice. Now, obviously the above is anecdata, but there’s a real chain of causality from the standpoint that if my friend had been vaccinated, this probably wouldn’t have happened. If the people within his immediate social circle were vaccinated, this might not have happened. If his community at large was vaccinated, not only would he be less likely to catch it, he would be less likely to end up in the hospital, and even in the hospital, he would have received more attentive care. You can’t just hand wave away the societal impact of having a novel virus circulating through the community. And even if you want to shoulder the risk yourself, what about the impact your contribution to spread has on other people? Where’s your obligation to your community at large? I met another person, friend of a friend, last week, who can barely speak above a whisper. She caught Covid (runner, vaccinated), and ended up with lung damage. It was two months before she could walk around without being winded. She did everything right, and still ended up severely harmed by Covid. Now, one can turn around and say, “well, look, the vaccines were pointless!”, but obviously that’s ridiculous- it’s just the law of large numbers. The data clearly shows that if you are vaccinated, you are less likely to get sick, end up in the hospital , and die of Covid. If everyone around you is vaccinated, it’s less likely you’ll need to depend on the vaccine to make the odds work out in your favor. There’s all kinds of aspects of life where we collectively decide to look out for each other for the benefit of all. It’s frankly shocking that so much death and pain is handwaved away as “getting old now”, and even more so that it’s political. Edit: I realize there’s no changing anyones mind here, so I could have saved my breath. But I think it’s worth calling out that the arguments put forth in the parent post are just ridiculous, and if we applied the same logic to drunk driving, or smallpox, or personal property rights, people would think the argument was ludicrous.
    - zerocount 5y ago
      That's exactly what we need to be questioning. Keep asking questions and pressing for answers that make sense. We need to move on.
    - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
      >why the continued mask hysteria Is that pro-mask hysteria or anti-mask hysteria?
      - argiopetech 5y ago
        I'm not sure it matters. Hysterical people do not make good choices. When the hysterical people who run the system do nothing to calm their hysteria or the public's, the result is chronic unreasoned decision making, rapid flip-flopping, and the overall appearance of bad faith. The knee-jerk reaction to bad faith interaction (from all people) is "I don't know what, but not that." The knee-jerk response of the powers that be to mutiny is to exercise more power. The feedback worsens the situation. If we would stop trying to manage rapidly-evolving situations with to-down legislation, returned individual freedoms, and all took a deep breath, I'm sure the populace (who certainly don't desire the death of their friends and loved ones) could find a reasoned solution that is at least as effective as what we have now.
        mbg721 5y ago
        Or the response to anti-human policy is just "Not that", and the policymakers are scrambling for another way to shove it in.
        argiopetech 5y ago
        There are, of course, people who are not hysterical on all sides. That some of those are capitalizing on the situation to enact long-desired changes (legislative or otherwise) comes as no surprise.
- VBprogrammer 5y ago
  I suspect you are being downvoted because of your question about what it means to have died from COVID. I agree this is a trope which is trotted out by vaccine deniers and even those who said that COVID itself was a hoax before that. However, 1500 people in the UK die on an average day. Remember back in the days we were able to point to the number of excess deaths in the UK? 14 people dead in 2 weeks is very near the noise floor. Unfortunately what we would like to know is how much longer these people would have lived without COVID. I suspect this is not knowable.
  - zerocount 5y ago
    He merely asked for the number of deaths directly caused by Covid. Where do you get the idea that anyone is questioning what it means to die from Covid?
    - VBprogrammer 5y ago
      Directly caused is a very tricky question to answer on both the positive and negative sides. For example is someone who has terminal cancer who dies of COVID counted? Even though they are on a cocktail of drugs to treat the cancer they may well have lived for months or years later. Similarly, someone with well managed diabetes, do we write them off as having a comortality even though they may have lived for decades longer by all available indications.
  - benjaminwootton 5y ago
    People on the “anti side” of the debate have been asking this for 2 years. It was a valid question then and a more important one now. It is likely that a significant percentage of people are dying with incidental Covid infections. Depending on how significant, that completely changes the dynamics.
    - Paradigma11 5y ago
      Well, you can estimate the probability of someone randomly selected in the population testing positive for covid at a certain point in time. The probability of "dying with Covid" should be similar unless there is evidence of a bias.
- lobocinza 5y ago
  Excess mortality is an useful metric. It's flaw being that our habits completely changed due to social distancing and lock down and has to be addressed somehow. > Because of COVID or with COVID when they died? I'm afraid this question is impossible to answer due to uncertainty but... I - Outliers like immunodeficient and morbid obese could be excluded. II - If you want to know the probability of someone dying due to having COVID you can use the Bayesian theorem to find it giving that you have (1) the incidence of people dying that have Covid (2) the incidence of any kind of death, (3) the incidence of Covid (lack of testing is an issue).

14 deaths in UK so far, ICU and deaths are a lagging indicator.

thehappypm 5y ago

14 total is very low, the UK was averaging over 100 deaths per day in October.

walterbell 5y ago

Would be good to see category percentages for UK cases.

listless 5y ago

Because of COVID or with COVID when they died? Why is it so damn difficult to figure out what’s really happening? I’ve read about 10 stories today all telling me I should be very worried about Omicron and not a single one has any data.

Barrin92 5y ago
because it's a relatively new strain and it's hard to figure out to what degree previous infection plays a role. A lot of people may have had covid without ever knowing it.
- landemva 5y ago
  'A lot of people may have had covid without ever knowing it.' If a lot of people had it and were ok, why the continued mask hysteria? It is beginning to seem like people don't want to move on.
  - brazzy 5y ago
    Because even if a lot of people are OK and only a few die, those "few" still add up to hundreds of thousands dead people, when the entire population gets infected. Which sure sounds like a good reason to get hysterical. To say nothing of the issue of a catastrophically overtaxed health system and what side effects that will have.
    - argiopetech 5y ago
      From the top-down, metrics focused perspective, I agree. From an individual, bottom-up perspective, most people don't have a high risk of death from COVID. The majority will avoid spreading any disease to others, usually by self-enforced quarantine. Some individuals will die, but all of us will die of something some day and we should come up peace with that. The only top-down mitigation to death of a specific cause is legislation. For an endemic disease, legislation to avoid the spread of that disease must necessarily approach tyranny. I've addressed the overtaxing if the health system I'm reply to a sibling. It is unclear to me that any overtax if the health system (which is, from what I can glean from the CDC limited, in the US, to a few states) is due to COVID directly rather than institutional responses to COVID.
      - spookthesunset 5y ago
        > rather than institutional responses to COVID I bet you a lot of fake internet money that when the fire is out and cooler heads prevail, most of the overtax was institutional responses to COVID. We won't be able to know how true this actually is until years (perhaps decades) after this all calms down. There is simply too much pressure to maintain the current narrative and do true root cause analysis.
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    My local clinic is so overbooked with work, that I had to come in before they opened and stand in line. Even though I was in line before they even opened, it took me 2 hours to get some basic care (just a TDAP booster, wooping cough, for reasons completely unrelated to COVID19). Yeah, there was a line long before I got there. This is a major story because all across the country, our health care system has been stretched to its limits. We had a nursing shortage before COVID19 started, but this pandemic has only made our nurses and doctors even _MORE_ overworked than expected, as they deal with case-after-case of COVID19.
    - argiopetech 5y ago
      How much of that is due to changes in procedure (additional cleaning, more involved check-in, etc.?) How much of that is due to healthcare workers leaving the local area (e.g., for incredibly lucrative travel nursing positions) or the industry generally (due to burnout, unemployment incentives, vaccine refusal, etc.?) Finally, how much of the current situation is due to the "catch-up" effect of people who were unable or unwilling to have sub-optimal diagnosed in the midst of the 2020 hysteria and are now seeking treatment for more and more serious conditions? There is much more at play here than the disease itself. Government, media, and institutions should be held to account for their role in exacerbating the situation.
      - dragontamer 5y ago
        A month ago, I had no problem getting a flu shot. Walk in, got the shot and left. Like 5 minutes. This past week, COVID-19 cases are triple what they used to be and flu cases are doubled in my county. It doesn't take a genius to figure out the problem. Same clinic, same staff, just one month apart with a sudden COVID and Flu surge. It was even the same nurse who administered the two shots. ----- And the receptionist said, sorry for the wait, we've had an explosion of COVID-19 cases. EDIT: "Overrun" was the receptionist's word actually. But you get the gist.
        argiopetech 5y ago
        Fair enough. Out of curiosity, do you live in one of the areas the CDC lists as having a high COVID-related ICU bed occupancy? https://www.cdc.gov/nhsn/covid19/report-patient-impact.html https://www.cdc.gov/nhsn/covid19/report-patient-impact.html
  - taurath 5y ago
    Masks help slow it and keep it more manageable. If everyone in a country attended a giant “get covid” rally in their neighborhood many hundreds of thousand or maybe millions would die as the hospital system would be overwhelmed despite omicron appearing to be less likely to require hospitalization. Right now the hospitalization number is already too high, and is putting massive strain on nurses. When Ventilators and ICU beds run out people die that normally wouldn’t. It’s not so much mask hysteria as hysteria of a large number of people refusing to protect themselves or their communities from the virus or spreading it. It would not be a problem if unvaccinated people simply agreed to not be treated by a hospital when they get covid. That will never happen. So wear a mask to slow the spread.
    - zerocount 5y ago
      The whole 'hospitals are overwhelmed' thing is getting old now. A few do get overwhelmed, but everything seems to work out and you don't hear any more about it. So enough with the fear mongering, if you're not high risk, go get Covid and be done with it. Oh, and we're not refusing to protect ourselves. Our bodies already do that, it's called an immune system and when I caught Covid all the little immune workers showed up and took care of business. You don't need the vaccine unless you're high risk. And another thing, before vaccines the hospitals and their staff were doing just fine without the vaccine, yet some were fired later for not taking it. It's insanity and it's profit and politically driven hysteria. Masks keep us from spitting on eachother. They help.
      - mattzito 5y ago
        A healthy-as-a-horse family friend caught Covid (unvaccinated because he didn’t believe Covid was a real thing), no risk factors other than being in his 50s, and died on a ventilator. Probably would have died anyway, but in his case he died because the ICU staff was overworked during a local wave and his vent tube clogged and no one noticed. Now his (also anti-vaccine) widow is considering suing the hospital for malpractice. Now, obviously the above is anecdata, but there’s a real chain of causality from the standpoint that if my friend had been vaccinated, this probably wouldn’t have happened. If the people within his immediate social circle were vaccinated, this might not have happened. If his community at large was vaccinated, not only would he be less likely to catch it, he would be less likely to end up in the hospital, and even in the hospital, he would have received more attentive care. You can’t just hand wave away the societal impact of having a novel virus circulating through the community. And even if you want to shoulder the risk yourself, what about the impact your contribution to spread has on other people? Where’s your obligation to your community at large? I met another person, friend of a friend, last week, who can barely speak above a whisper. She caught Covid (runner, vaccinated), and ended up with lung damage. It was two months before she could walk around without being winded. She did everything right, and still ended up severely harmed by Covid. Now, one can turn around and say, “well, look, the vaccines were pointless!”, but obviously that’s ridiculous- it’s just the law of large numbers. The data clearly shows that if you are vaccinated, you are less likely to get sick, end up in the hospital , and die of Covid. If everyone around you is vaccinated, it’s less likely you’ll need to depend on the vaccine to make the odds work out in your favor. There’s all kinds of aspects of life where we collectively decide to look out for each other for the benefit of all. It’s frankly shocking that so much death and pain is handwaved away as “getting old now”, and even more so that it’s political. Edit: I realize there’s no changing anyones mind here, so I could have saved my breath. But I think it’s worth calling out that the arguments put forth in the parent post are just ridiculous, and if we applied the same logic to drunk driving, or smallpox, or personal property rights, people would think the argument was ludicrous.
  - zerocount 5y ago
    That's exactly what we need to be questioning. Keep asking questions and pressing for answers that make sense. We need to move on.
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    >why the continued mask hysteria Is that pro-mask hysteria or anti-mask hysteria?
    - argiopetech 5y ago
      I'm not sure it matters. Hysterical people do not make good choices. When the hysterical people who run the system do nothing to calm their hysteria or the public's, the result is chronic unreasoned decision making, rapid flip-flopping, and the overall appearance of bad faith. The knee-jerk reaction to bad faith interaction (from all people) is "I don't know what, but not that." The knee-jerk response of the powers that be to mutiny is to exercise more power. The feedback worsens the situation. If we would stop trying to manage rapidly-evolving situations with to-down legislation, returned individual freedoms, and all took a deep breath, I'm sure the populace (who certainly don't desire the death of their friends and loved ones) could find a reasoned solution that is at least as effective as what we have now.
      - mbg721 5y ago
        Or the response to anti-human policy is just "Not that", and the policymakers are scrambling for another way to shove it in.
        argiopetech 5y ago
        There are, of course, people who are not hysterical on all sides. That some of those are capitalizing on the situation to enact long-desired changes (legislative or otherwise) comes as no surprise.
VBprogrammer 5y ago
I suspect you are being downvoted because of your question about what it means to have died from COVID. I agree this is a trope which is trotted out by vaccine deniers and even those who said that COVID itself was a hoax before that. However, 1500 people in the UK die on an average day. Remember back in the days we were able to point to the number of excess deaths in the UK? 14 people dead in 2 weeks is very near the noise floor. Unfortunately what we would like to know is how much longer these people would have lived without COVID. I suspect this is not knowable.
- zerocount 5y ago
  He merely asked for the number of deaths directly caused by Covid. Where do you get the idea that anyone is questioning what it means to die from Covid?
  - VBprogrammer 5y ago
    Directly caused is a very tricky question to answer on both the positive and negative sides. For example is someone who has terminal cancer who dies of COVID counted? Even though they are on a cocktail of drugs to treat the cancer they may well have lived for months or years later. Similarly, someone with well managed diabetes, do we write them off as having a comortality even though they may have lived for decades longer by all available indications.
- benjaminwootton 5y ago
  People on the “anti side” of the debate have been asking this for 2 years. It was a valid question then and a more important one now. It is likely that a significant percentage of people are dying with incidental Covid infections. Depending on how significant, that completely changes the dynamics.
  - Paradigma11 5y ago
    Well, you can estimate the probability of someone randomly selected in the population testing positive for covid at a certain point in time. The probability of "dying with Covid" should be similar unless there is evidence of a bias.
lobocinza 5y ago
Excess mortality is an useful metric. It's flaw being that our habits completely changed due to social distancing and lock down and has to be addressed somehow. > Because of COVID or with COVID when they died? I'm afraid this question is impossible to answer due to uncertainty but... I - Outliers like immunodeficient and morbid obese could be excluded. II - If you want to know the probability of someone dying due to having COVID you can use the Bayesian theorem to find it giving that you have (1) the incidence of people dying that have Covid (2) the incidence of any kind of death, (3) the incidence of Covid (lack of testing is an issue).