5 ms·

It's interesting, I do have trouble using excess deaths and attributing it to covid though. I was in Honduras in the ultra poor mountain region in intibuca and

It's interesting, I do have trouble using excess deaths and attributing it to covid though. I was in Honduras in the ultra poor mountain region in intibuca and the people there said the entire town got covid, but there was only one death. It's was a small town, but the area had well over 200 people. What did happen was that the government literally cut off access to the nearest city where people could get food, supplies, and medicine.and there are many life-threatening illnesses that can be addressed with cheap medication. In the major cities, they made it so one person could leave a household during a week to get supplies, but I have to think that lockdown and decreased access to healthcare and necessities had severe impacts, especially when populations are more active.

nerdponx 4y ago
I always thought that this was a feature of "excess death" analysis! It's the combined effect of the pandemic, not just the disease itself.
- jdpel 4y ago
  That's fine for historians, but useless for making decisions about interventions in the real world where there is always more than one confounding factor.
  - TheFattestNinja 4y ago
    But confounding factors average themselves out over long period of times. Hence why excess mortality is good, because you compare it to decades of data where the smaller effects even out. If I can't get a heart surgery bc doctors unavailable and die, that's (on average) caused by covid. Sure, it's possible that my doc was unavailable at the time bc he hammered a finger, but "on average" over the timespan the only constant factor was covid (or covid-policy consequences).
r721 4y ago
>one death >over 200 people That's like ~ 0.5% IFR which is quite close to the widely cited 0.68% IFR estimation (from 2020, for the original strain): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33007452/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33007452/
- mlyle 4y ago
  That's 0.5% fatality rate, not infection fatality rate. Likely "everyone" in the town didn't actually get it-- it may have been an overwhelming majority but probably some people lucked out. So the anecdote shared is even closer to the center of the range of expectations than you imply :D

nerdponx 4y ago

I always thought that this was a feature of "excess death" analysis! It's the combined effect of the pandemic, not just the disease itself.

jdpel 4y ago
That's fine for historians, but useless for making decisions about interventions in the real world where there is always more than one confounding factor.
- TheFattestNinja 4y ago
  But confounding factors average themselves out over long period of times. Hence why excess mortality is good, because you compare it to decades of data where the smaller effects even out. If I can't get a heart surgery bc doctors unavailable and die, that's (on average) caused by covid. Sure, it's possible that my doc was unavailable at the time bc he hammered a finger, but "on average" over the timespan the only constant factor was covid (or covid-policy consequences).

r721 4y ago

>one death >over 200 people That's like ~ 0.5% IFR which is quite close to the widely cited 0.68% IFR estimation (from 2020, for the original strain): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33007452/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33007452/

mlyle 4y ago
That's 0.5% fatality rate, not infection fatality rate. Likely "everyone" in the town didn't actually get it-- it may have been an overwhelming majority but probably some people lucked out. So the anecdote shared is even closer to the center of the range of expectations than you imply :D