Forget it.
- Thread starter Joe Cobb
- Start date
I’m not a Doctor so take this with a grade of slaw. But the reason the numbers are so low is because we shut the economy down, forcing millions to stay at home by losing their jobs. However, it can’t be understated how the POTUS should have stopped this long before it happened.
Seems like a lot of words to whitewash the fact that we have lost 100,000 people with no end in sight.
The average age of covid death is older than the average us life expectancy .
Stopped at your miscalculation of % tested. It’s 100 times .04
In addition: over 96% of the deaths in Italy were in people who had at least one major underlying health issue. Things like heart disease, diabetes, etc
will link the article when not mobile
I will keep saying it: BY FAR the leading cause of Covid deaths are that an infected person has underlying health issues. Data is very clear.
will link the article when not mobile
I will keep saying it: BY FAR the leading cause of Covid deaths are that an infected person has underlying health issues. Data is very clear.
I am not sure I understand what any branch of government could have actually done to better manage Covid-19. I know both the left and right want to take political advantage of the disease. I am sure hindsight is better than foresight, but someone help me here. I agree the government could have sounded better. But what could government have done differently as the death count went up?
How many lives lost due to losing jobs/having businesses taken away? What are the unemployment numbers up to now?
You are off by a factor of 100
4.7% have been tested. Out of that 4.7%, 12% tested positive. Out of that 12% who are positive, 5.4% have died.
Overall death rate is 0.03%
4.7% have been tested. Out of that 4.7%, 12% tested positive. Out of that 12% who are positive, 5.4% have died.
Overall death rate is 0.03%
I'm not sure why this fact is comforting to you. Do you expect to never have underlying health issues?
who says it comforts me? I have close family with health issues who more than likely would struggle to survive if infected. And they realize that and take every precaution necessary.
Was merely making a factual statement. Facts from an article I read 2 days ago.
The statement is true on underlying health issues being #1 indicator of ability to fight off infection or not
exactly. And how many Americans in the general population have underlying health issues? MAJOR problem in this country is our health.
Here’s a concerning statistic. The US has 28% of the global deaths from Covid19, despite only having 4% of the global population.
Yes, let’s don’t look at the fact that they are elderly and have underlying conditions. That absolutely matters.
You don’t shut down a state or country over that.
I am sure that OP is not discounting 100,000 deaths. While his math is off, I TOTALLY agree that COVID-19 has been overblown by the liberals. There is no way that we should have shut down the whole US economy for this “pandemic”. Half of the deaths occurred in 3 states. The facts and figures do not lie!
.26%
https://www.westernjournal.com/cdcs...ovid-death-rate-13-times-lower-initial-claim/
article based on stats from CDC
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html
also .26% is based on a 35% asymptomatic metric. This link is to a Times article on a study that proposes that the metric is closer to 80%.
https://time.com/5842669/coronavirus-asymptomatic-transmission/
synopsis: this is serious and we all need to do simple things and endure some minor inconveniences, BUT this isn’t the global killer that it was originally thought to be.
open up
https://www.westernjournal.com/cdcs...ovid-death-rate-13-times-lower-initial-claim/
article based on stats from CDC
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html
also .26% is based on a 35% asymptomatic metric. This link is to a Times article on a study that proposes that the metric is closer to 80%.
https://time.com/5842669/coronavirus-asymptomatic-transmission/
synopsis: this is serious and we all need to do simple things and endure some minor inconveniences, BUT this isn’t the global killer that it was originally thought to be.
open up
and we need to protect those people and/or they need to take every measure to protect themselves
they are very vulnerable
virus is never going away.
I think this is a testiment on how open and transparent we are as a society. If you think the numbers coming out of Russia, China and Africa are accurate, I have a 2005 Yukon XL with 300k miles on it I'd like to offer you for $50k.
76% of Americans have at least one of the underlying conditions that they are referring to. You people need to quit making out like there's only a few people or a select group that have these underlying conditions
Here is one article with some quotes from experts feeling it wont go away:
Coronavirus may never go away, even with a vaccine
Embracing that reality is crucial to the next phase of America’s pandemic response, experts say
There’s a good chance the coronavirus will never go away.
Even after a vaccine is discovered and deployed, the coronavirus will likely remain for decades to come, circulating among the world’s population.
Experts call such diseases endemic — stubbornly resisting efforts to stamp them out. Think measles, HIV, chickenpox.
It is a daunting proposition — a coronavirus-tinged world without a foreseeable end. But experts in epidemiology, disaster planning and vaccine development say embracing that reality is crucial to the next phase of America’s pandemic response. The long-term nature of covid-19, they say, should serve as a call to arms for the public, a road map for the trillions of dollars Congress is spending and a fixed navigational point for the nation’s current, chaotic state-by-state patchwork strategy.
With so much else uncertain, the persistence of the novel virus is one of the few things we can count on about the future. That doesn’t mean the situation will always be as dire. There are already four endemic coronaviruses that circulate continuously, causing the common cold. And many experts think this virus will become the fifth — its effects growing milder as immunity spreads and our bodies adapt to it over time.
For now, though, most people have not been infected and remain susceptible. And the highly transmissible disease has surged in recent weeks even in countries that initially succeeded in suppressing it. Left alone, experts say, it will simply keep burning through the world’s population.
“This virus is here to stay,” said Sarah Cobey, an epidemiologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago. “The question is, how do we live with it safely?”
Combating endemic diseases requires long-range thinking, sustained effort and international coordination. Stamping out the virus could take decades — if it happens at all. Such efforts take time, money and, most of all, political will.
Americans have only started to wrap their heads around the idea, polls show. U.S. leaders and residents keep searching for a magic bullet to bring the pandemic to an abrupt end: Drugs that show even a hint of progress in the petri dish have sparked shortages. The White House continues to suggest summer’s heat will smother the virus or that it will mysteriously vanish. A vaccine — while crucial to our response — is not likely to eradicate the disease, experts say. Challenges to vaccination are already becoming clear, including limited supply, anti-vaccine opposition and significant logistical roadblocks.
Meanwhile, some states are rushing headlong into reopening their economies. Even those moving more cautiously haven’t developed tools to measure what’s working and what isn’t — a crucial feature for any prolonged scientific experiment.
“It’s like we have attention-deficit disorder right now. Everything we’re doing is just a knee-jerk response to the short-term,” said Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “People keep asking me, ‘What’s the one thing we have to do?’ The one thing we have to do is to understand that there is not one thing. We need a comprehensive battle strategy, meticulously implemented.”
People keep talking of returning to normal, said Natalie Dean, a disease biostatistician at the University of Florida. But a future with an enduring coronavirus means that normal no longer exists. “As we find different ways to adapt and discover what works, that’s how we’re going to start reclaiming parts of our society and life,” she said.
An urgent intermission
America now finds itself in a moment of transition. Infections are declining in some states, even as they rise in others with worrisome emerging hotspots.
What’s missing in this interlude, experts say, is a sense of urgency.
Arriving at this moment of transition required countrywide shutdowns, soaring unemployment and devastating blows to our economy and mental health. All that effort was supposed to buy us time to think, plan and prepare, said Irwin Redlener, director of Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness.
“What’s concerning is that I don’t see any signs the federal government has learned any lessons and is doing anything differently to prepare for the next waves,” he said.
Leaders desperately need to shift their response from short-term crisis management to long-term solutions, he and other experts say.
Communities should be thinking about installing doors that don’t require grasping a handle, and re-engineering traffic signals so pedestrians don’t have to push crosswalk buttons, said Eleanor J. Murray, an epidemiologist at Boston University.
In coming years, robots and automated lines could become ubiquitous in meatpacking plants, which have experienced some of the country’s worst outbreaks. Families may have to make diagnostic tests routine ahead of visits to grandparents. Once-mocked work cubicles of a bygone era may become the rage again, replacing open-floor plans found in many offices. Paid sick time might become a necessity for jobs of all types. And heading to work while under the weather may no longer be seen as an act of admirable American can-do spirit but instead a threat to co-workers and the bottom line.
More immediately, states should be using this time to craft quick-response systems and protocols. With hundreds of cities and counties reopening, think of each as a mini laboratory yielding valuable data on what will work against the virus in coming years. But most still lack the tools to capture that data, said Cobey, the University of Chicago epidemiologist, whose models have been used by Illinois leaders.
The metrics being employed by states remain crude: daily number of deaths, hospitalization rates and confirmations of cases long after people show symptoms. All lag behind the actual transmission of the coronavirus by at least one to three weeks.
“We desperately need better data and fast. It blows my mind that we still don’t have it,” Cobey said.
What’s needed are more sophisticated testing strategies, say experts, that could serve as canaries in the coal mine — increasing our speed and ability to detect surges in the virus. States could select certain populations or areas to test extensively. They could establish a handful of sites that test only patients who have developed symptoms in the last four days, to increase sensitivity to sudden increases in transmission.
“You need testing strategies that allow you to put on brakes quickly enough to stop surges,” said Cobey, who has pleaded with state leaders to implement such strategies.
Another idea researchers have proposed is universally testing pregnant women to measure the asymptomatic spread of the virus — among people who have been infected but don’t show symptoms. The women could be an ideal sample testing population because they already visit hospitals for delivery and maternity checkups.
One hospital in New York tested every pregnant woman who came in to deliver and found 15 percent had the coronavirus. Most of those testing positive — 88 percent — showed no symptoms, a sign of how crucial such testing could be.
Get our Coronavirus Updates newsletter
Receive the most important pandemic developments in your inbox every day. All stories linked in the newsletter are free to access.
Living long-term with the virus also means addressing the mental health effects. There’s an assumption among many leaders, experts say, that increases in depression and anxiety are a temporary problem that will eventually disappear along with the virus.
But for some people, the trauma, fear and stress will accumulate and fester like a wound if left unaddressed, said Paul Gionfriddo, president of the advocacy group Mental Health America. “The psychological recovery is going to be as important as economic and logistical parts of this.”
‘Prevention always sounds easy’
America’s yearning for a quick fix has turned in recent days toward a vaccine, now being portrayed as a solution that will quash the virus once and for all.
But the world has achieved that only once, with smallpox — a measure of just how difficult it is for vaccines to wipe out diseases. And it took nearly two centuries after the discovery of a vaccine — and an unprecedented international effort — to vanquish smallpox, which stole hundreds of millions of lives.
Eventually, many experts believe this coronavirus could become relatively benign, causing milder infections as our immune systems develop a memory of responses to it through previous infection or vaccination. But that process could take years, said Andrew Noymer, a University of California at Irvine epidemiologist.
Barney Graham, deputy director of the federal government’s Vaccine Research Center, said emerging plans for vaccination are already stretching as far out as a decade.
“I’m thinking about things in different stages or eras,” Graham said. “We had a discussion this morning about what can be ready before this winter of 2021, what could be ready for 2021-2022, and what kind of regimen or vaccine concepts would we want after this has settled into a more seasonal virus.”
The success of those vaccines will hinge on distribution — a complicated, logistically fraught process.
In the first few years of a vaccine, global demand will far outstrip what manufacturers are able to supply. Roughly 60 to 80 percent of the world’s population needs to be inoculated to reach herd immunity — that point when enough people have become resistant to a virus that it has difficulty spreading widely. Without international agreements worked out beforehand, the short supply could devolve into bidding wars, hoarding and ineffective vaccination campaigns.
In the United States, the crucial job of distribution will depend on federal and local health departments, which have already shown signs of limited capacity and competence amid this pandemic. As a preview to the chaos that might ensue, the U.S. government’s rollout of the first and only treatment for covid-19, remdesivir, has been described by hospitals as confusing, unfair and lacking transparency.
“We also assume that everyone will want the vaccine because of the devastation this virus has caused, but that’s a big assumption,” said Howard Koh, a top U.S. health official during the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic. “Prevention always sounds easy, but it’s not.”
America already has vaccines for measles and the seasonal flu, which can be deadly. And yet the health-care system struggles every year to convince people to get those shots.
Looking further down the road, many top experts believe it’s critical that U.S. leaders start planning for the next pandemic now — even as they contend with this one — because of the short attention span and lack of political and public support for preparedness the country has shown in past decades.
“We’ve seen this story so many times before,” Koh said. “As soon as the crisis is over, people will go back to whatever is the new normal and they will move on.”
Our future selves
The struggle to get people to think long-term, of course, is not new to public health.
We know that smoking can kill us. Yet, it is still responsible for 1 of every 5 deaths in the United States.
“The problem is people putting the present ahead of the future,” said Frieden, who led the CDC from 2009 to 2017.
To bridge the divide between present and future, the CDC launched an ad campaign during Frieden’s tenure with former smokers showing in graphic, intimate detail the consequences of lighting up: the removal of their jaw. Having to speak through an electronic voice box. The emotional devastation to their families.
The campaign caused more than 16.4 million people to try to quit smoking between 2012 and 2018 and about 1 million to quit for good, the CDC estimates. “We found a way to show them their future selves,” Frieden said.
The challenge in this pandemic is few such shortcuts remain to push U.S. leaders and the public into forward-thinking actions. The CDC has been sidelined by the White House and blocked from holding public briefings. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has made clear its priority is restarting the economy.
Increasingly, leading experts believe many Americans won’t make the shift toward long-range thinking until the virus spreads more widely and affects someone they know.
“It’s like people who drive too fast. They come upon the scene of an accident, and for a little while, they drive more carefully, but soon they’re back to speeding again,” said Michael T. Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.
“Contrast that with people who have lost someone to drunk driving,” he said. “It mobilizes them and becomes a cause for them. Eventually, everyone is going to know someone who got infected or died from this virus.
“That’s what it may take.”
Coronavirus may never go away, even with a vaccine
Embracing that reality is crucial to the next phase of America’s pandemic response, experts say
There’s a good chance the coronavirus will never go away.
Even after a vaccine is discovered and deployed, the coronavirus will likely remain for decades to come, circulating among the world’s population.
Experts call such diseases endemic — stubbornly resisting efforts to stamp them out. Think measles, HIV, chickenpox.
It is a daunting proposition — a coronavirus-tinged world without a foreseeable end. But experts in epidemiology, disaster planning and vaccine development say embracing that reality is crucial to the next phase of America’s pandemic response. The long-term nature of covid-19, they say, should serve as a call to arms for the public, a road map for the trillions of dollars Congress is spending and a fixed navigational point for the nation’s current, chaotic state-by-state patchwork strategy.
With so much else uncertain, the persistence of the novel virus is one of the few things we can count on about the future. That doesn’t mean the situation will always be as dire. There are already four endemic coronaviruses that circulate continuously, causing the common cold. And many experts think this virus will become the fifth — its effects growing milder as immunity spreads and our bodies adapt to it over time.
For now, though, most people have not been infected and remain susceptible. And the highly transmissible disease has surged in recent weeks even in countries that initially succeeded in suppressing it. Left alone, experts say, it will simply keep burning through the world’s population.
“This virus is here to stay,” said Sarah Cobey, an epidemiologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago. “The question is, how do we live with it safely?”
Combating endemic diseases requires long-range thinking, sustained effort and international coordination. Stamping out the virus could take decades — if it happens at all. Such efforts take time, money and, most of all, political will.
Americans have only started to wrap their heads around the idea, polls show. U.S. leaders and residents keep searching for a magic bullet to bring the pandemic to an abrupt end: Drugs that show even a hint of progress in the petri dish have sparked shortages. The White House continues to suggest summer’s heat will smother the virus or that it will mysteriously vanish. A vaccine — while crucial to our response — is not likely to eradicate the disease, experts say. Challenges to vaccination are already becoming clear, including limited supply, anti-vaccine opposition and significant logistical roadblocks.
Meanwhile, some states are rushing headlong into reopening their economies. Even those moving more cautiously haven’t developed tools to measure what’s working and what isn’t — a crucial feature for any prolonged scientific experiment.
“It’s like we have attention-deficit disorder right now. Everything we’re doing is just a knee-jerk response to the short-term,” said Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “People keep asking me, ‘What’s the one thing we have to do?’ The one thing we have to do is to understand that there is not one thing. We need a comprehensive battle strategy, meticulously implemented.”
People keep talking of returning to normal, said Natalie Dean, a disease biostatistician at the University of Florida. But a future with an enduring coronavirus means that normal no longer exists. “As we find different ways to adapt and discover what works, that’s how we’re going to start reclaiming parts of our society and life,” she said.
An urgent intermission
America now finds itself in a moment of transition. Infections are declining in some states, even as they rise in others with worrisome emerging hotspots.
What’s missing in this interlude, experts say, is a sense of urgency.
Arriving at this moment of transition required countrywide shutdowns, soaring unemployment and devastating blows to our economy and mental health. All that effort was supposed to buy us time to think, plan and prepare, said Irwin Redlener, director of Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness.
“What’s concerning is that I don’t see any signs the federal government has learned any lessons and is doing anything differently to prepare for the next waves,” he said.
Leaders desperately need to shift their response from short-term crisis management to long-term solutions, he and other experts say.
Communities should be thinking about installing doors that don’t require grasping a handle, and re-engineering traffic signals so pedestrians don’t have to push crosswalk buttons, said Eleanor J. Murray, an epidemiologist at Boston University.
In coming years, robots and automated lines could become ubiquitous in meatpacking plants, which have experienced some of the country’s worst outbreaks. Families may have to make diagnostic tests routine ahead of visits to grandparents. Once-mocked work cubicles of a bygone era may become the rage again, replacing open-floor plans found in many offices. Paid sick time might become a necessity for jobs of all types. And heading to work while under the weather may no longer be seen as an act of admirable American can-do spirit but instead a threat to co-workers and the bottom line.
More immediately, states should be using this time to craft quick-response systems and protocols. With hundreds of cities and counties reopening, think of each as a mini laboratory yielding valuable data on what will work against the virus in coming years. But most still lack the tools to capture that data, said Cobey, the University of Chicago epidemiologist, whose models have been used by Illinois leaders.
The metrics being employed by states remain crude: daily number of deaths, hospitalization rates and confirmations of cases long after people show symptoms. All lag behind the actual transmission of the coronavirus by at least one to three weeks.
“We desperately need better data and fast. It blows my mind that we still don’t have it,” Cobey said.
What’s needed are more sophisticated testing strategies, say experts, that could serve as canaries in the coal mine — increasing our speed and ability to detect surges in the virus. States could select certain populations or areas to test extensively. They could establish a handful of sites that test only patients who have developed symptoms in the last four days, to increase sensitivity to sudden increases in transmission.
“You need testing strategies that allow you to put on brakes quickly enough to stop surges,” said Cobey, who has pleaded with state leaders to implement such strategies.
Another idea researchers have proposed is universally testing pregnant women to measure the asymptomatic spread of the virus — among people who have been infected but don’t show symptoms. The women could be an ideal sample testing population because they already visit hospitals for delivery and maternity checkups.
One hospital in New York tested every pregnant woman who came in to deliver and found 15 percent had the coronavirus. Most of those testing positive — 88 percent — showed no symptoms, a sign of how crucial such testing could be.
Get our Coronavirus Updates newsletter
Receive the most important pandemic developments in your inbox every day. All stories linked in the newsletter are free to access.
Living long-term with the virus also means addressing the mental health effects. There’s an assumption among many leaders, experts say, that increases in depression and anxiety are a temporary problem that will eventually disappear along with the virus.
But for some people, the trauma, fear and stress will accumulate and fester like a wound if left unaddressed, said Paul Gionfriddo, president of the advocacy group Mental Health America. “The psychological recovery is going to be as important as economic and logistical parts of this.”
‘Prevention always sounds easy’
America’s yearning for a quick fix has turned in recent days toward a vaccine, now being portrayed as a solution that will quash the virus once and for all.
But the world has achieved that only once, with smallpox — a measure of just how difficult it is for vaccines to wipe out diseases. And it took nearly two centuries after the discovery of a vaccine — and an unprecedented international effort — to vanquish smallpox, which stole hundreds of millions of lives.
Eventually, many experts believe this coronavirus could become relatively benign, causing milder infections as our immune systems develop a memory of responses to it through previous infection or vaccination. But that process could take years, said Andrew Noymer, a University of California at Irvine epidemiologist.
Barney Graham, deputy director of the federal government’s Vaccine Research Center, said emerging plans for vaccination are already stretching as far out as a decade.
“I’m thinking about things in different stages or eras,” Graham said. “We had a discussion this morning about what can be ready before this winter of 2021, what could be ready for 2021-2022, and what kind of regimen or vaccine concepts would we want after this has settled into a more seasonal virus.”
The success of those vaccines will hinge on distribution — a complicated, logistically fraught process.
In the first few years of a vaccine, global demand will far outstrip what manufacturers are able to supply. Roughly 60 to 80 percent of the world’s population needs to be inoculated to reach herd immunity — that point when enough people have become resistant to a virus that it has difficulty spreading widely. Without international agreements worked out beforehand, the short supply could devolve into bidding wars, hoarding and ineffective vaccination campaigns.
In the United States, the crucial job of distribution will depend on federal and local health departments, which have already shown signs of limited capacity and competence amid this pandemic. As a preview to the chaos that might ensue, the U.S. government’s rollout of the first and only treatment for covid-19, remdesivir, has been described by hospitals as confusing, unfair and lacking transparency.
“We also assume that everyone will want the vaccine because of the devastation this virus has caused, but that’s a big assumption,” said Howard Koh, a top U.S. health official during the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic. “Prevention always sounds easy, but it’s not.”
America already has vaccines for measles and the seasonal flu, which can be deadly. And yet the health-care system struggles every year to convince people to get those shots.
Looking further down the road, many top experts believe it’s critical that U.S. leaders start planning for the next pandemic now — even as they contend with this one — because of the short attention span and lack of political and public support for preparedness the country has shown in past decades.
“We’ve seen this story so many times before,” Koh said. “As soon as the crisis is over, people will go back to whatever is the new normal and they will move on.”
Our future selves
The struggle to get people to think long-term, of course, is not new to public health.
We know that smoking can kill us. Yet, it is still responsible for 1 of every 5 deaths in the United States.
“The problem is people putting the present ahead of the future,” said Frieden, who led the CDC from 2009 to 2017.
To bridge the divide between present and future, the CDC launched an ad campaign during Frieden’s tenure with former smokers showing in graphic, intimate detail the consequences of lighting up: the removal of their jaw. Having to speak through an electronic voice box. The emotional devastation to their families.
The campaign caused more than 16.4 million people to try to quit smoking between 2012 and 2018 and about 1 million to quit for good, the CDC estimates. “We found a way to show them their future selves,” Frieden said.
The challenge in this pandemic is few such shortcuts remain to push U.S. leaders and the public into forward-thinking actions. The CDC has been sidelined by the White House and blocked from holding public briefings. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has made clear its priority is restarting the economy.
Increasingly, leading experts believe many Americans won’t make the shift toward long-range thinking until the virus spreads more widely and affects someone they know.
“It’s like people who drive too fast. They come upon the scene of an accident, and for a little while, they drive more carefully, but soon they’re back to speeding again,” said Michael T. Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.
“Contrast that with people who have lost someone to drunk driving,” he said. “It mobilizes them and becomes a cause for them. Eventually, everyone is going to know someone who got infected or died from this virus.
“That’s what it may take.”
hard to feel sorry for unhealthy people that have made bad decisions
they are reason our health care system is broken to begin with
I have taken what you've written on TI to equate having a high level of concern over the deaths of 100,000+ people with a desire to keep the economy shut down. If I have misunderstood you, I'm sorry.
I have no desire at all to keep the economy shut down. I frequently bemoan the number of deaths while being strongly in favor of reopening the economy with suitable measures taken by everyone to limit the number of deaths going forward.
You are using a self full filling fallacy.
"We shut the country down so the infections wouldn't spread rapidly. Infections didnt spread rapidly, so why did we shut the country down?"
Yes these preexisting conditions are often what many people every day tell me they don't have. Yet are taking a medication to treat said problem. Often from a lack of understanding of their own health which is a fallacy from physicians and patients.
If you take one tiny little pill for your blood pressure, this counts as a comorbid condition, even if your blood pressure is pristine while taking that medicine. If your BMI is over 30, that counts. If you don't know what BMI is, Google a BMI calculator.
I don't say this to be the sky is falling, just for you to understand what risk group you may or may not be on. That's included in all this data that everyone is trying to make heads or tails of
If you take one tiny little pill for your blood pressure, this counts as a comorbid condition, even if your blood pressure is pristine while taking that medicine. If your BMI is over 30, that counts. If you don't know what BMI is, Google a BMI calculator.
I don't say this to be the sky is falling, just for you to understand what risk group you may or may not be on. That's included in all this data that everyone is trying to make heads or tails of
Another good article on deaths in nursing homes:
New data shows 42% of all COVID-19 deaths have been in nursing homes. When NY is excluded, the rate jumps to 52%.
Disproportionate
One of the long-running debates over the ongoing coronavirus lockdowns has been the disproportionate number of COVID-19 deaths in America's nursing homes and how those deaths have skewed the data used to set public policy.
It seems that everyone understands that residents of nursing homes and assisted living facilities are the most vulnerable among us. But now we have research that shows just how vulnerable they have been.
New data from the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity has revealed that an estimated 42.4% of all COVID-19 deaths have been in nursing homes and assisted living facilities (or residential care homes).
To show how disproportionate those deaths are compared to the rest of the country, the report points out that 2.1 million people live in those types of facilities and represent only 0.6% of the total U.S. population.
Yes, 0.6% of the population accounts for 42.4% of all COVID deaths in the U.S. From FREOPP:
Among states reporting nursing home fatalities, death from COVID-19 has struck 0.64% of U.S. residents of nursing homes and residential care facilities. We estimate that 5.1 million Americans over 65 live in nursing homes and residential care facilities; by extrapolating 0.64% across the entire U.S. nursing and residential care home population, we estimate that nursing homes account for 42.4% of COVID-19 fatalities.
The rates are even more disproportionate if you remove New York state's data, which is an outlier because of the state's high share of overall coronavirus cases and deaths as well as its data reporting methods.
When New York's COVID-19 deaths are removed from the equation, nursing homes account for 51.8% of all COVID-19 deaths. More from FREOPP:
This estimate excludes New York State, which is an outlier in terms of its reported share of COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes. A number of policymakers in New York have alleged that nursing home facilities in that state have been underreporting their COVID-19 fatality figures, possibly because New York State counts as hospital deaths those of nursing home residents who die in a hospital. It could also be that the high number of non-long-term care deaths in New York explain the lower percentage (i.e., a much larger denominator).
What about the rest of the world?
The report noted that the United States' experience with nursing home COVID-19 deaths is not unique.
A study from the International Long Term Care Policy Network looked at deaths in Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, FREOPP said.
According to the international study, 40.8% of reported COVID-19 deaths occurred in nursing homes.
Public policy recommendation
The FREOPP report says that the data shows there are "substantial flaws" in the public policy management of the coronavirus. More attention needs to be paid to COVID-19 infections in nursing homes and among the elderly.
According to the report, "those older than 65 are 26 times as likely to die of COVID-19 than those aged 25 to 54."
The people at FREOPP recommended that state and local governments reorient policy responses "away from younger and healthier people, and toward the elderly, and especially elderly individuals living in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities."
This story has been updated with new data from FREOPP.
New data shows 42% of all COVID-19 deaths have been in nursing homes. When NY is excluded, the rate jumps to 52%.
Disproportionate
One of the long-running debates over the ongoing coronavirus lockdowns has been the disproportionate number of COVID-19 deaths in America's nursing homes and how those deaths have skewed the data used to set public policy.
It seems that everyone understands that residents of nursing homes and assisted living facilities are the most vulnerable among us. But now we have research that shows just how vulnerable they have been.
New data from the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity has revealed that an estimated 42.4% of all COVID-19 deaths have been in nursing homes and assisted living facilities (or residential care homes).
To show how disproportionate those deaths are compared to the rest of the country, the report points out that 2.1 million people live in those types of facilities and represent only 0.6% of the total U.S. population.
Yes, 0.6% of the population accounts for 42.4% of all COVID deaths in the U.S. From FREOPP:
Among states reporting nursing home fatalities, death from COVID-19 has struck 0.64% of U.S. residents of nursing homes and residential care facilities. We estimate that 5.1 million Americans over 65 live in nursing homes and residential care facilities; by extrapolating 0.64% across the entire U.S. nursing and residential care home population, we estimate that nursing homes account for 42.4% of COVID-19 fatalities.
The rates are even more disproportionate if you remove New York state's data, which is an outlier because of the state's high share of overall coronavirus cases and deaths as well as its data reporting methods.
When New York's COVID-19 deaths are removed from the equation, nursing homes account for 51.8% of all COVID-19 deaths. More from FREOPP:
This estimate excludes New York State, which is an outlier in terms of its reported share of COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes. A number of policymakers in New York have alleged that nursing home facilities in that state have been underreporting their COVID-19 fatality figures, possibly because New York State counts as hospital deaths those of nursing home residents who die in a hospital. It could also be that the high number of non-long-term care deaths in New York explain the lower percentage (i.e., a much larger denominator).
What about the rest of the world?
The report noted that the United States' experience with nursing home COVID-19 deaths is not unique.
A study from the International Long Term Care Policy Network looked at deaths in Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, FREOPP said.
According to the international study, 40.8% of reported COVID-19 deaths occurred in nursing homes.
Public policy recommendation
The FREOPP report says that the data shows there are "substantial flaws" in the public policy management of the coronavirus. More attention needs to be paid to COVID-19 infections in nursing homes and among the elderly.
According to the report, "those older than 65 are 26 times as likely to die of COVID-19 than those aged 25 to 54."
The people at FREOPP recommended that state and local governments reorient policy responses "away from younger and healthier people, and toward the elderly, and especially elderly individuals living in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities."
This story has been updated with new data from FREOPP.
Heck, the numbers are skewed now and just about any death is Covid related now. We had a friend who died in a car accident recently and was pronounced as Covid-19 related death.
Article on Italy deaths (Bloomberg)
Italy Says 96% of Virus Fatalities Suffered From Other Illnesses
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The coronavirus outbreak in Italy has struck overwhelmingly among the nation’s older population and those with preexisting medical conditions, according to the national health authority.
Almost 96% of the country’s virus fatalities had previous medical conditions, data from Italy’s ISS health institute show. The ISS, which publishes a range of studies on the outbreak including a detailed weekly report, confirms a trend seen since the beginning of the emergency, with the average age of Italians who’ve died from the virus at around 80.
“The latest numbers show that new cases and fatalities have a common profile: mostly elderly people with previous illnesses,” ISS chief Silvio Brusaferro said at a news conference Friday.
With over 32,000 deaths and more than 230,000 cases, Italy was the original European epicenter of the pandemic. The country began emerging from a nationwide lockdown on May 4, when about 4 million people went back to work.
Most shops, bars and restaurants were allowed to reopen two weeks later with distancing rules, and Italians are again allowed to travel freely -- but only within their home regions.
The government has pledged to allow full free movement from June 3. But with some areas still seeing hundreds of new cases a day, Premier Giuseppe Conte may keep borders closed in the northern regions of Lombardy and Piedmont, newspapers including Corriere della Sera reported Tuesday.
Government officials and health experts also fear that young people may have gotten the message that they’re not at risk from the pathogen. After throngs of them gathered in squares and nightlife districts over the weekend, many not respecting rules on social distancing or use of masks, local officials have begun weighing moves to limit large groups. Milan Mayor Giuseppe Sala banned sales of takeout drinks after 7 p.m.
Although the average age of virus cases is 62 years old, about 30% of those infected are under 50. Still, fatalities point to a wider generation gap. ISS analysis shows that as of May 25 only about 1.1% of virus fatalities have been under 50 years of age and more than 57% were over 80. Nearly half of new cases in May were registered at nursing homes.
Unexplained Deaths
The most recent ISS weekly study, based on a sample of about 10% of fatalities until May 21, also showed that just 124 victims, or 4.1% of the total, had no previous pathology. Almost 60% of victims suffered from at least three prior illnesses and about a fifth had two conditions.
More than 68% had high blood pressure, about 30% had diabetes and 28% suffered from heart disease, according to the report.
Official figures may not capture the full picture: many patients that died in their homes may not have been tested. Several studies have shown a surge in fatalities in the country, especially in the north, at a rate higher than what official Covid-19 figures indicate.
Italy had 11,600 more “unexplained” deaths in the first quarter compared with previous years, none of which were registered as Covid-19 fatalities, according to a joint report by ISS and national statistics office Istat.
Italy’s INPS social security administration also estimated 18,971 “excess” deaths in March and April, coming on top of official Covid-19-linked fatalities.
Italy Says 96% of Virus Fatalities Suffered From Other Illnesses
Sign up here for our daily coronavirus newsletter on what you need to know, and subscribe to our Covid-19 podcast for the latest news and analysis.
The coronavirus outbreak in Italy has struck overwhelmingly among the nation’s older population and those with preexisting medical conditions, according to the national health authority.
Almost 96% of the country’s virus fatalities had previous medical conditions, data from Italy’s ISS health institute show. The ISS, which publishes a range of studies on the outbreak including a detailed weekly report, confirms a trend seen since the beginning of the emergency, with the average age of Italians who’ve died from the virus at around 80.
“The latest numbers show that new cases and fatalities have a common profile: mostly elderly people with previous illnesses,” ISS chief Silvio Brusaferro said at a news conference Friday.
With over 32,000 deaths and more than 230,000 cases, Italy was the original European epicenter of the pandemic. The country began emerging from a nationwide lockdown on May 4, when about 4 million people went back to work.
Most shops, bars and restaurants were allowed to reopen two weeks later with distancing rules, and Italians are again allowed to travel freely -- but only within their home regions.
The government has pledged to allow full free movement from June 3. But with some areas still seeing hundreds of new cases a day, Premier Giuseppe Conte may keep borders closed in the northern regions of Lombardy and Piedmont, newspapers including Corriere della Sera reported Tuesday.
Government officials and health experts also fear that young people may have gotten the message that they’re not at risk from the pathogen. After throngs of them gathered in squares and nightlife districts over the weekend, many not respecting rules on social distancing or use of masks, local officials have begun weighing moves to limit large groups. Milan Mayor Giuseppe Sala banned sales of takeout drinks after 7 p.m.
Although the average age of virus cases is 62 years old, about 30% of those infected are under 50. Still, fatalities point to a wider generation gap. ISS analysis shows that as of May 25 only about 1.1% of virus fatalities have been under 50 years of age and more than 57% were over 80. Nearly half of new cases in May were registered at nursing homes.
Unexplained Deaths
The most recent ISS weekly study, based on a sample of about 10% of fatalities until May 21, also showed that just 124 victims, or 4.1% of the total, had no previous pathology. Almost 60% of victims suffered from at least three prior illnesses and about a fifth had two conditions.
More than 68% had high blood pressure, about 30% had diabetes and 28% suffered from heart disease, according to the report.
Official figures may not capture the full picture: many patients that died in their homes may not have been tested. Several studies have shown a surge in fatalities in the country, especially in the north, at a rate higher than what official Covid-19 figures indicate.
Italy had 11,600 more “unexplained” deaths in the first quarter compared with previous years, none of which were registered as Covid-19 fatalities, according to a joint report by ISS and national statistics office Istat.
Italy’s INPS social security administration also estimated 18,971 “excess” deaths in March and April, coming on top of official Covid-19-linked fatalities.
Do they have what the seasonal flu death rate is? Forever we heard that COVID was way more deadly than flu, but it looks like it may actually be less deadly.
Maybe there is a world where our federal government acted quickly enough in February and we didn't have to shut down the economy, but also were able to stop a majority of the deaths. Just spit balling here.
Tommy, I normally agree with you on most things, but to be honest this is an ignorant post. At 52 years old I have high blood pressure and diabetes. I am generally in good shape, not obese, and live a mostly healthy lifestyle. My genetics are crap. Do you really think all illness is because of bad decisions? And if you do you cannot show empathy for someone that made/makes mistakes? Sorry if I broke your healthcare system.
I am at risk at 52. I am currently over weight and this lock down hasn't helped.
I don't find being stuck in my home, unable to have interactions with friends, and family the quality of life I want. I don't plan on spending a year or two or more locked away.
I am an adult, I understand the risks I am taking by being in public. I would imagine a large majority of people that feel the same way understand the risk or don't care about the risk. They would prefer to live their life, than just to have their life.
If you kill off all us stubborn ones, then everyone else can have their self isolating Utopia.
to answer: no, I don't think all health issues are a result of poor decisions or lifestyles. Some, as you mentioned are from genetics.
I was not very clear in the first post. You called me out on it, and rightfully so. Man enough to admit my post was made in haste and I didn't convey my thoughts very well.
already admitted my post was not clear and made in haste.
thinking was more along the lines of unhealthy people who have made poor lifestyle decisions, smokers for example. Obviously some health issues, as it relates to our topic, are not decisions. Cancer, also obviously, was not part of our discussion.
that original post really did not come across as intended, but I am going to leave it up and not hide and delete
So did OP come back to correct his original post or can we just fake math in a post and just pretend its true?
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