COVID-19 (2): Turns out it's going to be pretty bad actually

No clue if this is something, or nothing.

https://twitter.com/ScottGottliebMD/status/1253321483402674178

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I was wondering why gyms were specifically called out in the plan. Bribes basically.

Nail salons need better lobbyists.

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https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/494200-california-gov-orders-autopsies-back-to-december-to-find-out-how-long

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I’m not really disputing your take on the UK government, but I don’t think I’ve seen anything to indicate that cotton face coverings are particularly more or less protective either of self or of others from self than garden variety surgical masks. I was under the impression that both were not all that great at protecting you and somewhat better at protecting others. Am I behind the times?

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I’ve been thinking a bit about how COVID is mostly killing people who didn’t have long to live and how that is something that should be considered and I do think it is, but that’s not to say that the shutdown is an overreaction. It would be different if 20% of infected people who were 10-30 years old were dying as opposed to 20% of 85+, but it’s more that younger people dying would make this almost unimaginably bad.

That is what the Spanish Flu was - peak deaths were adolescents and very young adults.

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I have said a few times previously, with reports of the earliest Chinese cases in November, I thought we had to have cases here in 2019.

Unfortunately as we still scramble to understand milder cases and non symptomatic cases, we don’t have a good handle on things,

I’ve had this talk with my wife several times over the last 6 months or so. It’s not a good feeling to be questioning your reality like that.

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So…let people go to parks, beaches, go fishing, etc? Seems like that sort of stuff should clearly be the first thing relaxed.

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Well, I don’t think anyone really knows for sure, but there is some indication that cotton coverings help protect other people, so I don’t think it’s bad to tell people who have to go out to use a scarf if that’s the best they have.

If it mostly killed young people (18-35) There would be an even stronger push to reopen the economy. The only reason this is even being taken sort of seriously is because the people in power are old and face risk. They’d have zero problem with millions of youngs dying.

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https://mobile.twitter.com/MiriamElder/status/1253332264601006088

Disagree. And it’s the older people who seem to be taking this less seriously as is.

And when they send young people off to die in wars, they know their kids aren’t going.

So far we’re on track to reach 1.17M total confirmed cases in the US. These projections creep up a bit every time because the curve is fit to a symmetric model, so consider it an underestimate. I had to re-enter data for deaths after they re-did how they’re counting them, and I’m getting 70k, but I won’t be surprised if we get over 100k. Good news is the recovery looks a lot like Italy’s.

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60 Minutes from a week ago ran a story on a young woman who just graduated with some bio-tech degree, first in her family to go to college, trying to hold her Staten Island family together while her father is in the hospital. Her sister and Mom both need in-home dialysis.

Edit: looks like they’re putting stories online now:

The day after their interview the dad died so they did a follow up over skype. Absolutely heart-breaking. They couldn’t be there with him. They just had to wait for phone calls from the hospital. She got to see him in the hospital after he died. She said the nurses and doctors were all crying.

The dad was 50 and kind of overweight but not terribly.

There’s a gofundme btw: https://www.gofundme.com/f/santacroce-relief-fund

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Two things about the “it’s mostly olds who are dying anyways” angle:

  1. There is a common metric, QALY or quality adjusted life years, which I believe has been highly standardized for population mortality analysis. If we had more aggregate data on the deceased readily available, these calculations are not difficult to perform; like, it’s something that can be done with a lot more authority than a number of guesswork calcs done by the likes of the National Review, but I’ve yet to see any.

  2. If there are ongoing complications as a result of COVID-19 in younger people, such as Nick Cordero having his leg amputated or permanent lung damage among younger people, this will have a large (bad) impact on QALY losses due to COVID-19. Potentially a larger factor than the actual mortality from the disease.

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I’m going to be a nitty pedant and point out that most of the people who work in assisted living facilities aren’t nurses. They also get paid terribly.

Even in an actual nursing home the majority of the people providing care will be at best LPN’s. Typically there’s one actual RN per shift, possibly covering multiple wards.

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I don’t think this is right. Young people mean cheaper, more flexible labour and net contributors to the government’s coffers. Old people are the opposite and, political considerations aside, are expendable as they’re a huge drain on pensions and health resources that could otherwise be spent buying votes with tax cuts.

Yup, and in the US this means the people caring for olds are disproportionately transit-dependent people from larger than typical households with other family members who must work and who live in denser, more confined areas than single family houses.

Great system we’ve got here.

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My wife is a supervisor at an assisted living facility. We’re doing a LOT less to quarantine than the rest of you as a direct result. We know we’re getting it sooner or later (probably sooner) because getting takeout or starbucks is like 1/1000 as risky as her going to work literally any given shift. None of her coworkers can afford to do social distancing in any way shape or form. Kids are staying with random family members, buses are being ridden, and life is proceeding pretty much as normal in the world of extremely poor healthcare workers who work with the elderly.

The only good news really is that the families can’t come in any more. If we added a bunch of them to the mix it would come even faster.

As it stands it’s only a matter of time though.

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I definitely agree, and I don’t think that “uncounting” is appropriate either. I just can’t tell if I’m just an ageist asshole that deep down in my black soul simply doesn’t care as much about a 90 year old in a nursing home who was about to croak for any number of reasons dying as a “healthy 40 year old” or whatever that even means.

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