https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1279863122698919937?s=20
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I’m betting it’s already getting into a lot of retirement homes and nursing homes and the deaths aren’t being counted.
From my friend:
“One of my best friends brothers works at an old people home in Florida and she said he’s sad because a lot of the people are dying.”
To the degree that it is possible for the governor to prevent testing people in old folks homes, you just know DeSantis and Kemp are doing it 100%. I would imagine there are a few avenues to accomplish that but I am literally just guessing. Fairly likely Abbott and Ducey are too.
My guess is that a lot of procurement goes through the state. I also am guessing that the businesses and holding companies that operate them get a number of benefits/handouts from the government, and thus the governor would have some leverage. At the very least they have to be regulated and licensed, and could be leveraged that way.
On top of that they have a financial interest in not having a recorded outbreak, so they may not even need to be leveraged.
Keep in mind that once they’re locked down for the pandemic, as they should be, the amount of information going in and out is pretty limited. Also keep in mind that any one person’s death is not going to be scrutinized, given their age and health. Relatives will know their loved one died, but they won’t know 20 people died or whatever.
I mean, does that info even get publicly reported? Short of a whistleblower coming out and saying, “Yeah a bunch of people died here with COVID-19 symptoms and none was tested or reported because there’s a plan in place to cover that up,” how would we ever find out?
I have taken a lot of heat and people posting TESTING and YOUNGS in this thread for basically two months for pointing out death stats in several large states have never made sense. Several states death stats are openly, on the record rigged and we still spend literally tons of this time in this thread wringing our hands about WHERE ARE THE DEATHS.
Are the right wing talking points (more testing, lower average age of infected, etc) making an impact? Sure. But that doesn’t explain why some of these states have had way lower than average death rates on average long before those factors were relevant.
Georgia, Texas, Florida and yes even California are not reporting deaths the way they should be according to the CDC. That will artificially lower the death rates in those places by definition.
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It will come out. I have confidence.
I should have said per capita, yeah. Pretty sure we’re nowhere near first per capita.
I’m 100% confident it will come out. I’m 80% confident it won’t come out in time.
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Right, and the fact that those talking points are a source of debate on this forum, in this community, is evidence of how fucked we are IMO. I think a lot of people’s subconscious defense mechanism to the worst of what’s going on right now with regard to COVID-19 and with regard to Trump’s authoritarianism is basically some form of denial. That scares me as much, if not more than the challenges we face.
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Do you know how far off covid deaths from June are from excess deaths for June? If it’s 50% or more that would be a slam dunk to bolster this idea that death-gaming is a big component of current low death rates.
The last I saw total excess deaths since covid has been around - are off by like 20% or something from reported covid deaths.
Results There were approximately 781 000 total deaths in the United States from March 1 to May 30, 2020, representing 122 300 (95% prediction interval, 116 800-127 000) more deaths than would typically be expected at that time of year. There were 95 235 reported deaths officially attributed to COVID-19 from March 1 to May 30, 2020. The number of excess all-cause deaths was 28% higher than the official tally of COVID-19–reported deaths during that period.
For deaths to be way down since April in these states due to gaming, excess deaths should be way way up right?
Have all those states changed the way they report deaths, so that them being way off is a relatively new phenomenon, or are you saying they’ve been doing this from the beginning? If so, why don’t we see a greater discrepancy with excess deaths now vs. then?
I’m ready to believe you but it would be nice to see some concrete metric to back this up - like excess deaths for June are way way off of reported covid deaths. Or show that case demographics don’t skew massively young. Etc.
Meanwhile nicholas is saying it’s all just because deaths are still lagging. Which also makes sense. But somehow that doesn’t seem to be the general argument. It seems like you’re assume lagging deaths should have happened by now, but haven’t because of gaming
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I have seen several studies like the Yale study and this study which show us undercounting deaths:
They always end at May 31 or earlier for some reason. Someone smarter than me may know how to get excess death stats from June 1-present but we have “only” had about 25,000 deaths attributed to covid in that time period. I’d bet a lot of money the excess death total is significantly higher.
I agree we’re undercounting deaths. But from everything posted in this thread - death rates are still way down compared to April, right? So are we undercounting them even more now?
Or are they still just lagging like nicholas thinks?
FWIW - it makes perfect sense to me that the leading edge of this wave would be youngs and the death rate would be down because of that. Doesn’t mean the rest of the wave is going to be all young. I even posted at least one hospital saying their patients skew much younger than the first time around, and thus have a better chance of survival.
I don’t know why you’re just blanket ruling out demographics.
The lag was about 10 days for NY/NJ and Italy and etc. I suppose you could argue that in FL it’s starting to infect younger people and will take longer to work its way to nursing homes? idk, there’re just too many moving parts at play here.
Remember that at the time, in NY/NJ, they were only testing the really really sick people. It takes time for someone to get really really sick and then it takes even more time for them to die. Now they’re testing people who are likely sometimes presymptomatic. Give it another few weeks.
Arizona’s total case load seems to skew pretty young. Not sure how this compares to other states.
Maybe one of these states let’s you filter by active cases or something and still see demographics. That would be sweet.
Here’s NYC’s demographics for cases:
Of course it’s hard to compare because early in on NYC only really sick people got tested. But from anecdotal reports it’s starting to get like that in AZ and Houston.
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The states with the most cases now have always been undercounting them (GA,CA,FL,TX, etc). And we know, from the CDC, that they have not been following CDC death reporting guidelines.
The states with the most cases in April have been following CDC death reporting guidelines (NY,NJ, IL, etc).
As the number of new cases has shifted from 20% group one to 80% group one and vice versa for group two we have seen the CFR plummet for the obvious reason.
We have also seen that group two CONTINUES to have a basicslly 5-10x death rate vs. group two even though testing and age of infection has changed across both groups.
This is very complex. Beyond the stuff we talk about like traffic accidents being down, there are also people with like late stage cancer and such who would have died anyway but died of COVID-19. We should be counting them, we’re probably mostly not counting them, and the difference won’t show up in the excess deaths.
The ratio of cases in states trying to count deaths (NY) to states not trying to count deaths (the South and California) has shifted.
Yes and also because the testing is happening earlier in many cases, the lag time should increase.
wtf is this Oxford guy talking about?
Dr Tom Jefferson, senior associate tutor at the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (CEBM), at Oxford, and visiting professor at Newcastle University, argues that there is growing evidence that the virus was elsewhere before it emerged in Asia.
Last week, Spanish virologists announced they had found traces of the disease in samples of waste water collected in March 2019, nine months before the coronavirus disease was seen in China.
Italian scientists have also found evidence of coronavirus in sewage samples in Milan and Turin, in mid-December, many weeks before the first case was detected, while experts have found traces in Brazil in November.
Dr Jefferson believes that many viruses lie dormant throughout the globe and emerge when conditions are favourable. It also means they can vanish as quickly as they arrive.
“Where did Sars 1 go? It’s just disappeared,” he said "So we have to think about these things. We need to start researching the ecology of the virus, understanding how it originates and mutates.
"I think the virus was already here, here meaning everywhere. We may be seeing a dormant virus that has been activated by environmental conditions.
The World Health Organization has long held that the coronavirus is spread primarily by large respiratory droplets that, once expelled by infected people in coughs and sneezes, fall quickly to the floor.
But in an open letter to the W.H.O., 239 scientists in 32 countries have outlined the evidence showing that smaller particles can infect people, and are calling for the agency to revise its recommendations. The researchers plan to publish their letter in a scientific journal next week.
I fail to understand how average age of COVID case and %positive rate being lower now (although rapidly growing) is an example of how we are buying into right wing talking points.
Guys, these facts support team doom and gloom. If these are right wing talking points, they’re really shitty ones. They suggest the exact opposite of what the right is wishcasting (ie that the virus will magically disappear). Obviously if the virus is spreading massively among the youngs it means it is only a matter of time before more olds get infected. And obviously a big infection surge will push up %positive rates and make a coming surge in deaths that much worse.
The right’s best talking point is that somehow the virus has lost its intensity and has mutated into something less severe. There’s scant evidence for this, and the fact that youngs are getting COVID at high rates and %positive rates had gone way down until mid-June are counterarguments to this.
Riggage is probably true and rampant, but isn’t a very good reason to explain week to week changes (or lack thereof) in infection rates and death stats. Rigged in April, May, June, and July just the same. If a big surge in deaths occur, we will find out one way or another—it will take several weeks to sort it all out, though.
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I propose a bet. Will Florida see a 7dma of o/u 200 deaths by July 19 two weeks from today and over a month post spike.
I will bet up to 1k on under against whoever. I want the under and we will use Worldometers. They calculate it for Florida daily.
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