Yeah it’s kind of like climate change in that no single expert can really be qualified to address the scope of the whole problem. No one’s an oceanographer and an economist.
The 3.4% figure isn’t “bad science,” it’s a data point that needs to be understood in context. Like, it’s not hard to google dozens of experts patiently explaining why the real death rate will probably be much lower. This contrarian bro’s take seems to be that the experts aren’t aware of these nuances, and that’s just silly.
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seems like a lot of discussion, including some of the discussion on this forum, conflates case fatality rates with infection fatality rates.
as i understand it, the case fatality rate measures the fatality rate for people who get sick (i.e., have symptoms), and the infection fatality rate measures the fatality rate for all people who get infected with the virus whether or not they have symptoms. for reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, epidemiologists seem to care more about the case fatality rate. for example, i think most of the commonly quoted fatality rates for the flu are case fatality rates.
happy to be corrected by someone who actually understands this stuff.
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One nuance that definitely should be taken into account is how many that would survive with ventilation will die due to lack of access once systems become overburdened. It boggles the mind that governments wouldn’t take that into account but the narrative coming out of the UK right now is that this information only filtered through to the government in the last few days.
I hope you are starting your research for the dissertation you are going to need to provide to visit the grandkids…
Make them find a YouTube channel that is educational and have them report on one or two videos at meals that they like. Then have them do deeper dives on the topics of the videos.
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OK Boomer
I think we take a fundamentally different view of messaging that takes the form:
“WHO: CORONAVIRUS DEATH RATE 3.4%
[Several paragraphs]
Scientists emphasized that the actual death rate from coronavirus is unknown, but certain to be much less than 3.4%.”
Real experts can just go read the underlying papers and interpret them, but policy makers and the public cannot. People ITT cannot. Citizens who need to understand whether lockdowns are an appropriate response from their governments cannot.
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The death rate is likely highly influenced by the standard of care. In the extreme, a population gets no care (think rationing of vents in Italy).
I imagine ID of cases and starting O2 earlier has a positive effect on survival.
Watch the critical case and death numbers. Ignore the total number of cases in US for now. Testing is shamefully low so part of the current increases is catching up but still tons of people who likely have is but don’t meet the criteria. Also means we are underestimating the growth rate.
From a public policy standpoint we do the same things at 1% or even 0.5% as we do at 3.4%. I don’t understand what the point of the discussion is.
Pretty easy to assume that the infection rate is still higher than the testing rate. ie we are falling further behind the total case count each day.
Let’s use estimates that 20% of the infected require hospitalization, 5% require critical care, and 1% die if the system is not overburdened.
As long as we “flatten the curve” sufficiently, only the 1% (or whatever the theoretical mortality rate is) will die. Most of the 1% will use of critical care resources. As the medical system goes beyond capacity, those in the 5% go without critical care and, presumably, almost all of them die. As the number of infected increases above our capacity, the actual death rate approaches 5%, not including the spillover of non-infected who need critical care also not getting it. How close to 5% it gets depends on how far over capacity the needs are.
So, if we expect to exceed hospital capacity, then the critical care rate should become more important than the true fatality rate, because those are the people we are going to allow to die if we can’t treat everyone.
I don’t know if 3.4% is just a number taken by aggregating places where they have mitigated infections down to a manageable level and places they have not. I assume so.
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Precisely so.
That Imperial College study that’s doing the rounds estimated the UK would experience around 250k deaths (1.1 million US) and that this estimate excluded those who would die for lack of access to an ICU. They also estimated that current UK policy would overburden ICU’s more than eightfold. The effect on the mortality rate in such a scenario is obvious.
As far as I know the WHO figure was just their director giving the crude CFR of Deaths/identified cases at that moment in time. The exact quote was “Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died.” I don’t think it was meant to be an estimate of the true mortality rate at all, though I could definitely be wrong.
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Thinking about how bad the average person is with understanding math, exponential growth, probability, etc. made me realize something fun.
The venn diagram of people who are crowing about how the death rate is 1% so even if you do get sick you’re pretty much guaranteed to survive and the people who play the lottery religiously because “somebody has to win, why not me” is pretty damn close to a circle.
1 in 100.
1 in 300,000,000.
A lot of of people have no concept of how these numbers differ. They’re conclusion is based solely on what they want the outcome to be.
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No matter what, I think this exposes the need to develop standardized ways of tracking disease spread not only for medical but also for analytical uses. The two are being constantly conflated, and it’s both frustrating and detrimental to making sensible policy.
If it is true that only a very small (<1%) chunk of our population is infected, and that hospital admissions are already spiking regardless, and there is a large swing in survivable based on whether hospitalization is available, then our reaction to this currently is woefully inadequate. We should already be converting hotels into temporary hospitals, evaluating CPAP machines for their efficacy in treatments, etc.
If there is in fact a much higher rate of infection than is understood (say 20%), which our medically-oriented testing is failing to uncover (because it is geared towards people especially likely to have been exposed, avoiding false positives, isolating confirmed positives, etc), then perhaps it won’t be all that bad. Mortality rates will be much much lower than 1%, the vast majority of cases will not require hospitalization, and this is likely an overreaction.
But with the data we have, I fear we’re just pissing in the wind, and sort of striking a weird middle ground reaction between the two scenarios above.
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Guy in the cubicle farm is sick as a dog, no way I’m not getting something very soon.
It’s not bad from what I hear. As a socialist country they at least try to pump a bunch of money into stuff like that. Although a lot of it is complete bullshit - IE education sucks, high school costs money - one way Ortega recruits new Sandanista youth is with free high school. One of the hostels I stayed at was raising money to send kids to high school. That sucks.
https://www.scholaro.com/pro/countries/Nicaragua/Education-System
Secondary Education
A secondary school education is a luxury of which many poorer Nicaraguans can only dream, because the country is still harshly divided along language and ethnic lines, and the wealthy minority rule. Those fortunate enough to make it though grade 12, qualify to study further at local universities only, such is the world’s evaluation of the quality of their school education.
They have a shit ton of doctors. Costa Rica and Panama are probably better though. At least it’s super cheap and you won’t come out of it bankrupt like USA#1.
The data on the harm caused by the shutdowns won’t be in for years though so it’s pretty hard to compare. I suppose there are events in history similar enough to say something intelligent about it though.
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Why was he at work?
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You’re not sending home people exhibiting symptoms? That was the guidance a week ago!
Hopefully not the US.