OT: Coronavirus 2 - Covid Boogaloo

[Boom Boom Apathy]

Looks like our time and effort should have been placed in protecting the older and weaker of the population with out disruption of the rest of population to build a heard immunity.

There are roughly 330M Americans. Of that, roughly 245M are over 19 and older (2018 numbers), so I'll call them adults that make up the workforce.

~35M are 70 and older, thus at risk
~ 80M (30% of adults) have high blood pressure, thus at risk.
~ 30M have diabetes, thus at risk (and another ~ 85M are pre-diabetes).

Now, some of those in each group are the same person, so it's not all additive, but you also have people with compromised immune systems, other ailments, etc... So lets just say that probably 100M adults are either over 70 or are under 70 and have some sort of pre-existing condition to put them in the "weaker" bucket. That's ~40% of the adult population.

I think there might be some merit to the idea of protecting those most at risk while letting those at less risk get back to work and I base it off of data that shows death rates by age group and the news/data about certain pre-existing conditions and the virus's impact on people with those, like diabetes and high blood pressure. But how do you manage protecting tens of millions of people who are at risk? We haven't even been able to protect nursing homes AFTER we knew about it and knew actions needed to be taken based on the first outbreak in Washington.

 

[the halleJOKEL]

there is evidence that the virus causes long-term damage even in younger people

seems silly to race to herd immunity and potentially cut everyone's lifespans in doing so

 

[Sens1Canes2]

there is evidence that the virus causes long-term damage even in younger people

seems silly to race to herd immunity and potentially cut everyone's lifespans in doing so

WHO just yesterday said there was no evidence that having antibodies present will prevent contracting COVID a second time.
This may act like a cold.
Which would be a tad worrisome.

 

[The Stranger]

We haven't even been able to protect nursing homes AFTER we knew about it and knew actions needed to be taken based on the first outbreak in Washington.

Just listened to the latest Wharton Moneyball podcast. Per one of the Profs, half the deaths in Philadelphia are from nursing homes. Wonder how well that matches the rest of the US.

They also discussed a new model from the University of Texas for Covid deaths. There's a nice graph on this page that plots actual data and then transitions to a future forecast with confidence bounds.

 

[Unsustainable]

Nursing homes have always been a hotbed of diseases.

 

[Boom Boom Apathy]

Just listened to the latest Wharton Moneyball podcast. Per one of the Profs, half the deaths in Philadelphia are from nursing homes. Wonder how well that matches the rest of the US.

the other day, it was reported that it just passed 10,000 in the US, so about 20%. As @MinJaBen said a while ago, I suspect it’s a higher % if you remove NYC

 

[CanesFanBudMan]

WHO just yesterday said there was no evidence that having antibodies present will prevent contracting COVID a second time.
This may act like a cold.
Which would be a tad worrisome.

They then deleted this tweet and clarified with this one:

 

[Boom Boom Apathy]

They also discussed a new model from the University of Texas for Covid deaths. There's a nice graph on this page that plots actual data and then transitions to a future forecast with confidence bounds.

Thanks for posting that. If I compare it to the IHME model, it's a little more pessimistic than the IHME model, but similar shape.

I read two interesting articles this weekend about deaths and why it's so hard to get a truly accurate picture. There have been some people that have stated that the US death rate is inflated, because doctors are calling "everything" Covid19 related if the person tests positive. I talked to a couple of Dr's I know, and they told me that they can't speak for every hospital in every city, state, but that was a gross over-exaggeration. They said that if a death is likely due to Covid19, and they aren't able to test for Covid-19, they should count it, which makes sense to me, particularly early on where we didn't have enough tests (like the nursing home in NY where there were 50 deaths, but originally none of them were counted as Covid-19) and as doctors learn more and can likely identify it easier even without a test.

This article in the NYT, shows # of deaths in NYC compared to Historical Averages over a specific time in March-April.
36,000 Missing Deaths: Tracking the True Toll of the Coronavirus Crisis

The gist of article is that NYC had 300% more deaths than the historical average during this timeframe (or roughly 19,000 more deaths than average). At the time, there were ~15,000 deaths counted as Covid-19 related in NYC, so if you remove those, there were still ~4,000 more deaths than the historical average. That could be normal statistical variation, or other causes, but the author surmises that we are really underestimating the impact of Covid19 on the mortality rate. The trend occurs in some other countries as well, but not all, so some countries are probably doing a better job identifying the cause of death than others, which makes sense.

This second article talks about Covid-19 causing blood clots, and thus strokes in younger (30-50) people.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/04/24/strokes-coronavirus-young-patients/

While the number of people experiencing this is very small compared to the rest of the populations, it demonstrates that we continue to see how this virus (or our body's reaction to the virus) impacts us in ways we still don't fully understand.

 

[Anton Dubinchuk]

This second article talks about Covid-19 causing blood clots, and thus strokes in younger (30-50) people.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/04/24/strokes-coronavirus-young-patients/

While the number of people experiencing this is very small compared to the rest of the populations, it demonstrates that we continue to see how this virus (or our body's reaction to the virus) impacts us in ways we still don't fully understand.

This part seems scary on the surface. Not to be the "it's just another disease" guy (I'm not), but part of me wonders if the entire country and world were hyper-attentive in the same way right now to, say, the common cold, how many weird complications would be reported in the same way. To me those articles about people in their 40s getting strokes or etc. are analogous to the data itself - I'm not not paying attention to it, but until we have a greater sense of the full picture (which may not happen for awhile), I'm not sure whether to make heads or tails of it. Everyone once in awhile a kid gets the flu or chickenpox, takes aspirin, and gets Reye's Syndrome. It is the absolute exception to the rule, but if the whole world were focused on the flu or aspirin you might see similar articles about it.

Not making any statements about the validity of those articles, either, except that like the rest of it I'm approaching everything like we don't know as much as the article implies.

 

[Stickpucker]

Ideally, data

Can't generate data if you don't go through with it

 

[Joe McGrath]

So if this thing acts more like the cold than the flu, and there’s no such thing as a vaccine for the common cold and there’s no cure for the common cold, is it possible we are all just f***ed? Scientifically speaking.

 

[Boom Boom Apathy]

This part seems scary on the surface. Not to be the "it's just another disease" guy (I'm not), but part of me wonders if the entire country and world were hyper-attentive in the same way right now to, say, the common cold, how many weird complications would be reported in the same way. To me those articles about people in their 40s getting strokes or etc. are analogous to the data itself - I'm not not paying attention to it, but until we have a greater sense of the full picture (which may not happen for awhile), I'm not sure whether to make heads or tails of it. Everyone once in awhile a kid gets the flu or chickenpox, takes aspirin, and gets Reye's Syndrome. It is the absolute exception to the rule, but if the whole world were focused on the flu or aspirin you might see similar articles about it.

Not making any statements about the validity of those articles, either, except that like the rest of it I'm approaching everything like we don't know as much as the article implies.

Yeah agree, that's what I was trying to get at and why I prefaced all of it with " I read two interesting articles this weekend about deaths and why it's so hard to get a truly accurate picture."

I saw an interview on the 2nd article this morning, and the Dr. said those blood clots are pretty rare (thus my comment about it being very small numbers), just more that it shows how much we don't know yet.

 

[Sens1Canes2]

They then deleted this tweet and clarified with this one:

Aha. Never saw that one. Thanks.

The WHO doesn’t seem to be very good at stuff.

 

[Anton Dubinchuk]

Aha. Never saw that one. Thanks.

The WHO doesn’t seem to be very good at stuff.

They, at the very least, need a new PR guy. Or maybe a Chief Honesty Officer. Or something.

It sure seems like this is kinda the reason they exist and their time to shine and they are hurting more than helping...

 

[WreckingCrew]

This part seems scary on the surface. Not to be the "it's just another disease" guy (I'm not), but part of me wonders if the entire country and world were hyper-attentive in the same way right now to, say, the common cold, how many weird complications would be reported in the same way. To me those articles about people in their 40s getting strokes or etc. are analogous to the data itself - I'm not not paying attention to it, but until we have a greater sense of the full picture (which may not happen for awhile), I'm not sure whether to make heads or tails of it. Everyone once in awhile a kid gets the flu or chickenpox, takes aspirin, and gets Reye's Syndrome. It is the absolute exception to the rule, but if the whole world were focused on the flu or aspirin you might see similar articles about it.

Not making any statements about the validity of those articles, either, except that like the rest of it I'm approaching everything like we don't know as much as the article implies.

On a similar note, I wonder if we were tracking cases of the flu right now like we are COVID, how would the numbers compare (infections, rate, mortality, etc)? Because we're putting a daily count to it and tracking every single test/case/death for COVID, it makes it a real daily threat...and even though like in NC it's such a small portion of our population, numbers > 1000 start to seem huge because humans are not good at processing scale at that level ("oh no 9,000 people are sick" seems like a lot until you look at it relativistically - .086%) But I feel like if we did this same thing with the flu, numbers probably wouldn't be that much different...we don't freak out about it though because a) "it's just the flu", b) it hits every year regardless of a vaccine because of different/multiple strands, c) people die every day from flu, medical conditions, car accidents, overdoses, etc (just "background" noise while COVID is "extra" deaths). I bet there's a lot more people with the flu or common cold right now than our COVID count, but again, we're not micro-analyzing those things.

 

[DaveG]

Well well over 1000 at this point, continue here OT: - Coronavirus 3 - wait but Covid 19 is SARS-CoV-2