US Deaths Soared In Early Weeks of Pandemic, Far Exceeding Number Attributed To COVID-19 (beckershospitalreview.com) 309
hackingbear writes: According to The Washington Post, U.S. deaths soared in the early weeks of the pandemic, surpassing the number of COVID-19 related deaths, as well as the number normally expected for the time period. An estimated 15,400 excess deaths occurred from March 1 to April 4, nearly double the 8,128 deaths attributed to COVID-19 during that time. The excess deaths estimate was calculated by subtracting the expected seasonal baseline from all deaths but may be attributed to causes other than COVID-19 directly, such as patients afraid of visiting hospitals. On April 15, the New York City revised its COVID-19 death toll upward by 3,778 to account for people who were not tested but presumed to have died from the virus. On April 17, the city of Wuhan, the original epicenter of COVID-19, similarly raised death toll by 1,290 to account for omission due to overwhelmed hospitals in the early days of the epidemic in the city, but the change was viewed as an "evidence" of prior cover-up in the West. The excess deaths "could include people who died because of the epidemic but not from the disease, such as those who were afraid to seek medical treatment for unrelated illnesses, as well as some number of deaths that are part of the ordinary variation in the death rate," notes The Washington Post. "The count is also affected by increases or decreases in other categories of deaths, such as suicides, homicides and motor vehicle accidents."
"But in any pandemic, higher-than-normal mortality is a starting point for scientists seeking to understand the full impact of the disease."
"But in any pandemic, higher-than-normal mortality is a starting point for scientists seeking to understand the full impact of the disease."
It's happening elsewhere too (Score:5, Informative)
Same thing happened in the UK. Deaths spiked way higher than accounted for just by official COVID-19 numbers.
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The number of corona-deaths seemed higher in my country (BE) than in other countries due adding 'suspect-corona' - deaths in the statistics, which lead to higher number than in surrounding countries. Now a few weeks later by comparing the actual deaths with the average for april/march in the previous years the published number seemed correct. The difference was mostly attributed to deaths in nursing homes.
Re: It's happening elsewhere too (Score:2)
Donâ(TM)t forget that deaths tagged as covid carry funding....
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If COVID-19 deaths are a subset of the deaths, one should expect overall death rates to be greater than just the COVID-19 deaths. Baseline mortality in the UK was already near 10000 per month before the epidemic.
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Oops. Meant to say baseline mortality was 10000 per week, not per month.
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You've misunderstood; not surprising as the article headline is not well written. What they're talking about is not baseline deaths, but the number of deaths over the normal baseline. This number is much greater than the deaths attributed to COVID-19. It is most likely that a lot of these extra deaths are caused by COVID-19 but are not being attributed to it.
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Same thing happened in the UK. Deaths spiked way higher than accounted for just by official COVID-19 numbers.
I've been saying this for the past month. This was first reported (as far as I can tell) by the RIVM (equivalent of the CDC) and the CBS (not sure who they are equivalent to the in USA since every department there seems to be in charge of its own statistics) in the Netherlands.
Since then countries around the world have done similar studies. So far the excess mortality figures corrected for official COVID deaths are around 10-30% in most countries.
Re:It's happening elsewhere too (Score:5, Insightful)
Statistically speaking, only in retrospective, you can try to assess the false-negatives, people dying from a SARS-CoV-19 infection or associated complications, but not being tested positive for CoViD-19 by either not being tested at all or by being tested negative.
Re:It's happening elsewhere too (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It's happening elsewhere too (Score:5, Interesting)
The virus has some unusual complications that are almost certainly killing at least some people who might not go to the hospital for COVID-19 symptoms -- like clots that lead to stroke and heart attack.
There is some suspicion that it may trigger inflammatory and autoimmune responses that can have psychiatric manifestations, including possibly suicide. Social distancing and economic stress probably also contribute to suicide deaths.
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The case could be made that most countries on the list are over reporting covid-19 deaths, but I think we're looking at deaths from covid-19 were the person would have died anyway during the time period. Sweden and Denmark are both outliers, while Sweden is nearly twice the size of Denmark they have vastly different death rates per capita.
These are all from start to about today, so the figures could be different for a different time period, but I believe that countries that have a reported covid-19 death toll that is below the increased death toll from a five year average should be viewed with a high degree of skepticism.
I don't just believe but am sure the number of Covid-19 deaths is underreported everywhere.
Like in The Netherlands only those that have had a positive test and die are reported, similar is the case in most EU countries.
Germany is pretty good with testing but nowhere is sufficient testing done but Luxembourg is planning to test the whole population.
I'm quite sure every country will find cases that wasn't reported, but how do you account for countries where the covid deaths are way above the excess deaths, Denmark 334%, Sweden 81%, France 41%, Italy 25%? The hypothesis I have is that it's an effect of those who would have died within the time period anyway, but the case could certainly be made for over attributing deaths to covid. Decreases in other deaths such as traffic accidents etc can't really account for the numbers and there ought to be an addit
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It means people decided not to go to the hospitals even though they should have.
Thank you fear mongering POS.
And who knows how many were related to hospitals shutting down services to prepare for the plague.
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It seems unlikely that deaths would spike that high just from people staying away from hospitals. That can be confirmed through statistics as well. When a post mortem is being done on all of this, they can also look at hospital admissions and figure out how much hospital admissions were actually down by. It honestly does look like there are a lot of uncredited deaths due to Covid-19. The really worrying prospect there is that some of these deaths are from causes other than respiratory problems. There's defi
Re:It's happening elsewhere too (Score:5, Insightful)
Staying away from medical facilities is an issue. I had a close call with a relative who didn't go to monthly required testing for two months because of COVID-19 concerns, with tacit approval from the doctor, and the blood value being monitored went wildly out of range. The person had a very close call resulting in a weeklong serious hospitalization.
I totally support the lockdown but it's important to understand the big picture, in order to optimize the situation, and not cause collateral damage. There are people who have a vested interested in removing the lockdowns, and they will use any evidence to argue against it, but policy makers should deal with the complete picture in order to create the most social benefit.
COVID-19 concerns are without question pushing people with serious medical issues to stay away from hospitals/testing facilities, avoiding routine maintenance and monitoring, which could absolutely result in death.
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I totally support the lockdown but it's important to understand the big picture
Everyone does understand the big picture. I don't know of a single country who told people not to go to doctors during the lockdown. If people are afraid of COVID-19 and therefore not visiting the doctor then it has nothing to do with the lockdown, and everything to do with a mixture of perception, understanding, stupidity, and in the USA health insurance status.
Re:It's happening elsewhere too (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know what it is like where you live, but where I live (in the United States) we were specifically told to not go to doctors/hospitals (and are still being told that). Our local hospital is sitting empty, laying off workers, and has lost $3M so far according to an article in the local paper. I believe that they expect people to head in if it's "really serious" but I suspect most people have trouble judging whether any particular issue they have will be judged "really serious" by medical professionals, and may very well be erring on the side of caution.
My wife, who was being treated for a pre-existing knee problem, could not get an appointment to have an unexpected flare-up checked out after the COVID-19 shutdowns until her doctor's office put a "telemedicine" (Doctors visit via Skype, basically) system in place. After the telemedicine "visit" she was able to get an appointment to see a physical therapist in person, under very restricted conditions. The PT business is running a very reduced staff and only seeing the most urgent patients. My wife's not visiting the doctor sooner had everything to do with the lockdown, and nothing to do with stupidity, perception, or US health insurance status.
All of the dental providers in our area have shut down, as another example. The super high-end oral surgeon who lives in my neighborhood has been kicking around his house for over a month now. I hope he saved some of his $$ because he sure spent a boatload buying then completely refurbishing his house last year and probably has some big loans to pay off. My kid's dental clinic in town has closed - hopefully temporarily. My wife's dental clinic several towns over just called yesterday to cancel her checkup/cleaning appointment that was scheduled for early May; they say as soon as they are told they can open back up by the government, they'll be calling/re-scheduling appointments.
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What makes it seem unlikely? Everyone is on lockdown and the media is constantly beating us over the head with Covid-19 death totals and reminders to stay inside and away from others.
I have a friend who is an ER doc. She's having her hours cut back because there's no one coming in except for Covid. Even for heart attacks. They normally have a certain number that they treat and those people aren't showing up. They're dying in their homes, too afraid of a virus to seek medical attention for an acute, lif
Testing not available Re:It's happening elsewhere] (Score:3)
It means people decided not to go to the hospitals even though they should have.
Not even that. It's that a death is only attributed to Covid-19 if it is confirmed by testing, and the testing was not available.
see: https://www.wsj.com/articles/w... [wsj.com]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/03/16/cdc-who-coronavirus-tests/
https://www.businessinsider.com/new-york-man-denied-coronavirus-test-japan-trip-fever-cough-2020-3
http://archive.today/tp9HA
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Ahhh...no.
Deaths are attributed if they exhibit symptoms that match [nypost.com], even if the death is actually cased by long standing disease processes.
Re: It's happening elsewhere too (Score:2, Insightful)
It means people decided not to go to the hospitals even though they should have.
It has everything to do with the fact that it got here a lot earlier than reported (there's evidence that international skiers brought it to Germany and Colorado last year) and and is actually far less lethal by orders of magnitude than we're being told. Of course, if deaths were being undercounted then; it's quite the opposite now; to fuel the fear, everything including the kitchen sink* is now being 'officially' blamed on the virus.
*Lots of deaths are been caused by ventilator-use...
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Do you have a source for Covid in Colorado last year? I can find one article that speculates maybe mid-to-late January of this year, but very little else. I'd actually be really happy if there's an increased chance I've already been exposed and got through it, but right now that feels more like wishful thinking.
Re: It's happening elsewhere too (Score:2)
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To be fair, people aren't put on the ventilator unless they're likely to die if they aren't. Ordinarily 50% of the people who are put on a ventilator die. With COVID the figures seem to be around 80%, though I've seen a wide range of estimates, down to as low as 60%.
That said, there *are* suggestions that ventilators are a bad idea with COVID, and perhaps some other approach would be better. Proning combined with extra oxygen is one approach, I haven't heard how well it works. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov [nih.gov]
Re:It's happening elsewhere too (Score:5, Insightful)
When China does it they were hiding deaths. When we do it we are faking deaths. You can't win with the tinfoil hat crowd.
Re:It's happening elsewhere too (Score:5, Informative)
I wouldn't even call it incompetence. A lot of that is the early days. We didn't yet know the full extend of asymptomatic carriers and how far it had spread. In those days of early March, the US thought we had less than 100 cases (and mostly limited to a few areas). It wasn't really common yet to look to COVID-19 for an explanation unless you were in one of the few areas where it was starting to pick up. Plus, we've seen recently there have been a number of deaths where people die suddenly without having had any complications. If people didn't fit the symptoms of COVID-19, then even in an area where the hospitals were aware of it, they wouldn't have had reason to suspect it.
I think the thing is all the data was out there (Score:3)
Re:It's happening elsewhere too (Score:4, Informative)
I wouldn't even call it incompetence
I would. Look at the timeline of the WHO announcements. ELook at the WHO guidelines from Feb 27th:
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No. As ever, don't attribute to malice what can be fully explained by incompetence
Yes, because taking advice from ruthless dictators is wise...
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You don't need to accurately determine if a death was caused by COVID-19. You can simply look at how many deaths were registered compared to how many you would expect in a similar year (similar weather etc.) and the difference is approximately how many people died directly or indirectly as a result of the virus.
Donald Trump didn't want a ship to dock (Score:2)
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Correct, and due to the acute shortage of test kits, coroners were, and still are, unable to verify [cnn.com] if a person died [post-gazette.com] from covid-19 [cleveland.com] if they suspect that is the cause.
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The summary explicitly states that the excess numbers do not involve infections with covid-19. They're not just counting deaths by car accident when someone has covid-19 in their blood as "death with covid-19", they're calling death because you're afraid to get dialysis as "death by covid-19" which is also B.S.
Yeah, but car accident deaths are massively down because of reduced travel. For example, in California, car accident deaths are down by a factor of two. That translates to almost 5 fewer deaths per day. How many people do you think are dying because they're afraid to get dialysis?
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It means that a lot of people are dying without anyone noticing or attributing it to COVID-19.
In the UK there have been a lot of deaths in elderly care homes. Doubtless a lot in private homes that have not yet been discovered. Social distancing means people are not seeing friends and relatives as often, so no one goes to check if they are still alive.
Also some people are avoiding going to hospital for fear of getting infected, and some treatments are being cancelled because they can't be done safely.
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It means that a lot of people are dying without anyone noticing or attributing it to COVID-19. In the UK there have been a lot of deaths in elderly care homes. Doubtless a lot in private homes that have not yet been discovered.
Exactly. Look at the statistics again; they are statistics for confirmed cases. Without a test confirming it, it doesn't get recorded at a COVID-19 death.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/26... [cnn.com]
Re:It's happening elsewhere too (Score:4, Informative)
If you look at the rate for the country as a whole, it is perhaps about a 10% increase. But take a look at the numbers from NYC (in the Washington Post article). These went from about 1000 / week to 5000 / week. I think that is a bit above the threshold of certainty.
In most of the country, the virus hasn't been really widespread. But it spreads quickly and without the drastic steps taken, the numbers for the country would be much, much higher (and hence much more obvious when you read the graph). The lockdowns really have kept the cases low.
Re:It's happening elsewhere too (Score:4, Insightful)
nobody knows the exact proportion of each; All we can know at this stage is that in countries like South Korea, Taiwan, New Zealand and the Czech Republic which handled the disease early and eliminated it these things happened less. In countries like the UK and US where the "heard immunity" and "it's just a bad flu" theories were prevalent and lockdown happened late lots more people have died; already far more than just a slight acceleration of deaths that would have happened anyway.
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Just so ya know, the methods used to fight this in South Korea, Taiwan, New Zealand and the Czech Republic would have been met with ferocious opposition, especially before March.
For Fuck's Sake, Nancy threatened to pass legislation taking away the President's ability to ban flights after he restricted flights from China.
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I doubt the flights from China thing did anything to stop transmission - it was easy to go indirectly for a start. Never mind the problem was already in the country...
At the time putting temperature checks in at airports would have been thought sensible, but now we know 50% are asymptomatic. It might have helped however.
Better - early quarantine for people arriving from China, and checking any presence in China in prior two weeks regardless of route.
Italy banned flights from China. People went other routes,
Re:It's happening elsewhere too (Score:4, Insightful)
Restricting travel from China is completely pointless if you let US Citizens come back without mandatory quarantine periods. Chinese people in China are no more likely than US people in China to carry the virus.
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They were screened. Some of them were quarantined. You can't force 40000 people into 14 day quarantines when theres only a handful of cases.
You mention some of the precise reasons why the travel restrictions were not recommended, unless you stopped all travel that is and I don't know of any nation which was taking such drastic measures at the time (although in hindsight such a restriction would have helped as a delaying tactic). Half measures without proper planning had both the chance of making things worse (which they probably did) and the chance of causing complacency while people hope these half measures will be successful. It is clear we w
Re: It's happening elsewhere too (Score:5, Insightful)
No. WHO said there was no proof of human transmission. This is NOT a statement that there *is* no human transmission. It's a statement that they don't know.
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So what you are saying is that Trump could and was not afraid of banning things even if the democrats were strongly against it.
Congrats, you've just absolved the democrats from any responsibility in how Trump handled the crisis.
So let's see, an incomplete and arbitrary ban in January, and nothing in February.
Good job Mr "I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic".
What you hear vs. what you decide to understand. (Score:5, Insightful)
and "it's just a bad flu" theories were prevalent
Well, it is "a (very) bad flu" or as others have put it "a seasonal cold on steroid".
The problem is what was meant by those initially saying it, and what those hearing it wanted to understand out of it.
What was meant:
- it is an epidemic that share some characteristic with flu.
- it is similarly an epidemic that only kills a subset of the patients (meaning that a lot of people could spread it around and then recover).
- currently it is still roughly in the ball-park of some of the worse flus in term of deaths (say as opposed to black plague wiping half of Europe).
- at least 95% of patients recover from it (say as opposed to (untreated) rabbies).
- there's no reason to utterly panic anymore than with other "occasionnally-only deadly" epidemic.
- it is similarly a respiratory disease spreading mostly by droplets and some direct contact (person A coughs in hands, A&B shake hands, B touches face).
- the outside air isn't going to insta-kill you if you breath it. For 95% of people, the reason you are staying home is not to avoid dying your self, but avoid spreading it be meeting other people. If you don't stay confined you won't personnally die yourself, but you're indirectly contributing to killing the other 5%. (*)
(Also of note: it very likely came from an animal reservoir, just for once: an exotic animal (bat) instead of the usual animal that westerner stuff their mouths full of (e.g.: chicken and pork if you think about the flu) leading to masses of "bat soup" useless memes.)
What was understood by some:
- it is "only a flu" therefore we should do nothing about it, putting hands on the ears and chanting lalala
And that's stupid because even for regular non-bad flu we to vaccinate to increase herd immunity and slow down the spread.
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(*) and completely destroy the hospitals: all the heavy cases arrive fast and quickly overload the hospital, because the disease spreads fucking fast and heavy cases stay several weeks in there.
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That is not at all what was meant by the "it is a very bad flu" comments.
What was meant:
- we shouldn't be more worried about this virus than we are of standard influenza
- we shouldn't take more drastic measures than we do for every yearly influenza season, other than restricting some international travel
Anything else is just an attempt to rewrite history.
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Well, it is "a (very) bad flu"
I really wish people would stop calling this a flu. Sure both are viruses, but they are not even in the same taxonomic order. Calling a coronavrus a flu is like calling a cat "a very bad type of dog" because both dig up your houseplants.
The other animals too (Score:3)
Non-useless personal takeaway: Eat things that God tells you to eat,
Any other animal that is raised for meat is just as likely to transfer a zoonosis to human.
Wait, actually I should have asked: which god or gods?
Or do you worship a peculiar pantheon where every single one of them is represented: including Buddah (who is going to warn you against mad cow disease), Allah (who's going to warn you against Swine Flu and Nipah) and multiple other deities (somebody needs to warn you gainst Bird Flu and all the other multiple zoonosis) ?
If your takeaway is "do not eat" what a sing
influenza vs. sars-cov-2 (Score:3)
People that criticize the "just the flu" crowd clearly don't understand the flu.
Even with vaccines, the flu kills up to 650,000 people a year, including children. It's no joke.
I totally agree with this part. Influenza fucking kills, that's why we need to do something about it.
With the current level of science and technology, that something is a vaccine.
And though it's not a joke, it's not a reason to mass panic neither.
Same for COVID-19, it's not a joke, but it's not a reason to go hysterical.
It's also not a reason to shut down the world and neither was Covid.
I do not necessarily agree with that part.
There are three peculiarities to the SARS-CoV-2:
- As serologies start to show, not everyone gets to develop COVID-19. That means you can hav
Re:It's happening elsewhere too (Score:4, Informative)
there are people who died of Covid-19 but haven't been accounted in the normal figures because nobody tested them
My state counts Covid-19 deaths as anyone who had any of the symptoms, test or no test. So the numbers are probably inflated here. I believe the reasoning for this is political.
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You also missed people dying by running out of toilet paper...
Yes, dark humor. It's "but a flesh wound".
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It's Manson's mob at work again I bet, they've taken advantage of the opportunity to go out and commit 15,400 murders that'll get blamed on something else.
Initially I thought it was the Clintons again but Chelsea said her mother has only had a bit over 50 people killed [youtube.com] so it's a bigger conspiracy than that.
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The number will be worked out statistically to a reasonable degree of confidence in due course - possibly a larger manual death certificate check, presuming
The weather has been good (in the UK at least), and the death rate was trending below the average until March, and nothing occurred to change that except Covid19. At some point you can simply assume that Covid19 caused all the additional deaths above the trend line. And that's bad in the UK, as the FT (who have done some detailed number crunching) estima
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In addition, with people staying at home, there are fewer accidental deaths - including car accidents. So even the baseline is expected to be lower. Unfortunately higher on the drug addict side. I know locally of 3 that died of overdoses after their support group stopped meeting in-person.
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In the USA there's usually over 200K deaths per month not taking into account seasonal variations. 15K isn't even 10% of that and annually rates naturally vary +- 30%.
You only need to do a ballpark to find their figure is well within expected fluctuation and sufficiently small to urge extra caution in assuming the cause.
What it means is that it's a possible
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FWIW Belgium has been reported presumed COVID-19 deaths in their statistics, figuring it would be more accurate to revise downward later. They're probably right that the downward adjustment will be small compared to the upward adjustment other countries will need to do. There is also some variance between countries which report only hospital deaths versus nursing home deaths, and some spikes where countries started adding in the nursing home deaths. At any rate it is probably a reasonable assumption to w
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They have medications for your illness.
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The UK ignored it just as much. Our PM couldn't even be bothered to go to the COBRA meetings where they discussed it, resulting in no one taking charge or taking the necessary action.
We have a similar problem with dishonesty too. For example the government boasts about all the PPE it has, even though it counts thinks like paper towels as PPE and counts a pair of gloves as two items.
HOAX (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:HOAX (Score:5, Funny)
Re:HOAX (Score:5, Funny)
Re:HOAX (Score:5, Funny)
The camps are REAL, I have personally seen satellite photos of them, somewhere. Some guy said a friend of his actually worked for a contractor that had another crew that actually worked on the actual fencing! Really! So for starters don't make fun of them, us, whoever. FEMA is mainly funded by Mexico, you know. So now you know what to expect of them. And speaking of whoever, why do you think WHO chose those exact letters to represent them? Just think about that situation before you make fun.
WHO, no kidding
Re:HOAX (Score:5, Funny)
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And if you want your loved ones back, you're going to have send some bitcoin....
Clearly (Score:5, Insightful)
This is proof of a concerted effort by thousands of people from statisticians to politicians the world over trying to make Trump look bad! It's obviously evidence of some vast conspiracy!
I'm completely joking, conspiracy theories are absurd because they require a vast number of people to remain silent, which in this age of social media is pretty much impossible.
What amazes me is that people will genuinely believe what I said above, and yet they always fail to explain the mechanisms of how such a vast conspiracy would work. Instead they cite disparate "evidence" that collectively "proves" the validity of their claims, ignoring entirely the facts that call serious doubts on their claims. This is confirmation bias (and a number of other cognitively biases) at work.
Robert Anton Wilson, the writer and counterculture trickster wrote an essay in his book Everything is Under Control in which he analyzed the structure common to a conspiracies and then proceeded to demonstrate in the remainder of the book how one can construct a conspiracy by employing that basic structure.
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What amazes me is that people will genuinely believe what I said above, and yet they always fail to explain the mechanisms of how such a vast conspiracy would work.
That's always a great way to shut down any debate with a conspiracy theorist, challenge them to explain how it would work. When they can magic whatever effects they need out of thin air it's simple, when they actually have to explain how it would work in practice they typically get very frustrated very quickly, and then you can go back to your coffee while they go off in a huff.
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Re: Clearly (Score:2)
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An addendum to that, I was once arguing with a conspiracy "theorist" about the twin towers. He argued, due to his engineering background, that the fire wasn't hot enough to melt steel so it couldn't have brought them down. After thinking for 2 seconds, I replied it doesn't have to be hot enough to melt the steel, it only has to hot enough to weaken the steel....err...basic forge dynamics. I never did get a straight reply out of him.
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This is proof of a concerted effort by thousands of people from statisticians to politicians the world over trying to make Trump look bad! It's obviously evidence of some vast conspiracy!
In Trumps defense, thost statisticians are making all politicians in the world look bad.
Why do I feel sick? Could it be because I said in Trump's def *barf*
Remember to force push (Score:2)
There is no conspiracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Trump is a man who worries about nothing but money, at a time when that is the last thing he should be concerned about.
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Trump himself has been spreading conspiracy theories regarding the virus.
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Re:There is no conspiracy (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:There is no conspiracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of us just expect to work hard and get rewarded for it, which is supposed to be what America is about isn't it?
Even if it was a genuinely true at some point in time; its nothing but a blatantly false yet useful origin myth these days.
Re:There is no conspiracy (Score:4, Informative)
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Ya, dumping all that deficit spending into the economy from the last tax giveaway had nothing to do with it, eh?
Re:There is no conspiracy (Score:4, Informative)
Re:There is no conspiracy (Score:5, Insightful)
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Why do you even think that's strange? The disease, like many other respiratory pandemics, is more likely to kill the old than the young, more likely to kill those with cardiovascular problems than not, but even so some young will die and some old with co morbidity problems will live. You don't understand basic probabilities?
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Margin of error (Score:2)
Instances of co-morbidity affecting multiple... (Score:2)
There is a chance that cases where there were multiple contributing causes of death (co-morbidity) they were separately counted in each of those groups. As an example. A person with COPD contracts Covid-19 and subsequently dies. There are some instances where that patient was counted under COPD and Covid-19. This did not happen in large numbers but it did happen. I am searching for the link to the report I read but this was several weeks past and I didn't make a copy of the link at the time.
This may be one
It's pretty clear that testing is discouraged (Score:2)
But we're gonna reopen, except for the governor's mansion that is. No shit a guy called the GA governor's office to see what happens if he tries to schedule a tour and the lady said he was nuts, were in a pandemic, they can't do tours.
The wealthy and well connected will quarantine and we'll go back to work and die for Wall Street. Meanwhile
Removing car crashes might add more covid19 deaths (Score:4, Interesting)
If this number it taken into account the number of total deaths due to Covid-19 might be higher
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Yep, were gonna need a few years for epidemiologists to collect an analyze the data, but there's gonna be plenty of them eager enough to dig into this that well have a pretty good idea of it eventually. They'll have decent ideas for all the stats...number of reduced traffic fatalities, number of treatable conditions exacerbated by not seeking treatment, number of in home deaths, decrease in deaths from other serious illnesses...they'll see through all the under and over reporting of stats and get a fairly g
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oh? you know the percent of uninfected people and some other percent that will die? The global lockdowns were to slow the disease, you seem to be talking out of your ass about a mortality figure that was giving assuming no lockdowns.
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Are you trying to claim that more people have died from the restrictions than would have died without them? Where is your evidence for that?
Re:No kidding? (Score:4, Insightful)
Ever think that it was the drastic actions that prevented the predicted problems?
New York State (not just NYC) has a current death toll attributed to COVID-19 of about 0.1% of the entire population (22000 / 19 million). The fact that there are a large number of unattributed deaths and deaths that haven't yet happened (people who are currently sick and will die of the illness) means that number is likely going to be higher even if there were no new COVID-19 cases.
With estimates of 10% infected (20% or so in NYC), it isn't implausible that 1% could die if we let the virus go completely uncontrolled. A 1% rate for the US as a whole would imply 3 million or so, so based on the data that I see, 2.2 million isn't implausible (there are without a double large errors in my estimates).
The hospitals, while never quite overwhelmed in NY, were getting close. If there were no shutdown they would have been. The death rate likely goes way up if hospitals can't cope.
This likely will eventually spread over most of the population. The only real hope to reduce that is that we can reduce the spread long enough until a vaccine is in widespread use. Do you have any better idea on how we can do it? The virus really is extremely contagious and all it takes is a few irresponsible people to make it spread quickly.
Re: (Score:2)
Well clearly a poor economy kills more people than a mere virus /s
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
No, they're at the disco.
Re: (Score:2)
Congratulations. Your tribalism has revealed your lack of intelligence.
Re: (Score:3)
The lockdown IS an impact of the disease. And that's what scientists are trying to study. Didn't you get that ?
Re: (Score:2)
The lockdown around my area did not start until mid March, it should be easy to compare pre-lockdown figures with post lockdown figures to make the effect of the lockdown quantifiable.
Given that the lockdown will also have reduced transmission rates of other viruses (like flu) I suspect the health benefits (on a population basis, it may suck for a particular individual) will far outweigh the health detriment.