This is why I sit with the science teachers at lunch whenever I can. Nothing is off the table to be talked about while we’re eating.
When folks are tallying deaths, they also need to subtract all the car accidents that haven’t happened and similar things. Speeders are making it more likely to die in a car accident, but there’s still fewer deaths than normal. It’s hopefully a smaller amount, but my circle wondered how many school shootings didn’t happen after the last mall shooting.
I’m sure we could come up with a lot of things that would need to be considered - and likely never truly known. We just have the excess deaths.
On a different point. I recall med school lad telling me a doctor involved said the worst thing about it was not knowing who was going to die and who wasn’t. Someone he was sure wouldn’t make it ended up doing fine and someone he was sure would do fine died the next day. It was hitting him mentally.
Remembering that has me wondering even more about the stats of who is dying. Is he remembering the anomalies or is there more unknown with it? It seems to fit in with wondering why the predominant language would make a difference. What variable is out there that isn’t yet seen? I doubt it’s the language. Is it genetics? Typical diet?
But still, most I know in the “not high risk” groups aren’t afraid of dying. They’re afraid of lifelong side effects or taking to those who might die. Now it appears they also have to be afraid of being pregnant or taking it to pregnant women.
Back to the masks for a moment: There was a clip on GMA this morning with Dr. Jennifer Ashton, talking about how to deal with masks in the summer. In addition to the snipit of the demonstration (at minute 2:20) of how far germs fly when someone sneezes (up to 26 feet), and at about minute 3:05 there is a demonstration taken from Diane Sawyer’s recent special, showing the benefit of masks in blocking the # of particles that are released just from normal speech. The whole interview is less than 5 minutes. Worth a watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoX5IVRPR3Y
What you say is true, but you’ve just proved my point. In my example, the expected mortality for our 100 people, if there were no covid, is 8%. But covid happened.
Eight people of our group were supposed to die this year, and now ten of them are already dead. Of course the less healthy people are more likely to die of covid; they were more likely to die if there was no covid, too. But there is no number of deaths for the rest of the year that makes the total eight at the end of the year if ten have already died.
@romanigypsyeyes — glad my medium express mail box of sanitizing wipes made it safely to Michigan so REN can have things nice and clean, and everyone can stay healthy. I’m really not going thru many wipes, as we don’t go out much at all and everyone leaves footwear outside.
Based on the Swiss German and Swiss French friends I’ve known over the years, (not a huge sample, but we’ve known a few of each in our close friend group) I don’t think those differences are a medical difference, they’re differences in cultural practices. The Swiss French are very… French. Expressive, touchy-feely, la bise is obligatory, The Swiss Germans are very… German. More reserved, incredibly cleanly, no kissing on the cheeks. Guessing even the levels and types of home sanitation practices vary as well. Not that any of my Swiss French people were unclean at all, just they were normal levels of clean with few hangups while my Swiss German friends’ homes and workplaces approached medical grade levels of sterilization.
So my guess is the differences were cultural, not medical or genetic. But again, need more data.
While I’m guessing I’ve also been guessing that at least a portion of what’s happening with the Super Spreaders is not genes but habits and practices. We all know people who are very touchy-feely, who sneeze without covering their mouths, who are very social and interacting with dozens of people a day. Maybe some people produce or exude more C19, but my guess is that’s not the main driver - it’s sanitary practices.
Went to the bank ATM yesterday and again, it was only stocked with $100 bills! The lobby is closed and I was there before 9 so I couldn’t go to a teller drive through for my request. Anyone I tip is getting some factor of 20 since that’s all I’ve had for 3 months now. Grrrrrrrr.
If we look at the superspreader events we know about-- and there are a lot of them so far-- they don’t seem to be about kissing or being touchy. They seem to be about talking loudly, breathing deeply or singing. Here’s a list of a few superspreader events I can think of:
The Korean aerobics teachers teaching Zumba dancing
The choir practice in Washington where they were practicing while social distancing
Church services all over
The call center (in Korea I think) where almost everyone in the room, dozens of people, got infected
The restaurant in China, where people at other tables got infected if they were in the line of flow of the restaurant's ventilation system; waiters were not infected
Prisons all over
Food processing plants all over
In Japan, seems like there is no spreading on the subway if everyone wears masks and remains quiet.
Wow… never encountered an ATM in the US with only $100 notes. In the US, almost all of the ATMs that I have encountered had only $20 notes; one had only $5 notes and another had only $10 notes. But every ATM that I used in a country other than the US gave multiple denominations.
Maybe they just want to increase the reloading time interval, since it will take about five times as long for it to run out of money when filled with $100 notes than when filled with $20 notes.
I think the difference is what we consider as known. You referenced a rate of 13% for 80+. This rate is a CFR, which is a statistic which overstates the actual rate. COVID deaths don’t come close to exceeding total projected deaths(50-62,00 per week in the US depending on seasonality). We had events of significant excess deaths in Jan '17 and Jan '18 which did not occur the last 2 years. While excess deaths have definitely occurred the last 7 weeks, they peaked in the middle of April(YMMV based on where you live), and have been declining. We are in the middle of a curve. What happens on the back side makes a difference in how we define the impacts of the virus. Did average life expectancy change by 3-months of 3-years. What quality of life was impacted. Both are tragic, but there is a difference in scale. Anyone who claims to know the answer at this point is making assumptions with incomplete data.
I wonder what happens if you specify an amount like $75 or something that’s not an even increment of $100? So far, we have mostly been using charge cards, rarely cash. I have only used ATMs a few times in past many years. Having only $100 bills would be most unhelpful. Some of our local markets have banks and I’ve normally don’t quite a bit of banking there. Too bad the bodega was unhelpful.
You’ve never been to Aspen! Even 25 years ago they had machines that only gave $100s.
My ATM used to only give $20s, and you can only take out multiples of 20. Now you still have to take a multiple of $20, but if you ask for $100 it will give you $50, $20x2 and $10. But you can’t ask for $10. I went recently and was surprised when I asked for $100 it asked how I wanted it. I excitedly asked for $10s and $20s, and it promptly cancelled my transaction. I then just asked for quick cash and got 2 $20s.
@bp0001, We don’t know what the infection fatality rate for covid-19 for people who are 80 or over, but plenty of jurisdictions give us enough data to compute the case fatality rate, and it’s a lot higher than 13%.
In Santa Clara County, the case fatality rate (CFR) for people over 80 is 24.5%.
In New York CIty, the CFR for people 75 or older is 35%.
In Illinois, the CFR for people 80 or older is 28.7%.
The infection fatality rate will of course be lower, because even among the old, there are some asymptomatic cases. But 13% is possible.
[A quick glossary here, for those who are unsure: the case fatality rate is the death rate among people who are known to have the disease. Here, I just took the published cases for the age group, and the published deaths for the age group, and divided. The infection fatality rate is the death rate for everyone who has the disease, even if they are asymptomatic and don’t come to our attention.]
There is zero chance that that is an IFR. My guess - and it is only a guess of course - is that IFR for 80+ year olds is in the very low single digits. Mathematically, it would be impossible for any IFR to be much higher than that and still blend to an estimated 0.2-0.5% IFR across all age and risk cohorts (the best estimates right now appear to be ~0.25%). The math should be intuitively obvious given that this 80+ cohort constitutes ~10% of US population.
Thus, getting COVID even for the 80+ crowd is hardly a death sentence. Nevertheless, although I could literally not care less about an estimated 0.25% IFR for my own cohort as regards personal risk - absolutely zero substantive impact on my level of concern or behavior - a low single digit percentage IFR would trouble even me. You only get one life. 1/100 - 1/25 odds would be a little scary in light of the finality of the consequence. Old and vulnerable people should shelter in place, and we should do everything reasonably possible to aid them in this isolation, while the rest of the country gets back to work and living.
There is a blind level of panic, probably because people are so poor at making decisions under uncertainty, and suffer from obvious cognitive biases such as the availability heuristic (“if you personally knew anyone who died from COVID you would change your tune” - umm, no, I wouldn’t). Reflecting on the numbers should ease the stress and anxiety that many feel.
Somewhere up above, there were a number of comments to the effect that no one cares about the race disparities, the apparent higher rates of negative outcomes from COVID in communities of color. There were also a few mentions of the huge gender disparities in outcomes between men and women (also observed in the 2003 SARS pandemic), though with less of a lecturing and moralizing tone.
I certainly care greatly about these differences, and yet do not hold out any hope that serious progress will be made in understanding them. The differential outcomes are almost certainly due to systematic genetic differences between males and females, and between races. For obvious reasons, scientists will be extremely reluctant to look into these.
I am totally fine with your delivery being prioritized over anything I could think of ordering!! OMG I might have moved out into my car for the night if that happened here. You are brave (and compassionate).
There is zero chance that the infection fatality rate (IFR) for people over 80 is in the low single digits. I am willing to put money on that. But I see where your error is: you’ve somehow convinced yourself that the IFR overall is 0.25%.
If only 0.25% of people who get covid die of it, it’s difficult to explain the fact that in Queens 0.27% of the population has already died of covid. And when I say difficult here, I mean impossible. When they did serology tests in New York City a few weeks ago, they found about 20% of people had been infected, but you’re telling me in Queens it’s actually 108%. I believe it is, let’s just say, extremely unlikely that more than 100% of Queens residents have been infected with covid. Any theory that says they have has crashed into reality and needs to be jettisoned.
The ~0.25% is the CDC current estimate, remember estimated across all age and risk cohorts. Should we pick and choose what to believe from the “experts”? And I have not “convinced” myself that that is the true IFR; I provided a range of 0.2 - 0.5%. Even at the upper bound, your 13% IFR is impossible.
The NYC data are interesting but hardly dispositive The Queens population is not perfectly representative of the overall US population, in particular with respect to age and race. I haven’t actually checked the accuracy of the 0.27% death figure. Wow, if accurate, NYC really did make a mess of this, ironic given the disdain that was heaped on states like Texas and Florida from the canyons of 6th Avenue (Avenue of the Americas for all the transplants and not native NYCers.)
Moreover, I suspect that the climate (and maybe even Vitamin D levels) may have something to do with the apparent higher IFR and R0 of the NYC metro area. Again, the local conditions are not representative of the United States as a whole.
It’s fascinating to me that there some that are so adamant about not wearing a mask like somehow their personal freedoms are being taken away from them by the big bad government.
They will also say that they won’t wear a mask because they have a high risk tolerance but they neglect the fact that the mask not only protects them from the virus but also protects US from you.
Luckily where I live people generally recognize this fact and don their masks accordingly. Small price to pay if it helps lessen the spread of this disease.
