Maybe even bigly.
The context is how many people are dead from COVID.
No, the statistic is how many people are dead from COVID. The context is how many people are not dead from COVID.
Yes, sending covid patients to nursing homes was a massive error. But you are acting like delays to people’s health care and disruption of the education system and really all elements of the shut down were done merely to protect seniors, particularly in nursing homes. This is false.
Ask the doctors and nurses who have died from covid. Ask the paramedics and firefighters and cops who have died from covid. Ask the teachers who have died from covid. Ask the meat processing plant workers who died. Oh, you can’t.
The purpose of the shut down was to dramatically curtail the spread of the pandemic in the general public to keep from overwhelming the hospitals and medical resources. As it was, some areas needed vast help to keep up. The curtailing of medical tests and procedures was done precisely because the hospitals were swamped, and the ones that weren’t were expecting to be. Plus, having a raging pandemic in a hospital sure makes it a lousy place to send sick people.
Now maybe you can make the argument that letting up the shut down makes some sense if we continue to focus on the most vulnerable. But that is undercut by the fact that large numbers of Americans refuse to use decent and mild restrictions to allow everyone some let up overall. WEAR A FREAKING MASK! Not a chin strap, and noses count. DON’T THROW GIANT PARTIES IN FIELDS AND STREETS AND WATER PARKS! Don’t pretend that eating in a restaurant is safe because you’re six feet distance from some other table, especially when you gather people from more than one household in your “group”.
And I have no idea how you socially distance in bars and clubs, when their very purpose is close social interaction and mask wearing is precluded by the drinking.
The annual flu doesn’t fill hospitals over capacity, lining the hallways with gurneys. The flu doesn’t put health care workers on perpetual long shifts watching patient after patient die, afraid to go home to their own families for fear of spreading it to them. The flu doesn’t cause the need for refrigeration trucks to act as makeshift morgues because the regular morgues are full.
Was it a CDC guideline that sent covid patients to nursing homes?
You sound as if the case rate and death rate is not on the increase.
“YAY, I’m not at risk. Suck it, Grandma!”
The thing to remember about the flu is how much we know about it. We know about how many people will get it. We know about how many people will end up in the hospital (which means we can prepare). We know about how many people will die. We know when in fall it’s going to start getting really bad. We know when in spring it’s going to start letting up. If someone gets it, we know what to do. We know what to watch for. We have protocols in place for how to take care of them in the hospital. We have antiviral medications (ie Tamiflu) to help shorten the duration. We have a vaccine that cuts down on how many cases we have.
It takes all that to keep flu deaths, for the entire world, at around 650k/yr. And keep in mind, that’s with most ‘regular’ people not taking any precautions whatsoever, except maybe getting a flu shot. Covid appears to have already broken a million.
Also, when people start pointing out that death count is just a hoax because many of those people may have died of something else, but happened to have covid also. That’s how the flu numbers work as well. If you have pneumonia and then get the flu and then die, influenza is going to be mentioned, at least in part, for the reason you died.
I have found that a shorter version of this is easier when people compare it to the flu. “This isn’t the flu”.
The death rate has been in steady decline since August.
Yes, estimated deaths IN nursing homes, as reported by the nursing homes. It is not the total of deaths of nursing home residents inclusive of those who died after transfer to a hospital.
COVID-19 in many ways is NOT influenza, but the annual flu is worse than you think and in some years it in fact HAS filled hospitals over capacity, lining the hallways with gurneys and having makeshift tents set up in parking lots to handle the load.
It was the LACK of guidance, regulation, and prioritization of resources that had staff in nursing homes without adequate PPE, let alone training and supervision in proper use, and that had infected staff not taking care of many patients within each home but spreading it between homes as well.
My impression (and happy to be corrected with data not anecdotes) is that the vast majority of relatively young (18 to 39 say) adults are being fairly responsible. But let’s not belittle what is being asked of them for an indefinite undetermined current and future period of time: giving up the essential activities of their periods of life. Not dating and forming romantic relationships in any kind of normal way. Not having group social relationships and activities in any kind of normal way. For new parents, not having the extended family and community support that new parents usually get. For parents of young children, not developing relationships with other new parents and not having the experiences of your kids in activities with other kids. For those with slightly older children, taking on roles of teachers assistants of several kids at a time, while possibly also trying to work from home, and as with others, with less extended family support else you fear putting them at risk.
These are big deal things. Those of us who have grown kids and established lives, possibly partnered, are not really be asked to give up anywhere near as much. I wouldn’t judge so much. “Okay Boomer” does come to mind.
Asking that of them in an open ended fashion is simply not going be sustainable.
I’m having problems finding stats of cases by age. All I’ve found so far is death statistics by age.
However, what you said next would be a good argument that your age group example is a group that is socially active and mentally bulletproof.
I agree, these are big deal things.
OK, so I checked a couple of sites, and they do show that deaths have had an overall downward trend since the beginning of August.
Go down to the graph of daily deaths, and show 3-day and 7-day trends. The slope is indeed negative from about Aug 2 through Sep 20. However, the trend is flattening for October. So while the death numbers are declining, the rate is increasing.
Go down to Daily Deaths, trend. The graph shows a peak around Aug 20, which shows a slowing of the death rate since the beginning of August. However, the downward curve is flattening, showing an increase in the rate.
Furthermore, the death rate is a lagging indicator of disease spread. If the death count is flattening now and the case count is rising, then deaths will be going up.
Right, but the context was a comment that following the CDC guidelines caused deaths. An example given was putting recovering patients in nursing homes. I don’t think it was the CDC that said do that.
The lack of guidance and any sort of plan lies with the government administration, not the CDC.
I do understand the impacts to those age groups. I have a nephew who is a freshman in college this year, who basically lost the last quarter of school last year, and all the social milestones and traditions that entails. I have a younger nephew and neice dealing with online school and all the challenges of the pandemic.
And I get that sustained restrictions, even if for, say, a year, is severe to them.
It’s not even them I’m really angry about. Sure, some college students have elected to throw large social gatherings (i.e. frat parties) as if covid only applies to class times.
But the real trouble is the adults who are acting like there’s nothing going on. “Oh, Memorial Day is here, it’s summer, let’s go to the water park and crowd in with everybody there.” “Masks! We don’t need no stinking masks!” “This is a free country, your mask orders and shutdowns are TYRANNY!” “This will all just magically go away by summer.”
But my comment was to highlight the attitude being discussed that says that children aren’t typically as severely affected as adults, as if children have no interactions with adults. As if multigenerational households don’t exist.
The other thing bothering me about this discussion is the emphasis on nursing homes, as if they are the only vulnerable communities. Sure, a communal living group of people with poor immune systems and many health problems is certainly a highly vulnerable group. But this discussion is ignoring the racial disparities in outcomes, how Native American and Latino and black communities are disproportionately hit by the disease.
Some of that is an effect of wealth imbalance, i.e. poverty. But not enough is being done to aid and protect those groups, and they aren’t mentioned in this discussion.
Here’s a thought.
For the purposes of this thread let’s write off everything that was done in, say, Feb-June as a learning experience. Mistakes were made all over the board. Perhaps some of those were avoidable, perhaps some were not. Let’s quit relitigating that part of the past and see what we’ve learned since then, so we can apply that knowledge going forward. Both to mitigate that future, and to make better predictions about how it will unfold despite those mitigations.
Let’s look only at stats for post-June. By then, it was well-known to not put elderly recovering COVID patients into nursing homes. By then COVID was present in pretty much the whole country, minus the most rural areas, so travel-based quarantines were mostly (entirely?) useless. It was also well-known that properly worn masks work to knock down the risk of unwitting spread, and that unmasked indoor crowds = triple whammy for spread. And that staying home if overtly sick (with anything) was a darn good idea.
Now what do the stats tell us from there?
I know I don’t know the specific numbers. But my take is COVID will be here for the rest of human history. This is no more temporary than the flu has been for millennia. Novel diseases are temporary only when we can get everybody on Earth uninfected simultaneously for longer than the incubation period. Not gonna happen with COVID.
Long-latency infectious diseases such as COVID may mean I’ll be wearing a mask in public for the rest of my life. And learning to socialize in small groups only, and mostly not over food and drink.
The young people who lived in Europe during the 30s & 40s sure wished WWII wasn’t blighting that essential formative era of their lives. But it did and they coped.
I agree with @DSeid’s point that right now we’re clamping disproportionately on the younger to disproportionally aid the elders. At least as to impact. OTOH, here at my mostly retirement-aged condo, our very active group social activity stuff has gone into total deep freeze. With no sign of let up. Ever. Pretty much everybody is simply sheltering in place and venturing out to the bare minimum necessary. The fun has mostly gone out of retiree life too.
My work is now similar. At work, COVID risk management is top of mind all day and during all our on-the-road off-duty time too. Which sucketh greatly.
Ultimately the USA chose about the stupidest way to handle this, both from the top down and from the bottom up. Until we agree to cooperate in harm reduction by wearing masks, avoiding crowds, and supporting the most vulnerable economically, we’ll continue to have widespread unnecessary disease AND widespread unnecessary economic damage. Caused firstly by disease, secondly by fear of disease, and only thirdly by government (in-)action.
Or until we just decide that losing 150K Americans every year to COVID is just the cost of doing business. In addition to the (semi-WAGs ahead) 50K from flu, 30K from impaired driving, 600K from smoking, 20K from gun misuse, etc.
Do you have a citation for this? The label used on my cite is “Resident Cases and Deaths”. Someone in the hospital is still a nursing home resident. And the number of deaths it lists now, about 30% of total deaths is consistent with the 40% statistic from June if we assume that residents have been better protected since then.
Who cares how many people are not dead from COVID? Do we keep track of how many people are NOT killed in car accidents every year? Of course not. My response was to people implying that if we just protected all the nursing homes, then it would solve all our problems. But, in fact, it would only stop 30% to 40% of deaths assuming we could protect them with 100% efficiency.
I like this site’s visualizations for reference.
What the OP is missing is that it is not an “either or” thing. At one extreme you have everyone locked in their homes with no human contact and the economy grinds to a halt. On the other extreme you have business as usual and hundreds of thousands of people get sick and die. At some point we need to decide on a level of risk we are willing to accept.
Where I live in New Jersey, bars and restaurants have been opened to outdoor seating for months and relatively recently allow limited indoor seating. It’s not like life before, but it’s at least somewhat of a life, taking certain precautions.
School is a more troubling matter. My wife and I both work very busy jobs. We can’t teach our kids AND work our jobs. Not that I’m trained to teach elementary school over Zoom anyway.
Bottom line is people want to live their lives and they are terrible at assessing risk. Over the summer, my wife took the kids to her elderly parents in the country while I stayed behind in the city to look for a job. At first everyone was all concerned about me coming back and forth to visit, but who is more likely to infect who here:
- Me, who mostly spent his time in his apartment eating taking except to occasionally buy food and supplies or go for a run
- My wife’s mom and aunt having garage sales every other weekend and taking constant trips to Walmart or wherever
I dunno. Sounds like you both took some risks.
Of course, everyone has different risk tolerance, and different emotional needs, too. And it’s hard to balance that as a society.
My brother, in his 50s and living with his wife and two dogs, has a mild immune deficiency and is an introvert. He doesn’t see any reason to leave his home. (He and his wife are clashing over this.)
My mother, in her 80s, living alone, has a serious auto immune disorder and as a result is taking immune suppressing drugs. She has all sorts of other health issues. If she catches covid it will kill her. But she’s an extrovert who doesn’t have much life left, and she has been going out to lunch with friends. To her, being trapped in her apartment for the rest of her life isn’t a life worth living.
nm, accidentally posted before ready, will return eventually
Thanks!
I think I did find that, but didn’t recognize it as being meant for an actual current value, because the description of that table says:
Parameter Values that vary among the five COVID-19 Pandemic Planning Scenarios. The scenarios are intended to advance public health preparedness and planning. They are not predictions or estimates of the expected impact of COVID-19.
However I do now see that it might have been the actual value being reported to the CDC in early August, as the document says just above that:
Parameter values are based on data received by CDC through August 8, 2020.
-
Routine gathering in large groups of people is unlikely to be an essential human need, because for most of the existence of the species most people rarely got the chance to do it. Social interaction in small groups, yes, that’s a different matter.
-
What’s being asked of younger people is, not to have no interactions whatsoever, but to limit their interactions for, most likely, a year or two: a small fraction of their likely remaining lifespans. What appears to be being suggested by some is to allow all interactions among most younger people as if nothing were happening, while allowing for those at high risk no in-person interactions or going out in public whatsoever (which for some means also never going outside their own living quarters, however small), except the absolute minimum required to sustain life (which for some such people is none): in order for those without apparent risk factors to not have to limit themselves at all.
-
Dying is also a big deal thing. So is possible long-term damage.
I keep track of the numbers on a daily basis. We’re a month and a half into schools and businesses reopening. The downward trend is slowing but it’s still a downward trend. Fall was supposed to be the second wave and it hasn’t hit yet despite things opening up. Logically we SHOULD be trending up.
There have been many predictions on this site regarding death counts and so far they have been much higher than what occurred. I think this is probably due to the changes that have occurred since it started.
Every day going forward there are more people who have acquired immunity. This adds to herd immunity and creates a blood supply treatment. Medical protocols and drugs have improved. There are a number of vaccines in the final stages of testing. The infrastructure to produce those vaccines is ramping up to deliver them.
When the vaccine(s) hit the market we won’t need to inoculate everybody. We just need to inoculate those who are at risk.
While deaths are pretty flat, cases are definitely rising in the US (and in most US states) and have been rising for the last month. Yes, we are still below our July national peak. But cases are rising right on schedule with schools and businesses having been opened for 5-6 weeks.
Oh, bother, it claimed the link would be to my selected visualization, and it’s not. The image shown is not very useful. But click on the link and select US and newly reported cases, averaged over 7 days, and you will see the clear and unambiguous increase. Select new deaths averaged 7 days, and you might interpret it as up in the last few days, down over the last month, or pretty flat for the last 2.5 weeks, depending on your biases.
That’s the thing though; like you say, people are TERRIBLE at assessing risk, and the authorities have been god-awful and have proven themselves mostly untrustworthy about the information they provide, especially in red states. I mean, here in Texas, I don’t entirely trust the numbers because the state government is super-red, and I wouldn’t put it past them to fudge the numbers to support their political position. After all, that’s more or less what’s going on in Washington DC as well.
And really the main thing I was talking about was more that case counts are rising, and there are all sorts of dire warnings from public health authorities about how the winter will be tougher. So to me that reads as “Let’s clamp down a little MORE right now, in hopes of maybe getting a lid on this, or mitigating it some.”
Instead, the general attitude seems to be “Case counts are down from August! Let’s party and open back up!”
It’s like they haven’t paid attention, aren’t listening to the public health authorities, or aren’t smart enough to notice what rising case counts might mean. Or they just don’t care. That’s what has me so confused.