40-something year-old Uber driver dies after transporting passenger with COVID-19
I’m 40-something. I don’t want to die.
They did claim that Icelands smaller population and their ability to test a larger % of their total population means they may get a more accurate estimate of CFR and IFR, and it is showing potentially the IFR is much lower than we’ve been fearing.
But you’re assuming that people will have the same mindset and set of priorities after this blows over than they had before. Maybe if this shutdown continues long enough, people will realize that 90% of the consumer goods are crap anyway and what’s really important are those things/experiences that make us feel connected to ourselves and others. Good food, good art, good health. Maybe instead of wasting so much on the military, people will see the importance of supporting medical research and universal healthcare. There might be a whole paradigm shift heading our way.
I think we should use this period to not only buy us more time to figure out how to deal with the virus, but to effect structural changes that will benefit both us and future generations. Capitalists want us to get back to work? OK, we’ll do that when businesses are required to provide paid sick leave. And open Medicare up to everyone, ffs. Without these things in place, we shouldn’t get out of our pajamas.
Is this a pipe dream? Maybe. But this is as good a time as any to renegotiate the social contract.
This is from the highly respected Imperial College team:
Coronavirus pandemic could have caused 40 million deaths if left unchecked
Actually, though, it couldn’t have be left unchecked. Most people are not going to go to restaurants and plays and baseball games while hearing day after day of prominent people who got a new disease, or died from it, while emergency rooms and ICU’s are overloaded.
They also note that Iceland has been able (so far) to keep it out of their elderly population, due at least in part to their quarantine measures. (I daresay it is also due to lifestyle issues; I have not heard of many elderly Icelanders going on Caribbean cruises, e.g.) We already know this disease has a death rate proportionately much higher among older people, so I’m not sure Iceland’s experience will be similar to those of countries where the disease does get into nursing homes and other older populations.
Beyond that, you are still missing the point that if the number of serious cases rises too high relative to the available medical care, then IFR will rise not because the disease became more deadly but because more people received only limited or even no treatment, or palliative treatment instead of aggressive measures. That means that people who had perfectly survivable cases don’t survive. That’s what is happening in Italy and Spain right now, for example.
I agree and I understand that. Its just that there are a lot of unanswered questions right now. We don’t know the real CFR or IFR, and we don’t know the long term economic impacts, nor do we know what effects those economic impacts will have. A smaller global economy with better priorities (that invests a bigger % of GDP in education, R&D, infrastructure, renewables, etc) may not harm the younger generation as badly even if the economy overall is smaller.
So, this is clearly turned into a thread there the o.p., having “just asked the question,” proceeds to adopt an oppositional position and dogmatically defends it regardless of any evidence or logical arguments presented. Since there is no point to continuing this as an honest discussion, i’ll just leave a link to Dr. John Campbell’s latest data-based evaluation and cautionary warning to countries who aren’t taking isolation efforts seriously.
Oh, and by the way, PBS News Hour: “The US now has the most confirmed COVID-19 cases in the world.”
Stranger
Thanks, it is useful, and interesting. It broadly agrees with my back of the envelope thoughts. In fact it is a bit grimmer for some age groups. In a saturated health system the ultimate death rate for younger age groups probably rises between ten and twenty times from a situation where the system has capability to care for them. (I’m essentially assuming that if you need ICU care and don’t get it, you will die.)
If the pandemic is unchecked we can expect up to 1 in 50 of people between 30 to 49 to die. Something of a worst case, but quite reasonable. Hard to imagine what would happen in the few months when this was happening. Family members arriving at hospitals with guns demanding that their relative be put on a ventilator is probably just the start. You can be pretty sure that it anarchy resulting would rip the country apart.
I got bad news for you…
It’s looking like 10% in Italy right now. I think that’s mostly because their medical system was completely swamped. Unfortunately, I fear the same here.
Smallpox outbreaks routinely DID shut down the economy of the place with the outbreak, back in the day. And that’s despite some people being immune (due to having recovered in the past) and
And malaria kind of shuts down the economy on its own. I read a paper that plotted economic production per capita against incidence of malaria in some region of Africa, once, and the correlation was huge – huge enough that it was enough to explain the underperformance of a lot of African nations on a global scale. Lots of adults who don’t have the energy to work makes a difference in productivity.
Here’s an article with a nice graph comparing how contagious and how deadly various diseases are:
It’s a disaster relief bill, not an economic stimulus, and it looks like attempted bribery, not a way to funnel cash to those most needful. And why does Putin’s puppy behave so erratically? Only his insightful intestines know for sure.
The A-Q 9/11 crew also trained in Germany, Florida, and Arizona, which weren’t invaded. Let’s instead debate the worth of mandatory tamper-proof seals after only a few pill bottles were poisoned. What! Massive FDA over-reaction over almost nothing!
Same, but a lot of these you will never know (often for good reason, due to medical privacy) how much coronavirus caused the death versus how much it was the complications on top of other health conditions. Even most of the deaths in the 50s-60s I’m seeing a lot of vague language alluding to “in addition to other factors.”
People say this like this is supposed to be comforting. It isn’t. A lot of us have “other factors”. A lot of us have these factors without knowing we do, because we haven’t been to the doctor in ages.
On Reddit, you will always find people hand-waving away a story about a young-ish person dying from COVID-19 when it turns out the person was overweight. 60% of American adults are overweight. 40% are obese. But I guess those of us who aren’t overweight can be glad we’re safe, right? Not unless we have asthma, diabetes, or are heavy smokers.
Hell, Redditors have even diagnosed this super fit cycling fanatic who is battling COVID-19 with some underlying medical condition, despite the article clearly stating he has none. “He’s a cycling fanatic! Everyone knows those people are prone to heart attacks!” says the skinny-fat, vitamin D-deficient neckbeard who hasn’t touched a vegetable other than marijuana in the past year.
If you let the disease run its course, it will crush the health system - ffs, look at what’s happening to hospitals in NYC and that’s with extraordinary restrictions on commerce and movement. You’re just looking at survival rates; you’re not looking at many, many young people who go to the hospital who can’t breathe, some of whom end up in the ICU.
Trust me, in sufficient numbers, friends watching their friends gasp for air and stagger into a hospital where they lie on the floor and feel like they’re going to suffocate - and in some cases, do - that is going to scare people out of work, out of hanging out, out of shopping. It’s a fucking pandemic. There’s no getting around the public health impact, and there’s no getting around the economic impact either.
That’s why they want to flatten the curve. People have already studied the public health impact of this. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel; we need to be disciplined, keep our heads straight, and get through this.
It’s not 50 and 60 in addition to other factors; it’s the other factors. These other factors accumulate with age. But there are plenty of younger Americans with other factors as well - like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, obesity, etc.
Even if it doesn’t necessarily kill you, the scarring of your lung tissue will deprive you of pulmonary function, possibly for the rest of your life. You might be disabled. You might have to call it quits for your career. And oh yeah, you might end up having to file for medical-related bankruptcy. All things that young people can look forward to.
That’s a very strongly worded claim. One small study found about a quarter of recovered patients had some residual lung issues. Obviously this was done soon after recovery, so long term prognosis is unknown. Presumably this is more likely to be a problem in severe case, not your average 20 year old.
It’s intended to be strongly worded, and it’s based on fact. I’m not referring to all cases that self-resolve, but if COVID-19 is bad enough to send you to the hospital, you’re sustaining lung damage - I said possibly for the rest of your life.
I think we should err on the side of caution. I haven’t written anything that’s alarmist. People are taking a lot of false comfort in statistics that do not nearly tell the whole story. Almost from the beginning, people have been taking false comfort in the fact that only 1 percent die from the illness (in some countries, the death toll is considerably higher than that). We’ve been taking false comfort in the supposition that this afflicts older people or people who have extremely poor health. The reality is far more complex than that, and we’re seeing this time and time again, in country after country and city after city.
People want to believe that this is being overblown by the media - it’s not.
It’s mostly because they are under counting milder cases, especially in younger patients. This can easily be seen in the available data:
“The distribution of cases is very different in the 2 countries: individuals aged 70 years or older represent 37.6% of cases in Italy and only 11.9% in China.”
While Italy has an old population, those 70 and older represent far less than 37.6% of their population, suggesting a true denominator much higher than the number of positive tests they are reporting.
What point are you trying to make exactly? Are you saying it’s not that serious or that we’re blowing it out of proportion?
On the one hand, yeah, I certainly hope that 10% is overstated, and it seems likely that it is. On the other hand, I think they are seeing a lot more than the 0.5% mortality cited by the OP.