Covid 19 Updates Part 2

[Jim Pascoe]

I might not discredit the theory, but rather complement it. Doctors who are fighting coronavirus are extremely overworked and overstressed. Which in itself lowers your immunity.

In truth we are all just playing a guessing game.  In the coming months much more will be learned and one side or another might be proved right.  I do think it is better to be cautious though - in spite of the economic risks.

[LesPalenik]

In truth we are all just playing a guessing game.  In the coming months much more will be learned and one side or another might be proved right.  I do think it is better to be cautious though - in spite of the economic risks.

Slobodan is raising a valid point.
Unfortunately, overworked doctors and other support personnel have indeed a lower immunity, and on top of it, there will be situations when they may make also bad decisions.

[Alan Klein]

NYC Dept of Health issues reports every day on the virus.  These are as of Mar 25 yesterday.

This shows the number of deaths per each of the 5  boroughs.  It has some statistics about underlying disease but it has not clarified most of it.
https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-daily-data-summary.pdf

This one that shows cases and deaths by sex, age group, and borough
https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-daily-data-summary-deaths.pdf

This one shows number of hospitalizations by sex, age group, and borough.
https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-daily-data-summary-hospitalizations.pdf

This one shows testing and cases that are positive.  What's interesting is that cases are more prevalent in Brooklyn and QUeens than in the Bronx, Staten Island and Manhattan.
https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-data-map.pdf

This is their main web page.
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-main.page

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

Enough with your fancy C19 graphs. Time for a different visualization: 1. exponential growth 2. flattening the curve 3. recovery

[Alan Klein]

Death Certificate have immediate cause, underlying cause, and other information.  Here's an explanation of how they do them.  There's an example of a certificate down the page.  For example, the immediate cause could be heart attack.  But the underlying cause could be arteriolar sclerosis or covid-19.  So it would be said he died of a heart attack.  But really it was covid that brought it on as the intermediate ior underlying cause.

Immediate cause of death:The final disease or injury causing the death.
Intermediate cause of death: A disease or condition that preceded and caused the immediate cause of death.
Underlying cause of death: A disease or condition present before, and leading to, the intermediate or immediate cause of death. It can be present for years before the death.
Manner of death: The circumstances leading to death—accident, homicide, suicide, unknown or undetermined, and natural causes.
https://www.mdedge.com/familymedicine/article/60314/cause-death-certification-not-easy-it-seems

[JoeKitchen]

Rob,

The issue raised here is not of comorbidity. The issue is if a person with other conditions dies, say from a heart attack, and is tested positive for Coronavirus, but is otherwise asymptomatic, do you classify that that as a Coronavirus death or a heart-attack death?

I was listening to a podcast this morning with someone from New Orleans who is more in depth following the situation there.  He is reporting that 41% of people the media is describing as otherwise young and healthy who died are overweight and/or obese. 

This could be a factor not being taken into consideration as well. 

[Alan Klein]

Rob,

copying the entire information from a supplied link would make the posts too long. Here is a concrete illustration, how to use a quote block and an external link to a prematurely published article on how to reduce your load on the next photography trip. As a matter of fact, quoting the said reference today is also premature, but now only by two days.

Full article:
https://luminous-landscape.com/reduce-load-and-travel-lighter/
     

Hmmm.  A little self-promotion.  Have you been taking lessons from our president? 

[Alan Klein]

Thanks for the link - very interesting in the suggestion that Covid 19 may not be that deadly and in fact most of those who are dying might have died soon anyway.  However I find the fact that 50 doctors in Italy have died in the past few weeks from the virus somewhat discredits the theory.  I cannot believe that those 50 doctors were mostly elderly and with serious health problems.....

Jim

I read an article that health providers may have high death rates because they've been exposed to a high amount of the virus.  Maybe, with smaller amounts, the body can fight it off and people survive at higher rates.

[Alan Klein]

US Navy Hospital ship with 1000 beds and 12 operating rooms arrives in Manhattan.  It will treat regular patients leaving on-shore hospitals more room to handle Covid cases. 
https://twitter.com/KevRincon/status/1244628095698718725

[LesPalenik]

Hmmm.  A little self-promotion.  Have you been taking lessons from our president? 

I wrote it to compensate for all bad news. This is already an Annus Horribilis, in general and for me also personally. As the Queen Elizabeth said a few years ago,  "2020 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure".
As to the promotion, I haven't started with the tweets yet.

[Watermelon_seller]

I wrote it to compensate for all bad news. This is already an Annus Horribilis, in general and for me also personally. As the Queen Elizabeth said a few years ago,  "2020 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure".

I knew she was an oracle 

[John Camp]

The idea that we have some deaths attributed to Covid 19 that might otherwise have occurred because of other conditions like cancer and heart disease is rather beside the point, and only of interest to people obsessed by numbers. The medical facilities of advanced countries are calibrated to take those deaths, and those struggles, into account. So, generally, we have x number of ventilators and that number is adequate to deal with everything except occasional overloads which can be transferred to other hospitals. Now, we have a very serious shortage of ventilators which tells you something -- we're having an extraordinary health crisis involving thousands of people simultaneously, and a large number of them are dying. Parsing out which might have died anyway is a fool's errant -- they're dead. The only good reason for trying to determine the number of excess deaths (which can only be done when it's all over with) would be to serve as a warning of what could be coming next time, and could be even worse.       

[Alan Klein]

The idea that we have some deaths attributed to Covid 19 that might otherwise have occurred because of other conditions like cancer and heart disease is rather beside the point, and only of interest to people obsessed by numbers. The medical facilities of advanced countries are calibrated to take those deaths, and those struggles, into account. So, generally, we have x number of ventilators and that number is adequate to deal with everything except occasional overloads which can be transferred to other hospitals. Now, we have a very serious shortage of ventilators which tells you something -- we're having an extraordinary health crisis involving thousands of people simultaneously, and a large number of them are dying. Parsing out which might have died anyway is a fool's errant -- they're dead. The only good reason for trying to determine the number of excess deaths (which can only be done when it's all over with) would be to serve as a warning of what could be coming next time, and could be even worse.       

The issue with preparation is that we tend to fight the last war.  So we'll probably overbuy ventilators for the future.  Then, something else will hit that we're not prepare for.  Did you ever face the situation that you wished you had your other lens that you left home that day?  Life's like that.

[faberryman]

The idea that we have some deaths attributed to Covid 19 that might otherwise have occurred because of other conditions like cancer and heart disease is rather beside the point, and only of interest to people obsessed by numbers. The medical facilities of advanced countries are calibrated to take those deaths, and those struggles, into account. So, generally, we have x number of ventilators and that number is adequate to deal with everything except occasional overloads which can be transferred to other hospitals. Now, we have a very serious shortage of ventilators which tells you something -- we're having an extraordinary health crisis involving thousands of people simultaneously, and a large number of them are dying. Parsing out which might have died anyway is a fool's errant -- they're dead. The only good reason for trying to determine the number of excess deaths (which can only be done when it's all over with) would be to serve as a warning of what could be coming next time, and could be even worse.     

The conspiracy theorists are floating the idea that anti-Trumpers are counting people who die from a heart attack and test positive for the coronavirus as having died from coronavirus in an effort to blow the pandemic out of all proportion. Eventually they will conclude that the US only ever had 15 cases and they quickly went down to zero.

[Alan Klein]

The conspiracy theorists are floating the idea anti-Trumpers are counting people who die from a heart attack and test positive for the coronavirus as a having died from coronavirus in an effort to blow the pandemic out of all proportion. Eventually they will conclude that the US only ever had 15 cases and they quickly went down to zero.

The President, the Congress, Democrats and Republicans, the media,are all in as everyone else regarding the pandemic.  Who's going to say that they made a mistake about it's severity after shutting down the whole country and putting everyone out of work?  Deaths will justify the extreme measures taken.  No one in authority is going to downplay it or believe contrarian statistics.   

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

The conspiracy theorists...

You appear to be one of them.

[faberryman]

The President, the Congress, Democrats and Republicans, the media,are all in as everyone else regarding the pandemic.  Who's going to say that they made a mistake about it's severity after shutting down the whole country and putting everyone out of work?  Deaths will justify the extreme measures taken.  No one in authority is going to downplay it or believe contrarian statistics.

Until the total dead crosses the 200,000 threshold Trump has laid down as the outside marker where he can still claim he did a good job.

[LesPalenik]

The issue with preparation is that we tend to fight the last war.  So we'll probably overbuy ventilators for the future.  Then, something else will hit that we're not prepare for.  Did you ever face the situation that you wished you had your other lens that you left home that day?  Life's like that.

It's always prudent to carry a few extra lenses. You never know what you'll come across.

[JoeKitchen]

Until the total dead crosses the 200,000 threshold Trump has laid down as the outside marker where he can still claim he did a good job.

That is what you guys get for repeatably touting that USA 2.2M death toll number from the (now known to be flawed) Imperial College study.  You gave him an easy way out. 

I foresee Trump repeatably stating 2.2M Americans would have died if we did nothing at every press conference going forward, and the media/Dems really cant contest him on that since they themselves insisted that same number was the most accurate prediction. 

[faberryman]

That is what you guys get for repeatably touting that USA 2.2M death toll number from the (now known to be flawed) Imperial College study.  You gave him an easy way out. 

I foresee Trump repeatably stating 2.2M Americans would have died if we did nothing at every press conference going forward, and the media/Dems really cant contest him on that since they themselves insisted that same number was the most accurate prediction.

I don't see that as a get out of jail card for any other than his base. The Democrats will simply argue that if he had done more, better, sooner, the death toll would have been lower than it actually turns out to be.