COVID-19 Map worldwide, with statistics

[Brians356]

So we (still) agree that COVID-19 is going to be deadlier than any influenza in the past century, and can't be meaningfully equated to the seasonal flu.

I do concur with those two propositions, yes.
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[Straightshooter1]

Since there's been no mention of CRISPR in this thread, I wonder if anyone here is aware of it . . .??? I've followed the CRISPR technology for a few years now marveling at what it's been able to do and for its high potential for solving many medical problems. From all I've read there's good work going on with it to combat covid-19 an any other covid virus. I'm optimistic that there will be solutions developed through the CRISPR technology coming on line within a relatively short time.

Here's an examples of some of the work that's going on:

https://www.fiercebiotech.com/research/stanford-team-deploys-crispr-gene-editing-to-fight-covid-19

https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biote...hiv-and-other-viruses-gene-and-cell-therapies

https://synbiobeta.com/a-20-minute-...our-doctors-office-supermarket-and-workplace/

 

[RKS]

I'm surprised this thread is still going since it has nothing directly to do with firearms and other subjects on this forum.

I've seen many other non-related threads get locked or removed much quicker.

 

[Toby Bradshaw]

I'm surprised this thread is still going since it has nothing directly to do with firearms and other subjects on this forum.

I've seen many other non-related threads get locked or removed much quicker.

This discussion is full of useful data from a wide range of sources and perspectives, has remained civil, hasn't gotten political, and is particularly relevant to the members of this forum who are disproportionately at risk from COVID-19 (old and male).

A thread on the price of gas has more views than this one, and the "Warped sense of humor" thread had 5 times as many replies and 10 times as many views before it was locked.

You can always put this thread on your "ignore" list if you don't want to see it.

 

[Toby Bradshaw]

"Excess Deaths" is a good metric, and one I watch, but there's possibly a temporal displacement effect to consider. Many of those excess deaths in May and June may well largely be people whose deaths would otherwise have been spread over the next six months. What if there are significantly fewer than normal deaths down the road? Would that balance the ledger?
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For that to happen the age-weighted relative risk of COVID-19 death would have to be higher than for other diseases, which doesn't seem to be the case*. But time will tell.

*Excerpt for those who don't want to read the linked article:

Dismissing Covid-19 as a disease that only endangers those who were going to die soon anyway doesn’t make a lot of statistical sense either. The mortality risks from Covid-19 start exceeding the risk from influenza or transport accidents well below age 65, and the middle-aged and younger seniors can face bigger relative risk increases than the very old. Here, for example, is the increase in mortality risk that 200,000 U.S. Covid-19 deaths in 2020 would imply relative to the actual all-causes mortality rates from 2018.

Whose Risk Goes Up Most in the Covid-19 Pandemic
Percentage increase in U.S. mortality* by age, if 200,000 die of Covid-19



Sources: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, author's calculations

*Relative to 2018 all-causes mortality rates

 

[Laurie]

European experience may differ from current US southern states outcomes. With hindsight, a major mistake on our side of the Atlantic was to ignore the vulnerability of care and nursing homes. In fact, Public Health England's pandemic policy (based on a projected bird flu type epidemic which wasn't appropriate for Covid anyway) was to protect NHS hospital capacity at every and all costs by shipping out all non-Covid patients as early as possible. So, the large numbers of elderly patients hospitalised for a huge range of non-Covid infections and injuries were pushed out into care homes many of which were forced against their will to accept untested newcomers. As testing capacity was in very short supply it wasn't used at all on such transferred individuals unless they already displayed Covid symptoms. This policy resulted in carnage in some nursing and care homes. It wasn't the only cause of rapid transmission in and between these institutions, but it was definitely a significant factor. One result has been a large mortality displacement effect here with large numbers of the elderly and frail being exposed to the virus and succumbing.

Another significant factor was how badly the UK was caught out initially in stocks of PPE for medical and care home staff with inadequate strategic stocks and severe initial shortages. NHS frontline medical and nursing staff were priorities and care homes went unsupplied despite desperate pleas. With the UK care industry badly underfunded and its staff heavily reliant on part-time and itinerant agency staff working round many establishments, the combination of no PPE and individuals moving between homes (especially as permanent staff were themselves infected and went into isolation) was tailor made for injection of the virus into unaffected locations and transmission to residents across the sector.

I'm assuming that in the light of such experiences elsewhere, these dangers are better understood now in places like the southern US following on four, five months behind us and that homes / residents are being much better protected as a result. Despite their vulnerability, the American elderly may now be one of the better protected groups (at least if they're reasonably well-off financially). This is a hypothesis only, but might account for a very different age and mortality to age profile.

 

[Brians356]

You can always put this thread on your "ignore" list if you don't want to see it.

And Forum Boss has even "liked" at least one post here. Whew!
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[Twicepop]

I think there truly is something going on with this, but in the past when people (including government) start running around like their hair is on fire, I get very suspicious about how truthful it is. It was reported last week that many testing facilities in the state of Florida turned in that 100% of all those tested were positive. Then the truth came out that less than 10% were actually positive, most had no symptoms. Another place (I think it was New York) for all those that tested positive 500 was added to each because of possible contact with others. Since this began all deaths with this virus present at autopsy, the cause is listed as COVID-19 no matter what the underlying medical cause was or how severe it was. The narrative seems to change by the hour, both major political parties have politicized it for some dubious gain, I'm pretty sure my health and well being are at the bottom of their collective lists.

 

[Dgd6mm]

Skewed numbers!

 

[Brians356]

In contrast, the U.S. has substantial excess deaths, likely including an undercount of Covid-19 deaths....

View attachment 1190722

Incidentally, Toby, can you elaborate on your Covid-19 "undercount" contrarian teaser?

Also, do you expect deaths from all causes to fly below the "excess" threshold until 2021 or beyond? Or do you predict more excess deaths in 2020?
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[Mark W]

Skewed numbers!

Yep, that’s the problem! I’m nowhere close to believing the published numbers of cases or deaths.

Here’s a story out of Florida where a death from a motorcycle crash was called a COVID death. https://wsvn.com/news/local/florida/doubts-about-accuracy-of-covid-19-death-numbers-continue-as-mans-death-wrongly-attributed-to-virus/ .

This example was removed after it went public, but how many others are there? A guy that works in one of the larger hospitals in Pittsburgh told me weeks ago that this was happening. Someone dies of car crash, gun shot, electrocuted on a job site and it’s all COVID related......

 

[Toby Bradshaw]

Incidentally, Toby, can you elaborate on your Covid-19 "undercount" contrarian teaser?

From the peer-reviewed primary literature:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2767980

Preprint:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.28.20141655v2

Forbes summary of recent work on excess deaths.

Scientific American article on how deaths are (over- or under-) counted.

Also, do you expect deaths from all causes to fly below the "excess" threshold until 2021 or beyond? Or do you predict more excess deaths in 2020?
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I expect excess deaths throughout 2020 and the first half of 2021 (hoping for an effective vaccine by then). COVID-19 is, of course, killing many people who would have died from something else in the same year. But it is also killing another 5-10% of people who otherwise would have survived longer than a year, and that increase is not hard to detect statistically (especially when deaths are tracked weekly instead of yearly, which makes it easy to follow the weekly fluctuation in COVID-19 case numbers). When cause of death is broken down into the usual CDC categories, excess deaths due to pneumonia (likely how an undiagnosed COVID-19 death is assigned), the difference should be striking for 2020, though hopefully less so for 2021 if the U.S. can ever get its COVID-19 testing capability anywhere near the level it should have been all along.

Because of the U.S.'s embarrassingly inadequate testing, the lag in reporting of cause of death on death certificates, and general incompetence at all levels of government, we'll never have a perfectly clear picture of what has happened with COVID-19 in the U.S., but the picture should improve somewhat with time. In the end I'm confident that the undercount will have been substantially greater than the overcount, but the mechanisms that produce any overcount corrode public trust in the data, which is the worst possible outcome.

 

[rwj]

I wonder if there’s a financial benefit to health care facilities for deaths being “coded” COVID?

 

[Dgd6mm]

I wonder if there’s a financial benefit to health care facilities for deaths being “coded” COVID?

Yes there is!

 

[SGK]

Immunosupressant drug interferon beta shows promise in treating hospitalized COVID patients.



And a very good article in today's FT discussing T-cells. Note that a t-cell response requires prior infection by Sars-Cov-2 or, potentially, other coronaviruses. At the end of the article it touches on some of the notions previously mentioned here:

"Several studies suggest T-cells produced by other coronaviruses - which cause only mild cold-like illness - may also recognize Sars-Cov-2 and provide some protection against Covid-19.

This phenomenon may contribute to what some scientists have called "immunological dark matter", which could make herd immunity to Sars-Cov-2 achievable with an infection rate as low as 20 per cent, rather than th 60 per cent level often cited. But the idea is controversial and much more evidence will be required before it gains widespread acceptance."

I wonder how many people have had other coronaviruses. I doubt I have.

 

[SGK]

Similar goings on in the US. It has been reported that some testing facilities in Florida are reporting all (100%) of their tests as positive for Covid.

Yeah those facilities haven't even tested enough people to make a difference - whether all positive or all negative. Read back a few pages. A good example of how stupidly biased 'analysis' can influence public opinion.

It was reported last week that many testing facilities in the state of Florida turned in that 100% of all those tested were positive. Then the truth came out that less than 10% were actually positive, most had no symptoms.

Isn't it brilliant how someone can point out an error in reporting for a facility having done just 100 tests (0.0026% of total) and use that to undermine confidence in a total of 3.8 million tests. Sure there will be reporting errors as with the collection of any dataset but that doesn't mean the results are skewed.

 

[SGK]

For perspective, here is data for the US from 2017.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm

• Number of deaths: 2,813,503
• Death rate: 863.8 deaths per 100,000 population
• Life expectancy: 78.6 years
• Infant Mortality rate: 5.79 deaths per 1,000 live births

Number of deaths for leading causes of death:

• Heart disease: 647,457
• Cancer: 599,108
• Accidents (unintentional injuries): 169,936
• Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 160,201
• Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 146,383
• Alzheimer’s disease: 121,404
• Diabetes: 83,564
• Influenza and Pneumonia: 55,672
• Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome and nephrosis: 50,633
• Intentional self-harm (suicide): 47,173

As the Worldometer COVID death toll for the US approaches the 5th place holder in this list it worth flicking through the detail behind this summary. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_09_tables-508.pdf table I-12.

Yep, 2.8 million people died in 2017 from a huge range of causes. Surprise, surprise people die. If we followed some pundits' views here we'd wonder why some issues ever get a mention at all:

suicide? a mere 47,713
'flu? don't bother with a vaccine 55,672 incl pneumonia
diabetes? load up on sugar 83,564
alzheimer's? clocked through that. No need for a cure for it right? 121,404

Isn't dying from a stroke just "old age"? Covid's gonna beat it handsomely.

Then we get the multitude of things grouped under 'chronic lower respiratory diseases'. The top two subcategories under this are merely emphysema at just 7,085 and asthma at 3,564. Everything else (other than chronic bronchitis at 502) gets bundled under "other" and isn't worth a mention so COVID-19 has blitzed through all of these.

Accidents? Hmmm. Motor vehicle accidents 40,231. It's a wonder we bother with road rules which interfere with our freedom. Slip and falls? all that workplace 'elf 'n safety crap - pugh! 36,338. Accidental poisoning kills more people than many notorious cancers 64,795. Ever hear about it?

(Someone here once mentioned complications from surgical care; hmm just 4,459.)

So even on conservative measures COVID is already the third biggest killer.

Cancer. Again, a lot of issues bundled into this.
- Breast, cervical and ovarian cancer? all those pink ribbons - for what? 60,991
- prostate cancer? not even worth getting a finger up the backside, right? 30,488
Only one sub-category of cancers comes close to COVID: lung (trachea and bronchus) cancer 145,932. Let 'em smoke they're going to die of something anyway.

Heart disease. Yeah it turns out quite a multitude of things can go wrong with your cardiovascular system as well. All the attention the fitness industry gets is wasted as well.

 

[1911nut]

It turns out I’m a Patriot

 

[232]

I want a test to test the tests and the testers or the testers on testors

 

[SGK]

Test, track and trace is basically useless in FL right now. With it taking about a week to get results back due to overload the whole point of testing - to trace and track others an infected person may have come in contact with in order to reduce transmission - is undermined. The delay is too great. Today Quest Diagnostics (they're the largest tester in FL by a good margin) warned it would be impossible to increase testing in the Fall to keep up with the 'flu season. Both Quest and LabCorp (their main competitor) are struggling to keep up with demand.