livedarklions

So, basically you don't get what we can expect when the number of cases continue to grow exponentially, right? That mortality rate is likely to shoot up when that share of the population getting the virus gets a lot higher than 4%. Also, the mortality rates for car accidents, heart attacks, infected hang nails or whatever when no one can reliably call on emergent medical care.

Your use of statistics is completely illiterate.

clubman 

When our economic machine is chugging along, poor people are perpetually the primary victims of civil rights violations, mental help issues, unemployment, abuse(s), plus we all know the numbers of working poor are growing. But now that everyone has to make sacrifices and look how quickly we are to throw so many thousands under the bus. A low point in our history. Pathetic.

Maybe if people grew a pair and started caring about others, we'd get through this a little easier.
no stats or sarcasm either.

CliffordK

About 1/3 of the deaths have been in nursing homes. A sad statistic. One problem is that in the past, hospitals would routinely discharge patients into nursing homes for a step-down care level. But, that is really bad for COVID patients causing major outbreak risks.

But the average years lost for nursing home patients may be < 1 year, and not necessarily their best year of their lives.

That leaves about 2/3 of the deaths from community members. It doesn't matter if they die at in the hospital or at home. They went to to the hospital because of COVID.

Yes, many of those may have had other risk factors. But, they might have been able to live for years without COVID.

Risk is probably closer to 1%, with higher numbers due to individuals who aren't tested.

Still, if half the country was to get COVID, it could be millions of deaths, and tens of millions of hospital admissions. With our medical system largely collapsing (increasing the mortality rate).

livedarklions

The number of new cases has just started a dramatic rise, now exceeding a million reported cases per week nationwide, and we know that the lack of available testing is leading to a gross understatement of the actual number of cases. There's a lag time between the trends of new cases and hospitalization, and an even longer one for deaths. We're now just seeing the beginning of the take-off in hospitalizations nationwide, and the number of deaths per day has just started climbing. It had been stable at about 1000 per day, but now is more like 1500-2000 deaths per day, and that's by all reasonable calculations just the leading edge of a dramatic increase over the next several weeks to months.

If you actually want to understand what's going on, stop trying to cherry-pick factoids to make it sound like inaction is a reasonable strategy and look at the trend data that show inaction is going to kill a lot more people from COVID than we've seen so far. It's also already overwhelming hospitals and emergency care, so we're going to see all sorts of mortality increases for conditions otherwise unrelated to COVID.

So first you tried to get this thread shut down and now you're using it to deny the obvious. Unfortunately for you, people on this thread aren't part of your echo chamber, so when you try this half-baked data-distortion, you're going to get caught.

stevel610 

In Pennsylvania 68% of deaths were nursing facilities. PA still requires nursing homes to accept patients back and they don't have to be tested before being discharged from the hospital.

stevel610 

I didn't ask for the thread to be shut down, just moved to a more appropriate forum.

Who said anything about inaction? Older people and those at risk with other co-morbidities should be very very careful and protected. And can be done relatively easily with proper precautions.

That is not reason to cause harm in other ways to the 98% of the population who is not at high risk.

CliffordK

It would be easy enough to create a model of clean homes and dirty homes. Ok, so don't use those terms, but take some nursing facilities for COVID recovery care (and in the future communicable disease recovery). And, other facilities and separate staff for those without the disease. Although, multiple-exposures is a potential issue with lumping people with different diseases together.

Nursing care patients leaving a home and returning to the same home is an issue, although if the home is fighting an outbreak, returning back may not be bad as long as isolated.

Oregon previously published a map with nursing facility outbreaks, but has buried that data.

79pmooney

Deaths over the norm are about 100,000 higher than the CDC count. A lot of those happened outside those facilities, skewing your numbers a lot.

I hear ambulances day and night. Last Saturday I chatted with an ambulance crew member who was taking a break by his ambulance between calls. He was exhausted, Many times the number of calls before the pandemic.

Sentencing the weaker to death so the strong get to celebrate their freedom - OK, those who entered voluntary or involuntary (the draft) servitude to serve our country and preserve that freedom for people like you are now in the "weaker" category. Is it asking too much to suck it up and give up a little for a finite amount of time so that those veterans aren't sentenced to death similar to death by waterboard? Is letting them live out their lives to their natural end too much to ask?

Marcus_Ti 

The last 10 months of COVID show that you really need to stop talking and embarrassing yourself. I, personally, among many others have lost people in nursing homes. No it isn't easy with proper precautions. Just stop. Indeed, my pinheaded Farmlandia relations sounded EXACTLY like you--until they personally started losing their own out there, and couldn't even have a funeral.

But, like they say--you cannot teach old dogs new tricks. So, I fully expect you to keep going.

Hondo Gravel

Here is Bubba and Bubbette’s hero.

livedarklions

This was the approach Sweden was taking, and they were in a far better position to isolate vulnerable people than the US is. Sweden is currently giving up that strategy as it's been a miserable failure.

And you're just looking at deaths here, the morbidity from COVID has been terrible, and we'll likely be seeing those effects for years.

Again, you just ignore what happens to the medical system when you don't contain the spread of this thing.

Oh, and if you actually knew what the co-morbidities are, you'd know there's a hell of a lot more than 2% of the population in the high risk category. Seriously, just stop with the numbers, you're just embarrassing yourself.

Marcus_Ti 

I'm not sure who is more screwed in the head, dear old Kenny or tongues-talking Paula White.

stevel610 

I agree. It's just common sense.

stevel610 

I think I'm embarrassing you. But keep trying.....

cloud

This was a interesting article put out than taken down by John Hopkins.



https://web.archive.org/web/20201126...ue-to-covid-19

Marcus_Ti 

I'm sorry you've fallen victim to conspiracy theories. Best wishes.

Seen it before. Heard it before. Seen it debunked before. Could have saved yourself the typing.

livedarklions

Classic non-refuting retort. I'm accepting that as an admission you know you're beaten.

livedarklions

An article in a student newspaper.
Meantime,

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6942e2.htm

Hondo Gravel

I found the answer

Seattle Forrest

Trevtassie

They tend to do that with head injuries, even here in Australia, where health care is free, so no incentive to keep you in hospital, and actually government pressure to churn you out ASAP. Head injuries are complicated, they could send you home after a few hours and nek minnit you're dead and suing them (well technically it'd be your estate).
And yeah, the extra money for covid deaths is BS, if anything, deaths are being under reported.

Marcus_Ti 

This story has been around since Spring, when virus deniers labeled it a Liberal Hoax and the virus was going to magically go away by easter. This is literally the first result on Google:

https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/ho...9-death-count/

And there are lots of others. Those too, have been up since April...and you're here 7 months later parroting the debunked conspiracy.

It is BS. Conspiracy mongering BS that is only tangentially related to reality--used to dupe people into thinking a medical emergency isn't an emergency.

Oldairhead

People keep saying that the Federal Government (CDC) dropped the ball on this early on. Well, the CDC is an advisory agency only and cannot do anything but make a recommendation. Each States Public Health Department has the responsibility to deal with a pandemic locally. If they choose a different response from what the CDC recommends then it seems to be a stretch to put the blame at the Federal level. Essentially you now have 50 different responses to the pandemic and 50 different ways that they are tabulating the data. This is how we got to the place where a fatal motorcycle accident is listed as a Covid death because he tested positive post-mortem, and it is why you cannot trust the numbers. There are 50 different ways the data is being collected, and the standards keep changing so you cannot really even compare data from this past summer to current numbers.

I think one thing we can say with certainty is that things will get much worse before they get better!

canklecat

I have several friends who work in health care -- doctors, nurses, EMTs, etc. -- with no particular axes to grind politically or culturally. They're independent thinkers and well informed so I pay attention when they talk about the differences between this SARS pandemic and COVID-19 cases, versus previous years of the usual flu, colds, even occasional outbreaks of meningitis.

This pandemic is worse. Much worse than anything we've seen in the US in my lifetime (I'm 63).

But it still doesn't seem real to many Americans because so many of the deaths are among the invisible people - older folks who are retired, disabled, in nursing homes, assisted living or, like my apartment complex, independent living exclusively for folks over age 55. Many of these folks are invisible because they aren't working full time, or working at all, and rarely see their own families, if they have any surviving family. When I moved here I was surprised to discover how many residents never see or hear from their families.

Even my mom, who was one of the most generous and giving people I've known, never heard from her grandkids during her final decade. Her older brother was the only family member, besides myself, she had any contact with and he died a few years before she did. I was her caregiver during her final decade and the only family member she saw at all. For awhile I reached out to my kids and other family but they never responded. She didn't have any money, and was too old and tired to be a babysitter, so they didn't have any use for her. Their loyalties were to other family who had money and things to offer.

Sounds callous but that's a common theme here. And probably common across the US. These are forgotten people and the numbers -- now approaching a quarter-million deaths -- don't register with many younger folks.

Just today I read a baffling post on social media from a women who is an ICU nurse in my area. Her 2,000 word essay could basically be summed up as "Old people shouldn't expect to live forever. This is just a super-cold. If you die, well, too bad, that's life. The rest of us need to get on with our lives, having fun and partying."

As a former health care professional working in ICU, ER, hemodialysis and with chronically ill patients awaiting transplants, I was disappointed to say the least. I wish I could claim I was shocked but I've seen too much of that this year. I rarely respond to strangers but I suggested she reconsider her career and get out of patient care that involved acute illness and injury. If I was her manager or a hospital administrator I'd have been stunned to see such public callousness in an ICU nurse and would have taken action to protect the patients first. Her attitude was an imminent threat to patients and a liability to her employer.

And those rumors about hospitals fudging the statistics to boost their profits were based on misunderstandings by laypersons about how the SARS virus works. Despite months of readily available factual information, too many people still believe it's just a "really bad cold" or "just like the flu."

Nope. The respiratory system is merely the entry point. And, consequently, the system most commonly attacked. But it's not confined to the respiratory system.

The early 2000s SARS epidemic prompted research that made connections between SARS and a range of non-respiratory illnesses, ranging from cardiovascular disease to inflammatory diseases to autoimmune disorders to neurological damage and dementia.

Unfortunately there wasn't much follow up on that early research. This pandemic is prompting renewed research. If it turns out these viruses attack more than just the respiratory system, and there may be permanent consequences even for younger people who get sick but never fully recover, then we may finally see some emphasis on effective vaccines that may improve our lives in ways we didn't expect.

CycleryNorth81

Would you go shopping?

South Dakota's governor encouraged people to go shopping the same day the state reported its highest single-day COVID-19 death total

https://www.yahoo.com/news/south-dak...153612071.html