"In this survey, we demonstrated the researches and approaches of about 100 eminent scientists from around the world. In general, they agree that the current statistical data does not reflect the actual state of affairs, and the publicly distributed media estimates of the mortality rate are at least incorrect, and do not correspond to the actual picture.
The actual number of people with SARS-CoV-2 infection or people that already passed through COVID-19 early-stage or without symptoms is several dozen times higher than the public numbers show.
This is primarily due to the approaches and scope of testing. The public numbers have little to do with science. This is, to a greater extent, either media or politically motivated data. You should also consider the factor of a special picture of the course of the disease, which affects medical statistics (RKI Epidemiological bulletins).
Accordingly, the real mortality rate from SARS-CoV-2 is 25-60 times less than the figures presented to us by MSM and a number of governments." SF
The good news is COVID-19 is the cure for the common flu. Since no one is complaining any longer about getting the regular flu, somehow COVID-19 must have eradicated it.
Isn’t science great? /s
So all the fear mongering, flat-curvers are 100% convinced that social distancing is the reason that we have been spared 2.2 million deaths.
OK, fine, let’s explore that. California was he first state to lock down on March 19th. Eastern states like New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and a few others followed within 3 to 4 days and by April 1, 37 states (plus Washington DC) had some form of social distancing/stay at home orders. There were many states that did not have official orders until the first week of April and some never had any.
With that in mind, on March 31, The White House announced that the new models suggest that there would be 100,000 to 240,000 deaths. The reason stated was that social distancing was flattening the curve and what the American people were doing was working. On that same day, March 31, the distancing orders of more than 30 states was less than 1 week old and at least 10 states still had zero orders. This is what they claim changed the projections from 2.2 million to 100,000 to 240,000.
But wait, there’s more. If we assume a mortality rate of 1%, which I do not agree with, but lets just say it’s 10 times deadlier than the flu for sh!ts and grins. For social distancing to change the projected death toll from 2.2 million to 100,000, fewer people need to be infected. Right? People stay away from each other, less transmission. Got it! But how many fewer infections do we need to change it from 2.2 million to 100,000? Well, if the mortality rate is 1% and 2.2 million people were going to die, that would mean we were on pace for 220,000,000 infections before social distancing, roughly 10 times the amount of infections in the entire world and 2/3 of all men, women and children in the US. To get to 100,000 deaths we would need to infect 210,000,000 fewer people. Let me say that again. We are to believe that we were on pace to infect 220 million people, but after a week of panic buying at the grocery stores, standing in lines, not wearing masks, congregating in parks and celebrating Spring break, the experts were able to determine that the efforts so far, if kept up, would reduce infections by 210 million and save 2.1 million lives, all with less than 1 week of more than 30 state’s mitigation plan being in effect and without any orders from 10 other states who either started after the model change or not at all.
Pretty Amazing!
cui bono?
This doesn’t surprise me. Even in the early days when MSM was reporting wildly high mortality rates, the caveats about not knowing the rate of infection was mentioned. Having a lower mortality rate is only mildly comforting. In the last couple of weeks, MSM concentrated on the death toll even more than the number of infections confirmed by testing. The present death toll, in the light of a low mortality rate, would indicate an extremely high rate of infection, higher than most if not all infectious diseases.
I posted a link to a similar chart about weekly death totals due to various causes in an earlier comment. I found a better graph. The point of the graph is that Covid-19 has a much higher spike than the 2017-2018 flu and pneumonia season ever had. The chart comparing Covid-19 deaths to deaths by all other causes in NYC is even more startling. We’ll know in 8 to 10 weeks how fast that rate declines. It’ll never reach the total deaths caused by heart disease and cancer, but it will probably dwarf recent flu seasons in the US. If the mortality rate for Covid-19 proves to be in line with other flu strains, that means that the infection rate is many times higher. And we don’t yet know what longterm pulmonological, neurological or other organ damage this new virus causes in survivors.
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/not-like-the-flu-not-like-car-crashes-not-like
1) There are different numbers for mortality. Each definition makes sense in a certain context.
2) The mortality of all infected people can be estimated by the fate of the passengers on the Diamond Princess. An age corrected rate gives around 0.5% (+/- 0.2%) mortality of all infected. Experts in the field work with this numbers for months.
3) Even with 0.3% or 0.5% mortality you would have hundred of thousands of deaths before reaching herd immunity without a vaccine.
Strictly speaking, even the best case scenario is cruel, and if your ICUs beds hit the ceiling you have of course a much higher mortality. The discussion of misuse of mortality rates does not change this.
The issue in many countries is that they are not even prepared for the best case scenario, even less for a second wave during next winter after premature return to normal.
TTG, with the greatest respect, perhaps in military terms you are confusing harassing fire with a barrage.
Covid19 may have exactly the same mortality as seasonal flu. However seasonal flu does not produce 70 million cases in ten weeks. – which is what Covid19, unregulated, might do.
Covid19 would overrun our health systems without mitigation. Once that happens the current economic troubles would look like a minor scratch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGUgrEfSgaU
Dr. Ioannidis in short interview about Santa Clara Study
TTG,
” when MSM was reporting wildly high mortality rates”
Where were they getting those numbers from, special MSM sources or the same place Dr. Fauci and company were getting theirs?
” the infection rate is many times higher.”
Missing in the graphs is: The red line with the arrow which mysteriously disappears after week 7. Apparently nobody has died since week 7. I’m sure that is not an intentional distortion, just an editing error. They’ve only had a week to fix it.
“Strikingly, in the state of New York” The author’s don’t seem to find it striking that the mass transit system has remained in operation the entire time. Quality work there “New Atlantis”, quality work.
“Covid-19 has a much higher spike than the 2017-2018 flu and pneumonia season ever had.
Assuming, of course, that the two counts have equal validity. Did the 2017-2018 flu season count include 3700 deaths added in one day which were not known to have died from the flu but were merely presumed to have done so? Did the CDC issue instructions in 2017-2018 to certify the death as caused by flu even when flu was not known to be present?
Making calculations and predictions from a death count which is know with certainty to be greatly inflated is not, perhaps, the most useful of enterprises.
I’m with TTG and Ullenspiegel on the meaning of the stats. This is an extremely serious disease outbreak because it puts stress on the health care system, particularly ICU capacity, health care worker (HCW) staffing, and personal protection equipment (PPE). Many HCW people are working 2 shifts/day, PPE inventories are low, and some ICUs may be running near capacity. The risk is that too many cases, not spread out over months, could overwhelm parts of the system and cause local collapse — much as seen in northern Italy, eg, anecdotally — with many more deaths than necessary, if we can spread out the rate of appearance of severe/critical cases.
I posted some estimates for the US previously. Long run the extra deaths might be a 25 percent increase, over next 4-5 years. That assumes that system is sized up to handle the extra workload.
I don’t keep up with percents of GDP spent on health care, but suppose it was 16 pct previously. That will have to go up to about 20 pct. The 4 pct is achievable, as we are now seeing a drop of GDP maybe 15 pct overall due to isolations. But there will need to be a focus on training HCWs, making PPE, and such. Many HCWs will burn out, leave the field, so we need to train even more than 25 pct increase. Remarks about who-said who-did in the past are not very relevant to the needs of the situation.
Canada has established a national HCW volunteer database, with some screening, and the provinces and other HC related organizations can draw upon that inventory. I don’t know what the US does but it is likely somewhat similar. Almost everyone can do something as a volunteer. Eg a friend who cooks dinners for a guy who is a respiratory tech, so he can focus on going to work not going to grocery store.
Take care, and best wishes.
kr.
TTG,
With sincere respect, there is a serious problem with the graph you posted. If you look at the one I posted in response (thread about the Stanford study), mortality rates by week 2013 to present, deaths are not constant across the year. They never are. There is always a peak in the Winter months to early Spring. The graph you posted averages mortality rates and thus has a straight line for some of the leading causes of death with CV19 shooting up through that average. That’s pure data manipulation for the purpose of maintaining fear.
When people talk about “flattening the curve” they are making it clear that they don’t realize that there is always a curve with a sharp peak for all kinds of deaths, but especially the flu/pneumonia. Again, look at the graph I posted. There is a spike in mortality in the Winter of 2018 that Winter 2020 has not come close to matching and won’t even once the lagged data comes in, IMO, based on known lag factors.
If I recall, another issue with the graph you posted is that it parses out pneumonia to compare to CV19, but it shouldn’t. It should have a line for a combination of infectious diseases that kill people, e.g. flues, pneumonia, etc. CV19 deaths have not surpassed those. And the CDC is clear that it is including any death that had CV19 like symptoms in its figures for CV19. many flues present with CV19 like symptoms. because of that definition, the CDC even shows CV19 like ER admission rate starting Oct 1, 2019. That date should be a red flag as to how many CV19 attributed admissions and death are actually the seasonal flu – unless you really believe CV19 was here and causing hospital admissions back in Oct 2019. Definitional issues explains why mortality rates, Winter 2020 have not peaked above Winter 2018 (a bad flu) or even other previous Winters.
I feel like a complete dork battling graphs on the internet. But this is a serious matter in terms of impact on our country and I guess someone has to contribute some perspective in the discussion.
Walrus,
I am agreeing with you that Covid-19 is a serious problem. I’m with you in believing that without mitigation efforts, the number of infections and deaths would be a lot higher and that the nightmare of an overrun health care system would come to be.
Fred,
The data for Covid-19 deaths stops at week 7 because we are only at week seven since the first Covid-19 death in the US. There is nothing mysterious about it. No one has died since week 7 because those future deaths have yet to happen. Unless your a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey, that’s how it works. Whether we are at the peak, approaching the peak or on the downward slope won’t be known until that data arrives.
Eric Newhill,
Yes, I agree we can get down right Talmudic about battling graphs. This graph does have separate entries for flu along and flu and pneumonia deaths and explains that the flu alone figures undercounts flu deaths while the flu with pneumonia line overcounts flu deaths. The distinction in included because it is not clear whether pneumonia deaths are included in the Covid-19 deaths.
The graph I posted shows the number of new deaths each week, not the cumulative total. The total deaths are the areas under the curves. It shows that cancer and heart disease deaths will continue to dwarf other causes, including Covid-19. After a few more months, we’ll be able to see what the area under the Covid-19 curve looks like.
The graph you posted stopped just as recorded Covid-19 deaths started picking up. Once the data for a few more months are input, your graph will give a good view of what is happening this year.
Echos of Vietnam War body counts, used as surrogates for “winning the war”.
Should become obvious when comparing all cause death rates in the US for the past five years, did reported Covid-19 deaths increase above and beyond, or merely distort the “normal” reporting numbers.
Perhaps we might agree that the two key take-aways from this piece are (1) CV-19 is much less deadly than has been portrayed; and (2) the rate of infection is much higher than has been portrayed.
Put another way, it’s not too deadly, but it spreads efficiently. It was ‘out there’ in significantly higher numbers than realized. That it doesn’t kill its hosts at too high a rate is a survival skill, as is its contagiousness. That it can infect without drawing attention to itself is its ‘secret sauce’.
It strikes me as odd that some are taking comfort (or even vindication?) from this article. Anyone who isn’t concerned by the key points raised in this analysis – that the virus is not too deadly but it spreads efficiently, even silently – doesn’t fully understand the significance of these points in the context of a novel coronavirus.
MA department of health stats for 4-19. 146 deaths attributed to CV19, cumulative dates of death 3-27 to 4-19. (Why and how they are including deaths during this period of time is not explained.). Average age of decedent is 77.26. MA life expectancy is 80.5 as of 2018. Problem with CV death numbers is that they are grouped by decade. If you assume that everyone grouped by decade is actually that age plus 3 (e.g. actual average of all deaths grouped as ‘70s’ is 73) then the average age of death by CV19 is 80.26.
A follow-up interview of Dr. Jay Battacharya from Stanford who did the antibody study in Santa Clara.
https://youtu.be/k7v2F3usNVA
Good way for estimating the death rate is to look at it on per population basis (per 1 million inhabitants), as this takes out the bias of testing.
Last flu season (2018/2019) caused estimated 57,000 deaths in the US or 170 deaths per 1,000,000 people. Coronavirus deaths for US today sit at 125 per million people. You can say, well there is the evidence, it’s no worse than the flu. But that’s because we are averaging nationally and much of the country is still to face the brunt of the epidemic.
To get closer to the real number we have to look at the state level. New York, which was the hardest hit so far, has the current death rate of 940 per million, so already 6 times higher than the last flu season. Final number for New York will probably be in 1500-2000 range, so 10 times higher than the last flu season.
This is without even going into the mess of deaths being counted as coronavirus related or not. That’s a whole separate issue.
Basically, the US has absolutely horrible reporting standards. It isn’t the “fault” of the researchers, it is the fault of all of the individual states and counties that have different standards or delay reporting. In addition, of course, are the folks who have the virus or have died from the virus and don’t know it or it wasn’t noted as cause of death.
Actually, record-keeping would probably by hugely aided by a national health service type delivery system….uniform reporting would be at least one benefit.
TTG,
I agree with most of what you say. And yes, my graph does does cut off at just about the point CV19 started amping up, according to reports. That said, CV19, all by itself, would have to kill a heck of a lot more people that would have lived to get to the 2017/2018 flu deaths level. My graph will be updated next month and we’ll see what it says about all of this.
I’m just trying to point out that
a) Death has a seasonality to it that people need to keep in mind when quoting “facts and figures” about “spikes”, etc
b) That the only way to understand the true mortality due to CV19 will be from a retrospective view. The “models” were clearly wrong.
c) The CDC definition of a CV19 death isn’t very reassuring when one is seeking accurate information; “COVID-19 should be reported on the death certificate for all decedents where the disease caused or is assumed to have caused or contributed to death. Certifiers should include as much detail as possible based on their knowledge of the case, medical records, laboratory testing, etc. If the decedent had other chronic conditions such as COPD or asthma that may have also contributed, these conditions can be reported in Part II.” Which is why I say that the retrospective approach is the only one worth taking.
What is for certain is the cost of the govt reaction in terms of economics destruction that weakens our country as a whole and many individuals within it. Healthwise, the policy will certainly (and there is already real time ample data) result in suicides, drug and alcohol related deaths, mental health issues and erosion of social order. These are all costs – some in terms of mortality – that must be weighed against what advoactes believe would be the CV19 deaths without the policy.
There is no reason to think this epidemic will go away and return in the winter like a flu epidemic, that is just wishful thinking. Flu pandemics have shown a distinct wave structure due to flu’s extreme seasonality and the breaking effects as the population approaches heard immunity levels. The epidemiological curve for this epidemic looks similar up to the peak but this is entirely artificial having been caused by the lockdowns preventing transmission. The underlying conditions that allowed for exponential growth have not changed. Only China and S Korea have managed to relax their lockdowns without cases rapidly rising again. To achieve this they needed to reduce transmission to a level they could find and test new cases without loosing control of the situation again. The rest of us need to be able to test and contact trace to a point where we have clusters but not wide spread community transmission. Next winter we will have a problem, not because that is when a second wave will appear but, because flu cases will be added to the COVID cases. None of the numbers are reliable not new case, or deaths and certainly not any estimates for the number of mild recovered cases or herd immunity levels.
TTG,
Thanks for pointing out my error, however I stand by my conclusion that the graph is intentionally misleading.
“The distinction in included because it is not clear whether pneumonia deaths are included in the Covid-19 deaths.” That’s in your reply to Eric. Dr. Birx indicated in one of last week’s White House Coronavirus Task Force briefings that all deaths in which Covid19 is present are recorded as a death from that cause. She indicated in a later one that the jump in deaths recording in NYC is due to adding in even more. It is intentionally misleading.
JJackson,
Australia has mooted stopping the lockdown and replacing it with high capacity local contact tracing based on an App.
……Modeling indicates if 40% use e App, we can open up again without restarting mass infection.
The trouble is that the usual conspiracy theorists are railing against big brother and the App, despite Government offers to release the source code and enact supporting privacy legislation.
I am reminded of the conspiracy theorist character “ Alan Krumwiede” in the movie “contagion” by a lot of the internet.
JJackson,
The virus will shortly be gone with the wind, like peak oil; except in the fevered imaginations of some who cannot admit they were wrong.
https://news.usc.edu/168987/antibody-testing-results-covid-19-infections-los-angeles-county/
“Adjusting this estimate for the statistical margin of error implies about 2.8% to 5.6% of the county’s adult population has an antibody to the virus — which translates to approximately 221,000 to 442,000 adults in the county who have been infected. That estimate is 28 to 55 times higher than the 7,994 confirmed cases of COVID-19 reported to the county at the time of the study in early April. The number of COVID-related deaths in the county has now surpassed 600.”
On April 10, there were 241 deaths which would .109% mortality rate if that was approximate date for the testing.
https://www.loscerritosnews.net/2020/04/10/april-10-2020-covid-19-report-475-new-cases-in-los-angeles-county-18-additional-deaths/
Eric I stand by everything I have posted in these threads on anthropomorphic climate change, peak oil and COVID. While pl and I will have to agree to differ on the first two as neither of us will be around in 100 years to find out who was right. On COVID I hope we are alive in 5 years and one of us can say ‘I told you so’. I hope it will be you saying it to me as this is one occasion I would rather be wrong and have to eat humble pie.
I will provide you with a bit more ammunition and predict that this epidemic is just warming up and the all causes mortality in Africa and on the Indian sub-continent is going to be horrific and the economic damage to the global economy will take at least a decade to return to anything like normal. I hope pl will be posting that peak oil is real when the economy does recover and the oil prices rise as, if a drop in prices is evidence that it is not real then an increase in prices should be evidence it is.
jjackson
No. Price/bbl is a function of supply and demand. Most oil is sold under long term contracts, but there is also the oil sold in the spot market. There does not seem to be a shortage of petroleum in the earth. Nevertheless something like cold fusion is going to come along to replace burning it in vehicles. See Harper’s piece today. Market prices at any given time are the product of many factors, some of them political.
jjackson,
“predict that this epidemic is just warming up and the all causes mortality in Africa and on the Indian sub-continent is going to ”
So Xi’s Communist China is going to be a bigger killer than Stalin’s USSR? Probably true, but I doubt the virus is going to do that in the West. Most of the nations in Africa lack a modern health system, so a highly contagous virius will run through densly populated areas quickly, especially if they were intentionally “virus bombed” by the CCP or had extensive travel from China in areas where they have significant investment and nationals living. India faces even more risk due to urbanization but they have a much better health care infrastructure and aren’t likely to have a Dr. Fauci telling Prime Minister Modi that using hydrochloroquine and antibiotics is a bad idea without a months long study first.
Covid19 killed more in one month in the USA than the whole 2018-2019 flu season.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-kills-more-americans-in-one-month-than-the-flu-kills-in-one-year/
Fred how did Xi and Stalin get in to this. This is a virus, a creation of mother nature. Trump did not create it or Xi or Stalin. Where is your evidence that any human had anything to do with it apart from cocking up the response. Fauci’s advice is sound even if others are too stupid to follow it.
Walrus,
Sorry, but no one is saying what that article is saying. CV deaths have not exceeded the flu in the US, nor in the world. It is not that deadly for most people. Sometimes I can’t figure out if you deliberately stir the pot, or if you really believe what you’re saying. CVis turning out to be about as deadly as the flu.
The first clue was the cruise ships. That everyone on board didn’t get infected and die should have created scientific skepticism around the CDC/WHO projections …there is, however, a caveat that needs to be addressed. …..if CV19 is no worse than the flu and deaths attributed to it are *distinct from flu deaths*, then we are in a situation where we have double the infectious disease deaths we would have had without the presence of CV19 in our society…..so, in the US, flu kills 60K/yr and CV19 kills 60K/yr means we have 120K deaths a year instead of the normal and expected 60K with flu only……so “fatality rate no worse than the flu” isn’t all good news. We now have double the flu mortality……..However, there is ample evidence that many flu deaths have been attributed to CV19. There is also ample evidence that many non-flu deaths have also been attributed to CV19…..the CDC guidelines for reporting a CV19 death are explicit about how this happens (available on the CDC website)……so respiratory distress and a fever, no test performed, patient dies, is chalked up to CV19 even though those are also symptoms of the flu/other known respiratory infectious diseases……patient has heart attack and dies and tests positive for CV19? That is also chalked up as a covid death – even though we know that many people have the virus and are asymptomatic. …..how many CV19 deaths are misattributed is not known at this time. In the coming months we will look at over all mortality Jan 2020 – June 2020 and compare to same period for previous years. That – and that alone – will provide insight into the true “excess” deaths caused by CV19. …..right now it’s not looking like CV19 has had a great effect, but all of the data is not in……it would have to kill a lot of people who would have otherwise lived to match Jan 2018 – June 2018, which was a very bad flu season that overwhelmed ERs and ICUs and killed many Americans.
I should add that in previous years, when there has been a rough flu season, it’s not as if every death attributed to the flu is actually influenza A or B. The tests just aren’t done that often. In fact, every year there are novel viruses that attack the respiratory system and kill that way, or by high fever, by diarrhea, etc. The actual viral agent isn’t reported regularly unless the CDC has called it out as requiring special reporting, which they did for CV. The CDC is being duplicitous in that they require reporting of CV, yet they also call for reporting of “presumed” cases were testing wasn’t done. This skews reporting away from flu and towards CV. I strongly suspect that there will not 60K excess deaths truly due to CV
Eric,
What press are you reading? You have 44,000 CV deaths in one month in the USA.
As for cruise ships. Google “Ruby Princess” she is docked here. 2700 passengers, over 400 very sick and 21 deaths! About 200 of the 1000 staff are sick too. How you can possibly say this is no worse than seasonal flu is beyond me.
Do you think NYC is just a figment of Cuomo imagination?
……and this is WITH mitigation.
JJackson,
I’ll agree, until proven otherwise, that this virus is the creation of nature. “apart from cocking up the response” is exactly how it spread, but God forbid we hold China accountable because it might hurt somebody’s bloody feelings. Xi Jinping, President of the People’s Republic of China, closed internal travel out of Wuhan province, while allowing air travel out of the region, especially air travel to Europe and the US. I would not, however, call that “cocking up” the response, as I consider it to have been done purposely to ensure the rest of the world is damaged by this virus and not just the Chinese. That’s where Stalin’s brutality to his own people comes in. Let me know if you need links to evidence of that, which has been reported here repeatedly, and is easily available online.
“The virus will shortly be gone with the wind …”
Not at all sure, Mr Newhill. The measures Trump and his team, working with the various governors, have taken and are proposing to take – lockdown followed by testing and tracing to eradicate subsequent local outbreaks – are impressive. They are being pursued with energy and determination.
But yours is a big country. I don’t think we’re going to see the back of this disease soon in Europe and I doubt it’ll be gone that quickly in the US.
The question for me is ‘Are we destroying ourselves by our response to this thing or being prudent?
The longer the “lockdown” is in place more lives will be destroyed by the economic factors.
On the other hand even if this virus present with less lethality than originally feared is it more insidious than it now appears.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32302438
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32178975
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-southkorea/south-korea-reports-recovered-coronavirus-patients-testing-positive-again-idUSKCN21S15X
Unscientifically these symptoms remind me of my wife’s bouts with lupus.
That still leaves me with the original question which I do not have an answer.
Walrus?
The first documented case in the US was on Jan 19, 2020. There have been, allegedly, 44K deaths since then. So that three full months, not one (Jan 19 – Feb 19, Feb 19 to March 19, March 19 – April 21). Am I missing something?
I say “allegedly” because of the definitional and attributional issues that Fred and I have pointed out several times.
Release whatever flu was going around in winter 2018, on a cruise ship, given the demographic of cruise patrons, and see what would happen. IMO, about the same. Cruise ships are ideal virus petri dishes.
The flu is not a cold. It can be very serious business.
Sir,
My previous post may be more suited to this thread than where I put it.
My apologies as I am working through the posts in chronological order from older to newer.
g
Covid19 mortality numbers are unreliable at best.
If this document proves out to be real, someone should ask why the directive to assign Covd19 regardless the cause of death is needed.
https://d33wjekvz3zs1a.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Alert-2-New-ICD-code-introduced-for-COVID-19-deaths.pdf
NYC and the Lombardy region in Italy have something in common.
In a first instance, in both cases the actions of the health authorities facilitated the spread of the virus in nursing homes.
So the mortality in these 2 regions in particular, have a very high component of elderly individuals that already suffered from at least 1 underlying condition but often 2 or more.
Secondly, at least initially, no separate facilities were assigned for treating Covid19 patients and the health care workers seconded to these cases, were not asked to move into the facilities rather than returning home during their off time. Home where, once again, nobody thought of isolating the elderly and those that were already at immunocompromised.
For comparison, Lombardy in particular, can be compared to the adjacent region of Veneto for example, where the approach to handling the pandemic was different and the numbers dramatically different.
The data we have from the ships along with the findings of Professor Israel are congruous. I don’t know why that is so, but there you have it.
Thanks to The Guardian that wished to put out a hit piece variously to scare and to indict the cruise ship industry, we have a particularly accurate account of what happened aboard the Zaandam.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2020/apr/07/zaandam-onboard-the-coronavirus-hit-cruise-ship
From the moment passengers boarded the ship on March 7th and the moment flu like symptoms became manifest on March 22nd, passengers and crew had not been allowed to disembark at any of the scheduled ports. Whomever brought the virus aboard the Zaandam therefore, had a captive population of in excess of 2000 individuals and had 14 leisurely days to spread the virus good and hard. Yet infections were fewer than 1000 individuals.
I remind you that the average age of the cruise ship passengers is rather elevated making them the cohort that are particularly susceptible to respiratory infections.
Eric,
Thanks for your reply.
latest deaths 45373. (wikipedia)
Deaths to 22 March = 408 (wikipedia)
So that’s 44965 deaths in one month due to CV19.
But wait, there’s more:
The death toll doubled in a week. It was expected to do that.
https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/coronavirus-deaths-in-the-us-top-45-000-doubling-in-a-week-20200422-p54m1g.html
The disease appears to be amenable to mathematical modeling. Our response is based on the modeling. The modeling is correct. Our response is correct.
I guess we won’t be absolutely sure that Fauci and Brix made us dodge a bullet until we see what happens in India and Africa.
I guess when Fauci and Co. tel us to throw away the masks and gambol in the sunshine, the same naysayers who say we don’t need mitigation will still say it’s too early.
Stay safe.
Walrus,
The deaths spiked only when the definitions of what constitutes a CV death were broadened by the CDC. For example NYC retroactively added 3,700 deaths that weren’t previously attributed to CV. Going forward, deaths like the ones that were added were automatically counted at CV. See what Guidoamm says.
This is much like when Tyler and I were commenting that the polls showing Trump could never win were deliberately skewed. Everyone said we were crazy (someone actually used that word in a response to one of my comments).
You stay safe too.
“Let’s look first at the infection of T lymphocytes, or white blood cells. The authors of this report provide evidence that SARS-CoV-2 can infect certain white blood cells in a laboratory setting. They also noted that MERS-CoV, a virus closely related to SARS-CoV-2, can infect those same cells. Importantly, however, they noted that neither MERS-CoV nor SARS-CoV-2 demonstrated any ability to replicate in these cells. It appears that these viruses can enter the cells, but the infection is abortive. HIV, in contrast, replicates aggressively in white blood cells, with infected cells spewing out thousands of new viral particles.
What about the observed lymphopenia? In a study of individuals who died of COVID-19, researchers noted that the amount of lymphocytes in the blood decreased steadily during the course of disease. By contrast, other standard blood markers, like red blood cell counts, remained fairly constant. Does this observation mean that infection with SARS-CoV-2 leads to immunosuppression, like HIV? Not necessarily. The authors note that several[1] factors could lead to the lymphopenia. Instead, they emphasized that monitoring lymphocyte levels in people with COVID-19 may be an effective and easy way for clinicians to predict disease severity.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/coronavirusfrontlines/2020/04/22/this-hivaids-specialist-explains-its-similarities—and-differences—to-covid-19/#3cfbf849f8d1
This is much like when Tyler and I were commenting
were is Tyler? Does he have a new abode web-wise?
I think a better way to look at COVID is to just look at raw death numbers: How many people died in a country/region per week vs historical amounts for that week. This is surprisingly uncommon statistic to find.
In the UK we are seeing roughly 50% more deaths per week then the 5-year average: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsregisteredweeklyinenglandandwalesprovisional/weekending10april2020
18,000 week of April 10 rather than the 12,000 historical average.
Other EU countries(though not all) are seeing similar spikes in mortality: https://www.euromomo.eu/index.html
For NY City there are twice as many extra deaths as in September 2001(!!!) https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/10/upshot/coronavirus-deaths-new-york-city.html
https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/mortality.html
This is TOTAL number of people dead. It’s spiked massively in places like NY. This doesn’t automatically mean the extra deaths are caused by COVID, it could be that the quarantine is causing a spike in deaths. Personally, I assume the quarantine is causing a reduction in deaths(less traffic accidents mostly).
Regardless, it’s really untenable to argue that nothing has happened. NYC was hit by a double 9/11 increase in mortality. This is massively more impactful than even the worst past flu seasons.
Sebastian,
The quarantine is definitely causing deaths because people are unwilling and unable to seek medical attention for non-covid conditions and there are suicides and drug ODs; another cost of the blundered policy.
Even in your worse case scenarios; i.e. assuming the articles have it right, we are still looking at a just few thousand excess deaths in outlier places, like NYC; a unique environment (e.g. crowding, subways, lots of newly arrived third world immigrants, etc). Los Angeles, another big city, is nothing like NYC in terms of covid impact.
So military quarantine NYC. Air drop food and supplies. Let the rest of us get back to life as usual. The lives of a few thousand New Yawkerz are not worth the lives of many more thousands of Americans and the destruction of the US economy.
Another study suggests that many of us have contracted the virus – as many as 21% in new York City.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/new-york-antibody-study-early-results
Time to stop the panic and the failed shelter at home policy and open the country for business.