Help the Fight Against COVID-19

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A lot more people will die, and public needs to be prepared for it psychologically. Some 160K people a year in the US, mostly seniors, succumb to lower respiratory disease. Even more die of cancer and cardiovascular disease. A lot of them die even without any coronavirus, on their own or helped along by flu or something else. But now if those people get covid19 (the probability of which is rather high IMO), their deaths will be chalked up to covid19. Nobody has been watching the death counts for anything this closely in the history of our civilization.
 
Tell that to the families of the 900+ dead in Italy over the last 24 hrs

Or the families of the 26k people whose loved ones have been lost so far worldwide in a short space of time.

Tell that to the lady who lost her mother, 2 sisters and brother in a week cuz of this thing, that it's not as deadly as you thought.

Think about that for a minute.
Italy has a few issues:
1) A lot of direct trade (and human movement) directly with Wuhan due to leather trade. They had mass exposure early on, before anything was understood outside China (and while China was still lying to WHO and the outside world about it being transmissible).
2) A very old population - the oldest in Europe, one of the oldest in the world.
3) Huge smoking rates.
4) A culture of kissing and close contact.
5) A much more socialised (and therefore less expansive/responsive) healthcare system with much less equipment than yours in America.

No one is unaware of the cases you cite - what you need to look at is what's going on outside the worst hotspots.
Germany is near Italy, but its death rate appears to be 0.5% instead of >7%. Over an order of magnitude different.

You should ask yourself why.
 
No one is unaware of the cases you cite - what you need to look at is what's going on outside the worst hotspots.
Germany is near Italy, but its death rate appears to be 0.5% instead of >7%. Over an order of magnitude different.

You should ask yourself why.

A lot of experts have been asking that question but nobody knows why Germany has had so few deaths. It’s possible to come up with reasons why it’s lower than Italy. But why is it lower than neighbors like Belgium, Netherlands, France, etc.? An answer may emerge in the coming weeks but so far it is a mystery.
 
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Germany, has fourth highest per capita healthcare spending in the world (and that money is probably better spent as well, Teutonic efficiency is a thing), Italy is 21st. Significantly more old people as well. There you go. These are very nonlinear circumstances.

https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm

I guess if nothing else we'll be able to determine how much (if any) extra healthcare we're buying by paying nearly three times as much as Italy, and nearly twice as much as Germany. I'd guess not very much, although it should be better here in the end than in both countries.
 
Germany, has fourth highest per capita healthcare spending in the world (and that money is probably better spent as well, Teutonic efficiency is a thing...

sadly Teutonic bureaucracy is also a thing... so it’s not as well spent as it should be.

I’m pretty sure it’s the immense testing at 100,000 a week.
 
Second study on hydroxychloroquine/azithromycin confirms the first: https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/COVID-IHU-2-1.pdf. Patients are able to leave hospital in ~5 days.

Time to ban it in more states? :)
It's a big controversy over here in France, and the "hither and yon" from the government is starting to nerve the population a very big lot. I'm not a specialist, what are the risks associated to this treatment ? Seems to be effective and efficient, why put lives at stake for what seem to be unscientific personal quarrels ?
 
A lot of experts have been asking that question but nobody knows why Germany has had so few deaths. It’s possible to come up with reasons why it’s lower than Italy. But why is it lower than neighbors like Belgium, Netherlands, France, etc.? An answer may emerge in the coming weeks but so far it is a mystery.

Germany tests a lot more than other countries and they are in an early stage of their epidemic. Numbers will rise in a few days ...
Germany also had some capacities left and accepted patients from france and italy. But that will change too, even with its good heath care system.
 
I see a lot of statistics but one I haven't seen yet - and it's been mentioned here before - is the Serious Cases / Population.
The active cases depend on the testing. The wider you test, the more likely you're going to find active cases.
But, unless you test the whole population, you can't be sure of the accuracy of your tests.
If you take the serious cases per country, you get, IMHO, a better view of the severity in each country.
And this is something where we, in Belgium, aren't doing so well.

Corona cases per Mpop.PNG
 
I see a lot of statistics but one I haven't seen yet - and it's been mentioned here before - is the Serious Cases / Population.
The active cases depend on the testing. The wider you test, the more likely you're going to find active cases.
But, unless you test the whole population, you can't be sure of the accuracy of your tests.
If you take the serious cases per country, you get, IMHO, a better view of the severity in each country.
And this is something where we, in Belgium, aren't doing so well.

View attachment 65513
This is meaningless because there's no universal definition of what constitutes a "serious" case. It's also frustrating that nobody seems to give a shit about counting those who have recovered from the disease.
 
This is meaningless because there's no universal definition of what constitutes a "serious" case. It's also frustrating that nobody seems to give a shit about counting those who have recovered from the disease.

True, but nobody gives a shit about the "fully recovered" who only survived with severe lung, heart or liver damage.
 
This is meaningless because there's no universal definition of what constitutes a "serious" case. It's also frustrating that nobody seems to give a shit about counting those who have recovered from the disease.
Don't know for the states but in europe at least those who leave the hospital recovered are counted. This does not take into account those who got infected at home and that spontaneously recovered from the virus. So a good counting remains a difficult issue as long as no international agreement defines what these value data represent and how they're acquired.
 
This is meaningless because there's no universal definition of what constitutes a "serious" case. It's also frustrating that nobody seems to give a shit about counting those who have recovered from the disease.
It's less meaningless than the number of "Active Cases" because these depend of the spread of the testing.
Serious cases are probably the hospitalized cases and it would even be more meaningful if it were to present the cases in the ICU.
And I'm not saying that I don't give a shit about those who have recovered.
 
This thread has mostly served its therapeutic role for me and I’ll be stepping back. That said, OMG stay away from broadcast news on the left or right!! There are some genuine idiot-guests on those programs right now. Regarding news, I’ve gone as center as I can with Reuter’s app on my phone, but even there the content is not 100% insanity-free.
Try axios.com. They also have newsletters.
 
Germany, has fourth highest per capita healthcare spending in the world (and that money is probably better spent as well, Teutonic efficiency is a thing), Italy is 21st. Significantly more old people as well. There you go. These are very nonlinear circumstances.

https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm

I guess if nothing else we'll be able to determine how much (if any) extra healthcare we're buying by paying nearly three times as much as Italy, and nearly twice as much as Germany. I'd guess not very much, although it should be better here in the end than in both countries.

Keep in mind that a huge chunk of US healthcare spending goes toward corporate profit, rather than care. Even though we make our people pay more for healthcare, on metrics like life expectancy and mortality in childbirth, other countries with nationalized systems often fare better.
 
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