Coronainsanity

[tinselwolverine]

I am shocked! Shocked!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HMIyDf3gBoY

 

[Gulo Blue]

https://www.foxnews.com/us/us-life-expectancy-drops-a-year-in-pandemic-most-since-wwii

"Between 2019 and the first half of 2020, life expectancy decreased 2.7 years for Black people, to 72. It dropped 1.9 years for Hispanics, to 79.9, and 0.8 years for white people, to 78."

 

[tinselwolverine]

https://www.foxnews.com/us/us-life-expectancy-drops-a-year-in-pandemic-most-since-wwii

"Between 2019 and the first half of 2020, life expectancy decreased 2.7 years for Black people, to 72. It dropped 1.9 years for Hispanics, to 79.9, and 0.8 years for white people, to 78."

If that?s not proof of white privilege and systematic segregation, I don?t know what is.

 

[Michchamp]

If that?s not proof of white privilege and systematic segregation, I don?t know what is.

It's probably just an example of personal choice.

 

[Gulo Blue]

I really don't like it dropping by more than 6 months in a 6 month period. There's no significance to that threshold, but I don't like it.

 

[Gulo Blue]

I am suspicious of these recommendations for vaccinated people to keep wearing masks. I suspect they know that once some small percentage of people start not wearing mask other unvaccinated people will also stop wearing masks so they are asking everyone to keep wearing masks to avoid this. Are there any examples of viruses that people spread at significant rates after vaccination?

 

[Spartanmack]

If that?s not proof of white privilege and systematic segregation, I don?t know what is.

what's everyone freaking out about - those are generally the worst .8 to 2.7 years for everyone, regardless of race.

 

[byco42]

This concerns me. The perpetuation of a crisis in the face of apparent considerable skepticism, dismissed as “misinformation”. The need to convince people in the middle of a pandemic that there is actually a pandemic. When the survival rate is 99%+.

“Addressing and mitigating misinformation is a critical component for building vaccine trust and confidence. This Town Hall discussion will highlight how and why misinformation spreads, why it matters for vaccine confidence, and tools and strategies to identify and mitigate vaccine misinformation.”​

I mean, when you die with COVID, you die of COVID. When you die after getting the COVID vaccine, it didn’t kill you. And the other side effects? Manageable because ... the vaccine.

Oh, the duplicity. It is infuriating.

“It is ‘extremely difficult’ to definitively link a death to the vaccine itself, says Hilda Bastian, a writer and scientist who specializes in validating evidence-based health claims.”​

But so easy to attribute COD as CV19 even with significant co-morbidities present! (See below)

“That is partially because the deaths reported so far have occurred days or weeks after an injection, making it hard to rule out other circumstances. Another reason is that, right now, clinicians are prioritizing vaccines largely for a population of older people with underlying health conditions.”​

Somehow, this same circumstance never has applied to COVID 19 deaths.

Most of those who have died after vaccination have been in this group, according to reports from the United Kingdom and the United States.”​

Oh ... in that case ... nothing to see here; move along.

Who’s going to bother to read this anyway?

If you do, you are among the < .0001% of the US population who will. I love the way it is so cavalier about the number of people who have died after being vaccinated.

“These reports of death to VAERS involve temporally associated deaths following vaccination due to any cause; adverse event reports to VAERS, including deaths, should not be assumed to be causally related to vaccination.”​

Translation: “Most are old and sick anyway and we don’t really know if the vaccine killed them.”

 

[tomdalton22]

so, about 500K people died in the US without a vaccine. Do the "anti vax" people think more or fewer people will die if everyone is vaccinated?

 

[Gulo Blue]

This concerns me.

It's tough to say case by case, but due to changes of death rates overall, I see no reason to suspect attributions are wildly off. Hopefully someone will write a nice paper of death rates of vaccinated vs unvaccinated people by age with the window of data being produced right now.

Bringing up a survival rate of 99+% plus is one of those lies, damned lies, and statistics approaches. Sounds like a great big percentage, but it's the same as saying if 70% eventually get it, fewer than 54 million will die. The actual number is way better than 99%, but the stat sounds so good to some people when I put it that way, I don't even need to try to get it right which would be around 5 times fewer deaths.

 

[Gulo Blue]

Have there been any reported cases of loss of smell or taste with any of the vaccines that anyone has heard of?

 

[byco42]

so, about 500K people died in the US without a vaccine. Do the "anti vax" people think more or fewer people will die if everyone is vaccinated?

Were it that rudimentary. No one appears to know that at this time. Certainly not the experts. Link

Because there is a difference between immunization and transmission. And the experts don’t know yet if the vaccines in play prevent transmission. Which then, to me calls to question the actual efficacy of the vaccine.

From the article:

”As countries roll out vaccines that prevent COVID-19, studies are under way to determine whether shots can also stop people from getting infected and passing on the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Vaccines that prevent transmission could help to bring the pandemic under control if they are given to enough people.

“Preliminary analyses suggest that at least some vaccines are likely to have a transmission-blocking effect. But confirming that effect — and how strong it will be — is tricky because a drop in infections in a given region might be explained by other factors, such as lockdowns and behaviour changes. Not only that, the virus can spread from asymptomatic carriers, which makes it hard to detect those infections.

“These are among the hardest types of studies to do,” says Marc Lipsitch, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. “All of us are out there, hungrily trying to see what we can get out of little bits of data that do come out,” he says. Results from some studies are expected in the next few weeks.”​

64 million Americans have been vaccinated to date.

This has never been resolved in my opinion.

The people who died of COVID and who died with COVID. Until we do, we’ll never know who died of COVID. Or the actual number of confirmed deaths.

That number does not seem to exist.

And, as I have said in the past “Provisional Death Counts” were 50% of “Reported Death Counts”. Now, that number is the same as reported death counts.

And the CDC calls the category “All Deaths Involving COVID 19” 1

1 Deaths with confirmed or presumed COVID-19, coded to ICD–10 code U07.1

This is a rather wide net, IMO.

 

[Gulo Blue]

This is a rather wide net, IMO.

The low end of that net is high enough to justify mask wearing, distancing, and targeted shut downs.

 

[byco42]

The low end of that net is high enough to justify mask wearing, distancing, and targeted shut downs.

It?s way past that now. The next virus will be here soon. Two masks, 12 feet and house arrest is imminent.

If by ?targeted shut downs? you mean independently owned restaurants but not major sporting events, small businesses but not corporate retail giants, I suppose that?s accurate.

 

[Gulo Blue]

3.3 million died last year instead of the expected 2.85 million. How is that not good enough to suggest the impact of covid was in the ballpark of the numbers attributed to covid?

 

[byco42]

3.3 million died last year instead of the expected 2.85 million. How is that not good enough to suggest the impact of covid was in the ballpark of the numbers attributed to covid?

1. We don’t know, with all our faith in science, the subset of confirmed deaths solely due to COVID. Or if all the excess deaths are directly attributable to COVID.

2. But that’s part of the point. Consequences like this are the rest of it.

3. And it’s impossible to attribute the number of deaths to lockdowns, measures, directives, et al. Collateral damage, I suppose. Link

March through May saw a significant increase in deaths over previous years -- and not just from COVID-19, says a new study from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

When deaths attributed to COVID-19 were removed from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention totals, the death rate in several demographics outpaced the same period in 2019, the study found. The timeframe represents the first three months of response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.

"We know that the pandemic is selectively taking lives. It also seems to be causing ancillary deaths that are not directly caused by COVID-19, but are a consequence of the fact that we have COVID-19 in our society, in our health care system, in our jobs, in our lives. We're trying to capture those effects as data," Jacobson said.

The researchers used publicly available data from the CDC that are sorted by age and gender. Full numbers for 2019 are not yet publicly available, so the researchers calculated 2019 death estimates using 2018 CDC data and 2019 population estimates from the Census Bureau. They then compared those numbers with the CDC's provisional non-COVID-19 death numbers for 2020.

Even though the researchers chose a more stringent measure of statistical significance than commonly used in such analyses, they found a significant increase in excess deaths in 2020 for men between 15 and 59 years of age, and for women between 25 and 44.

"Although we don't know why, deaths increased to a greater degree than expected. As someone who has spent their career in medicine and public health, this concerns me," Jokela said. "The concern is that excess deaths will continue to occur during the pandemic, whether it's because people are delaying care for other conditions or because some COVID-19 deaths are going undetected. This is a phenomenon that requires ongoing monitoring and investigation."​

 

[Gulo Blue]

1. We don?t know, with all our faith in science, the subset of confirmed deaths solely due to COVID. Or if all the excess deaths are directly attributable to COVID.

2. But that?s part of the point. Consequences like this are the rest of it.

3. And it?s impossible to attribute the number of deaths to lockdowns, measures, directives, et al. Collateral damage, I suppose. Link

March through May saw a significant increase in deaths over previous years -- and not just from COVID-19, says a new study from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

When deaths attributed to COVID-19 were removed from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention totals, the death rate in several demographics outpaced the same period in 2019, the study found. The timeframe represents the first three months of response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.

"We know that the pandemic is selectively taking lives. It also seems to be causing ancillary deaths that are not directly caused by COVID-19, but are a consequence of the fact that we have COVID-19 in our society, in our health care system, in our jobs, in our lives. We're trying to capture those effects as data," Jacobson said.

The researchers used publicly available data from the CDC that are sorted by age and gender. Full numbers for 2019 are not yet publicly available, so the researchers calculated 2019 death estimates using 2018 CDC data and 2019 population estimates from the Census Bureau. They then compared those numbers with the CDC's provisional non-COVID-19 death numbers for 2020.

Even though the researchers chose a more stringent measure of statistical significance than commonly used in such analyses, they found a significant increase in excess deaths in 2020 for men between 15 and 59 years of age, and for women between 25 and 44.

"Although we don't know why, deaths increased to a greater degree than expected. As someone who has spent their career in medicine and public health, this concerns me," Jokela said. "The concern is that excess deaths will continue to occur during the pandemic, whether it's because people are delaying care for other conditions or because some COVID-19 deaths are going undetected. This is a phenomenon that requires ongoing monitoring and investigation."​

I know. I've made these points. But do I think it's likely they make up so much of the difference between 2.85 million and 3.3 million that the remaining number attributable to covid warrant less of a response? No. We don't get to respond based on objective reality, only our best estimates of what the real risks are. I feel like these points could be useful for academic discussions related to improving pandemic response, but they feel like they are aimed at criticizing the efforts that people made. Outside of the few missteps we should investigate where people did things to make things worse (nursing homes) most of my non-Monday morning quarterbacking criticism would be directed towards doing too little. I think it's fair to say that with something in the ballpark of 500k deaths, 4x the global rate, we did too little. We'd have to find that through overreacting, a large portion of our covid death count was misattributed.

 

[byco42]

What I like about our interchanges is that they are civil and I learn something. However, more then, is what, in your opinion? Not a “gotcha” in any way.

My opinion? COVID is steam in a pressure cooker that has to be released and the death count would be what it would be regardless. The reason I say this is that I don’t think it’s going away soon. And the vaccine, IMO, was brought out way too hastily. I hope that the long-term effects are not more destructive than the vaccine itself.

 

[Gulo Blue]

What I like about our interchanges is that they are civil and I learn something. However, more then, is what, in your opinion? Not a “gotcha” in any way.

My opinion? COVID is steam in a pressure cooker that has to be released and the death count would be what it would be regardless. The reason I say this is that I don’t think it’s going away soon. And the vaccine, IMO, was brought out way too hastily. I hope that the long-term effects are not more destructive than the vaccine itself.

I agree. We've got a good crew for this stuff. I can say things that might offend some people in the real world that would jump to conclusion and then get then feedback and opportunity to clarify. That's a rarity I think.

Here are my guesses:

I would not be surprised if the count is off by 100k. I think regular flu and driving deaths are down and suicides and missed opportunities caused by people not going to doctors when they should are up. I don't know how much, but I don't think suicides are more than triple, I don't think car deaths are down much more than 50%, we have some idea of how many flu deaths there are per year which caps how many lives could have been lost there (other pneumonia is another issue, much bigger than I previously thought) - so al in all, +/- less than 100k seems pretty likely to me.

I think our actions have a huge effect on how many die.

Had we reacted more strongly off the bat with uniform messaging to the best of our ability (meaning getting the masking wrong at 1st, but more evenly locking down and distancing) I think 50 - 100k lives would have been saved in the initial wave of 150k lives.

Had we not locked down as much as we did, I think we saw in a few places that got covid spread earlier how bad it could be (with overrun hospitals) if the curve hadn't been flattened elsewhere and we could have seen more of that in small towns around the country. I think North Carolina for example didn't have it that bad during the first wave and kept it low through the summer better than some other places (Louisiana, Georgia.) If the places that didn't have the early boom uniformly did as ban as the less good states, I think it could have been a lot worse. Since I think we're at 500k now, I think maybe twice as bad might have been possible - which implies that original crazy paper that talked about what could happen if people could somehow be forced to not change their behavior might have been in the ballpark.

 

[Gulo Blue]

I'm also concerned by the early reports of athletes with cardiomyopathy that we may have a long term rise in heart issues caused by undiagnosed damage to people that never knew they had covid.