Agreed, however the media has been singularly focused on new cases as a measure of the pandemic's severity. To me the news here is as much "NPR reports on the falling COVID death rate."
Even here they seem insistent that the lower death rate is attributable to "flattening the curve" even though there's almost no correlation at this point.
What are you referring to? The bulk of the article is about hospitals having more experience and standardizing protocols. Then they mention masks and social distancing as possibly reducing the viral load. They never mention "flattening the curve", but one of the last things they mention is keeping hospitals under capacity.
Probably because governors are no longer deliberately putting COVID patients into nursing homes. This is why NY and NJ have 3 times (!) the death rate of Italy.
Most people will believe whatever they read in the newspaper, and newspapers are unanimous in their opinion in this regard. As seniors were suffocating to death in the old folks homes, newspapers were pushing Cuomo as a _presidential candidate_.
True. Cuomo is imo as close as you can get to a typical Democrat politician and we’re told that it’s obvious a Democrat president would have handled the pandemic better.
The stats of hardest hit states are coincidentally blue states.
This is nonsense. Are you suggesting that if this illness had all the same characteristics -- long hospital stays, long-lasting damage to the body, highly transmissible -- but didn't kill, then we would not be "shutdown"?
"total cases per 100k" you need 100k because otherwise you numbers would be insignificant. You'd be saying 0.003 people per 1000 which shows how asinine this shutdown really is. It's only when you deal with populations larger than a small city can you see statistical difference and there are too many additional error factors such as quantity/quality of tests at play that far exceed what ever trend you were trying to draw.
"Are you suggesting that if this illness had all the same characteristics -- long hospital stays, long-lasting damage to the body, highly transmissible -- but didn't kill, then we would not be "shutdown"?"
YES, THIS IS THE PRECEDENT FOR LITERALLY EVERY OTHER FUCKING ILLNESS KNOWN TO MAN. Why didn't people care about AIDS this much?
Because it disproportionately affected (and was popularly portrayed as doing so even more than it actually did, reinforcing this) homosexuals and intravenous drug users, populations a large portion of the rest of the country actively wanted to die.
Do you really believe that most American's are like that? It's funny how liberals think a socialist utopia is feasible while simultaneously thinking the worst of people.
H1N1, Ebola, and Zika, can be transmitted through the air and they are all are more deadly than Covid. Thank God Barack Obama had that miracle cure to prevent mass panic and shutdown...
Easy. Incumbents always win during re-election and a stable economy. To beat Trump, you have to first tear down the economy. I know you aren't this naïve... Why do you think they always called it coronavirus instead of SARS-Coronavirus-2? They didn't want you to know it's just a mutation of the same thing we saw in 2004.
Wrong hill to die on, bud. 60M people got infected with Swine Flu, and nobody even thought of shutting anything down. Why? Because it was about as deadly as regular flu. So yes, deaths are the right metric to track.
Completely irrelevant. There were an estimated 274k hospitalizations from swine flu, over the course of that year. So swine flu did not have the characteristics I specified.
Are deaths the only thing that matters to you? Shouldn't we be just as concerned about hospitalizations? Is there any reason that you're aware of for cases to not be a good proxy for hospitalizations?
When you say "observed drop in deaths" are you referring back to the original article? Because the first sentence is "Two new peer-reviewed studies are showing a sharp drop in mortality among hospitalized COVID-19 patients." so I'm having trouble making sense of what you're saying.
If low-risk groups engaged in more risky behavior and no other factor changed, you'd expect death rates of hospitalized patients to drop because a larger share of the hospitalized would be from groups at lower risk of death if hospitalized with COVID.
Also, if hospitals learned more about interventions (like that ventilation wasn't appropriate as early or in as many cases as initially thought), and nothing else changed, same result.
Or if at-risk populations became more cautious, and/or less exposed due to policy (like better approaches to nursing homes), same result.
So, this is not even a tiny bit surprising. Nor does it indicate any reduced need for control measures.
> The article says the analysis controlled for age
Even if age was the only risk factor (in which case controlling for age would negate the first and third points), the second point would cover that. But age isn't the only risk factor, so all three points are still relevant.
I don't think your second point is up for argument. We're not trying to disambiguate whether doctors are getting better at treating COVID or COVID is itself getting easier for doctors to treat.
Age is a strong predictor of COVID fatality, either directly or through correlates. In every US county whose stats I've spot-checked, deaths go up with age. It's also one of the best predictors, given that advanced age is much more common in populations than stronger, but more selective factors.
Thus, controlling for age and nevertheless observing a reduction in mortality should be taken as an indicator that COVID is becoming comparatively more medically tractable.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 94.0 ms ] threadEven here they seem insistent that the lower death rate is attributable to "flattening the curve" even though there's almost no correlation at this point.
The stats of hardest hit states are coincidentally blue states.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_casesper100k
This is nonsense. Are you suggesting that if this illness had all the same characteristics -- long hospital stays, long-lasting damage to the body, highly transmissible -- but didn't kill, then we would not be "shutdown"?
YES, THIS IS THE PRECEDENT FOR LITERALLY EVERY OTHER FUCKING ILLNESS KNOWN TO MAN. Why didn't people care about AIDS this much?
Because it disproportionately affected (and was popularly portrayed as doing so even more than it actually did, reinforcing this) homosexuals and intravenous drug users, populations a large portion of the rest of the country actively wanted to die.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/2009-h1n1-pandemi...
A case only really matters to clinical medicine if there’s some type of symptom.
Of course it benefits the “concerned” side to couch their argument in the idea of some murky, unobservable effects.
It would make sense that an observed drop in deaths would correspond to a drop in hospitalizations if the case number is rising significantly.
That's good imo.
edit: CDC graph shows hospitalization rate steadily dropping.
Also, if hospitals learned more about interventions (like that ventilation wasn't appropriate as early or in as many cases as initially thought), and nothing else changed, same result.
Or if at-risk populations became more cautious, and/or less exposed due to policy (like better approaches to nursing homes), same result.
So, this is not even a tiny bit surprising. Nor does it indicate any reduced need for control measures.
Even if age was the only risk factor (in which case controlling for age would negate the first and third points), the second point would cover that. But age isn't the only risk factor, so all three points are still relevant.
Age is a strong predictor of COVID fatality, either directly or through correlates. In every US county whose stats I've spot-checked, deaths go up with age. It's also one of the best predictors, given that advanced age is much more common in populations than stronger, but more selective factors.
Thus, controlling for age and nevertheless observing a reduction in mortality should be taken as an indicator that COVID is becoming comparatively more medically tractable.