COVID topic vol 2

[ducknald_don]

I did wonder if the "coincidence" was that such a big deal was being made of a new strain just before Christmas, a time when millions of households would be mixing. It's certainly a convenient reason to change the rules at the last minute - "when the facts change, I change my mind" etc.

It does seem very convenient. I get the distinct impression the government has messed up over the last month or two regarding tiers and timing on lockdowns. Jacob mentioned the replication rate osculating around one and it has felt exactly like that. When it drops below one we start opening everything up then when it inevitably bounces back its panic stations.

[nomadscientist]

The Western strategy is to bounce around R0=1.0 while piously claiming we aren't following a herd immunity strategy. Which is sort of true. We're following a "no end in sight" strategy. Anything so the policy latitude this has created does not end.

[chenda]

I did wonder if the "coincidence" was that such a big deal was being made of a new strain just before Christmas, a time when millions of households would be mixing. It's certainly a convenient reason to change the rules at the last minute - "when the facts change, I change my mind" etc.

Maybe but scaring people with the new strain might not be a bad strategy as lots of people were going to flaut the rules over Christmas anyway. That said, been stuck over Christmas in a Tier 4 area is pretty shite. Apparently there was a mass exodus out of Tier 4 areas last night. Although I'm very pro follow the rules, I'd probably still leave to drive home for Christmas if I needed to.

[slsdly]

As someone who lives alone, I believe the rules allow me to hang out with another family at Christmas. I have no plans to, doesn't seem worth it. Mind you, I never put much emphasis on the holiday season. My requests to celebrate Christmas around Labour Day to avoid winter storm shenanigans met dear ears in the past .

[jacob]

If the new strain is 70% more infectious (a number that as far as I understand is theoretical whatever that means) it stands to reason that it would bump R~1 under the current measures towards R~1.7 (under simple assumptions) which would be a problem. Recall that R under pre-COVID was around 3-4 ... the raw R for the new strain would be 5--7.

Some technocrat probably plugged that into a model and saw the numbers blow up. At R~1.7 this would happen much faster than the vaccine can be rolled out, therefore ...

In the US, states regardless of political motivations all start to pay attention once regs have slacked enough to move R beyond 1.25 or so. It rarely goes much beyond that anywhere.

[Toska2]

I don't know which thought I had is more cynical. The one where the vaccine wasn't as effective as they thought so they said the virus mutated, the governments' checks cleared so the drug manufacturers decided to soak the taxpayers for another rushed vaccine, this mutation makes only russia's vaccine ineffective or this is to squash hopes of herd immunity and mandate a vaccine + card id.

It seems like this whole situation is a political blame game.*

*I don't understand the desire for a political monoculture. Want to live in a totalitarian regime? Go here. Want to live in a libertarian utopia? Go here. Want to live in a rich homogeneous socialist democracy? Well, they don't want you. We dont tolerate it in our ecology, economy or socially.

[enigmaT120]

I wish you people would stop using the abbreviation ED for erectile disfunction.

Yours,
Ed

[ertyu]

I wish you people would stop using the abbreviation ED for erectile disfunction.

Yours,
Ed

also stands for eating disorder. you're quite a lucky guy

[Hristo Botev]

Vaccine FAQ [very long]

https://elemental.medium.com/every-covi ... 0eeb334ded

Thanks for posting this @Jacob; very informative and even someone like me with no science background could follow along. DW gets the 1st dose of the Pfizer vaccine today; this helped put me at ease.

[nomadscientist]

https://twitter.com/eugyppius1/status/1 ... 7983277056

[Lemon]

Had my first dose of the vaccine. Nice that this could be the beginning of the end.

@nomad. There are multiple issues with that thread. Especially on Lombardy. You change the behaviour you obviously change the outcome. Lots of places got close.

Ventilators? Yeah overestimated the need. Fun fact, IF you get to ITU ventilated with COVID in the UK now you are MORE likely to die than the same situation in wave one. Why? We have better other treatments that work. So if with those treatments you STILL get sick enough to be ventilated you are really, really, sick.

As for pharmaceutical treatments. Those that actually work (steroids) have a better evidence base than a lot of medicine. There was a lot of try anything and everything. Unsurprisingly most of them didn't work. But large multi-arm RCTs being run in a pandemic quickly and effectively has given us some treatments.

Sweden...compared to Nordic colleagues has done badly and is also being more forceful on containment now.

On cost benefit - that's a political decision, people have tried but if you look at for example the uk populous 2/3 support tougher restrictions. So democratically this is the right way to go and the public feel the cost is worth it. I mean I doubt 2/3 follow the rules to the letter but that is a different matter.

Targeted protection/shielding - if you think regular lockdown is bad enough imagine how the vulnerable felt not leaving the house for 12 weeks at all...

[George the original one]

USA's COVID-19 deaths after 11 months (322,000+) are the equivalent of the past 9 years of flu deaths per the CDC estimates. I'm pretty certain we will hit a decade's worth by the end of January.

[A Life of FI]

Sweden...compared to Nordic colleagues has done badly and is also being more forceful on containment now.

Here are their total population adjusted deaths by year, from the beginning of each year until the December 6th of each year (which is the date of the last up to date numbers for 2020):

2020 87k
2019 80k
2018 85k
2017 85k
2016 85k
2015 88k

Notice that 2015 is greater than 2020 but Sweden was not criticized for their deaths in 2015 - or even noticed for that matter.

Further note that 2019 was a lite flu and virus season and total deaths were 5k to 6k below the average for the previous years, which will be made up at some point when a normal flu and virus season goes through. In this regard notice that the previous 3 year average of 85k (2016 to 2018) is still greater than the average for 2020 and 2019 of 84k so they are still in line with/slightly below the average.

Also in comparing Sweden to its neighbors they are significantly below Demark in age standardized mortality in 2020 and at the same level as Finland with only Norway being less.

So in addition to Sweden's total deaths not being different from their own average they are not different from their neighbors’ total deaths either - in fact they are lower than Demark.

The question then is how Sweden can have 9% of their total deaths from covid (8k covid deaths / 87k total deaths) but at the same time not have an overall mortality increase out of line with previous years. The answer lies in running 4 million test on a population of 10 million and recording anyone dying within 30 days of a positive test for any reason as a covid death.

There is nothing wrong with such a policy on the face of it. They apply the same policy to the flu every year, but only run 50,000 tests (and in some years only 15,000) and these are mostly for diagnosing very severe cases to determine what the person has so it can be treated. So recording people dying within 30 days makes sense, since the cases were severe enough to require testing to treat it is more likely that it may have been a contributing factor to death. In addition to these tested deaths, estimates are also made of the people that died of flu that were never tested and added to the positive test deaths to come to the number of total flu deaths.

So the answer to the question of how they can have 9% of their deaths be from covid but have no increase in overall mortality which out of line with the average of previous years is that running 80 times (50k / 4 million) to 267 times (15k / 4 million) more tests for the year’s predominate respiratory virus has resulted in many more cases found and as a result many more people recorded as dying from it and, as we can see from the total deaths numbers, a roughly equal off-setting decline in deaths from other causes.

Bottom line is the cause of death in older people is often more of an educated guess rather than an obvious fact and this combined with the fact that when people/societies start to look for any one thing (especially something they perceive as dangerous) they tend to find more of it. This often doesn’t mean life is necessarily more dangerous but often rather our minds are programed to seek out and identify danger and sometimes get carried away until they realize all the dangers they are ignoring are greater than the one new danger they are focusing on.

[Ego]

Targeted protection/shielding - if you think regular lockdown is bad enough imagine how the vulnerable felt not leaving the house for 12 weeks at all...

The vaccines are not 100% effective. The underlying conditions that make some people vulnerable to Covid are also likely to make them among the group for whom the vaccine is not effective. Add the fact that a significant portion of the vaccinated will continue to shed the virus after a milder infection and some who refuse to be vaccination will continue to spread it.

So, that begs the question, what has changed for the most vulnerable?

[nomadscientist]

Sweden did only about the same as most other countries therefore "lockdowns" work.

Japan doesnt even exists because thats ferreners.

I wish I could pay hundreds of thousands of people to amplify my opinions.

[Ego]

There are many aspects of the reaction to Covid that I do not understand. One that absolutely perplexes me is why people are not overwhelming their local clinics demanding these vaccinations:

https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectious ... id19/90266

[George the original one]

Bottom line is the cause of death in older people is often more of an educated guess rather than an obvious fact and this combined with the fact that when people/societies start to look for any one thing (especially something they perceive as dangerous) they tend to find more of it. This often doesn’t mean life is necessarily more dangerous but often rather our minds are programed to seek out and identify danger and sometimes get carried away until they realize all the dangers they are ignoring are greater than the one new danger they are focusing on.

But it's not evenly distributed throughout the year and your post lacks the necessary detail, such as whether traffic accidents were lower because less traveling, to make conclusions. For the death tally to come out even with prior years, the summer deaths from all causes had to be significantly lower. There has been a displacement of when deaths are occurring and it is directly tied to how many COVID infections occur.

"A total of 8,088 deaths were recorded in Sweden last month [November], corresponding to an excess mortality of 10 percent compared to the average between 2015 and 2019, according to Statistics Sweden.

"That's the highest number of deaths recorded during the month of November since 1918, which was the year the Spanish flu broke out," Tomas Johansson, a population statistician with the agency, said in a statement."

- https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-12- ... h-flu.html

[A Life of FI]

But it's not evenly distributed throughout the year and your post lacks the necessary detail, such as whether traffic accidents were lower because less traveling, to make conclusions. For the death tally to come out even with prior years, the summer deaths from all causes had to be significantly lower. There has been a displacement of when deaths are occurring and it is directly tied to how many COVID infections occur.
2"A total of 8,088 deaths were recorded in Sweden last month [November], corresponding to an excess mortality of 10 percent compared to the average between 2015 and 2019, according to Statistics Sweden.

"That's the highest number of deaths recorded during the month of November since 1918, which was the year the Spanish flu broke out," Tomas Johansson, a population statistician with the agency, said in a statement."

- https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-12- ... h-flu.html

Those are fair questions George:

1) In relation to driving they don’t appear to be driving any less. Type in Sweden in the box in the below link if it doesn't come up immediately

https://covid19.apple.com/mobility


2)The population adjusted deaths from June 1 to Oct 31 by year are:

2020 34.5
2019 34.1
2018 35.1
2017 35.3
2016 36.0
2015 36.4

So deaths during that period in 2020 are about 900 below average.


3) The mortality in November 2020 was higher but not completely out of expected bounds, from the same article you posted:

"The number of dead in November 2020 was also 77.9 per 100,000 inhabitants, lower than 79.2 in November 2010"

That would make 2010 both worse than 2020 and 1918.

I was living an hours flight from Sweden at the time and never hear a word about any type of mortality problem in Sweden. If we didn’t get upset about then or in other years when deaths were even higher (2000) why do we feel we should we now, when the number is lower.

[Toska2]

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.detroi ... 3838658001

"Michigan on Saturday reported 193 additional deaths linked to the COVID-19 virus, surpassing the previous record of 190 set Tuesday.

Saturday's deaths include 145 identified during a vital records review. Tuesday's total included 30 deaths identified during a review, according to state data."


Key words "Vital records review", not actual postive tests. Thats a great way to fudge the numbers. It even set a record "deaths" on a given day regardless of when they actually died or if it was actally covid19. Why should I believe those numbers are remotely right?

[matchewed]

@Toska2

Have you looked into the methodology used by Michigan to categorize a death as Covid linked?