An interesting data point was mentioned in an internal newsletter of my hospital today. Over the course of the pandemic so far, a total of 30 Covid-19 patients were treated, almost all of them in intensive care at some point. The overall survival rate was 90%, despite many very severe cases. As the pandemic progressed, the patients tended to be younger and their stay on ICU was shorter. Certainly the fact that this is a university hospital with top notch facilities and staff played a role in the high survival rate, as did the age profile of the patients (I have no full data, but posted some weeks earlier that the median age of our Covid-19 patients was around 50 years).
Nowadays we have only 3 patients with Covid-19, out of 1600 hospital beds.
Having thought about this, I honestly believe Europeans don’t understand the value of freedom over the perception of safety. It might sound like a cliche, but I think it’s true. The virus is a attack by nature on people, like many such other episodes it will thin the herd, in this case only a little, and life will go on. What will last is the effect on people due to precedents established by a third party, government, and its encouragement of people restricting others. I see that as far more dangerous than nature, especially when US daily deaths have gradually reduced to 20% of the peak value. Society is not government, participation is not dictate. To each his own view, but my priorities are now coming into focus.
I’m glad to be married to a German expatriate who sees this point even more clearly than I do.
I do hope that technology, as it so often does, eventually increases options in a way that diffuses the issue. Better treatments do seem to be helping, and maybe a vaccine will be developed by industry eventually.
@LeSving, maintaining an army and even drafting people into it when necessary is within the constitutionally defined scope of US government, and while your analogy of an external threat is valid (assuming you believe government removal of individual rights is effective, a hypothesis and not proven science), quarantine of the healthy was brought into being without any valid legal or democratic process, by bureaucrats who decided to copy China on their own, quoting law that was not intended to apply to this situation.
@alioth, fairly obviously the baseline is as important as the slope if the scope of the issue is the area under the curve. Ten times nothing is nothing. Hysteria does not help, and opens the door for tyrants.
It’s not ten times nothing, that’s the problem. It’s ten times something, and not only that, on an exponential growth curve. Remember the fable about the emperor and the chess board – one grain of rice on the first square, two on the second, four on the third. It still seems like nothing on the third square, but once you’re just rows in then you can see the problem. I hope to god that it is you who are right, but unfortunately there are good reasons that I’m not very optimistic that you are right.
The oft-repeated refrain of the libertarian is “my right to swing my fist ends at the tip of your nose”. Unfortunately, for those who have no option to go into work such as retail or forego eating, then if you go out with COVID19 (which you might not know you have), while railing against any and all precautions, then your metaphorical fist swing is indeed striking my nose pretty hard, even if you don’t know you’re actually swinging your metaphorical fist. If only people would actually live by that refrain; they seem to forget about the end of everyone else’s nose. The problem in Texas is so many people think even the most basic, easy to do precautions like wearing a face covering is some gigantic affront to their rights. They don’t think about the rights of the people they are willingly infecting – people who may have no choice but to go out if they want to be able to eat and have a roof over their heads.
Texas WAS doing well. They had it reasonably well supressed (and were doing better than most places) until they decided to “yolo” at the end of May/early June. Now Texas faces the situation where they got the worst of both worlds: the lockdown’s economic effects AND the high injury/death rate by just letting it rip through the population.
Oh for God’s sake, the daily death rate in Texas is 8% of that previously experienced in New York and for the last four days it’s been decreasing. The scope of the problem matters.
Stopping another individual from making a living by force, destroying productive business with willing customers, is equally swinging a metaphorical fist. In my view more so, especially given the relative scope of the problem and when doing so has no valid legal basis.
A 30 year old died from Covid-19 in Texas after being at a “Corona party”, exercising his “freedom” to disregard science and governmental regulations to his fullest extent:
And your point is? That he should be forbidden by force from doing so?
I’m sure the Guardian thinks so, also that they can make money from broadening poor individual choices into a political diatribe. Happily not everybody is stupid enough to fall for it.
I’m sure several young people died doing other things dangerous to their health yesterday. Recklessness of youth is not a new issue.
If that guardian article is accurate then I’d say it’s more Darwin award candidate than anything else. Deliberately going round to an infected person’s house. Seems like these gatherings would have been a perfect test case to see how infectious it was and how many people present caught it / badly / etc.
Silvaire wrote:
Oh for God’s sake, the daily death rate in Texas is 8% of that previously experienced in New York and for the last four days it’s been decreasing.
We can be optimistic when the 7 day moving average shows a decreasing trend over at least a week or two, as this will filter out nearly all the noise. The 7 day moving average still shows a sharply increasing trend, that has more than doubled in five days.
You’re being disingenious I’m afraid to claim that somehow it’s getting better and the death rate is going down. The spot numbers for each day have terrible signal to noise ratio, there is ALWAYS a local maximum somewhere about the middle of the week and ALWAYS a local minimum at the weekend, and you’ve just chosen the weekend to ‘prove’ that things are trending downwards (Friday, Saturday and Sunday always report lower numbers than the midweek peak, and the figures for Monday aren’t even all in yet). You need to ignore the daily rates and base your optimism (or lack thereof) on the trend of the 7 day moving average, which will filter a lot of the noise out. Unfortunately, the 7 day moving average is trending sharply up.
Add to that, the death rate lags the infection rate by some time, partly due to reporting lag and partly because vulnerable people don’t simply keel over the moment they catch COVID, and it’s too early to be optimistic. The CDC also explains that only around 60% of deaths are reported within 10 days in the US, and there is an additional 7 day lag for COVID deaths as these must be manually coded.
I will be optimistic if it has a sustained period (e.g. a couple of weeks) of not trending up, but this is not happening at this point.
If that guardian article is accurate then I’d say it’s more Darwin award candidate than anything else. Deliberately going round to an infected person’s house. Seems like these gatherings would have been a perfect test case to see how infectious it was and how many people present caught it / badly / etc.
People who do this are simply dickheads. Sorry… no need for any additional subtlety 
Here’s another article from one of the few UK news organs not behind a paywall, and sufficiently “left” to not attract the usual venom
It does contain a fairly crucial caution at the end:
However, both Pittard and Scriven cautioned that the data did not give a full picture of differential death rates between hospitals because it did not take account of four other key factors for risk of death from Covid-19, namely gender, ethnicity, deprivation and underlying health problems. All four have been found to significantly increase a patient’s chances of dying.
There is so much to learn about this disease… It is also possible there is a huge variation in the “condition” of the patients when they arrive at the hospital; you get the same with exam performance of schools according to where they are located. Or just some hospitals are not functioning properly?
Silvaire wrote:
Oh for God’s sake, the daily death rate in Texas is 8% of that previously experienced in New York and for the last four days it’s been decreasing
No, it hasn’t! In a week by week comparison the death rate has increased over every single of the last 4 days (and for a long time now).
Comparing today’s reported deaths with yesterdays reported deaths doesn’t make any sense as not all counties report these numbers every day. Please make yourself familiar with how the reported numbers are created before you try to draw your own conclusions – and even more before you try to explain something publicly.
