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There are 20 thousand dead people in New York and 20 million residents. Many of them have tested negative.
The death rate cannot be 0.1% or lower. It's higher.
We aren't going to know the death rate until we know the true infection rate. And right now, we don't know.
What we do know:
1) it clearly infected way more % people in New York than California
2) it is slowing in places that were hardest hit.
#1 tells us that lockdown/distancing measures work as they were implemented in CA first back when CA had the most cases (remember that?).
#2 tells us there is likely more prevalence in hardest hit populations with many more mild/asymptomatic than were first suspected. And that herd immunity is building in those hardest hit countries. We're going to find out soon as many nations in Europe are slowly reopening.
We aren't going to know the death rate until we know the true infection rate. And right now, we don't know.
What we do know:
1) it clearly infected way more % people in New York than California
2) it is slowing in places that were hardest hit.
#1 tells us that lockdown/distancing measures work as they were implemented in CA first back when CA had the most cases (remember that?).
#2 tells us there is likely more prevalence in hardest hit populations with many more mild/asymptomatic than were first suspected. And that herd immunity is building in those hardest hit countries. We're going to find out soon as many nations in Europe are slowly reopening.
We will never know the true death count. Current numbers vary by 50%, depending on who is doing the counting. People who die at home will never be autopsied. We have no idea if there is systematic under reporting or over reporting. All it takes is a signature on a death certificate, and if the secretary is sheltering at home, who is going to report it to the CDC?
When reporters start calling hospitals and nursing facilities, they come up with way more corpses than the official count. I have a physician friend in Illinois who says the CDC tests return at least 30% false negatives. Another physician says he is seeing about a 20% fatality rate among 40 year olds, and the majority of the survivors end up with cardiomyopathy, which will probably kill them. How are we supposed to evaluate claims like that?
At the end of the year we can total the deaths, compare it with 2019, and get a rough idea of how many people the virus killed. Right now, we have no clue.
Autopsy: Santa Clara patient died of COVID-19 on Feb. 6 — 23 days before 1st U.S. death declared
Quote:
Originally Posted by Larry Caldwell
.People who die at home will never be autopsied.
[red mine]
People who die at home are autopsied in California, unless perhaps the death does not meet the criteria for autopsy (not sure), for example a dying cancer patient in hospice at home. Again, I don't know if everyone who dies at home is autopsied here, but I know it is not uncommon.
As a matter of fact, just yesterday the Santa Clara County Health Officer reported that, according to autopsies done on two people who died at home in February, 2020, the CDC has confirmed that their deaths were from COVID-19.
They had no known travel to China or elsewhere, so they are considered to have become infected in the community. The earlier of the two deaths was on February 6th, making it the earliest COVID-19 death in the entire nation. The second COVID-19 death in Santa Clara (and the nation) was February 17th.
Prior to this announcement, "The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the first fatality due to coronavirus complications in the United States on Feb. 28. The patient was a resident of Kirkland, Wash".
Edited to add: "Investigations and Autopsies
States have different requirements for which deaths require investigation or autopsy. The tables below display characteristics of deaths requiring investigation or autopsy in each state. Footnotes for the tables are available below, along with documents providing information about additional circumstances that do not fall within the categories enumerated in the tables but that might require investigation or autopsy."
Table 1: Selected Characteristics of Death Requiring Investigation by State
Media reporting "increase of new cases" when everybody knows that there's not enough tests to test everybody that is sick
Of course the numbers are going to increase
The numbers aren't particularly useful (mostly), only because we aren't able to test a broad enough range of people. This is particularly true in many southern and/or red states that are eager to re-open from the lock-down.
Can't really hang your hat on "our numbers are going down" if you haven't tested anyone to know for sure. NYC is struggling as much as any city but they probably have a clearer picture of what's going on. I don't think any city or state should be pushing for a re-open until they have sufficient levels of testing.
I agree that the numbers are fuzzy because we have not done enough testing and so many people don't have symptoms. You can see the number of people dying per day has dropped from 800 to 500 in NYC. At this point that's the best way to show the rate of spread has slowed. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/20/n...rk-update.html
This is a big problem with it. It isn't as clear but it is very much serious. People use the flu to say it isn't but a lot of the serious symptoms of Covid-19 can mess someone up more so than long lasting effects of the flu. If the flu gets bad it can be pneumonia too. That said, I think Covid is far more severe with bad cases.
The numbers aren't particularly useful (mostly), only because we aren't able to test a broad enough range of people. This is particularly true in many southern and/or red states that are eager to re-open from the lock-down.
Can't really hang your hat on "our numbers are going down" if you haven't tested anyone to know for sure. NYC is struggling as much as any city but they probably have a clearer picture of what's going on. I don't think any city or state should be pushing for a re-open until they have sufficient levels of testing.
That's why I ignore everything but the corpse count. Yes, people who don't die suffer from a range of effects, from clots, stroke, kidney damage, liver damage and heart damage, so the number of people with symptoms is very important, but that doesn't tell us how many are infected. We can assume that better treatment means a smaller percentage of infected people die, but that's the only semi-solid number we have.
My state (Oregon) was one of the first to lock down. The governor is planning a phased reopening. My county (Douglas) is scheduled to reopen on Saturday. We have been static at 23 confirmed cases and 0 deaths for a couple weeks now, and have 700+ negative tests. Understand that my county is the size of Connecticut with only 225,000 residents. There is little reason to penalize rural areas when it's the cities that are promiscuous. Coos County, on the southern Oregon coast has only identified three cases, all in the county jail. It's scheduled to reopen too, though individual towns closed tourist facilities like motels before the state locked down. Visitors are likely to receive a cold welcome.
I'm worried that relaxing restrictions will trigger a rapid spread of CV. I guess we'll see. As long as people observe the six foot rule and wear masks, they think things will be OK.
… If I post a story about "Joe Bob, 37, dies of Coronavirus" and that's the headline, everyone gets out of it: OMG anyone can die of this thing!
On a related note, if the story explains Joe Bob was morbidly obese, asthmatic, a smoker, with lung scarring from a childhood disease, it vastly alters one's take-away from the article.
In this culture of being barraged daily with a firehose of conflicting data, not everyone reads more than the headlines, though.
That's why I ignore everything but the corpse count.
The number of confirmed COVID-19 hospital admissions, tallied weekly, can also be a pretty good proxy in an urban area. It’s easy to keep track of confirmed-positive admissions, and the general demographics of the city really aren’t likely to change much over a period of several weeks, so a sustained upward or downward trend in admissions does reflect what the virus is doing in the community.
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Autopsy: Santa Clara patient died of COVID-19 on Feb. 6 — 23 days before 1st U.S. death declared
