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Corona has vanished!


geoff.

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45 minutes ago, mungkiman said:

I believe in the greater good. Example - I don't have children, but I vote to be taxed in order to help fund schools and school programs.

Did you go to public schools? If not, then you are paying for a couple who are paying taxes equal to 2, and had more than 2 children who are in public schools. If yes, then you are reimbursing for what you received.  

 

45 minutes ago, mungkiman said:

If the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation contributes more to funding the World Health Organization than the United States does, is that a bad thing in your opinion?

 

"If"

If.. the numbers are right, bg pledged 1/2 of what the US (our tax dollars) used to. The WHO has not been so nice to the world, though. 

 

45 minutes ago, mungkiman said:

I asked with hopes of learning why you think what Bill Gates "is doing" is un American, if only in private.

 

Please...

 

 

45 minutes ago, mungkiman said:

You can choose not to share, but if asking publicly instead of privately precludes that, I call BS.

 That sound so heart felt, thank you for the respect.

 

 

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When I said it not important, well not important enough to me to lock a thread. Gates has done alot no doubt. Some may feel an overreaching in ways beyond MSFT. In the broad scheme of things, money can buy you alot

of power no doubt. As to

 anything underlying such as an ulterior motive, one can only speculate until it becomes factual.

Maybe it is still a free country after all.

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1 hour ago, Bosco-d-gama said:

Just the facts and nothing but......

 

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53780196

A red flag goes up when somebody says "just the facts..." but this article does just that.  Thanks for sharing.  That said, I tend to discount broad data metrics, such as "fatality rate" (some countries don't do much testing, some countries cook the books, some countries count deaths 'with covid' vs deaths 'from covid' etc), and deaths per-capita (since covid kills older people especially in LTC facilities, and/or people with weight, heart, and lung problems, per-capita covid death-rate is more of a measure of a society's demographics rather than a society's response to the disease IMHO).

 

The excess death stat is interesting to me.  I tend to believe that covid deaths in the US are over-reported, not under-reported.  If this excess death stat is true, then this could change my opinion.  I would still like to see how this stat is calculated though - are the excess deaths coming from covid alone or are deaths from alcohol, drugs, depression/suicide, domestic violence, missed cancer diagnosis, baking bad sour-dough bread etc also up?  Something tells me yes.

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6 hours ago, pbphoto said:

A red flag goes up when somebody says "just the facts..." but this article does just that.  Thanks for sharing.  That said, I tend to discount broad data metrics, such as "fatality rate" (some countries don't do much testing, some countries cook the books, some countries count deaths 'with covid' vs deaths 'from covid' etc), and deaths per-capita (since covid kills older people especially in LTC facilities, and/or people with weight, heart, and lung problems, per-capita covid death-rate is more of a measure of a society's demographics rather than a society's response to the disease IMHO).

 

The excess death stat is interesting to me.  I tend to believe that covid deaths in the US are over-reported, not under-reported.  If this excess death stat is true, then this could change my opinion.  I would still like to see how this stat is calculated though - are the excess deaths coming from covid alone or are deaths from alcohol, drugs, depression/suicide, domestic violence, missed cancer diagnosis, baking bad sour-dough bread etc also up?  Something tells me yes.

The ‘excess’ death numbers are the ones considered most relevant. They do umbrella deaths from all causes for a country and compare the 2020 numbers to the same annualized values historically. So it is death from all causation compared on a yearly basis. And this year we have covid19 in the data mix for the 1st time. Deaths in excess of the average are deemed excess deaths. And there’s a lot of them this year.  No - not every excess death will have come directly from covid19. Some might be from emergencies unable to get proper care because covid19 had the available health systems overwhelmed. So excess deaths may or may not come directly from covid19 but likely do reflect the consequences of covid19 and it’s impact on a country. Excess deaths tells us what covid19 is doing to a country in general terms. They compile tons of data specific to covid19 to understand its pathological impact and to trace how its care evolves. Clearly medicine is managing better more recently. 
 

And it is nice to see a valid comparison of how various countries have dealt with the pandemic. Some countries chose different pathways and we need to understand how all countries performed.

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5 minutes ago, Bosco-d-gama said:

The ‘excess’ death numbers are the ones considered most relevant. They do umbrella deaths from all causes for a country and compare the 2020 numbers to the same annualized values historically

I think we are talking apple and oranges. Thresholds and baseline wrt Covid 19 look at FLI/P deaths as a percentage of total  deaths (from any and all causes),.they look by week (we are in 32 or 33 now) and they go back 5 years. The threshold number is 1.61 std. dev. (I think) from 5 year weekly avg. Anything above that number is stastically significant. There are codes for most major illnesses groups, and codes when multiple causes. They have baselines for every code so it doesn't matter if it DWI deaths, auto deaths, wildfire deaths, cancer deaths, MI deaths, "other" deaths, if a threshold is crossed nationally or locally they start looking into it. With the Pandemic they start to produce more specific coding, that was the big news in May. The Mortality Data Repirting Figures can lag anywhere from 3 to 90 days or more, depending on which State. It's all in the CDC data in the fine print

 

That data is eventually going to be important to public policy people. Cumulative deaths and cases are of little or no importance to health officials 6 months into a pandemic because there was little or no testing available initially and much more is known.

 

What the public health officials and ID people I see talking and writing about it are most  concerned with lately daily new cases, avg. over last 7 days, dalily new deaths with same avg, and the positivity rate. They want the latter going down and well under 5%.

 

They don't need to concern themselves with baselines and thresholds they have real time numbers for positive tests, confirmed deaths, active cases (everyone ignores that one for some reason), and positivity rates in conjunction with real time data for hospital beds due to covid and  beds available, and respirators in use and available.

 

Once testing came one line, since June in Texas, over-reporting or underreporting became a non-issue from a healthcare stand point.  Texas doesn't report "probable" cases so they probably under reported initially in Feb, March, April, and May when testing was limited and slowing ramped up. Now there are multiple test types available,  results in 3 hours, plus antibody testing. 

 

How many new cases per day in your area is all you need to know. Is it 10, 100, 1,000, trending up or down? The deaths will track that as a percentage, but lag 3 to 10 days plus.

 

They may be over or under reporting in some places, all I know is my State is now confirmed cases that's look at daily, Monday includes Sat and Sun those numbers are real, subject to testing error. 

 

 

 

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10 minutes ago, dwilawyer said:

How many new cases per day in your area is all you need to know. Is it 10, 100, 1,000, trending up or down?

Thanks for your explanation above.  Wondering if this is still true or has been blown into hysteria-land, or both?

 

I know in the early days of covid, when doctors were still learning how to treat it, and it was going through LTC facilities like the black death, case count was a leading indicator of deaths.  Now, at least in Illinois and a few other places I watch, testing is through the roof as the healthy population wants to return to work/school, positive cases are up too, but all the hospitalization stats are way down.  Deaths are flat, way down compared to April/May, with the majority targeted at the non-working population.  This tells me that the healthy working population is able to fight this off (if they knew they had it at all) yet we are not doing a good enough job protecting the at-risk population.

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reported deaths in the USA now exceed 180,500 - the 100k deaths was reached on May27-2020-  -and  there are resurgences in Canada and the USA  while the fall is upon on us with the Flu season -----we are not even sure yet if we will send our kids  back to school ------it is a very worry some time when the worst would be to have  our kids exposed to covid 19-

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11 minutes ago, dwilawyer said:

I think we are talking apple and oranges. Thresholds and baseline wrt Covid 19 look at FLI/P deaths as a percentage of total  deaths (from any and all causes),.they look by week (we are in 32 or 33 now) and they go back 5 years. The threshold number is 1.61 std. dev. (I think) from 5 year weekly avg. Anything above that number is stastically significant. There are codes for most major illnesses groups, and codes when multiple causes. They have baselines for every code so it doesn't matter if it DWI deaths, auto deaths, wildfire deaths, cancer deaths, MI deaths, "other" deaths, if a threshold is crossed nationally or locally they start looking into it. With the Pandemic they start to produce more specific coding, that was the big news in May. The Mortality Data Repirting Figures can lag anywhere from 3 to 90 days or more, depending on which State. It's all in the CDC data in the fine print

 

That data is eventually going to be important to public policy people. Cumulative deaths and cases are of little or no importance to health officials 6 months into a pandemic because there was little or no testing available initially and much more is known.

 

What the public health officials and ID people I see talking and writing about it are most  concerned with lately daily new cases, avg. over last 7 days, dalily new deaths with same avg, and the positivity rate. They want the latter going down and well under 5%.

 

They don't need to concern themselves with baselines and thresholds they have real time numbers for positive tests, confirmed deaths, active cases (everyone ignores that one for some reason), and positivity rates in conjunction with real time data for hospital beds due to covid and  beds available, and respirators in use and available.

 

Once testing came one line, since June in Texas, over-reporting or underreporting became a non-issue from a healthcare stand point.  Texas doesn't report "probable" cases so they probably under reported initially in Feb, March, April, and May when testing was limited and slowing ramped up. Now there are multiple test types available,  results in 3 hours, plus antibody testing. 

 

How many new cases per day in your area is all you need to know. Is it 10, 100, 1,000, trending up or down? The deaths will track that as a percentage, but lag 3 to 10 days plus.

 

They may be over or under reporting in some places, all I know is my State is now confirmed cases that's look at daily, Monday includes Sat and Sun those numbers are real, subject to testing error. 

 

 

 

Agreed.......  what’s pertinent is what’s important right now. As you note there are a host of statistics which may be useful in a wide array of analytics. The article cited was looking to draw comparable data between countries and excess deaths, though rough, offers a relevant synopsis - but not the only one. Guessing you find excess deaths too simplistic and too generalized. It’s similar to treating the body as a bomb calorimeter. That will tell you how well you are doing on your diet but not specifically what your doing to make it happen. It’s still very useful information but not precisely definitive.

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38 minutes ago, JL Sargent said:

How long can I go before getting it? Is just about everybody gonna end up with it no matter what we do? Takes like 70% to reach herd resistance. Without a vaccine, isn't this where we are headed?

Thats the impression I've always had.  Herd immunity or a vaccine are the only 2 options to bring about the end of the pandemic.  Oh I forgot the 3rd option.  The election in November.:ph34r:

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The Spanish flu eventually ran it's course but at a tremendous cost in lives. I would hope we live in a better time and a vaccine will be found.  My best friend died in just a week after contracting the virus. Did not go to Dr, thought he could get over it by himself. Was dead wrong. Talked to my Dr about virus last visit and he said he had not lost a patient yet. He uses the antibody plasma and one of two viral drugs. Told me if show symptoms with fever go immediately to emergency room. It appears to me that timing means a lot on survival for old people like me, especially with preexisting conditions like myself. 

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1 hour ago, CECAA850 said:

So, if I'm reading this correctly, only 6% of people with wuhan die if they have no pre existing conditions?  That comes out to .0034% of the population of the US.

I'm wondering about this too.  I believe the report is saying that 6% of the people died with covid alone.  The other 94% died with covid and, on average, 2.6 other things wrong with them but they didn't go back and do a root-cause analysis of the death.  Since covid primarily kills elderly folks with heart, lungs or weight issues, it's tough to narrow down.    My mom's death certificate says "congestive heart failure" but ignores the fact that she had sepsis, pneumonia, and didn't eat or drink for 7 days in hospice...  The coroner has to pick something.

 

The Spanish Flu was unique because it targeted young healthy adults - maybe because a lot of them were conveniently bunched together in trenches on the Western Front.  I don't think we'll ever know how deadly it was because the allies didn't want to report the true numbers to the enemy, which is why it is called the Spanish Flu - Spain was neutral.  Covid appears to be the opposite - for most young healthy adults under 60, it's a nuisance if they realize they have it at all.  The CDC provisional counts show that the flu and pneumonia are deadlier for people under about 30 - if I'm reading the report correctly.  And if you are in Chicago and under 18, gunshot wounds are much much deadlier.

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