COVID-19

Its whats been mentioned.

 

It's just one of a few numbers I track. Some countries in Europe are giving lower mortality rates and some higher. The key factor is that they seem to all still be trending down, which was the main point of the post.

Scientists know what the death rate is? The US Centre for Disease Control estimates have gone from 3.4% to 2.0% to 0.26% to 0.65%.

https://in.dental-tribune.com/news/new-estimate-by-the-cdc-brings-down-the-covid-19-death-rate-to-just-0-26-as-against-whos-3-4/


We could have had 5m people infected or 25m. We don't know.

 

You're right, "know" was too strong of a strong word but they're best placed to gather the info that's for sure but even for them it is imperfect. For a layman it's basically impossible, especially with so many moving parts and complicating factors.

However I'm quite happy that it's going down although we need to remember that even if it gets down to the level of a "bad flu" that's not a reason for removing controls. If we didn't have a vaccine for flu we'd probably have controls for that as well.

 

Flu vaccines don't make that big a difference. A small difference is quite a lot of lives and illness spared,though, making them worthwhile but their overall effect on a flu outbreak and how society operates is very modest. In an effective vaccine year, they maybe stop 10%+ of cases. In a bad year, it's can be almost negligible. We would not have controls for flu without vaccines, except for the rare pandemic years like 1968's Hong Kong Flu. (Then we could start the discussion about how many people the controls kill.)

https://www.pharmacytimes.com/publications/supplements/2019/July2019/influenza-vaccine-efficacy-through-the-years

The CDC uses a mathematical model to measure the disease burden of flu on affected patients. Analyses of flu illnesses, medical visits, hospitalizations, and deaths are typically used to create season-specific data on burden of disease, vaccine coverage, and VE. During the 2017-2018 flu season, for example, the vaccine was 38% effective.4 That season was severe among all age groups in the United States and led to an estimated 48.8 million cases of flu, 959,000 hospitalizations, and 79,400 deaths.5 Conversely, an estimated 7.1 million illnesses, 109,000 hospitalizations, and 8000 deaths were prevented as a result of flu vaccinations.1,4,5

 

That does not tell you how many were infected. It just tells you how many had detectable antibodies at that time and it has been falling.. Antibodies fade. The figures were higher earlier at 7% of the UK population and that higher level would set the low limit. It's quite possible that maybe 10% had testable antibodies had they all been tested at their peak antibodies. Also, an unknown number fight the virus off without even producing a testable level of antibodies. It's quite possible that 6 or 7m had antibodies at some point and another 15m never needed to resort to antibodies to fight of the virus. As I said, we could have had 5m infected or 25m. We don't know. Excess deaths are in the range 30-50k after adjusting for the baby boomer effect. (UK 2020 deaths would have been around 21k higher than the 5-year average just due to the rising numbe of old people, plus a bit for the trend of rising dementia deaths.). That means the Covid mortality rate is somewhere between 0.12% and 1.0%.


Are you talking about the Covid-19 Infection Pilot Survey of households that is now expanding into Wales, Scotland and NI? It said they were increasing to 150k by October. It's their estimates I was using to calculate a mortality rate of 0.42% for England earlier.

 

Not going to get into a discussion about the effectiveness of the because I don't know enough about it and I'm guessing we can find conflicting evidence all over the place.

Whatever the number is, we still have one, we still worked to get one, governments still spend money providing one, they offer some protection. Logically even if Covid has the same rate (which is a positive estimate ATM) then we'd also need some protection from that either medically or behaviorally.

 

Lads, which demographic are we blaming for the latest round of lockdown measures?

 

How lockdown restrictions are decided upon,



Draw them out at random and see what happens. Leeds with a rate higher than Newcastle has so far carried on with national restrictions whilst Newcastle will be issued with a 10pm Curfew.

Liverpool with a rate well over 100 per 100k again sees absolutely no restrictions, yet Bradford were locked down in July for heading over 40 per 100k.

 

i'm still blaming the under 40s. Gonna stick with that for a while longer!

 

I reckon it's the 10 - 95's that are most responsible for it........

 

Any reason to be ageist?

 

What's a geist ?

 

German for 'ghost'.

 

Like most folk, I’ve given up trying to fathom what’s going on.

 

I wonder if the BBC are behind it

 

You not worked out that there is no scapegoat. We (the public) are the problem - doubtful there’s ever been a government so completely disconnected from the people.