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The Coronavirus COVID-19, is "Just Another Flu"
- Thread starter InTheLight
- Start date
Covid19 Ninja [link] an easy to understand science lecture on what all the fuss is about.
After listening you will be much better informed and better able to differentiate real news from the fake stuff.
Rob
After listening you will be much better informed and better able to differentiate real news from the fake stuff.
Rob
From the article: "There is no occasion for panic--influenza or grip has a very low percentage of fatalities--not over one death out of every four hundred cases."
I saw this today. I am quite unable to say how accurate it is, but it seems to be a serious study.
Not Like the Flu, Not Like Car Crashes, Not Like
Not Like the Flu, Not Like Car Crashes, Not Like
The 1918 "Spanish flu" possibly began in Canada according to a report I saw a couple of years ago. In the beginning it was considered a strange form of Pneumonia, It was mainly spread by armies travelling across the oceans, THe second husband of my great grandmother was invalided out of the Canadian army in 1917 due to having pneumonia but then re-enlisted for further treatment. He never went overseas.
One issue here is @Calminian 's agenda to discredit Trump. He is Democrat pretending support, but look at his posts!
Impossible!
There is not one credible source that has an accurate number of individuals that contracted COVID-19. The only statistics we have are those individuals who are confirmed positive. The number of people who have/had COVID-19 and were never tested could easily be three times those confirmed positive. This happens every year with influenza. The only cases reported are confirmed cases. How many people get influenza and never get the nose swab to confirm it? When Dr. Fauci recently said that it's possible the first case of COVID-19 in the United States may have been in December or January (and even that is a guess), does not that call into question the veracity of statistics we have been given? I am not saying that the CDC is lying. I am suggesting that their statistics do not take into account unreported cases or misdiagnosis (i.e. influenza instead of COVID-19).
See this thread I started on February 15, 2020: Bad year for influenza
Did I really have the flu? My doctor never took a swab, although he did take an x-ray. Whatever upper respiratory infection I had went to the lungs and gave me pneumonia. I had a non-productive dry cough that hurt. My doctor assumed it was the flu but he was really concerned about the obvious complication of the virus which was pneumonia. Similarly, it is not COVID-19 itself that is deadly, it is the complications it may produce. What makes my experience interesting is that the clinic my doctor works at called me a few weeks ago and asked if I would considering being tested for COVID-19 antibodies once tests are available in our area. Why the call? Could it be they are trying to ascertain whether suspected cases of influenza were actually early cases of COVID-19? Probably.
The point is that we do not know how many people have actually been infected but we can make a safe hypothesis that the number is far greater than the official numbers. Why does the accuracy of the data matter? Because it drives down the percentage of COVID-19 deaths. The mortality of the virus is lessened if the actual cases are higher. That does not mean we should not take the virus seriously or that we should flip the switch tomorrow and re-open everything. It does mean that much of the fear mongering that is occurring is misplaced.
See this thread I started on February 15, 2020: Bad year for influenza
Did I really have the flu? My doctor never took a swab, although he did take an x-ray. Whatever upper respiratory infection I had went to the lungs and gave me pneumonia. I had a non-productive dry cough that hurt. My doctor assumed it was the flu but he was really concerned about the obvious complication of the virus which was pneumonia. Similarly, it is not COVID-19 itself that is deadly, it is the complications it may produce. What makes my experience interesting is that the clinic my doctor works at called me a few weeks ago and asked if I would considering being tested for COVID-19 antibodies once tests are available in our area. Why the call? Could it be they are trying to ascertain whether suspected cases of influenza were actually early cases of COVID-19? Probably.
The point is that we do not know how many people have actually been infected but we can make a safe hypothesis that the number is far greater than the official numbers. Why does the accuracy of the data matter? Because it drives down the percentage of COVID-19 deaths. The mortality of the virus is lessened if the actual cases are higher. That does not mean we should not take the virus seriously or that we should flip the switch tomorrow and re-open everything. It does mean that much of the fear mongering that is occurring is misplaced.
Gold Dragon
Well-Known Member
Yes, confirmed cases are always less than actual cases and confirmed deaths are always less than actual deaths. And like influenza, covid19 has many unconfirmed cases and deaths that are missing from the actual data. This is normal in all tracking of infectious disease because it is not practical to test the entire population all of the time and cases and deaths get missed.
The statistic usually used to calculate death rates while a pandemic/epidemic is occuring is the CFR or case fatality rate which is by definition, the confirmed deaths divided by the confirmed cases. We always know this is higher than the IFR or infection fatality rate which is actual deaths divided by actual cases because we miss a lot more cases than we do deaths. IFR can never be truly calculated unless we test every person in a population at regular intervals (daily, weekly) which is impractical. It can be estimated with serology testing that is happening to see how many people were actually exposed.
However there are problems with doing this in the middle of the pandemic as it is hard to extrapolate data in one place and time to other places and times while they are still getting new cases. So again, we need to be testing a lot of people at regular intervals which is impractical. There are other problems with serological testing at the moment because the tests were rushed to market and not validated so there are lots of errors at his stage. The most accurate time to measure this would be after the pandemic is over but, it is important to get as much data on exposure as possible but not for the reasons you think.
Driving down the covid19 death rate is important to those with political motivations to say that covid19 is not a big deal. But it actually has no impact on what we do. Because whether the death rate is 5% of confirmed cases or 1% of 5x confirmed cases still equals the same number of people dead.
But finding the number of undetected cases does help us see how infective covid19 is and how effective or ineffective our measures have been. The higher number of undetected cases actually means we need to do more to control infectivity, not less. Because that is the reason for the lockdowns, to control the infectivity of covid19 so that health systems will not get overwhelmed by the high number of cases that need hospitalization.
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Maybe that is true for some, but not in all cases. If the mortality rate for COVID-19 is similar to influenza then perhaps it should change how we publicly respond to the virus. Again, I am not saying we should flip the switch and re-open society to normalcy today. I am saying that we should challenge what we are being told by government. Government is to be respected, but trust is a different matter.
Gold Dragon
Well-Known Member
The mortality rate and how similar it may or may not be to the flu has no bearing on why lockdowns are happening. They are happening because of how infective covid19 is and its tendency to send people to hospital at rates that overwhelm the health system. Finding lots of undetected cases means that covid19 is even more infective than we thought, making the reason for lockdowns even more justified, not less.
We have known for a long time that the mortality rate of Covid19 in countries that do a lot of testing and don't have overwhelmed health systems to be quite low for a "plague", less than 1% of cases. It is still many times more more deadly than influenza but the main problem is how infective it is and how easily it overwhelms health systems. And we don't have good measures to reduce infectivity except for public health measures, social distancing ... and when the rate of infection gets too out of hand, lockdowns.
timtofly
Well-Known Member
Or simply God Himself stopped society dead in it's track, by making humans in direct line with God's will.
Humans would have never cooperated with each other on such a mass scale. There is peace now, but soon the tables will be turned. It is time to prepare each one's individual lives for the soon return of Jesus Christ.
Humans would have never cooperated with each other on such a mass scale. There is peace now, but soon the tables will be turned. It is time to prepare each one's individual lives for the soon return of Jesus Christ.
But this is not the same everywhere. Surely population density plays some part in high hospitalization rates. I do agree with one of the CDC talking heads (name escapes me) who said that COVID-19's danger lies in the fact that it is novel. Once antibodies start to appear in large numbers in society that it will not be as dangerous. I am not a medical professional, so I cannot speak for the veracity of that claim. But I still hold to the opinion that state and municipal lock downs should not be of a cookie cutter approach. What may or may not work for New York City should not necessarily be replicated in Boise, Idaho. At the risk of being redundant, I repeat my earlier refrain. I respect government, but I do not trust it. I am not willing to take government directives at face value. Government needs to provide a convincing why. I have been on this sod long enough to know it seldom does.
Gold Dragon
Well-Known Member
Population density plays into infectivity, not hospitalization rates. Hospitalization rates are dependent on the health of the population and their level of comorbidities. Places with lower population density will have lower infectivity rates which is currently protecting them as well as the lockdowns. Those areas also often have fewer health services so they may get overwhelmed much more quickly if an outbreak were to occur. Areas of low population density should be able to have their lockdowns lifted sooner than the more densely populated areas. The difficulty will be having too many different recommendations for so many different places and people getting confused.
Yes that is the theory. There are a few problems though. One is that if you just let everyone get infected, your hospital system will get overwhelmed because covid19 just spreads very quickly though a population that has no immunity. That first wave will decimate your health system and kill lots of people in the process. The goals of "flattening the curve" are to have that happen gradually over a longer period of time so that health systems don't get overwhelmed. The other concern is that we don't know for sure that we will develop immunity and for how long. Some infections we develop antibodies to but then we still get the infection again because the immune response wasn't strong enough or the virus is able to still avoid our immune system or our immunity wanes after a short period of time.
Trumps Opening Up America plan is a good one and makes good recommendations for how and when states should open up. Individual states could also apply those principles in a more regional level. But I am worried many states are ignoring Trump's recommendations and opening up due to political pressure rather than good public health advice.