Your Aren't Saving Lives After All

I agree that depression and suicides will increase with the economic fall out from covid 19. Even if the US did no social distancing at all and dug their head in the sand to pretend covid19 didn’t exist, there would be a massive increase just because of global recession elsewhere and deaths from
Covid 19.

However, those additional suicides caused by shutting down the US economy would not all happen in 1 month. You would have time to mobilize employers to rehire, provide social support and get psychologists and doctors to treat their mental health which we have known effective treatments for.

We have no treatment for covid 19 that is yet shown to work and the wave of patients and deaths in hospitals is just beginning with no time to spare.

So while it is true that there will be an increase is some other types of death like suicide because of the economic impact of social distancing policies, the comparison is a false equivalency.

 

We have no reliable proof by regular medical scientific procedures of the death rate, unfortunately, although we will know more in the next couple of months. The big cities are the worse places to be. Globalization is dead and open borders are invitations to pandemics.

I wonder if this Chinese flu will sweep through the Muslim world?

 

Also from the article:

Is the Coronavirus pandemic serious enough to warrant putting much of the nation’s population into house imprisonment, or wreaking the economy for an indefinite period of time, or prohibiting worshipers from attending their churches, synagogues or mosques, or outlawing freedom of assembly and travel, or destroying businesses that have taken years to build up, or saddling future generations with unfathomable debt? The nation is choosing to plunge millions of people into depression, heart attacks, suicide and unbelievable distress, though they are not especially vulnerable and will only suffer mild symptoms or none at all.

This is what a police state is like. It is a nation in which the government can issue orders and edicts or convey preferences with no legal authority. Yet, it appears the majority of the American people are willing to sacrifice their freedoms and way of life in order to empower such a potential police state in the guise of conquering a pandemic. Governments never give up power once attained. They only seek to normalize it and now they have in their toolbox the knowledge that the citizenry will meekly acquiesce to any national emergency being declared an existential crisis which requires government to unconstitutionally impose its will on the people.​

The author is posing the problem of government assuming authorization to impose police state measures whenever it decides. He is not claiming that the measures themselves will remain in force at this time. Some of the current measures may very well curtail basic constitutional rights to an unconstitutional degree, in which case they need to be vigorously litigated and defeated.

An essential component of US government is consent of the governed. If the people are falsely led to believe they have no choice, or that the alternative to freedom is preferable, if the people lose their sense of responsibility to vigilance, that will spell doom for our constitutional republic. Perhaps there are cases where government willingly gives up power, but that of our own has grown tremendously since its inception. If government only relaxes power, it is claiming to yet have that power.

 

Watching this from a time 100 yrs ago is relevant to today.
Notice the parallels, today the doctors are saying similar things about the fast killing by pneumonia. Pneumonia is what really kills virus infected people due to their immune response causing the cytokine storm ravaging the lungs. Which is why chloroquine which suppresses immune response (one mode of action, it is why people take it for Lupus and Arthritis) and azithromycin that kills secondary infections works so well in some people.

Deadly immune 'storm' caused by emergent flu infections
The effect of the influenza epidemic was so severe that the average life span in the US was depressed by 10 years. The influenza virus had a profound virulence, with a mortality rate at 2.5% compared to the previous influenza epidemics, which were less than 0.1%. The death rate for 15 to 34-year-olds of influenza and pneumonia were 20 times higher in 1918 than in previous years (Taubenberger). People were struck with illness on the street and died rapid deaths. One anecdote shared of 1918 was of four women playing bridge together late into the night. Overnight, three of the women died from influenza (Hoagg). Others told stories of people on their way to work suddenly developing the flu and dying within hours (Henig). One physician writes that patients with seemingly ordinary influenza would rapidly "develop the most viscous type of pneumonia that has ever been seen" and later when cyanosis appeared in the patients, "it is simply a struggle for air until they suffocate," (Grist, 1979). Another physician recalls that the influenza patients "died struggling to clear their airways of a blood-tinged froth that sometimes gushed from their nose and mouth," (Starr, 1976). The physicians of the time were helpless against this powerful agent of influenza. In 1918 children would skip rope to the rhyme (Crawford):

I had a little bird,
Its name was Enza.
I opened the window,
And in-flu-enza.

Secret History Killer Flu

 

This CDC report tells us but not with the age breakdown.

Preliminary Estimates of the Prevalence of Selected Underlying...

Of the patients they had complete information on, around 1/4 of the hospitalized patients had no pre-existing health problems and 1/5 of the ICU patients had no pre-existing health problems.

 

Yes. We’ve known for a long time that those with preexisting illness are at higher risk. But those without still can have serious illness at lower rates.

 

The total number of cases changes every day. Are you going to wait until the pandemic is over to make any statements about the virus?

Actually that is a good idea. Please follow your own advice and wait until the pandemic is over before you talk again about what you think you know about the virus.

For myself, I evaluate a constantly moving situation with the best available current data to make the best estimates I possibly can and guide actions going forward every day.

 

Thanks for the link. It tells us only a small fraction of the cases.

"Information on underlying conditions was only available for 7,162 (5.8%) of 122,653 cases reported to CDC. It cannot be assumed that those with missing information are similar to those with data on either hospitalizations or underlying health conditions."

Also, to be more accurate and useful, they need to include obesity as a pre-existing condition in their assessments.

 

Definitely the more data that comes in the more accurate the numbers will get. It takes time to collect data in an active pandemic. So if you can imagine error bars around the numbers, they will get smaller with more data. But 7000 is not a small sample. That is more than all the positive cases in Australia. You can make very reasonable estimates from that sample.

 

But the point is that you are countering, ignoring, or minimizing the caveat of your own link.

And what about the omission of obesity and perhaps other significant factors? (By the latter, I don't mean that vaudevillian second opinion, "OK, you're ugly, too."

 

Not at all. You base your statements on the best data you have available at the time. And in this case the data is a pretty large sample that you can make reasonable statements about.

You can’t base statements on data that is yet to be collected or unknown. And these preliminary reports give timely information to assist in decision making while things are still moving and changing quickly. Everyone knows they are not definitive. That is the definition of preliminary.

They didn’t report on obesity. If you contact the authors, they may give you that data or consider including it in the next report. There is always more data to collect and report on but only so much time so you prioritize.

Yes it would have been good to see the obesity rates. Cardiovascular disease and diabetes could be considered proxy measures.

 

I will continue to pray for you, despite your hateful, sarcastic, inappropriate comments.

May the Lord forgive you for your prideful attitude, and help you resolve whatever personal issues you're struggling to overcome.

 

If guess if helping you understand how collecting up to date medical data during an active pandemic needs to be a dynamic process is considered promoting socialism, then sure.

 

Oh please.......I see things a bit differently than you, apparently. Your post to him is, oh wait, exactly what you accuse him of. Where have we seen that method before.

 

You need help getting that log out of your eye?

Zactly.

 

My point is that, counter to their caveat "it cannot be assumed," you are assuming. Whether their statement "it cannot be assumed" is correct or not, you have no basis other than assuming, and it is counter to their caveat.

Just for the record, assuming is what statistics are all about. In this case, the missing data in question exist but have not been shared or recorded. The reasons for that fact may be very significant and skew the results dramatically. Again, from your link: