>> Disclaimer: COVID-19 data is the number of ACTUAL US deaths since March 15th, 2020 as reported on Worldometer against the backdrop of the EXTRAPOLATED DAILY number of deaths for top 15 causes of death in the US based on the latest (2018) data from the CDC. This chart is not meant to represent statistical analysis of any kind, it is meant for visual purposes only to help raise public awareness of the exponentially increasing COVID-19 deaths in the US
This is a really awful chart. The number of deaths from Covid-19 is animated as they increase day-by-day, but the numbers of deaths from all other causes remain constant. These numbers (the blue bars) are stated to be the "EXTRAPOLATED DAILY numbers of deaths from the top 15 causes of death in the US" (other than Covid-19), but if they are "DAILY" numbers, why aren't they changing daily?
The last sentence in the disclaimer is at least honest about it: this graph has no real information content. I for one find this graph to only serve the purpose of sensationalising a situation that is already dramatic enough without the need of animations and special effects. Really. The only thing missing is epic music in the background. Something from Carmina Burana, perhaps.
The "extrapolated daily" seems to be a weird way of saying "on average". And I think it's reasonable enough to do, because I don't think this data exists at daily granularity, and even if it did the daily variation would not be particularly meaningful.
The chart's really only making a single point, which is that yesterday, more people in the US (probably) died of COVID than anything else. And the figures are likely to get worse before they get better.
Since the other causes of death remain static in this chart, its hard to tell if Covid-19 are new cases or "take away from other causes" (and by what percentage).
Would be interesting to see daily chart of Covid-19 deaths as % of total deaths and daily total deaths.
PS. Extra points - number of deaths due to lockdowns (suicides, unaccessible healthcare, etc)
Indeed, this is the key question, what are the number of excess deaths compared with this time last year. Are mortality statistics available to that sort of granularity and speed (e.g. "number of deaths registered last week") for any country or region in the world?
If you die of heart failure and happen to be covid infected (which is likely given how widespread it is) do you go down as a covid death rather than a heart failure?
Week 9 commences March 2nd (I'm assuming the weeks are the same as ISO weeks)
Week | Total dead(E+W) | Covid (UK) | Excess mortality
8 Feb24-Mar1 | 10,841 | 0 | ...
9 Mar 2-8 | 10,816 | 3 | no
10 Mar 9-15 | 10,895 | 32 | no
11 Mar 16-22 | 11,019 | 300 | no
12 Mar 23-29 | 10,645 | 1073 | no
13 Mar30-Apr5 | n/a | 3965 | yes -- England overall and 65+. not in Wales/Scotland/NI. Specific England regions - London, South East, E+W Midlands, North West
Ah great find. I was looking for UK hospital admissions data.
That's pretty shocking. Pneumonia and respiratory has hardly moved (where is the wave???) yet there's a huge fall in emergency cardiac patients. That's worrying. It implies people having heart attacks are choosing not to go to hospital fast enough, even though they could.
People are ignoring stroke symptoms and failing to ring 999 because they fear being a burden on the NHS in England duringthe covid-19 pandemic, the national clinical director for stroke has warned. Deb Lowe, consultant stroke physician at Wirral University Teaching Hospital, said that doctors across the country were seeing “quite striking reductions” in the number of people coming into hospital with symptoms of stroke. She said, “It appears that people aren’t seeking emergency help or going to hospital when they suspect a stroke, possibly due to fear of the virus or not wanting to be a burden on the NHS.”
The excess deaths caused by the lockdown are likely to be spread out over years. They will be deaths of despair from suicide, substance abuse, and chronic diseases (including depression). The epidemiologists and public health officials don't appear to be factoring those deaths into their models.
The long tail of deaths that have been subverted must also be taken into account, e.g. take those who would have otherwise passed in the near future to lung disease who succumb to the virus, they inflate this number, but next year's lung disease numbers will be proportionately lower.
From the disclaimer: COVID-19 data is the number of ACTUAL US deaths since March 15th, 2020 as reported on Worldometer against the backdrop of the EXTRAPOLATED DAILY number of deaths for top 15 causes of death in the US based on the latest (2018) data from the CDC.
If the objective is to put the risk in perspective, then comparing to normal times makes more sense. Our perceived risk of dying in a car crash is based on the times we are actually normally driving and not when we are quarantined at home.
but road traffic related deaths? Really? COVID-19 is not causing a decrease in road traffic deaths, the reaction to COVID-19 is. So, why would that data ever be relevant when talking about the disease?
To put this into perspective, we're about halfway to the 23,000 flu deaths in the US for the entire flu season this year. At the current rate, though, we'll be past that by next week.
For more perspective, the 1957 Asian Flu killed about 70,000 people in the US (1 - 2 million worldwide), and our population at that time was 177 million (about half of today).
CDC guidelines appear to ask medical professional, to over-report COVID as a cause of death, if there is reasonable suspicion, but not a definite diagnosis.
I am not sure if this right/wrong, and how different it is from guidelines relating, to say, flu as a cause of death.
> "...
In cases where a definite diagnosis of COVID–19 cannot be made, but it is suspected or likely (e.g., the circumstances are compelling within a reasonable degree of certainty), it is acceptable to report COVID–19 on a death certificate as “probable” or “presumed.” In these instances, certifiers should use their best clinical judgement in determining if a COVID–19 infection was likely. However, please note that testing for COVID–19 should be conducted whenever possible.
..." [1]
As an hypothetical example, if a deceased was in a contact with covid-positive person, but the deceased was not tested for Covid, should the cause of death be noted as 'presumed covid-19'?
At least the Covid-19 deaths have a limit, whereas many of the others will remain constant for a much longer time. The sadness of this disease is for many countries it did not need to be so bad. I wonder if we as a country (US) will learn anything from this.
What is the limit for Covid-19 deaths? We don't know yet if we'll get a working vaccine or if immunity from antibodies lasts long enough. What we have at the moment are educated guesses. If Covid-19 becomes endemic, it could be a death cause that is always present like influenza.
This might be a bit morbid, but every death cause has a limit, the whole population..
There are three big factors at play. These factors are magnified in cults, but you can actually see them working at the small scale even in your office or family about completely trivial subjects.
The first is hierarchy - most people get their idea of true/false right/wrong through the social structure they're embedded in, and from who they consider senior and look up to. This is pretty fixed even if the senior figure gets something conspicuously wrong.
The second is consistency; beliefs usually come in sets, and they're often tied together by being supported by the same sources (see above). And it's especially tempting to have a consistent set of beliefs that happen to be wrong, rather than deal with the messy inconsistency and uncertainty of the real world. This is why people don't get partially deprogrammed from cults.
The third is loyalty and identity group membership; this is the peer-to-peer version of "hierarchy" above. Disagreement is an attack on the peer group. The extreme version of this is seen in religions who will ostracise unbelievers. If you want to stop being a Mormon or a JW you may have to walk away from everyone you've ever known.
"Sources" are fairly useless in this situation unless you can find one that's already inside the target's perception of loyalty and hierarchy. Anything from outside can be easily dismissed.
I was stressing too much over it and it drives me insane people are so stubborn without any data to back their claims. If provided data they just wave it aside with a random argument and move immediately on to another topic within the subject criticizing something else, so you have to keep extremely sharp in all topics or they just swing from side to side until they find a topic you have no information about and start making shit up, since you don't want to reach conclusions without data they win there as they just create stuff out of thin air.
It's crazy, looks like debate club where the other party never gives up or surrender no matter what happens.
They won, I just do my best to educate the my small ones into critical thinking, save as much money as I can to have some fat for the next shit that comes up and hope for the best. Basically If people are so stupid to behave like that, it's not my problem anymore, my plan is to have enough to take care of my family.
Unless you know pigs. I can assure you they don't actually like it. They prefer clean water but go with mud because it's usually available. Wrestling with them in anything makes them unhappy (they're prey animals and it's instinctual). The only way to get a pig to do something like that and MAYBE be OK with it is food. I usually fill a kiddie pool with fresh water and Cheerios, to bathe them. The trick it to bathe them faster than they can gobble the Cheerios.
And today you learned something. You're welcome. Hopefully that was a good momentary distraction and you didn't have to thing about all the idiots who think covid isn't really all that bad for a couple seconds. :)
I have no opinion on this but I have read multiple times now that currently if someone dies, say on Heart Disease, and has positively tested on Covid-19, that the death cause is counted as Covid-19. So depending on how many people are really already infected it would be currently kind of impossible to die of anything but Covid-19. Maybe that's all wrong but at least that's how the deniers argue I guess. Can someone refute this argument please?
> “Someone who’s dying from a bad pneumonia will ultimately die because the heart stops,” said Dr. Robert Bonow, a professor of cardiology at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and editor of the medical journal JAMA Cardiology. “You can’t get enough oxygen into your system and things go haywire.”
> But Bonow and many other cardiac specialists believe a COVID-19 infection could lead to damage to the heart in four or five ways. Some patients, they say, might be affected by more than one of those pathways at once.
> ...But Bonow said the damage observed in COVID-19 patients could be from the virus directly infecting the heart muscle. Initial research suggests the coronavirus attaches to certain receptors in the lungs, and those same receptors are found in heart muscle as well.
> In March, doctors from China published two studies that gave the first glimpse at how prevalent cardiac problems were among patients with COVID-19 illness. The larger of the two studies looked at 416 hospitalized patients. The researchers found that 19% showed signs of heart damage. And those who did were significantly more likely to die: 51% of those with heart damage died versus 4.5% who did not have it.
> ...That work has already resulted in changes in the way hospitals deal with the cardiac implications of COVID-19. Doctors have found that the infection can mimic a heart attack. They have taken patients to the cardiac catheterization lab to clear a suspected blockage, only to find the patient wasn’t really experiencing a heart attack but had COVID-19.
I think it's impossible (with the current state of technology) to determine the actual cause in patients with comorbidities. The patients died _with_ coronavirus in these statistics rather than _from_ coronavirus.
Anyway, it's hard to argue with those people. But if you look at the average deaths a country has per month, and see the increase because of Covid, you should be able to infer something is wrong with just a bit of common sense.
Not a medical professional as well, but I can imagine a picture of a patient dying from coronavirus - say, due to the lung failure - should be quite different from the one dying from the heart disease. Shouldn't it?
There are also a lot of Covid-19 deaths that haven't yet been counted in NYC because they happen at home away from a hospital. So the uncertainty isn't just skewed downward.
> I have no opinion on this but I have read multiple times now that currently if someone dies, say on Heart Disease, and has positively tested on Covid-19, that the death cause is counted as Covid-19.
You have read incorrect information. Only deaths "where the disease caused or is assumed to have caused or contributed to death" [1].
Of course, there will be errors. As with any number, especially one reported daily.
BTW: there are also reasons for COVID deaths being underreported, so the bias in the number isn't really one way.
Almost no one dies "of" diabetes. It's a stroke, a heart attack, or an infection that kills you. But the stroke, heart attack or infection would never have happened if you hadn't had diabetes.
This is the difference between proximate and ultimate causes.
Dr's are not going to say that person who was asymptomatic but was infected with covid-19 died of it if there was something else. However they are going to record that the person was infected because that information is useful for later medical/epidemiological research.
However there is also a good chance that even if covid-19 isn't the only contributor to a person's death. For example a person with heart disease can extract enough O2 from the air to live but because of there disease they are below the normal human amount. Then comes along covid-19 with futher reduces their body's effectiveness and the person doesn't have enought air to live.
The sheer mass of dead bodies will be refuting it soon, if it hasn't already. Unless the deniers want to posit a massive increase in non-Covid deaths that mimics a pandemic.
I’m not sure why you are being downvoted. There was a news report today of YouTube taking down a video of a conspiracy theorist who spoke for two hours on how 5g triggered the Corona virus.
I love the fact people are attacking 5G anyway. Although the claims of a connection between 5G and the virus sound nonsensical, 5G still is a privacy catastrophe ought to be stopped.
You need to look at excess mortality. Currently we have a lot more people dying than normal. We know this because we're building temporary emergency mortuaries. Maybe these would have died within a year or two, but they're not, they're dying right now.
When someone has a heart attack and dies how do we know they had covid-19? We're mostly not testing people. We don't test the dead people. So we know or suspect they have covid-19 before they die. This is not a bunch of asymptomatic people dropping dead from expected causes then being labelled as covid-19 deaths, it's a bunch of people with severe symptoms who are dying and having multiple causes listed on the certificate, one of which will be covid-19.
Apples and oranges. There is no evidence that having diabetes significantly increases the risk of a traffic accident, but plenty of evidence that having diabetes increases the risk of dying from COVID-19.
So, "they were going to die anyway." This just in: we're all going to die anyway.
When you're lying on your deathbed drowning in the effluvia of necrotic lung tissue at least you can rest easy in the knowledge that your humanity didn't count and you're just a statistic, but at least you helped a wealthy person avoid not making as much money as he could have.
Heart attacks are a common consequence of the lack of oxygen, which is the consequence of failing lungs, be it by Covid-19 or COPD etc. So these things are closely linked.
Im 41 and have experienced this phenomenon since i was 13 arguing about evolution on usenet, and then climate change, and now a virus killing people right in front of our eyes. I don’t know the answer.
I have recently reached to a conclusion that it must be an auto-gating feature built into human brains.
Those baseless beliefs, conspiracy theories, denials and other seemingly pointless normalcy biases seems to occur when the reality is somewhat “substantial”, even if it might not be for you/me right now.
I can’t say which of those people are ill, those who have , or those who don’t have that kind of “plain wrong internet opinions”, because the former could be a more environment resilient form of thinking. Those people are functional IRL, so there must be more than just being idiots.
I mean, it certainly allows a lot of logical simplification... what if that was one requirement for self sustaining sentience...to be able to be casually schizophrenic? That would be too much of reality for me...
No, they like feeling "in the know" while the rest of us are "swindled by the rhetoric". They're very damaging to the population and I don't know how we can handle them.
That's really just the result of the decreasing trust within society.
"Bowling Alone" is a good book that tries to explore the underlying reasons for this development, that started some time in the 1960s.
The current "war" in cyberspace probably contributes to it as well. Here is an interesting interview with a US four star general about that new area of conflict: https://youtu.be/qOTYgcdNrXE
I think some of the denial is because of the lockdown, the lockdown is affecting their financials, money is more valuable for them then life or medics and some other guys so the lockdown is a mistake, the rest is a lot of number manipulating to prove why we need to remove the lockdown and make money again.
I mean if you see the situation in Italy and Spain and you still say "it is just flu, nothing different then usual" then there is no reality that can save you, maybe if you get sick and end in one of those hospitals...
People were denying things long before the lockdown, though. I do agree there's a component of "the alternative is more convenient, so I'll believe that instead" in many people, but those should be easier to convince.
Sure, I am not saying that all denials are from people with financial interest, some just think they are expert statisticians or maybe they are part of some political group and when his favorite politicians says is just the flu then he will put all his skills to prove that is tribe is right.
Yeah, this thinking pattern is already well-practiced with climate change: "if we acknowledge there's a problem, doing something about it will hurt us financially, so it's better to simply deny there is a problem in the first place"...
Actually the “flu bro” crowd has some really good points. For me, it’s impossible to ignore the inconsistency. Imagine tens of thousands of people standing before you before they perish gruesomely. These people who died of preventable things other than covid 19, are ignored by society — nobody cares. You aren’t considered a murderer for going to work with the flu (but you technically are) and you aren’t considered irresponsible for taking your kids on unnecessary car rides. When you look at the amount of death caused by unremarkable things and the amount of death caused by covid 19, they are the same. Compared to 7 billion, they are basically the same in that they are a drop in the bucket. After covid 19, will we care about all the people dying from other preventable things? No. Because this is hysteria. It’s not logic.
I think hospitals should maintain enough capacity to handle influx. I think that people should wear masks and wash their hands. But none of that changes what I wrote above. And it doesn’t change the fact that many, many people have a fetish for doom. It’s the same with global warming or the second coming of Christ — a kernel of truth or good intention becomes a mass fetish for doom and no reasonable discourse can survive.
I’m talking about the death toll at the end of the day, not the current death toll. I’m talking about the likely maximum number to ever be infected (roughly herd immunity number) multiplied by the percentage of people that the virus kills. I understand exponential growth. People who have their own opinions are not necessarily suffering from a lack of math knowledge.
And if we follow your premise that this is hysteria and we go back to work how many absolute numbers of people will die vs other causes of preventable death?
Herd immunity would still mean millions of dead people you'd have to step over.
The countries that thought they could go this route did a hard reverse once reality hit them.
You're comparing millions of death in the US to the world population. It would be more fair to either use the expected number of deaths worldwide if we just continued our business, or compare it to the total population of the US.
My friend, take the number of people who end up dying after herd immunity and compare it to the population that it infected. If it’s more than a drop in the proverbial bucket, then please excuse me.
I see there's no use in arguing, as the same pointless statement gets parroted back each time.
This disease is now the #1 cause of death in America. Nothing like a trifling total; nothing like a drop; nothing like an ignorable fraction. Very, very significant.
Unless and until 2008guy offers up his extended network of friends and family to be consumed by the disease, I think it's safe to assume moral reasoning isn't his/her forte.
This appeared to cross some threshold where it really scared people. Personally, the flu scared me. Motor vehicle deaths and hospital acquired infections also terrified me. Those were already above my personal threshold where I thought the risk was pretty bad. I would already maintain a wide berth around anyone coughing or visibly sick.
There's also some paranoia because this is new, and because of the fear of asymptomatic carriers. That makes people think they're helpless and have no way of protecting themselves. A loss of control is an important factor in creating terror.
That being said, this virus does truly appear worse. Wherever that fear threshold is for people, this virus has crossed it.
It is worse for sure. I was stuck in a hotel for the past two months so all I did was watch cnn. It was amazing to see the sentiment of the language on cnn actually become politically neutral as the disease spread in the US. That was when i really knew that this is something big. Anderson cooper actually defended Donald trump in a minor but explicit way at one point and I thought I was dreaming. The people at cnn were definitely scared for a little while there.
How much intensive care capacity do you think is available? And how much intensive care load would unmitigated covid-19 progression consume? The (wild) disparity between these numbers is the entirety of current crisis, but you seem to treat it as just another factor.
I’m not even sure if this would parse as legitimate English. What?
And in response to your other recent comment, my entire family has been “consumed” (you idiot) by one disease or another. I am the only one left. Nobody was hysteric when they died. People were apathetic. It’s difficult to sympathize with people’s hysteria when just a month ago they were apathetic in the face of countless lives lost to other preventable diseases even though there were easy prevention methods available. Difficult to sympathize with the hysteric mob when a month ago I watched them stream from the back doors of bars, staggering into their vehicles and driving off - the same drive of stupidity that fuels the hysteria and apparently your comments.
What negates this thinking is hard mathematics ie that all the other things don't kill at a _geometric_ rate. If left unchecked millions of people will die in a short amount of time.
Yes flu also progress similarly but we have vaccines for the flu and we manage it seasonally. Even considering the CFR for covid-19 will drop substantially it is still killing by OOM more people across all age brackets without co-morbidities (not to mention medics) which the flu doesn't do.
> When you look at the amount of death caused by unremarkable things and the amount of death caused by covid 19, they are the same. Compared to 7 billion, they are basically the same in that they are a drop in the bucket. After covid 19, will we care about all the people dying from other preventable things? No. Because this is hysteria. It’s not logic.
Should we be lucky enough for Covid-19 to have the same disease burden as the worst flu season as of late, and not the disease burden it's actually projected to have, several orders of magnitude more people will die than they would from the flu. So no, compared to 7 billion, they are not basically the same.
Your "really good points" hinge on a shaky understanding of statistics at best, or just outright ignoring the available data at worst.
What do you consider a "denier" exactly? This is obviously the worst public health crisis in our lifetimes. But on an individual level, the majority of people infected with SARS-CoV-2 won't experience symptoms any worse than a bad flu. So I can understand why some people aren't concerned.
> Is there a cure or a method to convert such dense crowd? (well, besides bashing their heads with something heavy)
It's not really the peoples fault, it's all the disinformation, bad reporting and incompetent governments. I work at a critical facility on a skeleton crew. I hide in my office, wear gloves out in the shop, and wash wash wash wash my hands. Though, at work most people have these impressions, all parroted from bad press and advice:
"you only need face masks if you are sick to prevent the spread."
"It's the flu, you can't avoid it."
"everyone is going to catch it eventually"
"you only need to worry if you're really old or have an underlying condition"
I think part of the problem is the level of uncertainty. We do not know:
- The true number of people who are infected.
- The death rate, which would require that we know how many people are or have been infected.
- The number of people who have tested positive and then died of COVID-19, rather than a pre-existing condition.
- The number of people who have already had COVID-19. Data from various sources show that up to 75 percent of people may be asymptomatic.
Some people--not all--look at the degree of uncertainty in the data and conclude that "experts" can't possibly know what they claim to know. It just isn't possible.
The "cure" for such people will be widespread testing or at least randomized testing.
As someone who tends to have a skeptical approach to most things, including this: you could consider not lumping into the same box every person who doesn't agree with every aspect of the prevailing viewpoint on something.
People are skeptical of the numbers, and rightly so. Unfortunately, this crisis has gotten to the point where you can't criticize any part of the response without being lumped into the "denier" category. For instance, I am not convinced that masks are more helpful to healthy people than they are harmful, and that is really my only criticism thus far, but whenever I mention that in an online forum, I'm dismissed as a complete denier.
I took a look at your post history, and I don't really agree with any of your reasoning not to wear a mask going outside.
But here is the biggest one: at pandemic level, it's much more productive and safer for everyone to assume that they are potentially infected, and wear mask to prevent spreading it elsewhere. In my country, when facing guidelines of social distancing, a lot of people are responding with "I am healthy, and I don't really care if I got infected so I should be able to go outside and do everything I want". And if you follow it up with "You might not care about your health, but you might spread it to other people, so you should still stay home", their answer is "Are you saying I am infected? I am not". Your argument is suspiciously similar to that line of reasoning.
Yes, non-medical mask might not block things coming into your body, but everyone is a potential carrier, and if everyone wears a mask, society gets safer, quicker.
And that's okay! It's good to apply a healthy dose of skepticism, especially when neither of us have all the facts. We can agree to disagree for now, and I may even change my mind as I get more verifiable info.
Why bother? Just tell them you hate flu, especially kinds easy to catch and prone to result in severe symptoms. I believe that's sufficient and easy enough to understand. Ok, we've got a particularly infective and nasty kind of flu here, let's do our best to avoid it.
> I don't understand how to deal with deniers anymore.
Consider smoking kills 1,300 per day (480,000 per year) in the US. That isn’t a contagious virus it’s a product you literally have to purchase and use for decades and people still do it. Think about before it was common knowledge that smoking killed and how it was ingrained in culture and how it took decades to remove smoking from air planes, school, restaurants, even hospitals. Even now with knowledge of the risk/dangers and social changes 1,300 die everyday.
I’m not trying to make it a whataboutism, but to highlight the difficulty in getting people to change their behavior even if it means death. For example, this virus seems to kill mostly people with chronic diseases (hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, obesity) which are all dietary diseases and responsible for about 1M deaths per year in the US, this is common knowledge and the fact this virus is most deadly to that group...yet how many people will actually take steps to change and improve their diet and lifestyle?
To your point/question I’m not sure how you change people’s behavior...I mean we could right now eradicate all new cases of type 2 diabetes moving forward by getting people to eat a certain way, but people would rather argue about that than actually curb their behavior
Most of them already know this, they are just trolling you - despite this being a matter of life and death.
Please read the newspaper article about the crona-denying pastor who went to Florida, got infected and died. According to his son he very well knew the virus was not a hoax and his stand came from "being frustrated with the media pushing Corona with a political agenda" (not a verbatim quote but it's in the ballpark).
"tis just a flu" is probably the least harmful of the lot.
There are fairly influential figures out there pushing far more dangerous stories. The virus was manufactured by Bill Gates in order to push a vaccine that contains a tracking microchip. The virus being caused by 5g is another one.
For those, I just don't have a clue how to deal with.
I have come to the conclusion that thinking about convincing everybody of everything just does not work. Like, at all. With "everything" I mean all those many, many big and small things, from "facts" to flat earth to this virus to climate etc. etc., and endless list.
First, it just does not matter at all what most people think. The scientific way would be to develop a good model to see whose opinions actually matter, directly or indirectly (network effects).
Second, there is an endless stream of deaths and births. If you look at the rate that you can possibly achieve to educate people and - far more important - to develop trust, you have to set this "rate of education and trust development" vs. the "rate of exchange in the population". Then it's easy to see that it's an unsustainable idea to try to educate everyone.
Third, what really matters is trust, education about a particular subject comes in with significant distance. The vast majority of people who "believe in [evolution, corona, 'science'" are actually just as clueless as those who don't. That's not criticism, that's just human brain capacity. Ask any real science questions, e.g. from freshman tests in college, and see how many of the "believers" are able to answer.
So I think a better approach is to not dwell on the problem that "x amount of people don't believe in...". It's the wrong problem. It is not possible to solve, unless you have a static extremely long-lived society. Instead, create a system that acknowledges the problem and finds solutions. Like, don't try to convince each and every person of the dangers of a pandemic. Just create rules and enforce them, period. Of course, this works best when people trust the "system", government etc. But solving that trust issue is the far better solution instead of hand-wringing about people's "stupidity", which I think is missing the point completely. There is no way around this so-called "stupidity", and IMO the far bigger issue is a lack of trust.
I'm with Sherlock Holmes and his famous statement about (sort of, don't remember exact words) "what do I care about the solar system and if the earth revolves around the sun?". If somebody works as a butcher, for example, their views of the solar system and of corona should not matter one bit. (Yes they elect politicians - but what does that have to do with anything?)
Yes of course it would be nice with more people knowing more stuff. I myself took lots and lots of (uni) courses way outside my own field just for fun. However, I think looking at that as a solution is looking at a non-solution and a distraction. That would be a bonus to make things better, not what makes it all work at all.
After careful and measured consideration, HN comes out swinging for technocracy.
I'm shocked.
(Meanwhile, half the COVID-19 threads are people pissed off because the US did take a technocratic approach to mask recommendations and they hate it because programmers don't get to be part of the inner circle of public health decision makers.)
In a sense they might be rational; anyone under 50 has a 95% of being out of action for a week or two then getting back up unaided. That is much less punishing for them than the lockdown unless they are the unlucky 1 in 20. Not prudent, but about the same level of risk assessment people use when talking on mobiles while driving.
One of the major issues is the Boomers are hitting that delicate age where things start to kill them instead of being shrugged off. Trying to protect the 50-70 cohort is the real dance here.
> anyone under 50 has a 95% of being out of action for a week or two then getting back up unaided.
Now consider a home with four people under 50. The chance of someone in that home getting unlucky is then around 1 in 5. There is only a 81% chance of all four "being out of action for a week or two then getting back up unaided".
It is a mystery to me why anyone downvoted you. Yep; exactly so. There are people on the edge of an economic disaster where 80% odds of being fine are substantially better than the economic stresses they are being put under. Someone without a good social network could be facing a risk of actually starving to death if they lose their job and all local businesses shut down in line with the quarantine. The disruptions happening are profound.
I'm cautious and I'm not about to venture out of my apartment until we all know what is going on, but the data we have so far isn't a compelling story that would convince everyone.
You seem to imply that you are holding the greater truth. You also imply that people that don't hold your views need some "cure", they are somehow sick. Haha! Question yourself why you think like that before trying to cure the others.
Also, I am surprised about the hatred Bill Gates is receiving (despite spending billions of his own money on fighting Corona and other diseases). Could someone please explain why?
As you’d know if you actually read those people’s comments, they believe he had a role in intentionally releasing the virus as a pretext to force his id2020.org human cattle marking system onto the world, among other incentives.
Don’t stop there, let’s see your responses to the other points I raised in my previous comment.
Some people does not seems to have any other type of learning skill on some topics.
Let them learn from their own experience or let them see it with their own eyes. There is a theory that anti-vacc is on the rise, because people does not know anybody who suffered from the grave consequences of the diseases which we have vaccines to prevent.
The same probably applies to the COVID-19. That's why I'm wondering, why the news are not full of videos about what is happing in the hospitals and why they are not trying to show what it is really like to have serious symptomps because of the infection.
> I'm wondering, why the news are not full of videos about what is happing in the hospitals
Funny you mentioned that. The reason most EU citizens are okay with the lockdown is a video from Lombardi showing doctors removing an old man from a respirator (basically killing him) to save a younger man.
Political discussion isn't so much about the exchange of views anymore, but about "winning" and "destroying" the other side.
And there is a reason for that. There is an interesting interview with a US 4-Star General about the topic of "controlling the public" in cyberspace: https://youtu.be/qOTYgcdNrXE
EDIT: just stating the obvious. if your post is dripping with condescension, then I can only imagine what your conversations are like. Take a deep breath, present your case, and keep what's important (your relationship with who you're talking with) at the forefront.
How do you know that this was the cause of death when all we know is that these people were tested positive on Covid19 before they died?
Not denying that Covid19 is a thing and measures are necessary but I think this question is valid when reading such headlines.
A positive test is not even necessary to report them as Covid-19 deaths in the US.
> Should “COVID-19” be reported on the death certificate only with a confirmed test?
> COVID-19 should be reported on the death certificate for all decedents where the disease caused or is assumed to have caused or contributed to death.
> A positive test is not even necessary to report them as Covid-19 deaths in the US.
But this applies to other forms of death. We count flu deaths in the same way, so the data is equally skewed.
> > > COVID-19 should be reported on the death certificate for all decedents where the disease caused or is assumed to have caused or contributed to death.
People can only put it on the death certificate if they can make that assumption to the best of their knowledge or belief. It's not doctors guessing.
I think the comment claims that both flu and corona deaths are assigned almost solely based on symptoms and medical history (eg. if someone comes in with a fever, develops a pneumonia and dies then they look at signs to tell apart the diseases - did the patient have runny nose and joint aches? yes? then flu. no? but had shortness of breath? corona.)
I would bet this number is an underestimate, not at overestimate.
There are probably more people dying in their homes of covid-19 without ever having received a test (and thus not being counted) than people with a severe covid-19 reaction (since its still very hard to get tested if you have mild symptoms) but dying from something else.
All mortality cause numbers are estimates, and the method is clearly stated in the website.
The title of the submission is somewhat misleading (we can't really say that the leading cause of death on that day was COVID-19), but the information is the best we have and it's helpful to make sense of the current crisis.
What you're asking can only be done months from now, once we have numbers for all deaths and their official causes.
Side note:
gun violence would average number 3 or 4, if not for the tireless lobbying from the NRA to block health impact research.
https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/
What we’ve learned from this Corona scare is the best way to protect people is to incarcerate them in their own homes. Take guns and hard instruments from people. Isolate everyone into their own cell would reduce the murder rate to zero. All communication would go through the Internet. No chance for physical abuse any more. No more transmission of disease since we’ve shutdown direct human interactions. It would be the perfectly safe world. Of course agency gets thrown out the window.
This is a really awful chart. The number of deaths from Covid-19 is animated as they increase day-by-day, but the numbers of deaths from all other causes remain constant. These numbers (the blue bars) are stated to be the "EXTRAPOLATED DAILY numbers of deaths from the top 15 causes of death in the US" (other than Covid-19), but if they are "DAILY" numbers, why aren't they changing daily?
The last sentence in the disclaimer is at least honest about it: this graph has no real information content. I for one find this graph to only serve the purpose of sensationalising a situation that is already dramatic enough without the need of animations and special effects. Really. The only thing missing is epic music in the background. Something from Carmina Burana, perhaps.