Sounds to me like someone has been reading too much John Ward. Yes, we don’t know much about it. Yes, the mortality rate is low. Yes, lots of Italians die every year. However this time there is something that is genuinely clogging up a number of otherwise well organised health systems. That’s not normal.
This, at about three minutes explains it in very clear and simple terms.
If anyone is interested in an expert opinion then this article makes for an extremely interesting https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/The-evidence-on-Covid-19-is-not-as-clear-as-we-think
The author is a qualified individual and raises really important statistical questions
This kind of mirrors my thinking in my OP.
The two basic points being made - firstly that there are many mild cases of Covid19 which are not being tested so the true fatality rate is lower then headlines and that deaths due to seasonal flu tend to be under-recorded are both fair.
But seasonal flu does not cause ITUs to overflow with critically ill people - which Covid19 is doing in Italy, New York and London right now and it does not kill young, healthy people nearly as often as Covid19 has.
Dr Lee is correct in as much as he says we do not yet understand the epidemiology of Covid19 and it might be a while before we get the full picture, he might even be right that it won’t be as bad as the full blown doomsday scenario but his interpretation is based on the same sort of evidence-free assertion that he is criticizing in his article.
You can’t simultaneously have it that the data is unreliable and say “here is my much more reliable interpretation of the data”.
Paul Flinders I think you need to re-read the article he is not saying he has a correct answer he is saying, we could be inferring a lot from a limited data set, which due to the criteria of collection could be significantly skew the results.
Agree - compare it to pandemic flu if you will but not to seasonal flu.
Which is true, and his closing comment is reasonable enough but the overall feel of the article seems to be trying to downplay the risks that Covid 19 presents.
However I can do some basic maths as well - sticking with the comparison with seasonal flu for a second:
Flu deaths vary quite a bit year on year - the UK estimates are 2015-15: 28,330, 2015-16: 11,875, 2016-17: 18,009 and 2017-2018: 26,408.
OK, Covid at 759 deaths has some way to go but let us not forget that we recorded the first UK death on March 9th - less than 3 weeks ago. Yesterday 181 new Covid deaths were recorded.
Assume all of the 26,408 flu deaths occurred in the winter months - so that’s 26408/26 = 1000 deaths a week, give or take.
Italy recorded 68,000 flu deaths between 2013 and 2017 so similar numbers, maybe a bit less than the UK but as Dr Lee points out reporting is variable also remember the population of Italy is slightly smaller than that of the UK.
Currently we are still only testing those ill enough to need hospitalisation - despite Dr Lee’s assurances this group has much higher mortality - perhaps as high as 15%
Those people who died in the last 24 hours probably became symptomatic about 18 days ago (ref: The Lancet) - at that point (March 10 ish) there were under 100 new cases per day.
Yesterday there were 2885 new cases, 18 days ago 62, 46.5 times as many - or 5.5 doublings- that gives 3.24 days to double the number of cases - that’s in line with current estimates so my maths seems to be holding up so far.
The deaths will track new cases from 2½ weeks ago so over the next two weeks expect the daily death rate to accelerate - I truly hope it does not follow the maths because 46x181 deaths per day is rather frightening, but let’s assume it follows Italy’s figures and goes up to about the 900 a day mark.
Let that sink in - 900 a day, not the 1000 a week or so attributable to seasonal flu. In the past 2 weeks Italy has seen about 7 and a half thousand deaths - getting on for half of their annual seasonal flu total.
We can hope that the lockdown measures will work or that some other factor will reduce the number of new cases - Italy has seen static (ish) levels for the past week but still 5-6000 cases per day. The UK’s figures are still growing exponentially (but it takes probably 2 weeks for the lockdown effect to show through), cases in France are running 2-3000 per day and it is not yet clear that the lockdown is slowing things down but hopefully it will do so over the next week.
Do you still think it is less of a problem than seasonal flu? - certainly looks much worse in the short term.
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I have a simple question, what happens when the exponential curve flattens out and the strict measures relaxed?
This virus will not go away, as a high risk person, am I destined to observe social distancing until a vaccine is developed?
Is it possible the virus will lessen when the weather gets much hotter?
There are mixed reports as to if hot weather may help or not
The truth is that no-one knows at the moment
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From your comments, would you even understand!
The mistake is to assume that “nothing is done” about flu - most countries now offer vaccination programmes which are effective at reducing flu, if not preventing it entirely, in the most vulnerable groups (the young and the old).
So flu has, indeed, triggered an effort to reduce its impact, its more that it’s always been there so there is no “oh that’s a new, BIG, problem to address” as there is with SARS-Cov-2
Plus all those little problems with exponential growth, lack of immunity etc, etc.
Ah, I am not saying nothing is done about 'flu, it is, but with a figure of 26000 deaths in the UK alone last year i would question your statement “most countries now offer vaccination programmes which are effective at reducing flu, if not preventing it entirely, in the most vulnerable groups (the young and the old).” They do offer vaccination programmes but it most definitely does not prevent it entirely.
What I am saying is that 26000 deaths did not trigger the measures that covid 19 has with (at the time of my OP) had far fewer deaths. I know that the new virus is not the same as the 'flu virus but there are similarities in the transmission & effect on the human body, so what is known about THIS virus that has made most of the world shut down?
The long term effects of the shut down will have consequences that will go on for many years - psychological, economic, legal & political. There are plenty of people whose health & wellbeing will be adversly affected by the measures being enforced now & their numbers may well exceed those who are direct casualties of the virus. Don’t misunderstand - I realise the importance of minimising the spread of any virus & do not advocate breaking the measures currently in force.
Its just that with the inevitable damage to future society. in my opinion, this virus must be far more serious than the various & varying figures being thrown at us by governments & the media suggest.
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Would I understand what, Harriet?
Mark can’t seem to get past the death count. Which since nobody knows what the death count would actually be if no measues had been taken, is a meaningless figure to bandy about.
The difference is in plain sight if you stop looking at figures and look at what’s happening out there. . Doctors and health workers are getting sick and dying. Hospitals can’t cope. Flu doesn’t break the health service but Covid19 has. How can you not see anything serious about that?
Pictures on news last night of seriously ill people in Mulhouse being stuck on trains with full respirator kit was rather alarming. So many small regional hospitals are at capacity now.
This ^
This is what you need to get into your head - Covid is breaking the system, ITUs are filling up, hospitals are overflowing - 'flu just does not do that.
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The trouble is he dismissed that right at the beginning because, as Anna has pointed out he only looked at the death rate. He seems unwilling or unable to understand the exponential growth of the problem and the effect that will have on the NHS and people’s lives.
I gave up long ago. As I said, you can take a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.
Let me explain my thinking.
Although 'flu & covid 19 are not the same, there are a lot of similarities in the behaviour of these viruses.
Flu, as has been pointed out, has a vaccine but despite this 26000 people still died. This number from a virus WITH a vaccine did not result in the shutdown of virtually the whole world.
When I wrote my OP the amount of deaths in the UK was 233. The government shut down the country.
A virus, by its very nature, will spread exponetially. This applies to 'flu as well as covid 19.
Actual figures vary depending on the criteria used so all the numbers being used are speculative. Most of the preparations being made are in anticipation of, not yet a result of, an increase in sufferers. Hospitals have been overwhelmed for some years with reports of people being left on trolleys in corridors for some cosiderable time while a bed is being found for them, sometimes hundreds of miles away.
This is from the BMA “NHS hospital beds have been cut by more than half in the past 30 years – leaving the health service ‘overwhelmed’ and hospitals across the country at breaking point.” This was in 2017.