Concerning the coronavirus, I wonder if ventilators increase mortality rates by removing the body's ability to create a stress adaptation?
Why would this be catastrophic, other then in a media driven mass hysteria? From my point of view, all I see is everything about this, has been embellished and sensationalized to the point that all decisions are being made in response to the media hype and bureaucrats need to feel importation. 1.5 million is about half the yearly deaths of the US and what many are ignoring, is that many of those that will die from this, already had one foot in the grave and would be dying anyway. We will grieve the dead and move on, just like we have every other time.
It can be relatively dangerous because of the side effects those two medications have (link below). That's probably why some people (myself included) would be hesitant to give it a shot unless they were already knocking on death's door. I've refused that particular antibiotic multiple times because of the issues it can cause.
Anti-COVID-19 Medications, While Possibly Life Saving, Can Have Life Threatening Complications if Used Inappropriately < Yale School of Medicine
yeah, but that article even references the 1957-58 pandemic IFR at 0.27% ...where as the German paper sees the new CCPVirus at 0.37% IFR.
USA had only 117K deaths back then (At a pop. of ~170M).
It's looking like 100K-200K deaths right now from the current flu outbreak.
Doesn't add up.
This does deserve an adult discussion (which lots of people are having). But it needs to be based on the correct numbers, so just two small corrections/clarifications:
- The 0.1% fatality rate that keeps getting thrown around is a rough estimate of the typical CASE fatality ratio for the flu. According to the CDC, roughly 50% of people infected with flu with not display classical symptoms. Applying this to the actual CDC estimates of number of deaths and symptomatic cases over the last 7 years for which there is complete data gives a typical IFR of 0.07% And these are actually pretty HIGH numbers, because in recent years the prevalent flu strain has been H3N2. The estimated IFR for the 2009 flu pandemic -- which was H1N1 -- was far lower yet, somewhere around or below 0.01%.
- The number of deaths doesn't just depend on the IFR -- it obviously also depends on the number of people who get infected. The CDC data shows that, in the same 7 years as above, the estimated number of flu infections was between 19 million and 68 million people in the US. This is without any social interventions, obviously. The number isn't higher because the reproductive rate of the flu is relatively low; there are vaccines that aren't perfect, but do help (both in terms of preventing infections and reducing deaths); and people have some (partial) immunity from prior exposures to related flu strains. None of these things apply to COVID-19, so an unchecked outbreak could easily infect a large percentage of the US population. The point of herd immunity would occur around 70% of the population, or about 230 million people.
So, let's put this together. The IFR of COVID-19 is around 5.7x that of the flu (0.4%/0.07%). To achieve herd immunity, maybe 3.8x as many people would have to be infected as in a typical flu season (230 million / 60 million). So the number of deaths expected would be around 21.7x higher (5.7x3.8). Not 4x higher.
By the way, if you doubt my maths, this is really kind of obvious. The number of deaths from flu in those 7 years above was 37,000 and 12,000 and 43,000 and 38,000 and 51,000 and 23,000 and 38,000. You can look those up for yourself easily enough. The TOTAL number of deaths from flu over those 7 years COMBINED was 242,000.
By contrast, for COVID-19, given an IFR of 0.4%, a herd immunity threshold of around 70%, and a US population of around 330 million, you'd expect around 920,000 US deaths. (Unsurprisingly, this is smack in the middle of typical estimates for the unchecked outbreak.) That's almost 4x more -- than 7 years worth of flu deaths COMBINED.
Past Seasons Estimated Influenza Disease Burden | CDC
Pinkbook | Influenza | Epidemiology of Vaccine Preventable Diseases | CDC
PLOS Medicine: Epidemiological Characteristics of 2009 (H1N1) Pandemic Influenza Based on Paired Sera from a Longitudinal Community Cohort Study
https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.c...879-017-2432-7
Real-time estimation of the influenza-associated excess mortality in Hong Kong | Epidemiology & Infection | Cambridge Core