COVID-WTF Thread

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mr_happyland said:
Of course he wasn't at risk of infecting anyone, but why is this guy above the law that (most) everybody else is adhering to? Nobody likes it, but most reasonable people in the city understand that it's NOT a nonsensical temporary restriction. If you really feel like breaking down the details of whether he was or wasn't physically on the sand, then I guess I can't convince you. But I can guarantee if he complied within the first 30 minutes of being asked, a verbal warning was the most likely outcome.
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This is an example of no common sense and power tripping on both sides.
 
deonb said:
It's very true. I haven't left the house since February 29th this year. So it's been about 5 weeks.

In 2017 I was working on a particularly hairy problem under a tight deadline and didn't so much as set foot out of the house from July 1st until September 25th - so 12 weeks.

2017 also felt worse since it was a summer.

I feel incredibly privileged/lucky that I'm in one of the few professions where social isolation isn't just a non-event, it actually improves productivity.
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2-3 telecons a day and we don‘t expect it to change for quite a while. Even after the ban is lifted, we’ve been told we have the option to continue working from home for some additional TBD time.
 
Grocery store has reduced it’s open hours, so now it’s more crowded than ever was.
 
MooneyDriver78 said:
Grocery store has reduced it’s open hours, so now it’s more crowded than ever was.
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Our local grocery stores are implementing all sorts of crowd control measures which I'm many ways are counter productive so social distancing creating choke point and crowding aisles. Grocery stores are seeing record revenues...if they REALLY cared about health and safely of customers they would staff enough checkers to keep lines from forming...but they don't really care THAT much. Another SMH.

I for the life of me do not understand why they do not create ONE line diverted away from rest of shopper that you wait for next available cashier while managing 6' in line AND free up the aisles for others to pass safely.
 
wilkersk said:
My head shaking moment: when I looked around at all the "official" statistics on the "epidemiological curve" and realized that not anyone's numbers agree. Not only that, but no one is measuring the same thing. In a world where we have ANSI, SNOMED, IHE, CCHIT, JACO, ELINC, ....literally standards for everything medical, yet we cannot agree on a standard set of metrics for assessing and monitoring a world pandemic.
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I heard Sweden is only counting covid-19 fatalities if the victim had NO pre-existing conditions. That skews their numbers compared to ours
 
Shawn said:
Our local grocery stores are implementing all sorts of crowd control measures which I'm many ways are counter productive so social distancing creating choke point and crowding aisles. Grocery stores are seeing record revenues...if they REALLY cared about health and safely of customers they would staff enough checkers to keep lines from forming...but they don't really care THAT much. Another SMH.

I for the life of me do not understand why they do not create ONE line diverted away from rest of shopper that you wait for next available cashier while managing 6' in line AND free up the aisles for others to pass safely.
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This is what Costco is doing. At least in Colorado.
 
Datadriver said:
I heard Sweden is only counting covid-19 fatalities if the victim had NO pre-existing conditions. That skews their numbers compared to ours
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Yup...there is a big difference between people dying FROM Coronavirus and people dying WITH Coronavirus. While there is no doubt that the virus accelerates mortality for those on the brink and is a severe risk factor for underlying conditions, know that the reported death toll count is anyone WITH the virus regardless of what they ultimately passed from. Not trying to minimize it, but context matters when comparing to typical daily mortality rates in the US and the World.

Just for context, 2,813,503 people died in the US in 2017...statistics say that a percentage of those people WOULD have COVOD-19 in today's count...question is now how many die FROM COVID-19?

Those numbers are important IMO.
 
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Shawn said:
Just for context, 2,813,503 people died in the US in 2017...statistics say that a percentage of those people WOULD have COVOD-19 in today's count...question is now how many die FROM COVID-19?

Those numbers are important IMO.
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So if someone has, say diabetes, or kidney failure, but they contract COVID-19 and die of respiratory failure, are you going to say they died of their pre-existing condition? That's essentially what Sweden seems to be doing (though I'm taking @Datadriver 's word for it here, I havem't checked whether they actually do this).

Pretty sure the cause of death at the hospital would be listed as COVID-19.
 
redtail said:
Watching the daily briefings... I can't help but have great respect for Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx and the Surgeon General, but not much for you-know-who.
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I concur. He has switched horses in midstream so many times, I'm not sure of anything he says. I wish he would just provide a summary, express belief in his team, let his team talk, and then say thank you and retire from the room.
 
azure said:
So if someone has, say diabetes, or kidney failure, but they contract COVID-19 and die of respiratory failure, are you going to say they died of their pre-existing condition? That's essentially what Sweden seems to be doing (though I'm taking @Datadriver 's word for it here, I havem't checked whether they actually do this).

Pretty sure the cause of death at the hospital would be listed as COVID-19.
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No, what I am saying is that if they died of kidney failure they still get listed in the death toll of COVID-19 which is not an accurate representation of the death toll FROM Coronavirus since thousands of people die every day with or without Covid-19...and those numbers are the most critical of all to have a clear picture of the impact especially as we destroy other peoples lives in the process.

Not trying to minimize the COVID-19 deaths but I just want a clear understanding of the data and actual impact on mortality and severity considering the measures that are being taken.
 
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Shawn said:
No, what I am saying is that if they died of kidney failure they still get listed in the death toll of COVID-19 which is not an accurate representation of the death toll FROM Coronavirus since thousands of people die every day with or without Covid-19...and those numbers are the most critical of all to have a clear picture of the impact especially as we destroy other peoples lives in the process.

Not trying to minimize the COVID-19 deaths but I just want a clear understanding of the data and actual impact on mortality and severity considering the measures that are being taken.
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Yes but it's not that simple, since catastrophic illness strains all the body's systems. I agree that if someone with end-stage renal failure contracts COVID-19 and dies of kidney failure, they shouldn't be listed as a COVID-19 fatality. But where do you draw the line? Someone with, say, stage 2 failure (which is a large fraction of the population) dying of kidney failure after contracting COVID-19 is probably correctly classified as a COVID victim, since they probably would have died of something else rather than kidney disease.

Classifying every case that dies is skewing the numbers one way, requiring no pre-existing conditions is skewing them the other way.

And I don't know what standards are actually used in this country, nor whether they vary from region to region.
 
azure said:
but it's not that simple... where do you draw the line?
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It's very simple as there is federal guidance in place on how SARS/COVID deaths are recorded and specifically indicates how COVID should be coded/entered on the death certificate. As Shawn stated, it's important to accurately gauge the specific impact of SARS on the population which the CDC has always done. This is no different than what is done for Influenza and other diseases. There are also ongoing provisional death counts due to COVID which are updated on a regular basis.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/vsrg/vsrg03-508.pdf
 
Bell206 said:
It's very simple as there is federal guidance in place on how SARS/COVID deaths are recorded and specifically indicates how COVID should be coded/entered on the death certificate. As Shawn stated, it's important to accurately gauge the specific impact of SARS on the population which the CDC has always done. This is no different than what is done for Influenza and other diseases. There are also ongoing provisional death counts due to COVID which are updated on a regular basis.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/vsrg/vsrg03-508.pdf
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Thanks, it's good to know there are guidelines for certifying a death as due to COVID-19. And it is definitely NOT very simple - that guidance is extremely detailed and seems designed to avoid both missing COVID-19 as the UCOD, and reporting it as such when it is not. In other words, I don't think it supports Shawn's argument at all. Assuming these guidelines are actually followed, I would trust our statistics over those that (allegedly) come out of Sweden.
 
As soon as people are freaked out enough? Or get so bored by long lockdowns, they will do anything to be done?

All kidding aside, some friends in NM said that they are only allowed outside in groups of 5, and only if they stay in their own back yard - even if they are all related and live in the same house. I am not sure of the point to that regulation, but there it is.
 
We could post stuff from Nextdoor here for everyone's amusement.

Someone in a neighborhood near mine posted about making citizen's arrests of violators.
 
AggieMike88 said:
I concur. He has switched horses in midstream so many times, I'm not sure of anything he says. I wish he would just provide a summary, express belief in his team, let his team talk, and then say thank you and retire from the room.
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JOhnH said:
In many cases, that will be about 1 week after the family begins to follow the "stay at home" order.
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Followed by justifiable homicide?
 
benyflyguy said:
Over on reddit they have a coronavirusmemes page. Quite numerous.
View attachment 84260
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Have had a FB group going for weeks.

Now that it’s like 6000 members there’s always a handful who are butthurt of course. No idea WTF they clicked on, or how to use a computer.

Pretty sure the mods are just tossing idiots like that all the way out now. LOL.
 
azure said:
In other words, I don't think it supports Shawn's argument at all.
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Are you medically trained? While I can't help you with its comprehension, it directly supports Shawn's point as the guidance is designed to break out COVID in the mortality data to be tracked by the NVSS. The same point is made in the Intro. As to whether it is "simple" or not I'll defer to the deputy corner I asked the question if they were separately tracking COVID deaths. His answer, "yes...by simply following the CDC instructions." Which he forwarded to me. Unfortunately, he's had to "follow" the guidance daily for the past week so it's somewhat 2nd nature to him at this point.
 
Shawn said:
No, what I am saying is that if they died of kidney failure they still get listed in the death toll of COVID-19 which is not an accurate representation of the death toll FROM Coronavirus since thousands of people die every day with or without Covid-19...and those numbers are the most critical of all to have a clear picture of the impact especially as we destroy other peoples lives in the process.

Not trying to minimize the COVID-19 deaths but I just want a clear understanding of the data and actual impact on mortality and severity considering the measures that are being taken.
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The best number to look at at this point is probably the Bergamo death rate, which over the last 30 days was 4500. The normal death rate there over a 30 day period is 916.

So approximately 80% of all deaths is Coronavirus related or at least Coronavirus accelerated.

That's with an infection rate of somewhere between 4% and 8% of population.
 
deonb said:
That's with an infection rate of somewhere between 4% and 8% of population.
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I honestly believe that the know infection rate both domestically and worldwide is exponentially underreported and true scope of spread is far greater than documented due to lack of testing measures...but that a a good thing if actually true.
 
Bell206 said:
Are you medically trained? While I can't help you with its comprehension, it directly supports Shawn's point as the guidance is designed to break out COVID in the mortality data to be tracked by the NVSS. The same point is made in the Intro. As to whether it is "simple" or not I'll defer to the deputy corner I asked the question if they were separately tracking COVID deaths. His answer, "yes...by simply following the CDC instructions." Which he forwarded to me. Unfortunately, he's had to "follow" the guidance daily for the past week so it's somewhat 2nd nature to him at this point.
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I'm not specifically trained in medicine but I am a scientist. Unless I totally misread Shawn's statement, he was saying that if someone dies of a cause unrelated to COVID-19 and would have died anyway from it, COVID-19 is still listed as the cause of death if they were diagnosed with it. It seems pretty clear from the document you linked that that is NOT the case (as long as the guidelines are followed). Indeed one of the objectives of the guidelines is to prevent that from happening.

NVSS said:
This section on the death certificate is for reporting the sequence of conditions that led directly to death. The immediate cause of death, which is the disease or condition that directly preceded death and is not necessarily the underlying cause of death (UCOD), should be reported on line a. The conditions that led to the immediate cause of death should be reported in a logical sequence in terms of time and etiology below it.

The UCOD, which is “(a) the disease or injury which initiated the train of morbid events leading directly to death or (b) the circumstances of the accident or violence which produced the fatal injury” (7), should be reported on the lowest line used in Part I.
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I read nothing in there that supports the claim that someone dying of kidney disease who is diagnosed with COVID-19 and then dies of kidney disease would be listed with COVID-19 as the UCOD. Just the opposite, in fact.
 
Shawn said:
I honestly believe that the know infection rate both domestically and worldwide is exponentially underreported and true scope of spread is far greater than documented due to lack of testing measures...but that a a good thing if actually true.
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It's not exponential (do you mean order-of-magnitude?), but it can be off by 5-fold or so in this case. In places that have done full coverage testing like Vo and South Korea, we know the IFR is at least 1%.

That means the infection rate can safely be capped at at most 100 times the death rate. Well, the infection rate 2 weeks ago is capped at the death rate of today, due to incubation time etc.

Which could mean that Bergamo had a potential infection rate of 40%. But it's estimated much lower because they have a much higher than average CFR/IFR there due to various other factors.
 
@deonb

You lost me on that one. Care to translate?

Tim
 
tspear said:
@deonb

You lost me on that one. Care to translate?

Tim
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IFR -> Infection Fatality Rate. Of all the people who got infected, how many died.
CFR -> Case Fatality Rate. Of all the people who tested positive, how many died.

CFR is easy to calculate, but not that meaningful. IFR represents the real risk, but to calculate IFR you need to have either perfect testing or great sampling. There are 2 places so far that did that:

Vo, Italy: Tested their entire population. Of everybody who was tested positive, 1.1% died. It's a small sample, but it holds.
South Korea: They tested a sufficient number of people to achieve control with only a test+track strategy. The only way to have achieve without lockdown is to have a very high (near 100%) coverage of tests over cases. Otherwise without the lockdown, death rate would be growing exponentially (which it doesn't over there - it's been stable for 4 weeks). Of everybody who tested positive in South Korea, 1.7% died.

Either way, it points to a Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) of at least 1%. This gives us an easy upper bound of the infection rate - 100 times the death rate. The CFR represents the lower bound. Current CFR is between 2% to 10%, depending on how thoroughly a country tests. So the lowest bound of the infection rate is about 10 times the death rate.

So e.g. if you have 10000 deaths (US today), then you know you have between 100 thousand and 1 million people infected.

EXCEPT, you don't actually know how many are infected today. You know how many were infected 2 weeks ago. (The average time from infection to fatality is 2 weeks). So with 10000 deaths today, we've had 100 thousand to 1 million infections 2 weeks ago. We've had a MEASURED increase of 10x since 2 weeks ago (33000 cases to 330000 cases). So if 3 weeks ago we in actuality had 1 million cases, then today we could have 10 million cases. But there were so many changes that went into those 2 weeks, including partial lockdown measures, increased of number of tests, change of testing criteria etc. that it would likely be lower than that. Either way, it does give us a upper bound of infected today, which is 2.7% of population max.
 
azure said:
I'm not specifically trained in medicine but I am a scientist. Unless I totally misread Shawn's statement, he was saying that if someone dies of a cause unrelated to COVID-19 and would have died anyway from it, COVID-19 is still listed as the cause of death if they were diagnosed with it. It seems pretty clear from the document you linked that that is NOT the case (as long as the guidelines are followed). Indeed one of the objectives of the guidelines is to prevent that from happening.
I read nothing in there that supports the claim that someone dying of kidney disease who is diagnosed with COVID-19 and then dies of kidney disease would be listed with COVID-19 as the UCOD. Just the opposite, in fact.
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Conclusion
An accurate count of the number of deaths due to COVID–19
infection, which depends in part on proper death certification,
is critical to ongoing public health surveillance and response.
When a death is due to COVID–19, it is likely the UCOD and
thus, it should be reported on the lowest line used in Part I of
the death certificate. Ideally, testing for COVID–19 should be
conducted, but it is acceptable to report COVID–19 on a death
certificate without this confirmation if the circumstances are
compelling within a reasonable degree of certainty.

"If the circumstances are compelling within a reasonable degree of certainty". So if the Doctor wishes, for expediency, he can just put down death due to Covid-19 and move on.

Several reports from countries such as Italy they were doing just that, which greatly exaggerated the numbers.
 
Shawn said:
...meanwhile in Alaska.

View attachment 84294
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I have, myself, used this very device for that purpose.
deonb said:
IFR -> Infection Fatality Rate. Of all the people who got infected, how many died.
CFR -> Case Fatality Rate. Of all the people who tested positive, how many died.

CFR is easy to calculate, but not that meaningful. IFR represents the real risk, but to calculate IFR you need to have either perfect testing or great sampling. There are 2 places so far that did that:

Vo, Italy: Tested their entire population. Of everybody who was tested positive, 1.1% died. It's a small sample, but it holds.
South Korea: They tested a sufficient number of people to achieve control with only a test+track strategy. The only way to have achieve without lockdown is to have a very high (near 100%) coverage of tests over cases. Otherwise death rate would be growing uncontrolled (which it doesn't over there). Of everybody who tested positive in South Korea, 1.7% died.

Either way, it points to a Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) of at least 1%. This gives us an upper bound of the infection rate - 100 times the death rate. The CFR represents the lower bound. Current CFR is between 2% to 10%, depending on how thoroughly a country tests. So the lowest bound of the infection rate is about 10.

So e.g. if you have 10000 deaths (US today), then you know you have between 100 thousand and 1 million people infected.

EXCEPT, you don't know how many are infected today. You know how many were infected 2 weeks ago. (The average time from infection to fatality is 2 weeks). So with 10000 deaths today, we've had 100 thousand to 1 million infections 2 weeks ago. We've had a MEASURED increase of 10x since 2 weeks ago (33000 cases to 330000 cases). So if 3 weeks ago we in actuality had 1 million cases, then today we could have 10 million cases. But there were so many changes that went into those 2 weeks, including partial lockdown measures, increased of number of tests, change of testing criteria etc. that it would likely be lower than that. Either way, it does give us a upper bound of infected today, which is 2.7% of population max.
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There's also the fact that some who die aren't tested for COVID, and thus aren't counted. And a smaller number may have tested positive, but that wasn't the true cause of death.
In any case, NYC has had more deaths from this than from 9/11. And I suspect that Wuhan has about ten times the number reported.
 
Doc Holliday said:
Several reports from countries such as Italy they were doing just that, which greatly exaggerated the numbers.
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It didn't greatly exaggerate the numbers. Bergamo had 5 times their usual amount of deaths over the last month. So it could be 20% over-reported at an absolute max. I wouldn't call that "greatly".

At the same time it was also under-reported in places in Italy because people who died at home were never given a COVID cause-of-death, which would also be wrong. Does the over/under cancel out? Maybe, maybe not. But looks like it would be a few percentage points one way or the other, not an order of magnitude.
 
deonb said:
It didn't greatly exaggerate the numbers. Bergamo had 5 times their usual amount of deaths over the last month. So it could be 20% over-reported at an absolute max. I wouldn't call that "greatly".

At the same time it was also under-reported in places in Italy because people who died at home were never given a COVID cause-of-death, which would also be wrong. Does the over/under cancel out? Maybe, maybe not. But looks like it would be a few percentage points one way or the other, not an order of magnitude.
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But we truly don't know. If anything it's just a SWAG.
 
azure said:
he was saying that if someone dies of a cause unrelated to COVID-19...
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??? I believe he was stating his concern that non-COVID deaths were not being culled out from direct COVID deaths and that this separation of data was important? Your posts in 50 and 53 appeared to confirm his concern they were not separated. I posted the CDC guidance in Post 54 to relieve his concern that in fact the causes of death are being separated by CDC into COVID and non-COVID related categories. Nothing more. And now you agree also that it is important to separate this data?

FYI: There is separate CDC guidance on respiratory issues/pneumonia when it comes to COVID which is additionally broke out in the provisional death counts.
 
Kenny Phillips said:
I just got back from trying to go fishing at a state park about 40 minutes away. Many of the parking lots were closed, and there were soooooooo many people crowding the place that I didn't even get out of my car. Bet they all think they are 'social distancing'.
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Local news had a spot encouraging folks to go fishing. The WTF moment came around when they said, "You know you are too close to the other fisherman if you can reach out and touch them with your pole."

WTF???

In my not so humble opinion, you know you are too close if you can SEE them!!
 
mr_happyland said:
The beaches are closed. He ignored multiple requests to return to shore. He deserved it. It definitely sucks but that's just where we're at right now.
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If the dude can move a paddleboard on the beach, he is someone with which I would not mess. ...but then again, he was not on the beach, was he?

HEY YOU!! YOU CANNOT BE OUT IN THE WATER!!! THE BEACH IS CLOSED!! NOW GET OVER HERE TO THE BEACH!!

o_O
 
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