Acceptable Covid death rates

Goldengirl

I don't equate the two . It's your post that is dishonest to claim that.

I am responding to another poster and it is applicable to the point of this thread .

As for " emotive coercion " if I can even understand what you mean when you say this , sounds like more hyperbole .

Those restrictions are all that is essentially left , restriction wise , which as you appear to agree , is not that onerous .

So the question posed by the op was that do people agree with the assertion by Paul about fixing an acceptable death rate figure and dispensing with the present regulations ?

I think we will definitely have immunocompromised people dying at a high rate ( as they are now unfortunately) if the extra doses do not give them adequate protection and this viral transmission continues to circulate at the rate it is without some restrictions .

These are the people presently very ill in ICU ( as well as unvaccinated ) which is why the op was so concerned about that article.

However if cases do fall generally as result of boosters and remaining restrictions we will reach a point where people may have to make such a decision .

My opinion is that that time is not now .

That was my point , no hidden agenda or " emotive coercion '!

There is no way to talk about this issue without an emotive aspect I don't think.

The fact that you think that that is coercive is your problem really .

blanch152

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118115304#Comment_118115304

Well yes, the evidence suggests that a relaxed attitude towards checking passes does equate to an increase in Covid-related deaths.

If you ask me, we are at a stage where

(1) mask mandate indoors in public places

(2) Covid certificate requirements for international travel, health centres and hospitality

(3) Maintenance of public hygeine standards

(4) Social distancing and minimising the number of contacts

are sufficient restrictions to ensure that the hospital caseload can be managed.

If we then take the WHO advice and vaccinate the world before booster shots, we have a chance to turn this into a endemic disease sometime in 2022. If we take the selfish/Israeli approach of booster vaccines for everyone every few months, then we will protect Ireland better but at the expense of a longer time before we return to full normality.

topper75

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118117662#Comment_118117662

We had a very relaxed attitude to passes last year because basically they didn't exist.

Compare death figures to this time last year. Yeah.

BTW - if you use a phrase like 'The evidence suggests..." it is often considered polite on the internet to present that actual evidence in your post.

blanch152

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118123190#Comment_118123190

This is mostly an evidence-free discussion place.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118123709#Comment_118123709

That which can be asserted without evidence...

Over 18 months into this, if anything, there appears to be no co-relation between the severity of a lockdown (incl. facemasks) and the following result.

Many of these restrictions appear to be self fulfilling prophecies and have no way of being verified.

astrofool

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118139764#Comment_118139764

This is a discussion about the acceptable level to which we should let people die, it's already fairly far off piste of what rational humans normally discuss.

And has to ignore that even if this number was decided, the only way to allow them to occur would be to start denying treatment to people and let them "die naturally" because they'll take up just as much of a hospital and ICU bed even if someone has decided that the death is acceptable.

But it is a natural endpoint for the "no masks, no restrictions, no vaccines, COVID is the flu" crowd of mouth breathers that exist in the world, as long as they aren't trying to qualify for the Herman Cain award themselves of course, then it's a case of jam them full of every medicine known to man so they don't have to pay for their own stupidity,

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118139971#Comment_118139971

This type of response is such a well know script that it is indeed deserving of the name cliché and I pin that accusation on my accuser, which is what they're resorting to.

Hopefully we all die naturally, at least that's how I would like to go. Considering that we are all going to die anyway, the real question is - what is an acceptable level or risk?

Sir David Spiegelhalter - a world renowned authority on the statistical assessment of risk reckons that the additional risk of death of cv19 in the UK was equivalent to 55 days extra days of normal risk. If you're a child it's 2 days. Another way of looking at it is to ask what's the average age of which people die of CV-19? It's about 82.5, what's the average age of which people die of everything else - very slightly less. So we are not looking at something which involves risk of an order of magnitude greater than what we face in every day life.

So you have to decide what is the degree of risk you are prepared to accept? There are some people who believe that no risk is acceptable that no additional deaths from a disease like CV-19 which can be prevented should be allowed as a justification for lockdowns, masks, vaccines. The problem about that apart from the fact that there is no real world evidence that these measures are actually working, unless we were all to be sedated, locked in wooden boxes permanently and fed by robots, it attaches no value to all the various other respects in which the counter measures undermine our national life. It attaches no value to the economic destruction, it attaches no value to the severe educational damage, it attaches no value to the fact that interaction with other human beings is a basic human need. At some stage people will have to accept that there is more to life than the avoidance of death.

astrofool

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118140259#Comment_118140259

And you're still ignoring that people don't die in isolation and need hospitals staff and beds unless you deny treatment to them, excess deaths cannot occur without the denial of treatment or the overwhelming of the health system (leading to even more excess deaths not just from COVID).

For all the other bluster about extra days, you need to ethically be OK with denying treatment to people for the extra days to be a factor.

You need to answer that question first rather than dodge around it.

It’s hard to say what is an acceptable level of deaths though because ultimately a Covid death is just a death where somebody tested positive using a questionable PCR test.

If we tested all those people again would they still be positive?

Even if so, how much of a factor did Covid actually play in the death?

Donald Trump

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118140893#Comment_118140893

Would they still be covid positive if you tested them again?

Likely not if they died more than a week ago.

You would hardly want to be basing any policy on that though

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118140939#Comment_118140939

A person in a nursing home could have tested positive and died a week later of old age or their primary illness.

If we had of tested them again, they might have been negative like Ryan.

We have to take the official figure with a pinch of salt.

Donald Trump

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118140979#Comment_118140979

Any maybe some who died with suspected covid had their tests come back incorrectly as negative.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118140985#Comment_118140985

Possible and probable are included in the figures.

Hopefully one day there’ll be a review and we’ll get a better idea.

Donald Trump

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118141009#Comment_118141009

At a very basic 101 level you have two statistical measures associated with a test. One is the p-value (or significance) and one is the power of the test. There will always be a trade off between then - i.e. eliminating false positives while trying to eliminate false negatives. But they will already know, statistically speaking, what each of the figures are for those.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118140736#Comment_118140736

Who is being denied treatment exactly? You’re trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.

astrofool

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118144335#Comment_118144335

No one is, that's why we have restrictions which keeps the hospital numbers down. The only way to let more "acceptable" deaths occur is for the hospital system to be overrun or stop treating people, there's no 3rd option there.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118145003#Comment_118145003

If your health system is at risk of being overrun then you increase capacity not imprison the entire population and conduct epidemiological experiments which have no way of being verified.

astrofool

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118145047#Comment_118145047

Sure, go hire all the doctors and nurses needed to increase capacity during a pandemic, you have 2 weeks to do so in order to be effective and so we can reduce restrictions early. GO!

Of course, every country is currently doing this meaning that significant expansion of health services during a pandemic is a pretty difficult lever to pull on, hence restrictions instead, but post pandemic, you better be asking for higher taxes to pay for a bigger health system so we can live with less restrictions at the next worldwide pandemic.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118145376#Comment_118145376

That's exactly what we did in March 2020 by taking control of private hospitals and the Citywest hotel. None of this extra capacity was required or used - this was before vaccines and facemasks were introduced so why would the situation be any different now?

FYI - the UK setup Nightingale hospitals and in NY the military setup field hospitals. In both cases the hospitals were dismantled because they were underutilised.

astrofool

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118145512#Comment_118145512

So now you're saying do nothing?

The gamble with reducing restrictions is the hospitals get overwhelmed, they do modelling for this, you can argue the modelling is wrong but you can't really argue about the options available (increase capacity or deny treatment).

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118145522#Comment_118145522

As I said, if your hospitals are at risk of being overwhelmed then you increase capacity as we did in March 2020.

Why do you think those are the only options i.e. increase restrictions or the hospitals will be overwhelmed? Hospitals have never been overwhelmed during the past 18 months or are we now expected to forever protect the HSE rather than it protect us as it’s funded to do?

astrofool

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118145709#Comment_118145709

In March 2020 we shut everything down and cancelled elective surgeries so that the capacity could be used for COVID. We still have that ability but with current restrictions, case rates and hospitalisations, that capacity isn't needed. If ALL that capacity was needed, we'd be back into lockdown along with it (more likely is that a few private hospitals would cancel electives before that happened).

As I said, it's either stop treating people or have restrictions, there's no 3rd option at the moment.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118145732#Comment_118145732

But why are those the only two choices i.e. restrictions or hospitals will be overwhelmed? How did you come to that conclusion?

astrofool

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118145912#Comment_118145912

That's based on modelling, you can disagree with that modelling if you want (and other threads have discussions on them), but it doesn't really answer the question of "acceptable covid death rates" given that each death takes up a hospital bed and hospital resources.

Are you saying that if we drop all restrictions, hospitals won't be overwhelmed? If you have data to back that up, we can remove all restrictions today and be done with it.

If the answer is to get extra capacity, that would need lockdowns or take a long time to get staff to run the extra capacity.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118145958#Comment_118145958

At no stage during the past 18 months have hospitals been overwhelmed, before restrictions, before vaccines and before mask mandates but why are you asking me to prove a negative, the onus is on you to show that the interventions you are proposing actually work, not for me to prove that they don't work?

This is effectively what you are saying:

"If I wear this purple hat, I am safe from badgers."

"What credible evidence do you have for that?"

"Well, I'm wearing it and there are no badgers attacking me right now."

In the first wave of the pandemic nursing home residents were definitely denied treatment.

My mother tested positive on 12 April 2020 and I received a phone call from her Doctor informing me of the result of her test. They also informed me during that same phone call that she would not be referred to hospital, as she would not be considered a priority for treatment and/or a ventilator.

In other words, beds were being kept for younger people.

I was also told I had no say or control over that decision, that it was his to make. She died on 22nd April - along with 23 other residents of her nursing home within a two week period in April 2020, none of whom were referred to hospital for treatment.

And for the record, the cause of death recorded on her death certificate is Covid-19.

astrofool

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118146041#Comment_118146041

What happened in Palermo and then Spain heavily influenced governments response to this. The Irish government has been ultra conservative in it's response (with high public approval ratings for that response). NPHET's modelling then tries to measure how much restrictions can be lifted but still avoid that scenario (and multiple models are produced from best case to worst case and data then fed into it to see what's likely to happen).

But after all that, the "acceptable covid death rate" is the number of deaths that occur without overwhelming the hospital system.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118146156#Comment_118146156

To prove something which is indeed false, and avoid examining that which is obvious... takes a special form of cocooning and heuristic-blindness which only academia and religion can impart.

astrofool

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118146225#Comment_118146225

The evidence is Italy, Spain and the modelling being done by NPHET, the papers being produced by scientists working in virus control. I've lost what point you are driving at other than "make more capacity" which has already covered and now claiming a lack of evidence.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118146296#Comment_118146296

Modelling alone isn't science, modelling is only science if it's correlated to the actual data. Models have to be to be tied to real world data and the only models that are really any use in science are models that have predictive values and predict what is going to happen in the future and then you compare that with what actually happens. Models that look back at what happened in the past are not useful because there are millions of ways you model a past curve mathematically, the problem with that is you don't know which variables are true and which are the right variables to be looking at.

The only way you can continue to believe in the modelling that is being done (which has been significantly off the mark for the past 18 months) is if you believe that the lockdown has been 100% effective, social distancing and facemasks have been adhered to to the letter and absolutely stopped this virus from spreading. I find those things non credible.