The maths of it all and what it means to Ireland

Clementine Refined Matte wrote: »

Ireland's case fatality rate from Covid-19 is now almost 4%, the latest data shows.
Some data suggest the uk could be triple this, around 12% which is nothing to be sneezed at.

The data published in the Health Protection Surveillance Centre's epidemiology report is based on figures up to midnight on Friday 10 April.
It shows that of the 8,496 confirmed cases of the virus, 329 people had died, giving a case fatality rate of 3.9%.

Any idea that this WuFlu is <1% (as suggested above) is bonkers.
When you consider the nature of the epicurve, demand surges, spread within nursing homes, lack of PPE, lack of medical staff (again their own high infection rates, even with some PPE).
Fact is demand vs supply means that many old folks, comprimised folks will all be labelled as 'DNR' if there is a queue of younger folks waiting for the 10-14 day stint on machines.

Wave2, circa November, is an great unknown.

Not as bonkers as your claim that 5% of the worlds population would be dead by the end of the summer from this. 350 million people.

You have no clue about how any of these numbers work and you're still ignoring the fact that there are far more non confirmed infections than confirmed ones.

Diarmuid wrote: »

Weeks ago, I was listening to a Sam Harris podcast. He was quite pessimistic in his outlook, which at the time seemed quite sensible, with the outbreak in China.

But his guest was quite clear headed. Even at that point, he made the very sensible point that the only country with extensive testing (S. Korea) was showing a mortality rate of 0.6%. That's still quite significant but he made the very important point that this was the upper bound. As time passes, this seems to be even more accurate.

The fact that this podcast was available back in March 11 when Ireland still had less than 40 cases is damning. For policy makers to know this fact, and that we ended up with the panic and ignorance over a whole month later, with another month of lockdown to go, is damning. It doesn't bode well for the future really

Obviously testing impacts the mortality rate. But it does so in more ways than one. Where there is moderate under testing then this can push the mortality rate high in comparison. But you can also get to a point of severe under testing like in the UK (or Sweden it would seem) where they are simply not testing anyone in the community and have been quite strict about even testing people in hospitals which makes the mortality rate half of what it is. It's difficult to know which of these forces is greater. I.e. is the mortality rate being falsely raised due to not enough asymptomatic people being included through testing or it being falsely lowered through thousands of deaths simply not being counted.

The testing also directly impacts mortality. Countries like South Korea and Germany tested extensively and followed this up with contract tracing and isolation. This helps to reduce the proliferation of the virus and protect vulnerable people so that health services are not overwhelmed like they were in parts of Italy and Spain.

From reading some of the posts above, I'm getting the sense that looking at the ideal study from Germany people are drawing the conclusion that the mortality rate from the virus would be 0.5% even if it was left completely unchecked. This seems to discount what happens when health services are overwhelmed with sick patients. And also the rate at which the virus devastates care homes and other long-term nursing facilities.

In Canada, for example, where they have done a pretty good job overall, there are numerous care homes where half the residents have died, including more than 26 in one in Ontario and 30 in a single facility in Québec and similar numbers in a facility in Vancouver. We're seeing the same in the UK with anywhere from 10 to 20+ people dying in multiple facilities.

I would submit that it is disingenuous to say that if the virus were left unchecked the mortality rate will only be .5% and that therefore all of the mitigation and the alarm bells that have been sounded by models from epidemiologists are panic inducing hysteria. In fact, what we have seen in Italy, Spain, France, the UK and New York seems to suggest that these epidemiological models would bear out and result in a very high number of fatalities if strong action had not been taken.

Blut2 wrote: »

For care home deaths, I don't think anyone is doubting the lethality of this for people aged 80+ with underlying health conditions. The mortality figure even in that age range thats usually accepted is approx 15% at the moment though, so individual cases of 90% are rather pointless to bring up as they're entirely anecdotal.

In regards to not knowing how high deaths would be had the virus been unchecked, luckily we have an ongoing case study of a country that implemented only social distancing, and no economic lockdown, in Sweden. Their deaths per million are entirely middle of the range despite this:

[img][/img]https://i.imgur.com/FSYgQJx.jpg

And this is their unemployment rate vs Norways in the last month, which shows a rather more clear cut effect of economic lockdown vs no lockdown:

[img][/img]https://i.imgur.com/JdbV1ds.png

Despite that I am of the opinion that implementing a quarantine here in Ireland for a month was the right thing to do - it at the very least bought the health service time to get more ventilators, PPE equipment, additional staff etc.

But as more and more studies come out showing how much less lethal the virus is than was previously thought, and how its just not effecting under 40s in any number, and as more and more economic damage occurs, questions really need to be asked about why we aren't beginning to lift our lockdown the way Denmark, Austria, Czech Republic etc all are already.

Sweden would certainly have made an interesting case study. Unfortunately, their numbers cannot be relied on. Their total number of tests is very low and has remained static at 54,700 for four days now. Their death rate had been rapidly climbing till about four or five days ago at which point they seemed to have stopped testing or at least not reporting those statistics. They are also not testing in the community and are testing at even a lower rate than the United Kingdom. If you compare them to Norway their testing rate and mortality rate, despite the poor testing, is far from ideal.

Therefore, it is not possible to draw any conclusions about the efficacy of their methodology.

Some of the countries such as Austria that are beginning to lift their lockdowns were ahead of us in the game and shut down sooner. It seems that implementing harsher measures earlier combined with strong testing and tracing allows a speedier return to normalcy. Although the response in Ireland has not exactly been perfect, we have managed to contain things reasonably well and the government have earned my trust at least in the guidance they are receiving and following thus far.

Here’s another interesting one in the State by State breakdown of American statistics
https://bnonews.com/index.php/2020/01/tracking-coronavirus-u-s-data/

If you go the stats on US military (listed as it’s own State) it has 15 deaths from over 4500 cases, a death rate of 0.33%

Not sure if the military get tested more than other sections of society, I would assume so?

ShineOn7 wrote: »

• Not a big enough sample group, and
• 4,500 fit army feckers aren't reliable at all to any country's general population

When the stats are broken down into the constituent parts only 2 ‘fit
army feckers’ of 2500 have died, less than 0.1%
The others are presumably retired military.

Jurgen Klopp wrote: »

Honestly Norman I don't know. After seeing the absolute geniuses in the other thread calculating their 21% death rate, I don't have the strength anymore

I get the feeling we are being trolled?

I know this data isn't clean as there's duplicates in it when someone is listed twice but the death rate from the 1st to the 14th of April seems up a lot more on previous years for the same period. You could make an assumption the daily death rate is nearly double of what's been reported.

Deaths 1-14th of April year on year:
2010 - 1102
2011 - 1070
2012 - 1047
2013 - 1303
2014 - 1376
2015 - 1555
2016 - 1604
2017 - 1423
2018 - 1647
2019 - 1607
2020 - 2200

Source RIP.ie

There's marked increase from the start of the last decade, that could be due to an aging population, I'm not sure why the numbers are ever increasing but it'd obvious were way higher than normal at the moment.

drunkmonkey wrote: »

I know this data isn't clean as there's duplicates in it when someone is listed twice but the death rate from the 1st to the 14th of April seems up a lot more on previous years for the same period. You could make an assumption the daily death rate is nearly double of what's been reported.

Deaths 1-14th of April year on year:
2010 - 1102
2011 - 1070
2012 - 1047
2013 - 1303
2014 - 1376
2015 - 1555
2016 - 1604
2017 - 1423
2018 - 1647
2019 - 1607
2020 - 2200

Source RIP.ie

There's marked increase from the start of the last decade, that could be due to an aging population, I'm not sure why the numbers are ever increasing but it'd obvious were way higher than normal at the moment.

Just an idea but could the apparent rise in numbers also be influenced by the rise of usage of the website, people now see it as a method used to notify people of a death whereas 10years ago, people may have viewed the traditional newspaper as the method to use.

Irishphotodesk wrote: »

Just an idea but could the apparent rise in numbers also be influenced by the rise of usage of the website, people now see it as a method used to notify people of a death whereas 10years ago, people may have viewed the traditional newspaper as the method to use.

You could make that assumption, I'd say it'd be safe to draw an average from 2015 on though..it would still put us 600 deaths above average for the same 2 week period on previous years.