[Politics] Jacinda Arden

Uh_huh_him · Aug 12, 2020

I keep hearing that the mortality rate for the under 70s/no linked condition is miniscule.
If this is the case, surely there are enormous economic benefits from isolating the vulnerable.

If this was done, then the option to pursue herd immunity would be a lot less callous, and may stand some chance of actually working.

sydney · Aug 12, 2020

Audax said:
Source please for that mortality rate figure.

It's dangerous to rely on the overall mortality rate:

1. The mortality rate varies a lot depending on demographics. Young (under 30), white, female? You're unlucky to even show symptoms, let alone get sick enough to require hospital treatment. Old (over 60), black, male? Chances are very high you'll need hospitalisation, and the mortality rate once there is a lot higher than 0.5%. The mortality rate in UK care homes has been eye-wateringly bad: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...uk-care-homes-13-times-higher-than-in-germany - over 5% of all residents in care homes died from covid-19. The actual mortality rate will be higher than that, as a lot of care homes managed to avoid having any covid cases. There's been reports of some homes having mortality rates of over half their residents having had major covid outbreaks.

2. The 0.5% number that gets bandied around a lot isn't accurate anyway. See https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality - the UK currently has a nearly 15% mortality rate for confirmed cases. That will be a big over-estimate, as our testing regime has been so piss-poor we'll have missed a lot of non-symptomatic cases early on (and probably still do now). On the flipside, it may also fail to take into account a lot of care home deaths from early in the pandemic where testing was not being carried out and Covid was not confirmed as being involved in the death as a result. However, if you look down the page you'll see that based on current knowledge a fairly good estimate of the real mortality rate is probably somewhere between 2% and 5%. But again, that fails to take into account demographics (see point 1).

3. There is increasing evidence that this virus can leave affected individuals who survive with long term health issues. There is significant risk of stroke after recovery, there is significant risk of long term lung damage, issues with chronic fatigue, etc.

4. The mortality rate for Covid-19 does not, and will not, take into account the additional deaths that occur as a result of the period when the NHS was at full stretch handling the peak of the crisis causing treatment for other diseases to be delayed (eg cancer patients who die unnecessarily due to their treatments being delayed).

5. There's growing evidence that this virus can attack us multiple times. It's closely related to the common cold, which we already know we lose immunity to between 3-6 months after the last time we had. Many members of society who survived hospitalisation due to covid-19 the first time around, may not survive a second encounter with the virus.

The mortality rate number (even in that 2-5% range) may not look high. But it's not just the mortality rate that matters - it's the background situation. Seasonal flu, for example, we have vaccines for to help protect those vulnerable to it. Flu has also been around for a long time, and it's well known how best to treat it to minimise the risk of death - and, crucially, if you get flu you know about it as barely anyone has flu without having significant symptoms. These are all things that don't, currently, apply to Covid-19. We're only now starting to discover effective treatments, we don't have a validated vaccine yet (despite what the Russians might want to claim), it is possible to catch and pass on the virus without knowing you have it, and before the pandemic started no one had any exposure to it before and thus no immunity in the community. Covid-19, therefore, spreads easily - which makes it far more likely that those who are susceptible to dying from it are far more likely to catch it, and having caught it are at greater risk of death.

It is highly irresponsible for anyone to make light of this disease by minimising it's impact throwing around a theory that the world has over-reacted because the mortality rate is "low". Especially if you're bandying around an unproven, unsourced percentage for that mortality rate.

22 ,000 cases in Australia.....331 deaths....mostly aged , 12,000 have made a full recovery.

Audax · Aug 12, 2020

sydney said:
22 ,000 cases in Australia.....331 deaths....mostly aged , 12,000 have made a full recovery.

The source I linked shows Australia with a 1.5% mortality rate currently. That's still 3 times what you quoted. Australia are at the low end of the scale, largely because there's quite a different dynamic in Australia:

a) the original peak was in summer, and Australia avoided the worst outcomes as a result. Also, despite ScoMo doing his best to stuff it up, Australia did respond quickly enough to curtail widespread transmission.

b) it helps massively that Aussies typically want more "personal space" than Europeans. That helps reduce transmission rates.

c) related to the above, it helps that Australia's population density is a typically lower than in the EU.

d) Australia's mortality rate in the second wave currently gripping Melbourne is going to be interesting to see, because in the second wave it's got into the care homes and thus affecting those who are more vulnerable. Even then, however, from what I've heard even Melbourne hasn't had enough cases to inundate the hospitals.

e) The second wave in Australia has come late enough that they'll be benefiting from the first proven treatments that help reduce death rates. [This being a massive positive, btw, so will be interesting to see what the numbers from this second wave look like.]

Tangent, but I'm going to add here that without lock down the mortality rate here in the UK would have been sickening. As it was, the lock down only just barely started early enough to prevent the NHS collapsing under the strain. 1 week later and I honestly believe the UK would have been looking at a far more severe situation than it's already pretty poor (comparable to rest of the world) numbers.

So far around the world, the mortality rate appears to be reasonably well correlated with how well the local health care sector was able to manage the influx of cases. Early lock down + good health care system with high capacity means a lower death rate, late lock down + health care system flooded means a higher death rate. Alongside that, mortality rates are far higher for countries that failed to protect aged care homes.

CheeseRolls · Aug 12, 2020

Uh_huh_him said:
I keep hearing that the mortality rate for the under 70s/no linked condition is miniscule.
If this is the case, surely there are enormous economic benefits from isolating the vulnerable.

If this was done, then the option to pursue herd immunity would be a lot less callous, and may stand some chance of actually working.

If you take the UK, US and Sweden you have three corners of a triangle. The UK and Sweden have forms of near universal helath coverage, the US does not. Sweden has a much higher proportion of ICU beds per head of population than the UK.
Do not kid yourself that healthy younger people with no linked conditions do not get very sick. It is absolute fact that many do. What you are discounting in your argument is the benefit of treatmen and the fact that so many healthy people DO respond to treatment. If the hospitals are full, they have to start making decisions as to who is a viable patient.

If you get a bad dose of Covid it is life threatening and illness and recovery can take months. Yes you are less likely to get this if you are young and healthy, but there are no guarantees. Looking at the problem through the narrow lens you have chosen, we may as well close all hospitals, save the money and anyone who gets sick can just be shut away to recover or not.

Audax · Aug 12, 2020

Uh_huh_him said:
I keep hearing that the mortality rate for the under 70s/no linked condition is miniscule.
If this is the case, surely there are enormous economic benefits from isolating the vulnerable.

If this was done, then the option to pursue herd immunity would be a lot less callous, and may stand some chance of actually working.

That's a slightly too simplistic view. There are vulnerable members of society in the under 70's age groups as well. Typically those with other conditions, such as diabetes, heart or kidney conditions, or are overweight (and unfit) are also at elevated risk of developing a more severe version of the disease, or having the disease complicate the pre-existing condition.

zefarelly · Aug 12, 2020

Not to mention those with compromised immune systems, be it medication induced ( steroids for example ) or cancer patients . . . . basically There are a lot of very lazy selfish people in 1st world countries, a shame the virus doesn't target that.

Jolly Red Giant · Aug 12, 2020

Audax said:
That's a slightly too simplistic view. There are vulnerable members of society in the under 70's age groups as well. Typically those with other conditions, such as diabetes, heart or kidney conditions, or are overweight (and unfit) are also at elevated risk of developing a more severe version of the disease, or having the disease complicate the pre-existing condition.

And while the mortality might be low - there is potentially long term health consequences from contracting the virus, even if you have mild symptoms.

Audax · Aug 12, 2020

Jolly Red Giant said:
And while the mortality might be low - there is potentially long term health consequences from contracting the virus, even if you have mild symptoms.

Yup, I mentioned that in my earlier essay

. Assume you've seen the reports of people having strokes that have been clearly linked to covid?

Even for myself - 43, white, male. I'm convinced I had it back in March but couldn't get a test. Mild case (slight high temp for 1 day, dry cough and chest tightness on and off for a few weeks) at the time. But I still, even now, get the odd feeling in my chest that there's something not completely right. I suspect my lungs are still recovering, although it'll never get proven / properly diagnosed. Even if I did get antibody tested now the likelihood is that it would come back negative, as there's been a major study that shows that antibody levels drop away massively after 3 months. I'm now 5 months beyond when I think I had it, so odds are antibodies are gone and the virus itself definitely will be.

Lower West Stander · Aug 12, 2020

Audax said:
The source I linked shows Australia with a 1.5% mortality rate currently. That's still 3 times what you quoted. Australia are at the low end of the scale, largely because there's quite a different dynamic in Australia:

a) the original peak was in summer, and Australia avoided the worst outcomes as a result. Also, despite ScoMo doing his best to stuff it up, Australia did respond quickly enough to curtail widespread transmission.

b) it helps massively that Aussies typically want more "personal space" than Europeans. That helps reduce transmission rates.

c) related to the above, it helps that Australia's population density is a typically lower than in the EU.

d) Australia's mortality rate in the second wave currently gripping Melbourne is going to be interesting to see, because in the second wave it's got into the care homes and thus affecting those who are more vulnerable. Even then, however, from what I've heard even Melbourne hasn't had enough cases to inundate the hospitals.

e) The second wave in Australia has come late enough that they'll be benefiting from the first proven treatments that help reduce death rates. [This being a massive positive, btw, so will be interesting to see what the numbers from this second wave look like.]

Tangent, but I'm going to add here that without lock down the mortality rate here in the UK would have been sickening. As it was, the lock down only just barely started early enough to prevent the NHS collapsing under the strain. 1 week later and I honestly believe the UK would have been looking at a far more severe situation than it's already pretty poor (comparable to rest of the world) numbers.

So far around the world, the mortality rate appears to be reasonably well correlated with how well the local health care sector was able to manage the influx of cases. Early lock down + good health care system with high capacity means a lower death rate, late lock down + health care system flooded means a higher death rate. Alongside that, mortality rates are far higher for countries that failed to protect aged care homes.

This is paralysis by analysis.

You have absolutely no idea how different reactions would have affected death rates. No one does. I could lob a load of figures at you (7 times more deaths from flu than Covid over the last few weeks for example) but you'd just chuck a load of stats back at me telling me I'm wrong.

The demographics are all so different around the world, as are how deaths are being recorded and reported. Its getting to the point that there is so much focus on this, that we are losing perspective.

You can use statistics and charts to prove any point if you wish. Eg deaths have doubled from 20 in 100,000 to 40 in 100,000 that's a doubling but the actual rates are 0.02% to 0.04%. And what is the age and ethnic minority mix of that? Is bad its risen or good its so low?

Basically, I've stopped reading about this stuff or following it in the press. I'll do what I'm told re social distancing and guidelines but until its decided this thing has gone by somebody somewhere then I'll stick to the sports pages.

Audax · Aug 12, 2020

Lower West Stander said:
This is paralysis by analysis.

You have absolutely no idea how different reactions would have affected death rates. No one does. I could lob a load of figures at you (7 times more deaths from flu than Covid over the last few weeks for example) but you'd just chuck a load of stats back at me telling me I'm wrong.

The demographics are all so different around the world, as are how deaths are being recorded and reported. Its getting to the point that there is so much focus on this, that we are losing perspective.

You can use statistics and charts to prove any point if you wish. Eg deaths have doubled from 20 in 100,000 to 40 in 100,000 that's a doubling but the actual rates are 0.02% to 0.04%. And what is the age and ethnic minority mix of that? Is bad its risen or good its so low?

Basically, I've stopped reading about this stuff or following it in the press. I'll do what I'm told re social distancing and guidelines but until its decided this thing has gone by somebody somewhere then I'll stick to the sports pages.

Bit in bold - it absolutely isn't. Just because you've chosen to take the easy route and just do what we're told is the right thing to do (good on you, btw, that's a lot better than many!) doesn't make understanding the details any less important. It's understanding the details that informs us on what the "right things to do" are.

And then in red - it's those very statistics you turn your nose up at that will help very clever people (cleverer than me, I admit) to actually have an idea on these things. What we do know, is that before lock down the UK was on a path to major trouble. It is likely (as admitted by SAGE recently) that an earlier lock down would have meant a lot fewer deaths. It is thus likely that a later lock down had the potential to be catastrophic, given how close the NHS came to being overwhelmed during the peak.

The effect of lock down on covid and flu numbers is very interesting. More so in that lock down has been very effective in reducing covid transmission, while flu - still down on average, btw - has been less affected.

sydney · Aug 12, 2020

Audax said:
The source I linked shows Australia with a 1.5% mortality rate currently. That's still 3 times what you quoted. Australia are at the low end of the scale, largely because there's quite a different dynamic in Australia:

a) the original peak was in summer, and Australia avoided the worst outcomes as a result. Also, despite ScoMo doing his best to stuff it up, Australia did respond quickly enough to curtail widespread transmission.

b) it helps massively that Aussies typically want more "personal space" than Europeans. That helps reduce transmission rates.

c) related to the above, it helps that Australia's population density is a typically lower than in the EU.

d) Australia's mortality rate in the second wave currently gripping Melbourne is going to be interesting to see, because in the second wave it's got into the care homes and thus affecting those who are more vulnerable. Even then, however, from what I've heard even Melbourne hasn't had enough cases to inundate the hospitals.

e) The second wave in Australia has come late enough that they'll be benefiting from the first proven treatments that help reduce death rates. [This being a massive positive, btw, so will be interesting to see what the numbers from this second wave look like.]

Tangent, but I'm going to add here that without lock down the mortality rate here in the UK would have been sickening. As it was, the lock down only just barely started early enough to prevent the NHS collapsing under the strain. 1 week later and I honestly believe the UK would have been looking at a far more severe situation than it's already pretty poor (comparable to rest of the world) numbers.

So far around the world, the mortality rate appears to be reasonably well correlated with how well the local health care sector was able to manage the influx of cases. Early lock down + good health care system with high capacity means a lower death rate, late lock down + health care system flooded means a higher death rate. Alongside that, mortality rates are far higher for countries that failed to protect aged care homes.

my wife and daughter are nurses ....the hospital my wife works at has 110 beds put aside for covid in controlled climate wards .....the opinion amongst medical hierarchy is that we haven't really had a first wave yet.....sure the dynamic is totally different here and basically we are being warned there will be no overseas travel for 2 years ....the whole situation is bad and the media are having a field day with it .

Uh_huh_him · Aug 12, 2020

CheeseRolls said:
If you take the UK, US and Sweden you have three corners of a triangle. The UK and Sweden have forms of near universal helath coverage, the US does not. Sweden has a much higher proportion of ICU beds per head of population than the UK.
Do not kid yourself that healthy younger people with no linked conditions do not get very sick. It is absolute fact that many do. What you are discounting in your argument is the benefit of treatmen and the fact that so many healthy people DO respond to treatment. If the hospitals are full, they have to start making decisions as to who is a viable patient.

If you get a bad dose of Covid it is life threatening and illness and recovery can take months. Yes you are less likely to get this if you are young and healthy, but there are no guarantees. Looking at the problem through the narrow lens you have chosen, we may as well close all hospitals, save the money and anyone who gets sick can just be shut away to recover or not.

Yeah that's fair enough.

Clearly I took too simplistic a view.

blue-shifted · Aug 12, 2020

highflyer said:
More along the lines of 'if a manager proves themselves extremely competent, first in the Swedish leagues and then in the championship with (plucking a random name here) a team such as Swansea...then maybe it would be fair to assume that they might be a good bet to do well for a medium sized team with aspirations to get into the top ten in the premier league?

Let's be clear, at the global level the UK is not Man City!

A long way from Man City mate.

Just for the sake comparing the UK to a football club, I don't suppose you or anyone else could think of a club, who did achieve great things a very long time ago, but only on the back of some highly unethical conduct? And to make the comparison spot on, their fans would have to increasingly be making embarrassingly terrible decisions, presumably because of an extremely arrogant and outdated view of their status. And this arrogance would have to be likely to soon explode into anger due to an impending dose of reality that's inevitably going to brutally administered in the coming months?

Thank in advance for this

Lower West Stander · Aug 12, 2020

Audax said:
Bit in bold - it absolutely isn't. Just because you've chosen to take the easy route and just do what we're told is the right thing to do (good on you, btw, that's a lot better than many!) doesn't make understanding the details any less important. It's understanding the details that informs us on what the "right things to do" are.

And then in red - it's those very statistics you turn your nose up at that will help very clever people (cleverer than me, I admit) to actually have an idea on these things. What we do know, is that before lock down the UK was on a path to major trouble. It is likely (as admitted by SAGE recently) that an earlier lock down would have meant a lot fewer deaths. It is thus likely that a later lock down had the potential to be catastrophic, given how close the NHS came to being overwhelmed during the peak.

The effect of lock down on covid and flu numbers is very interesting. More so in that lock down has been very effective in reducing covid transmission, while flu - still down on average, btw - has been less affected.

But you are using the words "likely" and "potential". Nobody actually knows.

You can try and understand but that understanding can be read in so many different ways. It is all driven by interpretation on unknown unknowns.

Clever people with spreadsheets (like the swinging idiot who said there would be 500,000 deaths) are not the be all and end all of this. Common sense should be the prevailing factor.

Lower West Stander · Aug 12, 2020

sydney said:
my wife and daughter are nurses ....the hospital my wife works at has 110 beds put aside for covid in controlled climate wards .....the opinion amongst medical hierarchy is that we haven't really had a first wave yet.....sure the dynamic is totally different here and basically we are being warned there will be no overseas travel for 2 years ....the whole situation is bad and the media are having a field day with it .

That's interesting.

My partner is a nurse too and in the (albeit small and provincial) NHS hospital she works at is that, the view is that it is pretty much under control. There have been 3 cases in the last 5 weeks.

Surf's Up · Aug 12, 2020

After much consideration, yes.

zefarelly · Aug 12, 2020

Lower West Stander said:
Common sense should be the prevailing factor.

Unfortunately that's not something thats in abundance these days, been in steady decline for 50 years. IMO of course.

Audax · Aug 12, 2020

Lower West Stander said:
Clever people with spreadsheets (like the swinging idiot who said there would be 500,000 deaths) are not the be all and end all of this. Common sense should be the prevailing factor.

IIRC that "swinging idiot" was paid to produce a "worst case scenario", and that number is what came out of that. Such a worst case scenario will have been predicated on a range of assumptions, many of which at the time will have been nothing more than best guesses, which we now with hindsight will be able to refine into proper educated estimates using proper data analysis. I would assume they based that worst case scenario on things like the government doing nothing (so no lock down), easy airborne transmission, that it affected all care homes, etc etc. Ergo, we shouldn't deride it as being a terrible estimate because we simply don't know how accurate it would have been (although we can probably make a rough guess using data we now have how accurate it might have been).

The government also asked for a range of other estimates. One of which, they used to inform them on when to go into lock down. And Sage has since admitted was based on inadequate data (they didn't know that community transmission was already happening when they ran their first models, and thus underestimated the impact). That was a product of the government not acting anywhere near soon enough to get testing capacity in place and thus not having adequate data to go into the modelling.

At the end of the day, common sense is informed by knowledge, and in many cases knowledge is derived from data. As an Aussie, common sense tells me not to play with spiders (even here in the UK) because I grew up being informed that spider bites could and would make me very sick, and they should be evicted from the house whenever possible. Thing is, here in the UK the prevailing common sense is that spiders in the house aren't a problem. Your spiders are relatively harmless compared to a funnel web or red back or even a white tail spider. Even simpler: common sense in Australia is having mesh screens on all doors and windows. Same doesn't apply here. Or maybe a closer analogy to health topics: once upon a time "common sense" meant smoking was socially accepted, even encouraged. Nowadays, with the product of data driven research, "common sense" tells most people that smoking is health risk. But even now, many folks ignore such common sense and smoke anyway. Common sense sometimes isn't so common as we'd hope.

Murray 17 · Aug 12, 2020

highflyer said:
Let's be clear, at the global level the UK is not Man City!

The two articles I read had the UK at 5th and 6th biggest economies in the world. I'd say that was pretty Man City.

Sent from my SM-G950F using Tapatalk

CheeseRolls · Aug 12, 2020

Uh_huh_him said:
Yeah that's fair enough.

Clearly I took too simplistic a view.

Cheers, glad I didn't pen a sarcastic response now.

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