Comments by "dixon pinfold" (@dixonpinfold2582) on "Dr. John Campbell"
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Dr. Campbell strikes a well-meaning moral pose here. He gets huffy and a little indignant. But Sweden at this point is broadly in the statistical middle of the western European nations. Of the big countries, Germany kept deaths much lower, France somewhat lower, but the UK, Italy, and Spain fared quite a bit worse. See the countries table at https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ Moreover, the sustained and striking resurgence of infections he points to was accompanied by a by an equally sustained and equally striking drop in deaths. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/ But this crucial fact does not fit with Dr. Campbell's narrative and he indeed fails to mention it.
As in Canada, the problem was focused squarely on long-term care homes (median age of the deceased in Sweden: 86 years), which were not adequately protected (in Ontario, 80% of deaths, in Sweden 75%). It amounts to a scandal, to be sure, and I hope investigations will be carried out; these are in the works in Canada. Thus the numbers suggest a major failing in one area; they do not indicate a disastrous mishandling of the government and public health authorities' overall response.
Some people just naturally like seeming strict and stern. Perhaps they were spanked a lot as children, then went on to spank their own children quite a lot. They hate it when family members are untidy or don't save every possible penny, take a very dim view of candy, and are apt to become quite indignant when someone else sleeps in on Saturdays or has a couple of drinks except at a wedding party. They are often great people, certainly, and their conscientiousness is an asset to society, but they are not always to be taken very seriously when they are merely expressing their individual personalities.
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@apsert No surprise there. As equipment and medicines have gotten better, people on average, for unrelated reasons I won't get into, have gotten less acute of mind and more selfish. They are kept quite busy by their cost-conscious managers, but---again, on average---they're not really thinking and care less than formerly. I'm not singling out health care, it's the same pretty much everywhere. It's the highly competent and energetic minority that's shrinking fastest, the able few, whether staff or management, who keep it all afloat, or used to. Thus medical mistakes loom as large as ever, if you're to believe the studies, and are the 3rd leading cause of death in the US.
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@gorkyd7912 Sorry, you're making a rookie mistake in your stats. You're describing case fatality rates (CFR), not death rates (usually called mortality rates).
A mortality rate is deaths divided by infections, a CFR is deaths divided by documented cases.
These are very different things, because the great majority of SARS-CoV-2-infected people are undiagnosed. In fact the great majority of infected people clear the infection and have no idea it even happened. This is revealed by the presence of antibodies in their blood serum.
Current estimates of the multiple of infections to documented cases in the US range from 5 to 81 times, with most ranging from 10 to 30 times. The real number will emerge over time as more Americans are randomly blood-tested.
So it's an error to proceed from a 1.5% CFR and 20m infections to 300,000 deaths.
Thus, using the 10-30x range, 20m infections in the US would, at present rates, show up as 667,000-2m diagnosed cases. And a 1.5% CFR would result in 10,000 to 30,000 deaths.
So you should feel quite relieved, as 270,000 to 290,000 people just had their death sentences rescinded.
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It strikes me that the goal of flattening the curve is probably at odds with avoiding the impoverishment of us all, perhaps for no payoff whatever in lives saved. Lives may be at first be saved by slowing an otherwise uncontrolled spread, but slowing the spread roughly means shutting down the country until most people are vaccinated or have caught the virus and recovered. Pausing the economy for a full year or longer would likely be a disaster in many ways worse than letting the disease run its course whilst the sick and the old are safely hunkered down for several months.
And drawing out the spread over time is not guaranteed to save a great many lives anyway, as hospitals may be overwhelmed even by a relative trickle of patients: it's clear that they can't handle an influx of the sick amounting to 5% of the population, but what makes anyone think they could handle even 1%? Hospitals will no doubt rise to the occasion in astonishing ways, but they operate within realistic limits against which there is ultimately no remedy.
Thus the best way to save the most vulnerable might be to focus on isolating them in the most thoroughgoing manner possible, a task more achievable if people are working at their jobs and circulating freely, maintaining the normal functioning of things needed to support such an effort. It would also free up things like masks and medicines for those who need them most, including medical workers. To isolate those most at risk for half a year is not only much easier on them and all of us than doing so for twelve months or more, and cheaper---it also gives the virus much less time to get through to them.
Imagine on the one hand emerging from the summer with herd immunity achieved at the cost of tens of thousands of lives and with a quick economic and social recovery at hand, versus having the disease hanging over us all for a year or longer whilst it slowly but inexorably picks off the vulnerable one by one, at the cost of a similar (or greater) number of lives and an economic and financial hole so deep that it takes several years or a decade to climb out of it.
All the while we would swing back and forth agonizingly between tantalizing reprieve and resurgent outbreaks which continue through 2021. Quality of life and standards of living, obviously, but also the health of the people in all other respects would be sure to be seriously impacted. Do we know whether society could hang together throughout all that? We are most certainly not the same people who withstood the Second World War with such stoic resilience. And what if the net effect of an unnecessarily protracted struggle against the disease is a massive transfer of political and economic power to China?
The national science advisor may have been right to float the herd immunity idea. The country which gets through this soonest will enjoy an enormous feeling of gladness and also be the envy of the world. Possibly it could mean sacrificing a certain number of younger lives for a vastly greater number of older ones. As Orwell said, "it is disagreeable to weigh human lives like groceries", but in the worst circumstances that may be precisely what is wisest.
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