I find the new York chart especially interesting Murmur.  I wonder what the 'etc' graph would look like were it not for COVID-19?  I suspect it would be much the same as 2019.  Which leads me to believe that the majority of COVID-19 deaths in 2020 were from the underlying causes which COVID-19 aggravated and the pure COVID-19 deaths would have only been about 3,000.

The Sweden-England chart is interesting too.  The lockdown versus no lockdown curves are almost identical.

So are the lockdowns necessary based on that chart?  Probably.  When I moved into my house almost 25 years ago I nailed a clove of garlic over the front door.  It must be working because in all that time I have never seen a vampire in the house.  But then neither has my neighbor who doesn't have a clove of garlic nailed over his front door.

Noel

Deleted :-)

Edited April 23, 20206 yr by n4gix
See corrected information further down the thread!

2 minutes ago, MartinRex007 said:

You can't just compare daily deaths between England population 55,258,000 and Sweden population 9,800,000, you have to compare the rate of death so England on 16/4 would be approximately 600/55,258,000 x 100000 = 1.1 per 100,000 and Sweden on the same day would be 600/9,800,000 x 100000 = 6.1 per 100,000. 

Martin

Thank you. 

I was expecting somebody to come along to put those numbers in perspective, and you were even quicker than I was hoping.

In either case, Martin, the deaths are only fractions of 1%.

Noel

Its been pointed out in other places that sweden's overall fatality rate is now actually quite a bit higher than its neighboors with lockdowns. Approx 131 per million people, compared with 55 per million in Denmark and 14 per million in Finland, which have adopted lockdowns.

30 minutes ago, HiFlyer said:

Thank you. 

I was expecting somebody to come along to put those numbers in perspective, and you were even quicker than I was hoping.

Actually I thought I deleted this post because I didn't see there were two y-axis one for England and the other Sweden, actually when you do the death ratio you end up approximately with England at 3.4 per 10,000 and Sweden at 2.1 per 10,000 this data from John Hopkins.

Martin

31 minutes ago, birdguy said:

In either case, Martin, the deaths are only fractions of 1%.

Actually Noel see my updated post I had thought I deleted that one, my mistake.

Cheers

Martin

Food for thought: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/04/22/reopening-america-states-coronavirus/

14 hours ago, Murmur said:

England (lockdown) vs Sweden (no lockdown):

 

 

Here is the current graph normalised for deaths per million showing UK and Sweden - which show the Sweden looks to have a problem...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-deaths-per-million-7-day-average?country=SWE+GBR

 

 

Edited April 24, 20206 yr by SteveFx
Changed text to describe the linked graph as deaths as it was incorrect

I think these are more oranges to oranges matchups:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-deaths-per-million-7-day-average?country=SWE+NOR

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-deaths-per-million-7-day-average?country=SWE+FIN

Edited April 23, 20206 yr by HiFlyer

48 minutes ago, birdguy said:

I find the new York chart especially interesting Murmur.  I wonder what the 'etc' graph would look like were it not for COVID-19?  I suspect it would be much the same as 2019.  Which leads me to believe that the majority of COVID-19 deaths in 2020 were from the underlying causes which COVID-19 aggravated and the pure COVID-19 deaths would have only been about 3,000.

The New York chart is odd because of the way the other causes of death are so dramatically reduced in 2020.  Makes me wonder how things are being reported and classified.  I'll try to find out more about what's going on with that.

About the question of underlying causes vs "pure" covid deaths - it's really hard to pick the threads apart.  This is true of all causes of death, not just covid, because when people die, there are often multiple things going on.  I'll give you a real-world, close-to-home example.  My father died at age 87 and the immediate cause of death was pneumonia.  So far, so good as far as clarity is concerned.  But the reason he had pneumonia was that he also had Stage 7 Alzheimer's.  For those who don't know, Stage 7 is the most advanced stage - the stage at which damage to the brain extends beyond higher-order functions like memory and cognition to autonomic functions like breathing and motor control.  People in Stage 7 have trouble holding their heads up or sitting upright because the areas of the brain governing those functions are gone.  One of the reasons he was susceptible to pneumonia is that he wasn't breathing particularly well, and his compromised breathing made it more likely that fluids and bacteria would gather in the lower lungs.  Now, there's an additional dimension to this, which courts some controversy but it's part of the picture so I'll account for it.  When he contracted pneumonia, we made an affirmative decision not to treat.  He had been admitted to hospice and in the rare moments when he was awake, he was so agitated and distressed that in consultation with the nursing home and hospice staff, we'd chosen to keep him mostly sedated, and that in turn led fairly naturally (for us, given our outlook and priorities) to opt not to treat the pneumonia.  That's one of those choosing among the awful options moments that I've talked about before.

So... taking all that into account, what did he die of?  Pneumonia, but that really isn't the story.  The death certificate reported pneumonia secondary to Alzheimer's, which is a much more complete picture.  It would have been equally accurate to say that he died of "complications related to Alzheimer's." The treatment decision was another factor but also Alzheimer's-related.  The bottom line is that to say he died of pneumonia and not Alzheimer's would be inaccurate.  Yes, elderly people are susceptible to pneumonia, but Alzheimer's directly and radically increased his vulnerability, and of course led to the do-not-treat decision, in the sense that if he'd been fully himself, enjoying life and had primary pneumonia, of course we would have hit him hard with antibiotics and gone on enjoying each other's company in the here and now.

Bringing it back to covid - there really isn't such a thing as "died directly of covid" because what the coronavirus does, once there's enough virus present, is kill off cells, for example in the respiratory tract, which in turn leads to conditions like respiratory distress, maybe compounded by heart failure as a result of the sheer strain of breathing.  Anybody with an underlying condition - asthma or heart disease or something like that - is going to be more vulnerable because that person has less in reserve.  But in the absence of covid, the same person could have gone on living for years with the asthma or the heart disease managed and under control.  They died because the coronavirus came along - that was the one straw too many.  So it's safe and accurate to say that these people died as a result of covid.

Classification is hard and messy, so the working question generally is, "what would have happened if not for that?" or "what pushed that person over the edge?"

10 minutes ago, SteveFx said:

Here is the current graph normalised for case per million showing UK and Sweden

So this graph shows UK at 11.01, Sweden at 10.38, and United States at 6.82 - interesting.

Martin

According to this:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

The USA has had 48,809 deaths and 84,812 people have recovered ... a total of 133,621 cases resolved.

Currently there are 732,484 Active cases.

Assuming the same percentage of deaths occurs in the active cases:

48,809/133,621*732,484 = 267,561 deaths, which when added to 48,809 is a total of 316,370 - a not insignificant number.

I dread to think how much higher that could get if restrictions are relaxed too soon.

Dave.

 

 

 

5 minutes ago, MartinRex007 said:

So this graph shows UK at 11.01, Sweden at 10.38, and United States at 6.82 - interesting.

Martin

Try adding Belgium they are in the 20s - also New York would have been in the mid 20s at their peak.

I have been watching Sweden as the Imperial model believes that their R is still around 2.   

Their daily reporting  jumps around a lot more than other countries.   

So yesterday Sweden had a huge 170 odd and today 84  - the UK is 6.5 x the size so that would be like 1100 and 550 for the UK - the UK  was 800 ish yesterday and 616 today.

The next week will tell whether the more relaxed Swedish social distancing will work or not.

 

 

 

2 minutes ago, SteveFx said:

The next week will tell whether the more relaxed Swedish social distancing will work or not.

i hope it works out for sweden, but you cant compare it to lets say spain or italy, the sweden way would absolutely not work there,

i cant imagine what would happen in italy without a lockdown a few weeks ago.