The P&R Plague Thread (Covid-19)

[Jason Sitoke]

1 hour ago, Guy Chamberlin said:

 

I think we agree on enough to move forward, but not only has Omnicron been considerably more fatal than the flu, it could well be more fatal than Delta.

 

https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20220127/deaths-due-to-omicron-higher-than-from-delta

 

 

I agree let’s not drag this on. All I’ll say is that article is looking at daily deaths alone to define its own version of deadly. If you’re interested enough, you can do some quick envelope arithmetic with the NYT data over the delta and BA.1 surges to get a better picture of the infection-mortality ratio. Omicron was quite clearly less lethal than delta. 

[knapplc]

 

[BigRedBuster]

17 minutes ago, knapplc said:

17 minutes ago, knapplc said:

 

This has been going on in the us even with the mandate. 
 

time to end it. 

[nic]

Our friend is a nurse that helps those at the end of life. She said there has been a notable uptick in deaths from cancer…at least in her surroundings. The theory is this came from people delaying or skipping checkups. I guess we have started to see the secondary affects of the pandemic. 

[nic]

On 4/11/2022 at 9:11 AM, Guy Chamberlin said:

 

It is. The Northeast is currently getting hammered. 

 

Also, 800 deaths a day is hardly flu-like. We'd have to get down to 160 COVID deaths a day to equal the worst flu-season in recent memory. 

 

Everyone is going to end up being right. COVID is considerably deadlier than the flu, but we're gonna have to live with it. Mandates and shutdowns, no, common sense and decency, yes. 

I checked the Times plots yesterday and saw only a couple minor bumps in two of the NE states, but even though those charts have relatively current dates on them they seem to lag the news on the ground by a week or so. I am seeing articles from Philly that say they are spiking.

[Guy Chamberlin]

4 hours ago, BigRedBuster said:

This has been going on in the us even with the mandate. 
 

time to end it. 

 

My sister-in-law was taking a short flight to visit her elderly mother in Florida this week, had three flights canceled and finally gave up. There was a vague attempt to blame the weather but airline personnel finally confessed they just couldn't stay staffed. 

[Guy Chamberlin]

13 hours ago, Jason Sitoke said:

I agree let’s not drag this on. All I’ll say is that article is looking at daily deaths alone to define its own version of deadly. If you’re interested enough, you can do some quick envelope arithmetic with the NYT data over the delta and BA.1 surges to get a better picture of the infection-mortality ratio. Omicron was quite clearly less lethal than delta. 

 

If I may trouble you one last time, good sir, for a bit of clarification:  are we to move forward with your increasingly tortured insistence that more deaths equal less deaths if you adjust the words,  or go with the motherf#&%ing Chief of Mortality Statistics at the National Center for Health Statistics, who went to the trouble of offering the most relevant perspective on the larger issue?  If you are "interested enough" this is not the only article on the subject. 

 

Deaths Due to Omicron Higher Than From Delta

By Ralph Ellis

 

 

Jan. 27, 2022 -- With the Omicron variant accounting for 99.9% of all COVID-19 cases in the United States, it’s proving even deadlier than the Delta variant.

This week the nation recorded a seven-day average of 2,200 daily coronavirus-related deaths, higher than the daily death count recorded two months ago during the Delta variant surge, The Wall Street Journal reported.

That’s also the highest number of deaths since February 2021, when the U.S. was coming out of a winter wave of cases, and the vaccination drive was only a few months old, The Wall Street Journal said.

Health experts say that Omicron generally causes milder symptom than previous variants. But the death count is high because Omicron spreads quickly and is infecting a large number of people.

“You can have a disease that is for any particular person less deadly than another, like Omicron, but if it is more infectious and reaches more people, then you’re more likely to have a lot of deaths,” Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality-statistics branch at the National Center for Health Statistics, told The Wall Street Journal.

A CDC study released on Tuesday showed nine deaths per 1,000 cases during the Omicron surge, compared to 13 deaths per 1,000 cases during the Delta surge and 16 deaths per 1,000 cases during last winter’s deadly surge.

The current seven-day average of cases is 692,400 per day, a 6% slight dip from the previous week, while deaths went up 21% from the previous week, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, MD, said Wednesday at a White House news briefing.

During the briefing, Walensky again urged more people to get vaccinated. Many of the deaths and hospitalizations are occurring among unvaccinated people, health experts said.

“It’s vital that we all remain vigilant in the face of this virus,” she said. “I know many people are tired, but many of our hospitals are still struggling beyond capacity. It’s been a long two years. However, please now do your part to lean into this current moment. Now is the time to do what we know works: Wear a mask, get vaccinated, and get boosted.”

[Jason Sitoke]

13 minutes ago, Guy Chamberlin said:

 

If I may trouble you one last time, good sir, for a bit of clarification:  are we to move forward with your increasingly tortured insistence that more deaths equal less deaths if you adjust the words,  or go with the motherf#&%ing Chief of Mortality Statistics at the National Center for Health Statistics, who went to the trouble of offering the most relevant perspective on the larger issue?  If you are "interested enough" this is not the only article on the subject. 

 

Deaths Due to Omicron Higher Than From Delta

By Ralph Ellis

 

 

Jan. 27, 2022 -- With the Omicron variant accounting for 99.9% of all COVID-19 cases in the United States, it’s proving even deadlier than the Delta variant.

This week the nation recorded a seven-day average of 2,200 daily coronavirus-related deaths, higher than the daily death count recorded two months ago during the Delta variant surge, The Wall Street Journal reported.

That’s also the highest number of deaths since February 2021, when the U.S. was coming out of a winter wave of cases, and the vaccination drive was only a few months old, The Wall Street Journal said.

Health experts say that Omicron generally causes milder symptom than previous variants. But the death count is high because Omicron spreads quickly and is infecting a large number of people.

“You can have a disease that is for any particular person less deadly than another, like Omicron, but if it is more infectious and reaches more people, then you’re more likely to have a lot of deaths,” Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality-statistics branch at the National Center for Health Statistics, told The Wall Street Journal.

A CDC study released on Tuesday showed nine deaths per 1,000 cases during the Omicron surge, compared to 13 deaths per 1,000 cases during the Delta surge and 16 deaths per 1,000 cases during last winter’s deadly surge.

The current seven-day average of cases is 692,400 per day, a 6% slight dip from the previous week, while deaths went up 21% from the previous week, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, MD, said Wednesday at a White House news briefing.

During the briefing, Walensky again urged more people to get vaccinated. Many of the deaths and hospitalizations are occurring among unvaccinated people, health experts said.

“It’s vital that we all remain vigilant in the face of this virus,” she said. “I know many people are tired, but many of our hospitals are still struggling beyond capacity. It’s been a long two years. However, please now do your part to lean into this current moment. Now is the time to do what we know works: Wear a mask, get vaccinated, and get boosted.”

I guess I would simply ask to move forward with the idea that words mean things, and when evaluating data...these distinctions are important.  Are we saying Omicron daily death number peak was higher than delta?  If so, then true I guess.  Are we arguing whether Omicron has killed more people than Delta in total?  Glancing at the numbers, I would say it's not clear one way or the other.  Considering Omicron infected far more people (not up for argument at all), an individual's risk of dying of Omicron is clearly less than it was with Delta.

 

When evaluating how deadly snake venom is they use tests like LD50/LC50, which is meant to independently verify a person's chance of survival if they were bitten.  Whereas if we just decide that the most dangerous snake must be the snake that has killed the most people throughout history, that doesn't necessarily tell me everything about how an individual might fare in an encounter.

 

As we move forward  into an endemic stage, it is as important as ever to evaluate our own risk tolerance individually.  For me personally, I want to know how well I might tolerate a COVID infection, particularly measured against something that I'm historically used to living with (yes, like the flu).  2200 deaths a day is only part of the story.  How many people were infected in total that eventually were hospitalized and died would give me a better idea of my own individual risk. 

 

I'm not linking articles or headlines to make my point.  I'm looking at the same data you (presumably) are.  

 

[Guy Chamberlin]

1 hour ago, Jason Sitoke said:

I guess I would simply ask to move forward with the idea that words mean things, and when evaluating data...these distinctions are important.  Are we saying Omicron daily death number peak was higher than delta?  If so, then true I guess.  Are we arguing whether Omicron has killed more people than Delta in total?  Glancing at the numbers, I would say it's not clear one way or the other.  Considering Omicron infected far more people (not up for argument at all), an individual's risk of dying of Omicron is clearly less than it was with Delta.

 

When evaluating how deadly snake venom is they use tests like LD50/LC50, which is meant to independently verify a person's chance of survival if they were bitten.  Whereas if we just decide that the most dangerous snake must be the snake that has killed the most people throughout history, that doesn't necessarily tell me everything about how an individual might fare in an encounter.

 

As we move forward  into an endemic stage, it is as important as ever to evaluate our own risk tolerance individually.  For me personally, I want to know how well I might tolerate a COVID infection, particularly measured against something that I'm historically used to living with (yes, like the flu).  2200 deaths a day is only part of the story.  How many people were infected in total that eventually were hospitalized and died would give me a better idea of my own individual risk. 

 

I'm not linking articles or headlines to make my point.  I'm looking at the same data you (presumably) are.  

 

 

Yes, and I thought maybe we should both take a back seat to the professional health statistician who knows more than we do, took all this into account, and offered a simple clear-eyed perspective to the Wall Street Journal. 

 

We can continue to parse words, but I don't think think the 150,000 Americans who died of Omicron in the first three months of 2022 were thinking "at least I didn't get Delta"

 

Again, everything I've posted is about moving forward and celebrating the hopeful, but it's odd to harken back to the "no worse than the flu" argument that was popular but flawed about 1,000,000 COVID deaths ago. 

[Jason Sitoke]

6 minutes ago, Guy Chamberlin said:

 

Yes, and I thought maybe we should both take a back seat to the professional health statistician who knows more than we do, took all this into account, and offered a simple clear-eyed perspective to the Wall Street Journal. 

 

We can continue to parse words, but I don't think think the 150,000 Americans who died of Omicron in the first three months of 2022 were thinking "at least I didn't get Delta"

 

Again, everything I've posted is about moving forward and celebrating the hopeful, but it's odd to harken back to the "no worse than the flu" argument that was popular but flawed about 1,000,000 COVID deaths ago. 

I think it's also an odd popular argument that we're irresponsible if we dare to adapt our thinking and accept that circumstances have changed.

[Guy Chamberlin]

1 hour ago, Jason Sitoke said:

I think it's also an odd popular argument that we're irresponsible if we dare to adapt our thinking and accept that circumstances have changed.

 

I'm not doing that. Nor is anyone in the piece I cited. If you think the mere caution that COVID still has some tricks up its sleeve is an endorsement of previous public policies, you're not actually reading my posts. You seem like a reasonable guy, so I'm vexxed why you're digging your heels in on this. Adapting to changing circumstances also includes understanding the stone cold fact that the weaker Omicron variant still managed to kill three times as many Americans in three months as the worst flu season did in a year. Seriously, you can have this discussion without advocating a return to draconian restrictions, which is what me and most other people are doing. 

And again, you're asking us to run with your link-free anecdotal observations over someone who analyzes mortality statistics as his full-time job. 

[Jason Sitoke]

1 hour ago, Guy Chamberlin said:

 

And again, you're asking us to run with your link-free anecdotal observations over someone who analyzes mortality statistics as his full-time job. 

I'm actually asking you to look at data that's freely available.  These are not advanced analytics or archaic graphs.  I offered my endorsement of what some other qualified folks have offered in terms of estimated infections of BA.1.  You could also do something as simple as cases/deaths for both Omicron and Delta, and you should still reach the same conclusion I did.  If you're unwilling to do that, and want to stand by 'this guy is smarter than you, and he says...', that's fine.

 

I too, believe you to be reasonable.  Which is why I was a bit surprised by 'are we to move forward with your increasingly tortured insistence that more deaths equal less deaths if you adjust the words,  or go with the motherf#&%ing Chief of Mortality Statistics at the National Center for Health Statistics'.  Not sure I'm the one digging my heels in here.

[Guy Chamberlin]

28 minutes ago, Jason Sitoke said:

I'm actually asking you to look at data that's freely available.  These are not advanced analytics or archaic graphs.  I offered my endorsement of what some other qualified folks have offered in terms of estimated infections of BA.1.  You could also do something as simple as cases/deaths for both Omicron and Delta, and you should still reach the same conclusion I did.  If you're unwilling to do that, and want to stand by 'this guy is smarter than you, and he says...', that's fine.

 

I too, believe you to be reasonable.  Which is why I was a bit surprised by 'are we to move forward with your increasingly tortured insistence that more deaths equal less deaths if you adjust the words,  or go with the motherf#&%ing Chief of Mortality Statistics at the National Center for Health Statistics'.  Not sure I'm the one digging my heels in here.

 

Again, what make you think either myself or the expert I've cited have not taken all this into consideration, used the same freely available data, and come to a conclusion that is merely adjacent to yours?

 

Do you think the Chief of Mortality Statistics at the National Center for Health Statistics didn't already work this out on an envelope, and directly address your death rate argument in his short, un-controversial assessment? 

 

And he's not even advocating for a return to mask mandates. I'm still unclear what concerns you so. 

 

 

 

[Jason Sitoke]

1 minute ago, Guy Chamberlin said:

 

Again, what make you think either myself or the expert I've cited have not taken all this into consideration, used the same freely available data, and come to a conclusion that is merely adjacent to yours?

 

Do you think the Chief of Mortality Statistics at the National Center for Health Statistics didn't already work this out on an envelope, and directly address your death rate argument in his short, un-controversial assessment? 

 

And he's not even advocating for a return to mask mandates. I'm still unclear what concerns you so. 

 

 

 

I am equally perplexed at you bringing up mask mandates. Not sure where on this odd tangent we find ourselves in I ever spoke to that.   
 

This is/was my only point:  The fatality rate of Omicron is significantly less than any flavor of COVID that came prior…due to some combination of immunity in the population and characteristics of the strain itself.

I didnt realize this was such a polarizing assertion. I thought most knew this. 

 

[DevoHusker]