Survey Results and Opinion by Kip Hansen – 21 November 2020
The “Where Are All the Sick People?” survey has had nearly 3000 participants since its inception at 10 a.m. EST on 17 November. Three questions were posed to illuminate the issue of the effects of the SARS-CoV-2, which is causing the current Covid-19 Pandemic, on the readers of this blog, WUWT.
The readers here are a diverse, eclectic, multinational cohort. A totally unscientific cross-section of the general public. My experience in responding to thousands an thousands of comments over the years – comments in response to my essays on a rather wide variety of topics – has convinced me that readership here has a broad range of professional and occupational backgrounds. I have found it interesting and surprising – I write about insects and an entomologist weighs-in in comments. I write about dogs and veterinarians weigh-in in comments. I write nuclear power – nuclear power technicians weigh-in.
Please don’t think that this survey is meant to be a broad sociological study of Covid-19 and the various governmental responses to the pandemic. It is nothing more than a snapshot of actual experience of the readers here who have taken the few moments necessary to go to the online survey and answer the three questions.
I was hoping for three thousand participants before writing up the results, but the response percentages have not shifted since about participant 1000 – which is a good indicator that the snapshot is at least “in focus”.
SURVEY RESULTS (with 2851 responses)
Question #1: “How many people among your immediate family, extended family, friends, acquaintances and colleagues are CURRENTLY sick (ill enough to voluntarily stay home from work, school, or normal activities) with Covid-19?”
A strong majority of people, 85.8%, know no one who is currently ill with Covid-19. Some people know some sick people: 13.5%. There have been complaints in the comments that using a range like “1-5” prevents us knowing that many people selecting 1-5 know only 1 sick person – a valid criticism. How many people know many sick people? O.66% (19 of 2851) know 6 or more. Comments reveal that there are some nurses and doctors and nursing home staff answering the survey, which may account for some of these response with higher numbers.
Question #2: “How many people among your immediate family, extended family, friends, acquaintances and colleagues have been sick (ill enough to voluntarily stay home from work, school, or normal activities) with Covid-19 during the last nine months?”
Since the beginning of the pandemic, characterized as “the last nine months”, a majority of people, 54.4%, know no one who has been ill with Covid-19. Again, some people know some-but-not-many (1-5) people who have been ill – 39.5%. That is about four-out-of-ten have had someone in their circle of family, friends and acquaintances become ill with Covid-19. In total, 93.9% who know either none or only a few (less than 5) people who have actually been ill during the entire pandemic so far. However, 6.1% know “more than a few” (6-10) or “many” (11 or more) that have been ill. How ill? We don’t know. A more complete survey might have asked additional questions, like “How many of those were ill enough to require hospitalization?”
Question #3: “Covid-19 has caused many deaths, particularly, but not exclusively, among the older population and those already ill with serious conditions. How many of these deaths have occurred among your immediate family, extended family, friends, acquaintances and colleagues since the beginning of the pandemic in January 2020?”
As the question itself acknowledges, Covid-19 has caused or contributed to a lot of deaths around the world. More deaths than an average annual influenza pandemic, less deaths – so far – than the worst of the influenza pandemics — Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 which reportedly killed between 50 and 100 million people out of a world population of 1.8 billion. Today’s population is about four times that — 7.8 billion. A pandemic that deadly today would kill 200 to 400 million people. As of today, Covid-19 is reported to have contributed to the deaths of about 1.37 million humans. (for more on “contributed to”, read my upcoming essay on Cause of Death).
Our survey reveals, that among survey respondents, a huge majority, 88.4%, know no one in their circle of family, friends, acquaintances or colleagues that have died from or with Covid-19, since January 2020 – the earliest possible date for the pandemic in the United States and Europe. Unfortunately, some readers, 327 of them, have suffered losses of at least one family member, friend or colleague. My condolences go out to them, each and every one. Only three (3) respondents report a range of higher than 5 – two report 6-10, and one reports >20. (This “>20 deaths” response came in very early in the survey, and may be a troll trying to spoil the survey – or it may be a legitimate response from someone in the medical or nursing home field.)
Discussion:
Those of your who know no one who is currently ill with Covid-19 are not crazy and not terminally isolated from society. That is the experience of over 85% of others reading here and participating in this survey. So, you are not alone. I would interpret >85% as “most everyone”. Yet, more than one-out-of-ten (13.4%) do know one or more (up to 5) people who are sick right now. Comments indicate that many of these folks know only 1. I do wish that I had created more categories in the lower range, such as 1, 2, 3 4 & 5.
However, the result for the first question – “know any people currently ill?” — is that most people don’t know anyone or just know a few. Readers should compare this to any of the very bad recent flu seasons, trying to remember when we all knew many people ill with the flu simultaneously. Here are figures for the last three flu seasons in the United States:
2017-2018 45,000,000 Symptomatic Illnesses
2018-2019 36,000,000 Symptomatic Illnesses
2019-2020 38,000,000 Symptomatic Illnesses
These flu seasons saw massive workplace absenteeism, school closures (mostly due to too many teachers out with the flu), hospital ERs overrun with flu patients and a media pouring out Flu Panic. The numbers above are Symptomatic Illnesses – people who were actually sick – unable to go to school, work, or do their daily activities. For the most part, they were simply miserable for days – some died. Those of you with sharp memories will remember these years and some of you will recall your own bouts of influenza.
We should not compare these numbers with what is being reported today as “Covid-19 Cases” — these are not sick people but simply people who have tested “positive” for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA fragments in their nasal swabs. “Positive Test” does not mean infection. The current standards of the RT-PCR test are way too sensitive to produce “actionable” results and do not return positives that indicate a current ongoing infection and nothing even resembling a “Symptomatic Illness”. According to the World Health Organization the vast majority of Covid-19 infections are asymptomatic– which just means “not sick”.
The Public Health viewpoint is that a “positive test” might mean “infection” and “if infection then maybe infectious, now or later”. Most testing done today does not test for the one thing health officials need to know to protect the population: “Who has an infectious case of Covid-19?” Public Health viewpoints cause authorities to do stupid things – such as closing an entire school because five pupils – pupils not sick and at school – “tested positive” – and ordering a “deep cleaning” of the school before pupils can return.
And there have been sick people — while a majority of respondents (54.4%) don’t know even a single person who has had Covid-19 in the last nine months, the remainder of respondents, 45.6%, know at least one person who was sick. From the comments, many of the early cases could have simply been any one of the influenzas – testing was not rampant in Jan-Feb-Mar. There is some evidence that the current ramp up of “Covid Cases” might include the new flu season’s Influenza Cases. Influenza season generally begins the first of October, we are now halfway through November – six weeks into flu season.
And sadly, many people have died in in the Covid-19 Pandemic. Most of us, almost 9-of-10, know no one who has died. But the other 1-of-10 have lost a family member, a friend, an acquaintance or a colleague. It is suspected that susceptibility to serious, life-threatening, severe illness involving SARS-CoV-2 has a genetic basis. This may mean that families suffering deaths of loved ones may experience multiple deaths – as the family shares genetic material. Everyone has been exposed to the idea that the risk of severe Covid-19 illness and death involves, almost invariably, a list of common comorbidities:
“Adults of any age with the following conditions are at increased risk of severe illness from the virus that causes COVID-19:
- Cancer
- Chronic kidney disease
- COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease)
- Heart conditions, such as heart failure, coronary artery disease, or cardiomyopathies
- Immunocompromised state (weakened immune system) from solid organ transplant
- Obesity (body mass index [BMI] of 30 kg/m2 or higher but < 40 kg/m2)
- Severe Obesity (BMI ≥ 40 kg/m2)
- Pregnancy
- Sickle cell disease
- Smoking
- Type 2 diabetes mellitus”
Source: CDC here
In fact, any condition that weakens the immune system or cardiovascular system or the pulmonary system places one at higher risk of developing a severe illness from SARS-CoV-2 than those without those conditions.
A note on “Covid-19 Deaths”: The CDC has asked that all death certificates [link is a .pdf] that list Covid-19 or even suspected Covid-19 anywhere, in any portion, of the Cause of Death portion of a death certificate be reported as a Covid-19 Death. This means that the mortality figures are reported far higher than they should be in order to be released for public consumption without serious caveats. (There are valid epidemiological reasons for this requirement – responsibly informing the general public about the Covid Pandemic is not one of them.) They are reporting all deaths that in any way involve Covid-19 or look like they might involve Covid-19 or might be suspected of involving Covid-19 as a “Covid-19 Death.” That is the subject for another essay – savvy readers can confirm this for themselves.
The GIANT omission on the list from the CDC, known almost from the first month of the pandemic, is this: The older you are, the higher your risk of dying from Covid-19 if infected. Person aged 80 or greater had nearly a 1-in-3 chance of dying if they had a Covid-19 infection. Those 70-79 had a 1-in-6 chance of dying, and those 60-69 a 1-in-16 chance. We can look at this another way. Percentage of all Covid-19 deaths by age group.
Over 85% of all Covid-19 deaths occurred in those over 65 years of age. Advancing age itself is a major risk factor for death by Covid.
The next chart is Rate Ratio (akin to Risk Ratio) of Covid Death by age group compared to young adults aged 18 through 29.
Moral to this story? Don’t get old? Well, not really – but we should have been protecting our aging population, those 65 and older, from the very start – all while keeping our economies and societies functioning full-blast so that governments at all levels could afford to take the steps necessary to protect the elderly. Sensible guidelines for their protection should have been the first order of business accompanied by plans to safely serve the elderly in nursing homes.
BOTTOM LINES:
- If you don’t know any people sick with/from Covid-19 you having the same Covid-19 experience as the vast majority of other people – at least according to this somewhat unscientific survey.
- If you don’t know anyone who has died, or only one or maybe two, you are again having the same experience as almost everyone else.
- While most of us don’t know anyone who has died from/with Covid-19, we probably know someone who does know someone who has sadly lost a family member or acquaintance during the ongoing pandemic.
- Opinions vary wildly on the subject of Governmental Responses to the pandemic. It will be years before the historians, sociologists, medial researchers, and others sort out the quagmire of mistakes that have been made at all levels of governance.
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[ Some minor typing and formatting errors were corrected — kh ]
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UPDATE: 1900 hrs, 22 November 2020
The survey has now had 3040 respondents. The percentages for the three questions are as follows — with comparisons to those given in the essay above:
In the essay With 3040 respondents:
The percentages have not changed significantly with more respondents, meaning the first pass was pretty well in focus. I’ll leave the survey operating for a week or so.
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Author’s Comment:
This survey was just a quick peek at the real-world experience of the readers here. I have not fooled myself into thinking that it tells the full truth about Covid illnesses or Covid deaths. It does tell us something interesting – but what is up to the readers.
Bias Alert: Both my wife and I fall into the most vulnerable category by age. But we also have children and grandchildren – and they are more important to us than ourselves.
Let me hear from you in the comments.
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Here is a very interesting analysis of what might be going on by Dr Mike Yeadon, formerly a VP at Pfizer and well qualified in immunology and infectious disease control. The focus is on the UK but his analysis would be valid everywhere:
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=409747283542470
https://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/off_belay/wil_yeadon_retract_and_apologise-727010
While interesting, the information you link to is not a retraction or in fact a disproof of what Dr Yeadon said. Maybe you missed the info on the false positives? did you note that while the infection rate is 5 times what it was in the April peak, supposedly, the death rate is a tiny fraction of the death rate during that peak? That actually suggests that much of what Yeardon said is correct.
We’ve had some experience with false positives in US testing where the false positive rates that were 5% or more. One medical system in the Midwest had 490 positive tests among staff in a single week, Of which at least 470 were false positives. I know this because I am married to one of the false positives.
The shut downs etc obviously don’t work for Covid though seasonal flu and Strep were virtually6 wiped out Their is something we don’t understand at work and the people shouting for restrictions are clearly not understanding the math. 10 20 or even 30% of people going unmasked would not sustain the epidemic if masks worked the way the fanatics pretend they do.
85% of cases are among those under 65.
80% of deaths are among those over 65.
24% of deaths occurred in elder care, nursing, hospice.
Half of the 520,000 deaths occurred before 6/30, 20% of them in NYC alone.
All who have serious underlying medical risks are at equal risk from the seasonal flu which cov2 is now part of.
“Half of the 520,000 deaths occurred before 6/30, 20% of them in NYC alone.”
Well, they’re giving the governor an Emmy so that should make everyone feel better….
Fat fingers and poor proofing – should be 250,000 not 522,000.
I completely 100% agree with the points Dr Yeadon makes. Those are many of the same points I’ve been making since May when we knew the nature of the virus and why pre-existing immunity (T cells from related common corona virus colds) is likely a significant percentage.
Similarly I’ve been screaming in my writings why this mass PCR testing of otherwise people is utterly wrong from both policy and science views, and a large percentage of the +ives are extremely likely to be false positives.
Just wonder how long it will be until FaceBook deletes his video and stops it from being shared. The Great Resetters can’t allow truth to be heard on this.
An excellent video by a true expert. Excessive Covid-19 testing is itself a pathology.
Regards, Allan
In this exclusive film, former Pfizer Vice President Mike Yeadon discusses his thoughts as to why the lockdown was a mistake, and why the government strategies to manage the pandemic are only making things worse.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=409747283542470
Where I am, near Toronto, the hospitals are starting to fill up and they’re worried about ICU admissions. link
anecdotal…probably a CBC terror report
Lazy. Check the link.
There is so much false, but “official” informantion re: C19, that NOTHING can be trusted.
Disingenuous. Note that the link does not identify how much of the ICU capacity is actually Covid-19. Here in Houston, ICU utilization is at 97%, but only 17% are Covid-19.
Exactly.
I pointed this out in another thread in a comment reply in which I linked to a state health service information site.
My experience has been that what you report regarding Houston is generally true across the US.
And it ought to be stated clearly that hospitals are in general bust places, and are frequently full or nearly full.
A hospital having none or few open beds is and always has been a common occurrence.
I think that large hospitals in major urban areas are almost never less that two thirds to three quarters filled to capacity.
Everyone who breaks a bone or gets a laceration that needs stitches, needs to get immediate medical care.
It used to be the case that every one of these people had to go to a hospital emergency room.
Nowadays, in at least some places, such as here in Florida, there are numerous “Urgent Care” facilities which take a lot of the case load that would otherwise fill ER departments at hospitals.
There are places that people can go to get bones set, wounds stitched, infections treated, antibiotics prescribed, without having to incur the hassle or expense of going to a hospital.
not sure if these are everywhere now. The last time I lived outside of Florida, they were pretty much not a thing yet.
Anyway, the upshot of all of this is that we should consider how much excess capacity typically exists at hospitals, in order to critically assess in a useful way, what exactly it means when hospitals “begin to fill up”.
I have to say, prior to this pandemic, I was never aware that hospitals have commonly filled up during bad flu seasons.
There is another bit of information that does apparently tend to make this illness harder for hospitals to cope with an influx of patients…covid infection seems to take a lot longer to resolve once someone is sick enough to need to be in a hospital.
I believe that flu rarely causes a person to be sick for more than a week, and maybe sometimes ten days, but covid commonly takes several weeks to resolve for those who develop a severe case.
I am assuming that “complex continuing care” is the same as ICU – AND that all of the CoViD-19 patients are in that condition. The one hospital that actually gives numbers is the Toronto East General Hospital, which has 11 CoViD-19 patients, and 75 beds in ICU. That’s not even quite 15%.
Did you actually check the link yourself while using your brain, @commieBob???
Hospitals are designed like hotels – for near full utilization. Empty hospitals close.
Your data is incorrect or misleading – TMC (Houston) reports the number of COVID positive patients in the ICU. TMC does NOT report the number of those COVID positive patients that are in the ICE DUE TO COVID. So TMC’s numbers give you no ability to actually determine the effect of COVID on the ICU demand.
Further as reported by TMC, ICU capacity is expandable (by a significant number), so the utilization rate is a bit misleading. The normal ICU utilization rate is very high. The TMC site does a decent job of showing the ICU expansion capabilities.
Read carefully the Toronto Sun article, particularly the St. Michaels hospital situation. They have a first wave backlog they are still dealing with, a rising number of non COVID cases, COVID transfers from other area hot spots and a slow growth in COVID cases. Is that not a sign of a seasonal influx of respiratory admissions, and not necessarily a huge COVID spike. At least it is a more informed and detailed description of the situation at their site in the heart of Toronto. I wonder if their circumstance is unique or representative of conditions at other hospitals?
commie ==> It is difficult to sort out the actuality from the media reports. Do you have personal experience with your local hospitals?
Yes, as anyone knows who has been part of a news story, the news and reality are often seriously unrelated. 🙂
Where I actually am, an hour away from Toronto, we only have a couple of people hospitalized with Wuflu. I have a close friend who is actually part of the medical system in Toronto and she’s seriously worried. Toronto is just entering lockdown again. link
Kip
Speaking of hospitals, in the UK and also in Sweden and France some 40% plus of covid deaths were in care homes and caused by bringing in untested elderly patients from hospitals as they prepared for mass outbreaks of covid and ‘cleared the decks.’
In the UK up to 20% of deaths were caused by hospital infection whereby the patient came in to be treated for something else.
These are vast numbers whereby the authorities have made things worse and the hysterical reaction to the pandemic has likely killed more people than if this had been treated as an influenza outbreak, which regularly kills 20/30000 a year in the UK and in my lifetime there has been 5 worst pandemics than the one we are currently dealing with.
Is the cure worse than the cause? Some 28 million GP appointments were cancelled as were 2 million operations so this will rumble on for years
tonyb
I have heard from many sources that people are avoiding such things as screening visits, vaccinations, and all sorts of care that would under any other circumstance have caused them to seek medical care, including things like cancer treatment and for chest pains and such.
I am sure Kip is correct when he opines that it will be years before anyone has a full understanding of what has resulted from the response to covid.
Only in hindsight can accurate assessments be performed.
For one thing, it has always been the case that nationwide statistics on pretty much anything do not reach a state of being reasonably accurate and complete until a year or two has passed.
Stats for crime, economic data, and health data, are always revised, updated, and corrected for some period of time after the initial reporting.
My parents neighbor died this summer. She wasn’t feeling well just as lockdown hit so waited months to go in to see her doctor. By the time she made it in she was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer and died within two weeks of the diagnosis. Would she have survived if she went it soon as she started feeling bad? We’ll never know if it was already to late for her or not because of our the lockdown.
I was lucky. My cancer was diagnosed in July, very early and slow growing. Was able to go through the four month delay of surgery with no ill effects.
Democrats following Vladimir Lennon’s advice, “never let a good crisis go to waste,” have through their complicit fake news shit done almost a perfect job of using this to destroy they USA.
Welcome to the USSA!
The number of people hospitalized in my area is up but the cases are not as severe as in March and April (based on internal hospital communications at two healthcare systems).
Kip, ref to your numbers:
I downloaded EU data last week:
https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/COVID-19-geographic-disbtribution-worldwide-2020-11-23.xlsx
Looking at OECD numbers, I found that 15% of the planet’s population reported 60+% of cases and ~70% of deaths.
Would you believe that our health services are that much worse than Africa’s?
Oddgeir
“Would you believe that our health services are that much worse than Africa’s?”
No, they are light years and billions of dollars better.
The US (& UK) have the financial resources and commitment to keep the very old way past their self life to the point of having multiple comorbidities in contagious elder care when C-19 arrives.
All that does is delay the inevitable at a very high cost.
Mother Nature and the Grim Reaper will not be denied.
Speaking first hand from observing the years and medical expenses leading up to the inevitable passing of my octogenarian parents and father-in-law.
And guess what. We ALL tread that path.
None of us here gets out alive.
the Lizard King
commieBob,
That link is just more panic porn. They are not overloaded nor in danger of overloading. They are just going for readership.
Is is possible that hospitals are filling up because of flexible admission criteria? Our health-care system in Canada has been government-run for a long time and it is difficult to assume that it is immune from political interference–after all, nothing else run by government is. It remains possible that admissions are directed by political instruction to change admission criteria to change the appearance of the Covid situation. After all, beds were vacated to make this possible.
(Before I get severely criticized for proposing a ‘conspiracy theory’, please understand that my wife died of MS. I was her caregiver until she passed. Through that I gained considerable experience on changing hospital admission criteria.)
The value of the statistics obtained from this survey remains questionable however, without criticizing the attempt; I agree that someone has to do something to put all this in perspective. But reading the WHO guidelines on the identification of possible, presumed and confirmed cases of Covid-19 there is no definitive proof of any one particular virus causing any of them. If there is no proof of any one particular virus, how can there be proof of ‘Covid-19’?
And that means–how can anyone KNOW someone who is either sick or has died of ‘Covid-19’–could it not be any flu? The rt-PCR test as it is being applied seems to be entirely unreliable in positively identifying one specific coronavirus, therefore how would one know? And ‘confirmed case’ requires nothing but a positive PCR test result.
It would seem that the best one could report is that they know of someone who was sick or died and they were told that it was Covid-19. But positive knowledge seems to remain elusive.
I may just be being suspicious, but I’ve been told by a lot of prospectors over the years that ‘Oh there’s gold there, LOTS of it, trust me’–and as full of BS as they were they were more credible than today’s politicians and media.
Len Werner ==> I will be writing a piece on Cause of Death reporting in the United States.
Other than four issues/question I had, the survey was very interesting and presented real numbers from real people. No COVID models making wild guess predictions, no doctors pretending to be COVID experts, and especially no #@%$@ politicians pretending to be doctors. Very refreshing.
The point about CDC encouraging death certificates in 2020 to blame COVID-19 is a new policy and continues the CDC’s haphazard way of estimating flu deaths.
But … concerning COVID — we are in the middle of a pandemic, so any conclusions now are premature, whether from this informal study, or papers by doctors pretending to be COVID experts, or TV pronouncements from old Dr. Grouchy.
The CDC has a history of wild guessing flu deaths with computer models, and most doctors think their estimates are way overstated. It’s very unlikely that flu alone (except SARS1 and MERS) would kill a healthy person. … And most likely that flu would cause complications that led to death for a sickly person in a nursing home. But do you blame COVID-19 alone for death of an old timer in a nursing home with emphysema? It would seem that both emphysema and COVID could be blamed. But what if the patient was not expected to live for more than a year? And then COVID hit him. Does COVID then get 100% of the blame?
I look forward to your article on cause of death reporting. My research so far suggests very inconsistent reporting. A lot of instructions online about how to report deaths properly … which implies there are problems.
With the exception of deadly SARS1 and MERS, it is very unlikely that any type of flu is 100% responsible for any death. Most often pneumonia will be the cause of death, but there are many causes of pneumonia other than the flu. The result is a wild guess — CDC computer model guessing game every year (at least through 2019) of how many people are killed by the flu 00 ask any of your doctors, and the typical answer is zero, maybe one patient killed solely by the flu in the whole career, even this year.
Several problems with this survey:
(1)
The pandemic is still in progress, so the numbers could change a lot in the next year
(2)
Many people infected with COVID don’t know they are infected. Some don’t even realize they are sick, while others assume they have a cold or ordinary influenza. Three of the five people I know who tested positive for COVID had only loss of smell and taste. Two didn’t even realize they were sick, much less COVID infected, until later, when they had antibody tests. The third realized those were COVID symptoms, and tested positive for COVID, but never got more than mild symptoms. I’m sorry to report one of the two younger people who lost the senses of taste and smell still has those problems many months later.
(3)
Assuming they KNOW they are COVID infected, what percentage of people will announce that fact to every single person they know? If I get a cold or the flu, or come home from a doctor’s visit, I don’t tell everyone I know what’s wrong with me. I don’t place an announcement in a newspaper. If I got really sick and died, THEN I’d call everyone. … When a doctor recently asked me about my parents’ medical histories, I couldn’t answer. They never whined about their medical conditions or allowed their children to worry about them.
(4)
Experience with nursing home deaths would depend MAINLY on the ages of the people taking the survey. Until I reached my sixties, for one example, I didn’t know anyone in a nursing home. But in the past few years, both of my in-laws were in them, until they died.
Richard,
“The CDC has a history of wild guessing flu deaths with computer models, and most doctors think their estimates are way overstated.”
I had come to the conclusion long ago that people who compile statistics are very often not unbiased reporters but in fact ore often biased advocates of some point of view, narrative, or position, and as such, may well have cause to overestimate the numbers they report.
People who run or are involved in public health bureaucracies have every reason to make public health statistics sound as bad as they can. Their funding is likely tied directly to perception of the severity of the problems they are reporting on, while at the same time they are not held to be culpable for any of it.
Any stats that do not involve numerical counting of something should be taken with a large grain of salt, at best.
Estimates and modelled data should be looked at with a skeptical eye.
Being credulous and gullible is not how people that want facts, go through life.
As to #3, Richard Greene, when you are home sick, your immediate family (wife & children, parents & siblings, roommates, etc. depending on your household circumstance) will know about it. When you are home sick, you employer and co-workers will know about it, and in current circumstances, most, if not all, employers require you to inform them if you tested positive so they can inform any coworkers you’ve been in close contact with so they too can get tested. And, for that matter, you should be informing anyone else you’ve been in recent contact with as to your status so that they also can seek to be tested. And, of course anyone who knows will inevitably talk with other people about it, including other people you know. So while you might not shout it from the rooftops, a good number of your acquaintances will know if you’ve got COVID when you are staying home from it, no matter how much you might not want the word to get out.
as to #4, it depends as much on circumstances as age. When I was a teenager, I knew of someone in a nursing home, my grandmother who was in her 80s (I was the youngest child of her youngest child). Even before my grandmother was in a nursing home herself, my sister (who is 12 years older than me) knew of people in nursing homes because she would go on the seniors trips with my grandmother (grandmom was very active socially before entering the nursing home, but had some mobility difficulties in her later years which my sister would be there to help her with), so knew her friends and knew when one of them ended up in a nursing home.
Are they filling up with covid patients (i.e., patients who come to the hospital because of symptomatic covid), or also with patients with normal seasonal illnesses or unrelated medical procedures (who might happen to test positive while there for covid bug)?
Oh I see the link now. More whinging about over capacity and tipping points. Haven’t we seen enough of that by now? A big part of their problem is their own doing that they are now having to address (backlog).
Has Canada approved the antibody injection ? My understanding is the USA has approved it for high risk people in the early stages of the disease. This should really cut down on hospital beds because the high risk spend much more time in hospital on average when sick.
I’ve heard adds where they are looking for people who have recovered to participate in a study, recently.
Months ago, the BC gov’t asked people who thought they might have had covid early in the year if they would be willing to participate in a study, take a blood test, etc. I had a chest cold in Feb, followed by 5 days of no taste or smell, so I gave them the info and said I’d be willing.
Crickets. Never heard about it again.
They panic people when they get a positive test and then encourage them to go home to quarantine or go to the hospital, with the latter a benefit to the hospital. We have a new flu season and a wonderfully crappy PCR test that not only detects Genetic fragment from a past infection but also is primed for coronaviruses in general, the rhinovirus, and even some human sequences.
What many do not know is that, using 37 nucleotides from a reputed virus isolate, a group then had a computer fill in the remaining 30 000 nucleotides from a computer database of know genetic sequences. The fabrication is why the PCR test is designed for coronaviruses in general, the common cold, and human sequences.
The PCR test is worse than just bad. As the virus in question has never been isolated, cultured, and shown to cause any disease, the PCR simply does not measure what they claim it does. It’s a complete fraud and tells you nothing. We should be doing what we have always done in the flu season, tree the symptoms, sequester if ill, and social distance if you have to go out. Masks are worthless and unhealthy for the healthy and the ill.
https://twitter.com/AlexBerenson/status/1330178488356188171
Hasn’t the whole world learned by now, that no data out of China can be trusted? Chinese govt. “data” is whatever they want it to be.
My son was a physician in the Covid ward in a large Melbourne metro hospital during the peak of the second wave in Victoria. Recorded daily cases peaked at 750 in a population of 5M. A good deal of the staff contracted the virus and were required to isolate. That put a lot of stress on the remaining staff. On his worst shift he filled out 10 death certificates but typical was 2 per day and his youngest death was 72yo with heart issues.
He went from 3 patients in a single ward to three Covid wards with between 80 and 110 patients in 2 weeks. The big issue in Victoria was the use of contractor cleaners and kitchen staff working across a number of aged care facilities. It spread rapidly through a number of aged care homes; all vulnerable people apart from the staff.
He was appreciative of the government response to limit the spread; I believe Victoria holds the world record for lockdown up to this point. He was not in the ICU. Many of the older patients from aged care would not handle the intrusive treatments in ICU so were simply given oxygen and medicated for their breathing stress. He did not see any of the deaths in ICU, who were typically under 80yo. Patients of any age could end up in ICU. If they were in ICU it was a tough time but most got through it.
Rick ==> Thanks for the report from Oz.
Hospital IU’s have always had periods when they have been overrun. The question is; did governments increase the number of ICU beds after the first wave. If not then it would not take a lot of severe covide cases to once again cause a shortage of ICU beds.
The article says the hospitals are already busy. Before the ‘surge’.
“……fearful that the rising tide of COVID-19 infections will swamp their already-strained systems.”
Panic reporting article.
I’m a nurse, live near Ottawa. Yes, we are hearing stories of ICUs and hospitals filling up. This happens *every winter* Covid or no. Hospitals run at pretty close to capacity in Canada ALL THE TIME, which is why we have overflowing emergency departments too. ICUs do have some Covid patients, yes, but they also have post op patients (province is trying to madly make up the backlog of cancelled surgeries in the spring), MVA patients, MI patients, etc. There will soon be more, as snow is coming and there will be more cardiac patients, serious falls, car accidents. Our health care system is woefully underfunded and understaffed, which is what happens with government-run & funded health care.
I remember reading somewhere (recently) that ICU’s are, by design, typically over 90% capacity. Due to the cost of keeping too many open beds.
Heather ==> Thanks for the Nurse’s Viewpoint — very helpful. And from Canada as well.
Very few people understand the issues regarding Emergency Room beds. In doing clergy visits to ER patients, I found that my local hospital often has ER patients in rolling beds in the ER hallways, as all the “rooms” are occupied. Not related to the Covid pandemic at all….just perfectly normal for them.
last week there were 10 people in icu in toronto and 2 people just in hospital with cov2 in hamilton. nothing is filling up.
although I didn’t have a chance To take the survey, Ian in the zero category for knowing no one with Covid-19 or dying from it. thanks you answered how I feel about it.
I know of 1 person who died of covid but they went into hospital for something else and caught it there.
tonyb
People, please educate yourself on the exponential function: https://youtu.be/LqcHG7QUK9k
Then consider the R-number which basically describes your exponential function. R=1.2 means infections grow with 20% per day.
Then do the math. You are are allowed to start with one corona-virus positive individual.
Then after you are done laughing consider why you are being lied to by your government
Current testing for CV19 exceeds influenza testing by about a factor of 500 based on data from CDC. Clinical labs have all but stopped testing for influenza in favor of the more lucrative CV19.
It’s still early in the flu season, so the bulk of actual respiratory illnesses now are probably CV19. However, if the rate of testing for CV19 remains so elevated, one should expect many influenza cases to be misdiagnosed as CV19. One would then expect to see more younger people mistakenly diagnosed with CV19.
Scissor, I posed this question by text to a cousin on the east coast who is a retired lab manager for a large hospital. She was kind enough to check with former co-workers, and replied awhile later that upon arrival at her hospital, patients are immediately tested for both influenza and Covid. Other respiratory viruses and pneumonia are circulating out there. If a patient tests negative for flu and Covid, they have an algorithm for more extensive respiratory testing.
Frankly, I was surprised that her former employer was doing that much testing. My concern is that much testing is not occurring everywhere, and “suspected” Covid cases are a large piece of the surge in “confirmed and suspected cases” as announced on the news all day.
Perhaps your cousin is associated with a hospital that is doing it right. There cannot be many. Influenza testing is recorded and tracked by the CDC. For week 46, approximately 33,000 influenza tests were performed. In contrast, over 1.5 million CV19 tests are being done daily.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm#ILIActivityMap
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/individual-states
Thanks for undertaking this unscientific but quite revealing survey. The greatest pathology we will suffer from with this pandemic is not the death count. What will remain with us forever is the pathologizing of the normal risks of daily living. The culture in economy that we enjoy today was built by people for whom epidemic disease was a constant handmaiden. These were diseases that did not just make you feel bad for a few days. They maimed, disfigured and killed with reckless abandon and the people were essentially powerless to stop it. Our advances in life sciences have created generations of people in the west who have come to believe they should never be bothered with the inconveniences of living. COVID should serve as a stark reminder as to the unavoidable constraints on an individual’s life and why it is so essential to make the most of the time you have because you have no idea when it will end
Scott Manhunt
That was a depressing comment.
With COVID, about 999 or 1,000 infected WILL survive.
Long term damage for those who need hospitalization is unknown, but some is expected.
Perhaps 40 percent will have no symptoms or mild symptoms.
The never ending partial lock downs are causing health and economic damage
that probably exceeds the medical damage from the COVID-19 disease alone.
I guess this comment is as depressing as your comment?
” Both my wife and I fall into the most vulnerable category by age. But we also have children and grandchildren – and they are more important to us than ourselves. ”
Having great-grandchildren I couldn’t agree more.
There was a time when young men fought under the banner “Live Free or Die.”
Perhaps it is time for a little elderly civil disobedience in defense of Freedom for our collective grandchildren.
“Both my wife and I fall into the most vulnerable category by age. But we also have children and grandchildren – and they are more important to us than ourselves.”
Just the two of us, 79 and 82, no children. Age, smoking, hypertension – we’re vulnerable. “Self-isolating” in the Southern California desert; it’s a twenty mile round trip to grocery shop in 29 Palms. There might be 10 adults living within a half mile radius from us – no socializing. Just waiting for a vaccine. Even a 95% effective vaccine doesn’t really make us want to break-out any time soon. A one in twenty chance it’s not effective? I recall the line, “If it weren’t for bad luck I’d have no luck at all…”
Dear god don’t go for that vaccine! It has been shown that older people are more likely to die of the flu, if they have a history of flu vaccination, as little as two in three years increases you mortal risk by something like fourfold? Don’t quote me on exact numbers, no two studies agree.
Can anybody remember, right in the beginning, how up to 50% of staff were put on furlough, retrenched and otherwise ‘redeployed into the labour market’? Now they complain about being understaffed?
As far as I can tell, the covid maths work as follows:
See patient with flu =$9 subsidy.
See corona patient = $19
Book corona patient into hospital = $9 000
Put corona patient into ICU = $19 000
Intubate the poor dear = $39 000 even though you just permanently harmed or killed the patient.
Now, why would anybody have reason to lie and inflate numbers?
I mean, hospital administrators get their Ferrari’s for free, don’t they?
Tombstone Gabby ==> I love that desert …. my family spent nearly all my childhood vacations in some part of it or another. After-dark wildlife walks were a big deal for us — experiencing the barren desert come alive once the sun has set.
We are having a family (7 people) Thanks Giving at our house and one family member is going to sit in the other room in fear wearing a mask, testament to the effect that the nightly news has on people.
We have CBS news on before “Jeopardy” every night, and Noah O’Donnell screeches in a steady David Brinkley cadence for about 20 minutes about new cases, deaths, and over flowing hospitals. TV news seems to always be punctuated with some poor soul weeping to illustrate how dire the situation is. I generally walk out of the room.
Steve Case ==> In my opinion, the media has a lot to answer for in this disaster.
In my opinion, the ‘media’ is dead. The media is as dead as broadcast infotainment, as dead as anything mediated by Masters of the Universe.
So true. The “Oscars” for television, the Emmy Awards, just decided to give a special Emmy to Governor Cuomo for his “leadership” on the COVID crisis in his many tv briefings. Is it any wonder nobody watches their award show anymore or views major media outlets with such skepticism?
But Governor Cuomo DESERVED a special Emmy for leadership in the special category of:
— Leadership in the Wrong Direction, with great confidence, and even wrote a book about how great he was
In regards to Mr. Greene’s “Wrong Direction” one might need to clarify by asking “whose plan?” Perhaps it really was in the intended direction.
I have some other ideas about what Cuomo deserves, but this is a family website, so…
Cuomo could have won a Grammy, but she would have died.
The spread of social contagion has produced greater damage and collateral damage than the virus. Cover-up of Planned Parent (e.g. senior and long-term care) facilities to which around 1/2 of Covid-19 deaths can be attrributed. Stigmatizing early treatments (e.g. HCQ cocktail) that have reduced disease progression and hospitalization by 80 to 90% globally (i.e. signal diversity). Restrictive mandates, including mask mandates that have been shown to be placebos, and or reduce or increase infection in two controlled studies, and lockdowns that delay development of community immunity and prolong exposure.
Has the media ever answered for their activities?
Sadly, Kip, I doubt there will be any consequences. I’ve seen it go on too long with nothing happening (as, I’m sure, have you)
Kip
President Reagan said, “Government is the Problem.”
President Trump said, “The media is the enemy of the people.”
They’re both right.
That is pretty much true of every disaster.
I first started feeling sick on 11.5: fever, headache, body ache, extreme tiredness. Tested negative for COVID on 11.6, but symptoms persisted. Tested for flu and COVID (rapid tests), on 11.9. Both negative. Chest X-ray negative. Remained sick and went to ED on 11.15. Positive test in hospital with evidence of pneumonia. Been in hospital for one week; hopefully getting discharged today. 61 yo in excellent health. Never get sick. Took vitamin D and zinc supplements. This was the sickest I’ve ever been in my life.
Hah! The CDC actually publish flu statistics as “FLI and pneumonia”. That is Flu-Like illnesses and pneumonia. Flu makes you ill, pneumonia kills often. That’s why the old people on intubators dies like flies: the greedy bastards blew compressed air into their pneumonia lungs. But it made the hospital $39 000, and the old dears were “beyond the general life span” and “economically inactive” anyway, yeeesss? Using resources that could be used for younger people, yeeesss?
So, in their urgent need to make an extra ten bucks, they kept looking for your ‘Rona, and missed the pneumonia, those venal, incompetent farks!
…glad you surviv(ed), you were about to be written up as corona anyway, betcha. Wit a quick intubation for your last few hours, of course
Steve–have ready a mask for the ‘one family member’ that is made out of nylon window screen; you will be able to tell him/her, even have a printout ready of Xiao’s report right from the CDC website, that it is every bit as effective against a 0.1 micron virus as the one that he/she is wearing and you’ll be able to hear him/her better. It just might make a useful scientific point.
Chain link fences for mosquitoes is the simile that I have enjoyed.
Those are really big mosquitoes where you are.
Location, please. I’ll stay away.
In England I use the chain link fence with snow (no mosquitoes here) analogy. That has the advantage if someone argues that it is droplets the mask is trying to stop, I only have to throw in a snowball (serious point being the smaller particles penetrate deeper into lungs).
No need for masks?
https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1307512001812475904?s=20
So because some guy is an inconsiderate, thoughtless slob everyone should wear a mask? What a strange way to think.
Funny; I remember seeing filming like that on Benny Hill–usually eventually revealing him with his signature mischievous grin, standing and holding a garden hose.
Hey it’s Ghalfrunt who told people to drink bleach…I am pretty sure that is what you wrote 🤔
He didn’t, why do you keep repeating it? Is that how sophisticated your jokes get?
He did. Why do you like that Loydo?
Ghalfrunt. August 26, 2020 at 4:22 pm
Derg:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertglatter/2020/04/25/calls-to-poison-centers-spike–after-the-presidents-comments-about-using-disinfectants-to-treat-coronavirus/#372229c61157
Words have consequences.
It’s as simple as that, and words coming from the President of the United States matter.
They matter because words and direction coming from the President are typically taken seriously by people who live in the U.S.
When Donald Trump said that he would consider exploring the use of injecting disinfectants into the body to treat coronavirus, the medical community shuddered due to the dangerous and irresponsible implications of this suggestion.
…
Meanwhile, calls to New York City’s Poison Control Center for exposure to specific household cleaners and disinfectants increased more than twofold after the President’s comments on Thursday, WNBC New York reported today. Data from the New York Poison Center center revealed that in the 18 hours after Trump’s comments, the Poison Center received 30 exposure calls about disinfectants. Ten involved bleach, 9 were about Lysol, and 11 others regarding other household cleaners. Compared to the same time window last year, there were a total of 13 exposure calls, with 2 involving bleach, but none involving Lysol-type products.
Ghalfrunt. June 10, 2020 at 5:24 pm
He was asking his experts to investigate getting light into a body to kill the virus.
“Trump appeared intrigued by the research after Bryan’s presentation.
“Suppose we hit the body with a tremendous ultraviolet or just very powerful light,” Trump said, following Bryan’s presentation. “I think that hasn’t been checked but you’re going to test it.””
he was asking to check out injecting disinfectant.
““The disinfectant knocks it out in a minute. One minute,” he said. “Is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside?” He said it would be “almost a cleaning. It gets in the lungs and does a tremendous number on the lungs.””
Ghalfrunt you are a liar. Stop it. Stop telling people to drink bleach.
You are disgusting
That’s what some guy I met the other day uses. His wife took normal cloth masks, cut out a square hole over the mouth and nostrils and sewed in screen material.
We try to watch the ABC nightly news before Jeopardy. I can’t stand the biased news anymore. However, my wife began watching Jeopardy for the first time this month, right after the news. I am stunned by how much contestants know and especially by how fast they answer. Makes me feel like a big dummy. (No replies please). I keep wondering how Trump and Biden would do as contestants.
I fear that Jeopardy will never be the same without Alex Trebek.
Elsewhere there are some who contend that C-19 is a uniform threat across the entire population, that everyone is equally likely to become infected and equally likely to die and that’s the justification for dictatorial shutdowns, social distancing, masks and trashing the economy and civil liberties. The lying, fact free, fake news MSM left wing propaganda machine certainly does. And according to that same MSM a positive test is a walking death sentence. You will die a miserable, lonely death in some packed ICU and your family and friends you so wantonly exposed will follow swiftly after.
Well, what does the CDC data tell us?
85.3% of C-19 cases are in people younger than 65.
79.9% of C-19 deaths are in people older than 65.
Seems to me the largest percentage of the general herd with natural immunity is shrugging off C-19.
And the too old, too sick, too crammed together in badly run, contagious, elder care facilities become stragglers culled per Mother Nature’s and the Grim Reaper’s job description.
And the fear-mongering elsewhere’s and MSM are full of s***!
BTW this applies globally as well.
Graphic can be viewed here:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nicholas-schroeder-55934820_data-lyingmedia-covid-activity-6735209875254710272-RkE_
You’re right. It seems that this wave in Sweden is diminished compared to elsewhere and may already have peaked due to immunity effects.
As far as propaganda is concerned, it seems likely that when young people begin to be hospitalized and die from influenza this season in significant numbers, the fake media will attribute this to virus mutations of SARS-CoV-2.
I don’t know anyone who has caught, suffered, or died with/from CV19. I only know of 2 who have been tested, and both were negative.
“So the bulk of actual respiratory illnesses now are probably CV19”
Does anybody think the authorities will publish records of how many people suffer respiratory illnesses caused by wearing masks? For months a number of doctors and health workers have been warning of this, and reports are now surfacing – Bacterial Pneumonia being one. As some of the “terrified” are regularly seen driving (alone!) in their cars with a mask on, sooner or later a nasty accident is going to be caused by the driver dozing off as a result of hypoxia…
Florida headline…….Cases surge in Florida
reality…….Florida went from testing ~60,000 people a day……to testing over 120,000 people a day
the case rate stayed the same…..~7.5%
how retarded does someone have to be, after all this time, to still fall for that BS
Florida is showing over 15,000 beds available…..what’s changed is people are only staying in the hosp days….not weeks and months
Additionally, between 1 and 2 million people are being tested daily for CV19 in the U.S. About 5 thousand are being tested daily for influenza.
It is about ninety days, now, until we are off to Withlacoochee SP bike trail to escape northern Wisconsin mud season thaw and the EverS Stupider governor.
We were at Inverness in 2020 happily bicycling everyday with friends when we had to rush home to quarantine. My bicycling miles this year are equal to previous years. We are both 72 & 82 healthy and active, not advisedly sick at all in 2020.
Have you been to Rainbow Springs? Lovely.
I’m in Inverness, too. Lovely place. Stupidest thing Santos did was close the state trails — like the Withlacoochee — at the start of this whole mess. Maybe it did make sense to close some of the more crowded state parks, but closing trails like the W made no sense at all. That said, it did get us triking on the roads like Gobbler and Itachatta which we wouldn’t have done before. Of course, the idea that it was safer on the roads with cars than on a bike trail is a bit of a head-scratcher….
DeSantis, not Santos! We were triking today on the Marjorie Carr Greenway near Ocala — and put in at the Santos Trailhead. Oopsie — got a wire crossed.
Let’s look at the so-called “gold standard” PCR test.
It is extremely sensitive. So sensitive that it may take 30 cycles — 30 doublings — to become a detectable amount. In 30 doublings 1 bit becomes 1 gigabyte. So sensitive that it can respond to the detritus of virus parts left over after having been killed by the immune system. Not an indication of infectivity nor illness.
It is accurate, but too accurate. It cannot distinguish between a low viral load and a beaten viral leftover load. Someone may be asymptomatic after testing positive because they already had symptoms from days to weeks ago. The immune among us who are re-exposed generate antibodies and virus fragments. Immune people are not “cases.”
Your requirement of ‘sick enough to voluntarily stay home’ is hard to quantify. Nowadays that means a positive test and no symptoms. I’m convinced that most of my acquaintances have had it to some extent. But none of them had any serious symptoms worse than a cold. Very few had tests either, as that’s a way to get the attention of the authorities here in michigan.
Rick ==> The purpose of the definition for the survey was to distinguish between people who were told that they tested positive for Covid-19, or who had minor symptoms that could be/have been cold/flu/Covid. Sick People…that’s what the survey was asking about.
Obviously not a medical definition — but a practical, everyday-life definition for “people sick with Covid”.
I believe it part of the PLAN that testing Ag / Ab is so fraught.
I believe that I was exposed in March 2020 by a traveling companion that suffered explosive diarrhea – most likely route – chronic nonproductive cough and malaise. His bicycling miles were slightly curtailed, mine were not. I don’t believe that I can get an Ab test at all. An Ag test will demonstrate nothing useful.
‘The readers here are a diverse, eclectic, multinational cohort. ‘
Are we sure about that? I’d say they were older right wing males, mostly from the USA, predisposed to conspiracy theory and rejecting of science…
The advantage if being an old right wing male like me, is that you don’t have to step in s*** to know what it smells like. In your case, you have to get down on your hands and knees and stick your nose in it, and even then aren’t sure.
I’m an old conservative scientist that rejected leftism because examination of AGW made it obvious that the establishment is crooked. It’s been a long journey that goes back to 2000 for me. I’m not ashamed to admit that I voted for Gore because some of the people are fooled some of the time.
Ironically, I could not stand W and his accepting AGW began to open my eyes and I found WUWT.
Coincidentally elsewhere here on WUWT idiots babbled about nuclear power.
I used to use the dog poop analogy to introduce the hazards of radiation – the invisible smell – and radioactive contamination – the poop on your shoe undesired. Exposure is minimized by time, distance and shielding.
Griff,
“Are we sure about that? I’d say they were older right wing males, mostly from the USA, predisposed to conspiracy theory and rejecting of science…” That sure sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.
I guess we can now be fairly certain that you are not old, not male, not from the USA, but clearly predisposed to conspiracy theories. And, of course, your acceptance of the scientific method and science has always been in doubt.
Be sure, I’m not a right wing US citizen, and be sure,I don’t reject science, in contrast, I’m sure to know more in science than you, beside the fact thand your knowledge tends to be < 0.
Btw. griff, define “right wing”, thx
Why do you have to be such a jackass all the time griff? What do you know of science? You’re just a typical British left-wing twit.
There are many regular posters from Canada, the UK, Australia, Germany, France, New Zealand, Norway, Denmark, Poland, South Africa, Argentina, just to name a few off the top of my head.
Griffy is probably right. Unctuous, older, white, conservative men can be found in many places, but given the US population, probably more there than anywhere else.
When Kip does the survey – I’m guessing 88%.
Lovely way to demonstrate your ignorance. You’ll note I actually use my real name and don’t hide behind an alias
Is that you, moderator Charles Rotten. penning another fake “Griff” comment to stir up the mob here?
Very clever.
To the Grifter:
You were right to question the statement:
‘The readers here are a diverse, eclectic, multinational cohort. ‘
CORRECTED VERSION:
‘The readers here are a diverse, eclectic, multinational cohort, plus one left wing duffus. ‘
I think you undercounted the left wing duffi contingent by at least one.
Would not want Lloydo to feel left out.
Hey, now you’re excluding ghalfrunt! (I also believe that is “doofi.” Although many might use “doofuses.”)
To Nick McGinty and Wrestling Observer
I deliberately spelled duffus wrong because I think it’s funny to insult someone and spell the primary insult word wrong. Unfortunately only 47.6 percent of my jokes are recognized as jokes. Even after I explain them two or three times.
@richard – NOW you’ve managed to thoroughly insult this contrarian by including me in the majority!
I do occasionally observe wrestling, however, so you are not being insulting there. I will probably watch the retirement of The Undertaker tomorrow night with the wife. We saw the start of his long career way back when we lived in southwest New Hampshire and the only TV station we could get (on UHF, does that even exist any longer?) was the one in Manchester. She got hooked on the drama, I didn’t, but this is the “end of an era.” (I don’t get irritated – it could have been “General Hospital” or “Days of Our Lives.” Those would have been deal-breakers…)
They are multinationals, such as I, most of them formerly or currently engineering and science professionals, who reject nonsense. You make blanket, offensive, assumption laden characterisations about people you don’t know, although some of the names offering their time, energy, and wisdom here are well known and respected in their fields and beyond. It is typical of your hypocritical and uninformed approach that instead of actually learning something from these people, you just cover your ears and judge them through your ignorance.
Just to be clear, what is your educational and ethnic background? Do you have a degree in a technical field, ever worked in science or engineering? Only fair to ask since you know so much about me.
I did a similar analysis a couple of months ago using data provided by the Massachusetts Dept. of Health (go to Mass.gov and follow the Covid 19 breadcrumbs. They used to provide better data but have now moved to fear mongering with “cases” instead of reporting deaths.). My results matched yours very closely. Here in MA the average age of death is 82, compared to a life expectancy of 80, and two thirds of all the deaths occur in assisted living facilities. The sick and elderly should be protected and everyone else should live a normal life.
Paul Linsay ==> I agree with you 100%. The governmental actions have failed to focus on the elderly.
Based on ECDC data 50% of the US’s 250,000 deaths occurred between 3/18/20 and 6/29/20, 20% of them in NYC. (CDC)
C-19 arrived, culled the too many, too sick, too crammed together in contagious, poorly run elder care facilities warehoused as Medicare/Medicaid cash cows.
24% of the Covid-19 deaths occurred in nursing home/hospice. (CDC)
Japan has a densely packed population with the highest 65+ percentage yet not even 2,000 deaths. (1,963)
What do they know/do that the world does not? (WHO)
“Japan has a densely packed population with the highest 65+ percentage yet not even 2,000 deaths. (1,963)
What do they know/do that the world does not?”
Japan’s experience has fascinated me from the start, when they released people off of that cruise ship and into the general population. I would have expected a surge then, but it didn’t occur.
Their population is older, and population density is high, yet very few deaths. Why? Surely, there are some serious answers there, but I’ve seen little discussion as to what they might be. Thoughts from others here as to what those answers might be?
This might provide a clue. I believe Japan uses the BCG vaccine to prevent TB.
See: September 6, 2020
Politics Before Science
in http://www.libertyunbound.com/
Early treatments is my guess. I don’t think those are discouraged there like they are in the US. The doc who started using nebulized budesonide in the US said he got that idea from similar treatments used in Japan and Taiwan.
Japan fish consumption is high = high vit D?
Also, the rest of the diet:
Quercetin is a natural pigment present in many:
fruits – vegetables – grains
I have a question, maybe tangentially related to “Where are all the sick people?” We have a great many positive cases that are asymptomatic. Has there been any testing to see if these people developed antibodies? In other words, are they really infected with Covid or is the test picking up something else?
In a similar vein, there are various published articles putting forth the idea that the actual infection rate is a lot higher than the case count of positive tests. Have there been any studies to detect antibodies in the blood of random people who have lived through hot spots (such as NYC or Detroit) but did not, to their knowledge, have the disease?
I’ve not seen anything about organized antibody testing, other than a possible attempt in Houston, TX. The answer to “Where are all the sick people” could be that they are around us and neither we nor they know it. An antibody study would answer that question, perhaps.
George V ==> We won’t know the true story about how Covid-19 infections produce antibodies and immunity for some time yet…maybe years.
Current testing is far too sensitive to produce actionable results — it does not identify infectious persons.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0965-6
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w
George,
The problem with testing for antibodies is that it has been reported that mild and asymptomatic cases may be fought off with a T cell response with little or no antibodies being developed. Compound the problem with overly sensitive and high volume (quality control?) testing resulting in high levels of false positives. Result is nobody has a good picture of where we stand with this disease. But authorities don’t mind the false positives because they justify scaring the crap out of the public. I am pretty confident that I and my immediate family had Covid back in late January / early February before it was a “thing”. The disease started in China in the fall of 2019, is highly contagious, and China was allowing flights out of Wuhan to the rest of the world. Covid had to be circulating in North America long before the shut downs and masking orders.
As I understand it, Current Covid tests in the US use a Ct 0f 40. Far too sensitive. Does the rest of the world use the same sensitivity?
There does not to be standardization around this. I get the impression that some places run more than 40 cycles and report the Ct where a positive, if any, results.
Do some use fewer, Like the 32 that I’ve heard was standard for other viruses? IIRC, some countries used two consecutive negative tests as an indicator of recovery. That would not be possible with such a sensitive test.
Chris4692 ==> Yes, that is the case. See this report.
In the UK, this document on PCR from Public Health England contains the line – A typical RT-PCR assay will have a maximum of 40 thermal cycles, so yes the scandal is widespread.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/926410/Understanding_Cycle_Threshold__Ct__in_SARS-CoV-2_RT-PCR_.pdf
This document also shows the typical course of COVID-19 as being infectious for four and a half weeks (Figure 3), but the infectious (symptomatic) are only asked to self-isolate for ten days (asymptonatic contacts for 14 days).
What’s this “sensitive” nonsense? I thought by now everyone knew PCR is a process that improves on previous processes to correctly reassemble the genetic code from millions of fragments of DNA/RNA sliced by enzymes. IT IS NOT A DIAGNOSTIC TOOL. As for the quick tests, I can find no useful info as to how they actually work, but the search continues. It seems those 30-minute jobs work on highly suspect theories, like every time they find a somewhat complex hydrocarbon somewhere, the whole world has to be let known: “we found signs of life on Mars/Venus Youranus…”
So, throw three (marked, identifiable) dice, only the combination in exact dice number order 1,2,3 showing 2-5-3 is a coronavirus. Now take a hundred dice, throw them, and see if you can anywhere find the combination 2-5-3, no matter the order of the dice. Announce you have positive proof of the ‘Rona.
Sensitive my fooking fut.
I would just like to mention that the situation during the Spanish flu 1918 was radically different. Hygiene was not at the level we have today. No antibiotics. TB was rampant. Many people were also weak due to food rationing during World War 1. This means that many co-infections, especially pneumonia quickly resulted in many deaths during that flu epidemic. Today, with modern medicine, I think many more people would have survived. Comparison of Covid-19 with the 1918 flu epidemic doesn’t really make sense, and is mainly used as a scare tactic.
Good points. Stats from the 1968 Hong Kong flu, population adjusted, are more relevant.
Eric Vieira ==> The first model of a disastrous Covid pandemic, the Imperial College model, was based on the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, and set off the panic that continues today. The Spanish flu dropped people in the streets, killed more humans that all that died in WWI, killed more soldiers than the war itself.
I mention the comparison simply to defuse the panic and fear. I also point out just the last three flu seasons in the US.
Good point Eric, and I checked the mortality statistics in the USA in 1918 just to see how bad that pandemic was. From what I could tell, the (total) age-adjusted mortality in the US in 1918 was no different than the age-adjusted mortality in 1900, 1904, and 1907. So while 1918 was a deadlier year than the years immediately preceding and following it, it was a completely normally deadly year when compared to the previous decade. I haven’t checked similar statistics for other countries, I just chose the US because I thought it was likely to have pretty good record-keeping in those days. Another overblown pandemic?
Both good posts above, but lets not let sight of the co-morbidties of 2020 that were not as prevelant as they were 100+ years ago: obesity, diabetes, heart disease, etc., not to mention the opioid crisis and mental health issues.
True, that last one was probably around 100 years ago, but lets face it: media, social and otherwise, is much more prevalent now, and is the cause of a great deal of anxiety, etc.
For sure Caligula. We appear to be in the middle of a panic-demic, on top of the existing health deterioration that you mentioned.
I don’t mind people panicking, at least for a bit, but when governments do…it starts to get a bit anger-inducing.
I’ve worked as a health data statistician for almost 30 years, and I’d really like to get a t-shirt that paraphrases another one: “I’m a health information analyst. If you see me panic, run”.
Seriously here in Ontario, Canada we’ve shut down most of the Toronto region for what amounts to a handful of cases (read: positive results of an overly sensitive test) that are over some imaginary panic line. I don’t get it.
BTW, this website was recommended to me…maybe as a parody?
https://howsmyflattening.ca/#/home
It has Toronto as “Curving up Dangerously”, although Case Incidence, Rt, % positively, ICU are all down from last week…
The 1957 Asian flu probably k!lled more in a world with about 1/3 as many people. Estimates range from one to four million. A 2016 study found 1.1 million as best guess, in which case slightly lower than deaths attributed to COVID so far, but a rate almost three times higher.
The pandemic ended with a vaccine.
John ==> Had they been using current CDC guidelines for reporting Asian Flu deaths, the numbers would be far higher.
Sorry I missed the survey; you can add my responses now: zero is the answer to all three questions.
Now do a survey about how many people we know personally who are suffering mental calamity and its physical byproducts from being out of work or having to lay off longtime employees or having to stop supporting suppliers and other businesses. My answer is 15-20.
One good result for kids: my daughter has been forced to get much closer to her two grade school kids’ curriculum and now is contemplating private school because she sees how unchallenged they are in what is considered a good CA school district.
Jeffery ==> You can still take the survey. appreciate your weighing in.
The press and journals are full of reports of psychological damage from the constant drumbeat of fear, panic and bad news about the pandemic — despite the fact (as shown in this and many other surveys) that most people don’t even know any sick people.
I too know many people who are sick with fear and worry over Covid — and the same for kids scared about the climate, “extinctions” and a host of other popular manias.
Today was the first day I got the survey to function, where it finally accepted my final answer and indicated my answers had been accepted. In prior days efforts, it always locked up after clicking my third answer. 0 people that I know for all three, which includes the immediate neighborhood I live in, and among my closest pile of Facebook Friends.
Russel ==> Sorry you had trouble with the survey — it is on SurveyPlanet which is usually pretty reliable.
I was one of the 0-0-0s in the survey. Most years I richly earn my high ranking on Cold’n’Flu Trip Advisor – anything respiratory and I’m right there. This year, scarcely a cough, despite my tempting the thing back in March by deliberately routing my exercise walks downwind of the local hospital, despite my washing my hands exactly no more than normal, despite, having a condition which exempts me from wearing a mask, breating in all the toxic indoor air which so frightens people. Good grief, I even pay in cash. A minor head cold in the summer was gone after a couple of days. A very, very quiet year.
Nottingham has two universities, so double the density of students who, noticing no effects, want to party – the local paper has reported some of them being hit with £10,000 fines for daring to disobey orders. The city was in the highest ‘tier’ before the latest lockdown, I live on the edge of one of the hottest spots and *still* nothing.
Meanwhile, Excess Deaths bumble along much as normal, and we are told that flu is down by 98%. Or maybe 98% of the flu deaths have been called covid. The evildoers running the world economic system declare covid to be the royal road to their ‘Great Reset’, but the public are all hiding behind their muzzles too scared to find out about any of that stuff, and the MSM certainly ain’t going to tell ’em. It’s not all the lunatics running the asylum, just the surrealist psychopaths, but I’m afraid the beggars are ruining my old age with all this nonsense.
Steve C ==> “Meanwhile, Excess Deaths bumble along much as normal, and we are told that flu is down by 98%. Or maybe 98% of the flu deaths have been called covid.” Yes, and Yes.
See this story at The Stream: Whats Happened to the Flu? by Axe, Briggs and Richards.
Give it a few weeks as it’s still early in the flu season. But, first they test for CV19 and at a rate of about 500 to 1. Likely, a significant fraction are being misdiagnosed and facilities have incentives to do so, e.g. Medicare pays a 20% reimbursement bonus for positive CV tests.
Past studies showed that mask wearing was ineffective in preventing flu. Social distancing would help. The question of what happened to flu is a good one.
The excess deaths argument is nearly worthless unless there is a large change in deaths versus the prior year(s) .
With about 1 of 1,000 COVID infections leading to death, that’s not large enough to have a definitive effect on 2020 deaths.
US deaths can go up or down one percentage point in any year just by chance. With 2.8 million deaths in a recent year, a change of 280,000, up or down, could be just a random variation. Let’s say COVID kills 280,000 this year, and total deaths are 280.000 higher than the year before. How do we know the +280,000 in 2020 is not just a random year to year variation?
Richard Greene
Self Appointed
Vice President
of Random Thoughts
BS, MBA, TBW, SOHL
Kip,
On this CDC web page
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
about half way down, is a bar graph labeled
weekly number of deaths (from all causes).
It runs from week ending 1/14/17 to what appears to me to be week ending 1/07/21. Currently the data ends with week ending 11/07/20. I suspect considerable data from recent weeks has not yet reached CDC or not yet been processed.
Earlier year’s data going back decades, perhaps to the beginning of the last century or further, are tabulated on other pages but I have not tried to integrate the information into this picture. This graph shows that, for the latest four years, total deaths have been below what CDC labels as
threshold for excess deaths
almost all the time until recently. A significant change occurred with the week ending March 28, 2020. Since then, while no longer near the peak reached on week ending 4/11/20, the data would seem to indicate something unusual is still happening. While currently only a little above that threshold, total death totals are still considerably above almost all of the previous 3 and 1/4 years.
Considering there was a second peak over July and August, 2020, it does seem to me a bit premature to declare the disease danger is over unless it is possible to show that the ongoing excess deaths are from some other unusual cause.
Mike Yeadon seems to make a compelling argument in his interview, pointed out by richardw at November 21, 2020 at 6:14 am , that general restrictions on the population are useless and cause great damage of their own, based on a great deal of understanding gained over a considerable period of scientific investigation, but as has been pointed out many times on WUWT, predictions about the future are particularly difficult.
Excess deaths are substantially above normal! See https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm (for national) or https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/05/us/coronavirus-death-toll-us.html (by state) or https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6942e2.htm (also shows data by age group and by race/ethnicity). And given that the national COVID deaths from Worldometer have shot back up to levels not seen since mid-May, I’m guessing the CDC excess death count will follow and we’ll be back to 20% excess deaths on the national level soon (and way higher than that in states like South and North Dakota).
Also, the answer to “what’s happened to the flu?” is easy: global pandemic lockdown isn’t quite good enough to eliminate COVID, but the less contagious flu has been wiped out (wider flu vaccine coverage has also helped).
How does Flu propagate
How does C19 propagate
Same really so lockdown reduces both
ghalfrunt ==> The real question is “Can we stop the spread of influenzas or Covid-19?” The scientific answer, known from past experience with influenzas, is NO. Once they are loose in human society they become endemic (in the sense of “widespread within a place or population of people.”) They often fade away as diseases as the viruses mutate to less contagious forms. This is why the annual flu shot contains differing strains of influenza each year. But they never really go away.
We can vaccinate the population against the most common flu strains — which we do. We will be able vaccinate populations for Covid-19 (SARS-CoV-2 virus) soon.
We can restrict each outbreak from some areas with a lot of diligence — we could have kept it out of nursing homes and away from the elderly — but we focused on a society-wide — totally ineffective — approach and destroyed economies and businesses causing us to be unable to afford to protect and treat the most vulnerable.
C’mon Kip…masks save lives. Just look at the mask mandate in MN. Are cases surging according to the media? Are the cases non mask wearers?
🤓
Kip Hansen November 21, 2020 at 9:52 am
…Once they are loose in human society they become endemic (in the sense of “widespread within a place or population of people.”)
—————
so you agree with my thoughts that as soon as the 1st case appears in a country it is too late?
So why is trump always claiming he saved millions by banning flights and of course claiming that WHO did not allow him to do so.
Governors and mayors have authority in these matters, not the president.
Trump’s actions were severely criticized, especially by the New York people.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, early March: Says That Healthy People Should Still Be Dining Out “If you’re not sick, you should be going about your life,”
Operation Warp Speed has brought vaccines faster than any time in history. Lives will be saved.
John F Hultquist November 21, 2020 at 8:42 pm
Operation Warp Speed has brought vaccines faster than any time in history. Lives will be saved.
——————–
Warp speed did not fund the research for BioNtech vaccine (not developed in USA)
Warp speed did not fund vaccines outside US – china, russia, etc. all coming on line within a few weeks of the two announced so far
moderna requires -20°C costs $$$$$ -with profits
Pfizer/BioNtech vaccine requires -70°C and costs $$$$$$ -with profits
Oxford University/AstraZeneca requires no special storage and costs $ -at cost.
Harnsen
This is just common sense COVID science:
Keep younger, healthy people away from their jobs = no problem
Don’t protect nursing homes = no problem
Singing at church = big problem
Hollering at cops = no problem
Sitting less than six feet from strangers at the next table in restaurant = big problem
Eating your meal six inches from a total stranger seated on an airplane = no problem
As you can see, the politicians followed “the science”.
Especially that Governor A.(hole) Cuomo.
Wrote a book to guide others.
Kip wrote: “— we could have kept it out of nursing homes and away from the elderly —”
One needs to back up a year of more to have done that.
The Life Care Center of Kirkland was a hotspot before anyone was aware. The place had an average of several (5?) deaths per month so until there was a spike above that the virus spread well beyond the facility. Within the facility bad decisions were made.
Officials never caught up. This is a sad story.
The rest of the Nation seems to have taken the wrong message — exactly opposite of what you suggest.
John F Hultquist ==> The data from Northern Italy informed the medical profession that the elderly were the most at-risk population by a very large margin. Since that point, the focus should have been protecting them and leaving the rest along. Cuomo in NY ordered known Covid patients INTO NY nursing homes, directly causing thousands of unnecessary deaths.
Kip,
Protecting exceptionally at risk people is a life long commitment as most never recover out of that category. Some people are basically, or completely, unable to think adequately for themselves. Those either receive care all their lives (from the beginning of their problem) or die soon. That is the way this universe works.
As for the majority of those especially at risk people, those who are capable of deciding and acting for themselves, whether or not they choose to do so, is it rational that the rest of the population should take the decisions out of their hands and regulate their lives for them?
AndyHce ==> Protecting the elderly already confined to nursing homes was imperative but not done — in New York State — the opposite was done — they were sacrificed seemingly intentionally by the Governor.
Families should have been responsible for their own elderly (my children, say, for my wife and I). Health and Human Services agencies and Pubic Health agencies should have been assuring the protection.isolation of those oldsters living alone.
We are currently not mixing with people, getting food with minimal contact (home delivery/click and collect)
so far this year we have had no colds. Isolation is ok for a time and certainly seems to work.
Yep and the Covid is spreading. Or we could use the Ghalfrunt solution of drinking bleach 🤔
How does Flu propagate
How does C19 propagate
Similarly except that C19 has a 5-day asymptomatic infectivity and Flu but 1 day. People auto-isolate at home in bed with flu when symptoms appear.
We could simulate the flu situation if we had a low sensitivity self-administered spit test. There is one that is 20% effective at detecting on day 1 and >90% detected on day 2 and costs about half a buck each test. (Not FDA approved because it is not good enough for use in hospitals to confirm infection. [That is not its purpose, but that’s bureaucracy.])
What to do if test shows positive? Spit again right now. If this one confirms the first positive self-isolate until two consecutive negatives. If symptoms demand, go to a hospital. If most everyone did this it would be like flu with about 1 day infectivity.
Thanks for the survey.
The results were pretty much according to my own anticipation.
Here are some comforting words Naomi Seibt just Telegraphed:
Carl Friis-Hansen ==> Thanks for sharing that encouraging message.
JFW. Seibt can say anything she wants – She is not as far as i know an expert on pandemics (nor AGW – but at least Thunberg says listen to those with more knowledge!).
I presume you are also feeling encouraged by the F|at earth aficionados?
Grapefruit sez:
“We are currently not mixing with people, getting food with minimal contact (home delivery/click and collect)”
Looks like that regimen has put you in a really good mood, Grapefruit.
Contrary to the party line and well buried, smoking may actually have a protective effect (if it did not lead to co-morbidities). I find it generally difficult by now to believe any official position on any subject.
Thats why I continue to smoke my Gauloises, and in the late afternoon, I desinfect my gorge with a good mouthfull Pastis (40%).
If you are under forty, how many people do you know who have cancer? When I was forty, that number would have been zero, and of course cancer kills many more people that COVID-19.
I am now 68, and fifteen people I knew personally died last year. No one young would be able to say that, unless he had recently been a soldier in a war, or was a worker in a hospital.
For a few years in my late thirties I was poor, and lived on what used to be called skid row, in Edmonton, Canada. After two years, ten people I had known personally had been murdered. No one affluent would ever in their lives be able to say the same thing.
My point: The number of people you know who have suffered a severe illness or injury or death is dependent on your age and personal circumstances. COVID-19 is obviously affecting very few people under the age of 60, which is why there is so much resistance to the measures to suppress its spread. It’s somebody else’s problem.
Ian Coleman ==> Most of us oldsters have lots of family members — kids, grandkids, uncles/aunts, cousins, on and on. If we think of it, we will know many that have died of cancers — breast and lung cancer particularly.
For the general public, if they are themselves in their middle years, they know living people who are in their 60s and above — their parents, their uncles and aunts, grandparents even.
This survey is just meant to be a peek at how our readers here are experiencing the pandemic.
The readers here are a diverse
Number or color? It matters.
n.n ==> Diversity has almost nothing whatever to do with skin tone — ever, anywhere. Even my own children and grandchildren have differing skin tones. Judging “diversity” by skin color or hair color or eye color is one of the things that is wrong with the world. Counting the number of humans by skin tone and calling that diversity creates a falsehood. [end of sermon — kh]
Anthony Watts occasionally posts demographics and analytics for this site. WUWT currently gets about 50% of its readership from the United States, followed by Canada, Europe and Australia/New Zealand.
Occupational history and personal experience of readers is diverse. Like almost all SCIENCE based blogs — the vast majority of readers and especially those that comment are apparently male. This is an oddity that I have yet to understand.
griff, read that:
and realise, you are on the wrong path, as usual.
I agree, diversity of individuals, minority of one. Unfortunately, the popular conception is diversity of color, not limited to skin (e.g. “race”), and that belief has socially justified denying individual dignity, individual conscience, intrinsic value, and normalized color quotas, color blocs, and affirmative discrimination in lieu of affirmative action.
Judging “diversity” by skin color or hair color or eye color
Low information attributes. Sufficient for choosing a date, but not a mate.
n.n ==> I am a white California Surfer Boy by birth and boyhood. I attended a predominately black Los Angeles high school in Watts (before and after the first Watts Riots). I dated girls — not skin colors — Black girls, brown girls, Asian girls, Latina girls, and yes, white girls.
I married a blond white girl from New Jersey that I met on my first foreign merchant marine ship in Lisbon, Portugal (where we sailed, before and after the Portuguese Revolution of April 1974).
I personally have had a rather diverse life — by experience.
Precisely, girls, not colors. Diversity of individuals, minority of one. So, we agree. We see past the popular euphemism.
the vast majority of readers and especially those that comment are apparently male
Probably a matter of a sex-correlated interest priorities. Girls tend care less about the technical, especially minutiae where many boys tend to dwell. Then we grow up, date, marry, and together raise “our Posterity”, which, if not changes, influences/adjusts our perspective.
I judge diversity with one variable — the hair
– Curly hair
– Straight hair
– Glued on hair (toupee)
– Hair plugs (two ran for president this year!)
– Some hair
– No hair
– Big hair
(big hair = no brains … old Greek proverb)
– Sold all hair to science lab for experiments (me)
Actually, Kip, WUWT is limited in its diversity. Most people who post on this site have had post-secondary training in Science. (I myself studied Engineering for two years.) You notice pretty quickly how well-written most of the posts are. Lots of education apparent around here.
The mostly male thing did strike me unusual at first. Ramble around the ‘net a little, reading sites dedicated to climate alarmism, and you find a lot more women on the other side. (Or, as I like to call it, the wrong side.) This is because women are in general more fearful than men, and therefore much more susceptible to imaginary threats.
Also, not a lot of posters younger than forty. Although that’s a guess, since posters don’t usually reference their ages.
Same with chicken eggs.
White chickens can produce both white and brown shelled eggs.
Brown shelled eggs are not ‘healthier’ than white shelled eggs.
Whether diversity matters depends on how it is being considered. In this case, it is worth looking at the data. Who is dying? If people who are labelled “Black” are dying at higher numbers, then that’s worth considering. If people whose names begin with the letter “M” are dying at higher numbers, then that would be worth considering (though I’d have trouble finding a good reason for that, so my default assumption would be “statistical fluke” or a correlation with some other factor, like that M names were more popular in older generations).
In the case of COVID, excess deaths shows substantially higher increases in mortality in various non-white categorizations: see Figure 3 of https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6942e2.htm. It would not surprise me that readers of this blog are skewed white compared to the US or the global populations. (I’ll note that a similar skew is true for liberal environmentalists as well). Unfortunately, the CDC does not provide an income-based data analysis: I would guess that we would see a skew towards excess mortality in lower income Americans, which would perhaps explain part of the non-white skew (and I imagine that readers of this blog also trend towards higher incomes).
How does the overall health/cause of deaths of the black demographic compare? to whites? to average?
Obesity?
Drug/alcohol abuse?
High blood pressure?
Guns?
Kidney failure?
Diabetes?
Respiratory?
All of these health issues exacerbate C-19 and render recovery difficult if at all.
If you are going to use demographics use it everywhere, don’t cherry pick.
FBI demographics are crystal clear: blacks commit crimes at rates that are considerably higher than their demographic would suggest.
That means more police contact.
When you behave in ways that attract the police and give them shit when they show up – expect bad thangs to happen.
The point is “diversity” is relevant in the case where a) some minorities have higher fatality rates by CDC data, and b) readers of this blog are generally skewed white (an assumption on my part) and then therefore it would make sense for readers of this blog to have less exposure to deaths.
On policing: I encourage you to read https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/opinions/systemic-racism-police-evidence-criminal-justice-system/.
WaPo won’t open their opinion article without subscribing which I won’t do.
I’m Just tired of having every misery of the black race blamed on whitey.
Btw are there now only two races? black and white and a whole bunch that no longer count?
How is white privilege responsible for:
Chicago, Heyjackass.com:
YTD 651 shot & killed!!!!!!
YTD 3,188 shot & wounded!!!!!!!!!!!!
WTF?!
79.8% BLACK
16% Hispanic
WTF!?^2
Not exactly representative of the population/per demographic, eh?
Shot by police: 6 dead, 11 wounded.
Must not be newsworthy enough to foment riots.
If Garfield Park, Austin, Englewood, Humboldt were plantations the Massa would roll through with shot guns and dogs and put an end to that shit – it’s bad for the bottom line.
Maybe Kaepernick, Rahm and Obama could hold a cease fire kneeling celebration.
Ballistic vest and helmet recommended.
There is not a generic police problem.
There is not a generic race problem.
There is a specific BLACK problem.
Actually, several.
Those require a BLACK solution.
But so long as a bunch of clueless, juvenile, woke nit-twits get away with lame excuses like “white privilege” that just incite race riots, vandalism and looting (of fellow minorities) those actual problems will not get addressed.
Keep your D level up.
Sam ==> I deleted your accidental duplicate comment. Thank for reminding people to take their daily vits.
We have a very short time left to Slow the Spread with the vaccine coming around the corner. Just having most people use the vaccine will solve the “overcrowding”.
But those that don’t trust the “models” really know that it is just socialist bureaucracies that want more money and power. The more panic they make, the more they can emphasize on how they are important and at high risk.
This gives them the power to control each person, because they are the “authorities” that are empowered by the socialist mob, and because it is the “frontlines” of the battle, they need more money because it is the most dangerous.
The ChiComs, UN and the socialist EU governments, band together to shout down any dissenting voice to all their nonsense.
Once the vaccines are out. we will have many that will go so far for their beloved Socialism that they will voluntarily die for the Big Brother.
I see only one reason that any countries or states would still be urging, much less enforcing, any COVID precautions, and that is that it is a power grab in preparation for inflicting some more severe artificial calamity upon us, such as The Great Reset. I hope it’s OK to discuss that topic here.
I suffered from Hong Kong Flu in 1969, it was the worst illness I have had since Scarlet Fever at 4 years. Completely knock me down for a fortnight, whereas Scarlet Fever saw me in isolation hospital for 4 months.
So I’ve been interested in the stats for Asian and Hong Kong Flu pandemics during the current one. Taking Hong Kong Flu, in the UK it killed over 30,000 in a population of just over 50 million whose life expectency was just over 70. On purely population considerations, UK currently about 70 million over 42000 would have died as a direct consequence of CV19, as opposed to 54,626 (worldometers) who’ve died within 28 days of testing positive. For Hong Kong Flu there is a large chunk of population, the over 70s, missing. My thoughts are that CV19 is on a par with Hong Kong Flu as worst and on the population of the UK in 1969 less deadly
Ben ==> The 1968-69 Hong Kong Flu Epidemic was a bad one. I was at university — and skipped it — though classes were canceled depending on professors being down and under.
Speaking of masks, John Sununu, the Republican governor of NH recently issued a statewide mask mandate. A number of towns had already issued mask mandates, so I guess he buckled to the pressure. I thought he had more backbone than that, though. Guess I won’t be voting for him next time around.
Chris Sununu – John’s son. Not that John Sununu was any great defender of freedom; I think if he had the same proportion of refugees (that failed to learn by their own mistakes) from the People’s Republic of Massachusetts, he would have had about the same responses.
Since taking the survey and posting in that thread, a close friend has been confirmed to be “under the weather” from the virus. He’s home with flu-like symptoms. His wife hasn’t shown symptoms.
Still brings family and other associates to less than five confirmed infections plus one death.
For any readers who are thinking the news about surges, overcrowding, triage tents in hospital parking lots, etc, sounds familiar, you would be correct.
https://wmbriggs.com/post/33597/
windsong ==> Thanks for linking to my favorite statistician. Have you read his Covid Panic book?
Average age covid deaths – 84
Average age non covid deaths – 84
Shutting down the economy is futile. It is no different than trying to save lives through human sacrifice.
FerdPurple
This is GREAT news for people who are 83 or 85 years old.
Kip,
You may want to add some sort of dementia to your list.
This from the government of Alberta: https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm
Joe ==> As you probably know, dementia is a function of advanced age as well.
I got to thinking today (yeah I know that can be dangerous), has there been an accounting for those individuals who take a biologic such as Humira for arthritis and then died from COVID? Those people are highly susceptible to infections are are warned that even slight infections can turn life threatening when they would not otherwise be. If they do not account for that, I would suspect it is because biologics like Humira are widely prescribed and it would be a huge financial hit to the manufacturers if word got out not to take it and switch to Plaquenil (which is hydroxychloroquine and does not affect your immune system).
Just saw a news story that “Minnesota officials counted 86 cases that they said were related to the [Sturgis motorcycle] rally”. Wow, shocking. Seems there was actually some criticism in the mainstream about the earlier report by economists (!) claiming that 260,000 cases nationwide could be attributed to Sturgis.
jl ==> “Cases” not not not Symptomatic Illnesses.
Hi Kip,
Looking at your results I don’t see anything that might suggest Covid-19 has been overblown, or that it isn’t widespread in the US.
Taking your first question: “How many people among your immediate family, extended family, friends, acquaintances and colleagues are CURRENTLY sick (ill enough to voluntarily stay home from work, school, or normal activities) with Covid-19?”
According to Worldometers, which we might call a ‘ballpark figure’ for argument’s sake, there are currently 37,216 per 1 million US citizens infected with Covid-19. (That would include non-symptomatic cases, I presume; whereas your question would only identify the smaller population of symptomatic.)
US population is given as ~333 m. 37,216 per million is a small proportion of the US population. The number of symptomatic cases is an even smaller fraction of that. It is unlikely, outside pockets of concentration anyway, that any one individual in the US would know someone currently infected by, and symptomatic with, Covid-19. That doesn’t mean it’s not a problem, of course.
I’m a bit rushed here, but my back-of-envelope figure wasthat the average US citizen currently has about a 3-4% chance of knowing someone who has tested positive for Covid-19; probably much lower than that for people who are actually displaying symptoms. The response to your WUWT survey does not contradict the official figures. In fact they strongly support them.
Nail ==> The survey is simply a snapshot of how readers here are actually experiencing this pandemic, in regards to family, friends and colleagues being ill (as opposed to testing positive) and dying.
Compare to any recent bad influenza season, in which we all would have personally know dozens of people who currently or “during the current season” had the flu.
We are looking at real world experience to illuminate, for one thing, the fact that most of us don’t know any sick people and determine if it is “just us” or a real phenomenon.
Kip, your thoughts on the precautions mandated and voluntary people are taking. Do you think these have an affect on the numbers one way or the other? I am not saying all the precautions work, just an overall thought.
nc ==> My personal opinion is that almost all the mandates, for most people, are counter-productive and do almost no good whatsoever. However, I am aware that Opinions Vary.
If I still had a living parent who was over 70 and had several comorbidities, I would see that they were protected from exposure to the virus — even after vaccination.
If governments had left the general public just get on with it, we would have the wealth and resources to protect and treat the vulnerable.
Worldometer reports 37 total cases per 1,000 population for the USA, so the odds of anyone knowing someone who has had the virus per Kip’s survey seem reasonable.
Case: past (e.g. viral fragments, seroconversion), probable (e.g. positive test), possible (e.g. Covid-19-correlated symptoms), and progressive (i.e. Covid-19).
Imagine what your answers would be if you are a surviving resident of a nursing home in the greater New York area?
Since this disease has an age dependent hospitalization and fatality rate, your survey probably has an age dependent bias in how many people one knows who have been killed, etc. People do tend to have broader social circles, so the effect won’t be as pronounced.
I expect three basic groupings. Children – through college graduation, these people tend to associate most with others near their own age. Working age adults, work forces associations with people over broader spectra. Retirees, rapid change from forced association to voluntary associations, slow change to retirement communities, assisted living, nursing home, etc, gradually restricting associations.
Anyways, I find it interesting that there is similarity in the numbers for knowing someone who is sick, and knowing some one who has died. Freak of timing?
And the numbers of people who haven’t known someone who was sick show that a lot of us are still susceptible to the virus. I won’t get my hopes up on natural immunity building up to stop it.
Sorry if this is a repeat.
85% of US positive cases are in people under 65 years.
80% of C-19 deaths are among people over 65 years.
24% of C-19 deaths occurred in elder care, nursing, hospice situations.
Half of the US’s 520,000 deaths occurred before June 30.
So, what does the data tells US.
Fauce and the MSM are full of it!
James Donald Bailey ==> While our circle of friends — and maybe colleagues and acquaintances — will be age-related, we all have families. Everyone’s extended family contains people of all ages — from newborns to geriatrics. You and I have parents/grandparents (mine are all gone), kids, grandkids, uncles/aunts, cousins, nieces, nephews, on an on down the family tree. Some families are larger and some smaller.
Working people (not me, retired long ago) know adults across the age spectrum. School teachers know a lot of kids. Nursing Home nurses and doctors and staff know a lot of old folks.
“And the numbers of people who haven’t known someone who was sick show that a lot of us are still susceptible to the virus. I won’t get my hopes up on natural immunity building up to stop it.”
We will not stop it — even with vaccines. We can limit the impact on society in each of the upcoming influenza seasons if enough people are vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2. But it will be with us for the rest of human society, just alike all the other influenzas and corona-viruses.
Well done Kip! In three or four years time there will be many disertations written on this topic. How these papers will untangle the data is a huge question. With politicians around the world and the WHO openly and agressively speaking out about how Covid 19 has presented a wonderful opportunity to pursue totalatarian objectives it will be difficult to disentangle data that has been purposely corrupted. Currently the US is enduring a disaster of a presidental election, largley because certain politicians used this wonderful oportunity to monkey around with election procedures.
I look forward to reading disertations and analysis specifically from stataticians and economists. I hope that Dr. Lomborg takes an interest.
Cheers,
Glen
glen ferrier ==> Thank you Glen. I suggest reading Axe, Briggs and Richards’ “The Price of Panic” as a starting point.
Listen to this Pathologist/Virologist with other very impressive credentials.
His radio testimony bears out what is being said here. Stream takes a second to get started.
I am not entirely sure what this survey is meant to do but it doesn’t seem to be very useful or surprising.
Currently worldwide there are 7000 cases per million people and so if you imagine that every one of those people tells 50 others that they have the virus then you still get a number that is less than the numbers reported by Kip. With deaths again the global fatality rate is less than 1 in a thousand so it is hardly surprising that 80% of people in Kip’s survey don’t know someone who died.
Izaak Walton ==> The purpose of the survey is stated in the original essay and repeated in the essay above.
The result is not surprising at all — since I am not crazy nor am I clinically socially isolated. I have a wide circle of friends and colleagues, and a vast extended family. And my answers were 0, 2, and 0.
I wanted to know what the experience of others was. We find that my experience is the same as most other people.
I could not have been more clear when I stated “This survey was just a quick peek at the real-world experience of the readers here. I have not fooled myself into thinking that it tells the full truth about Covid illnesses or Covid deaths. It does tell us something interesting – but what is up to the readers. “
Harnsen sez:
” … I am not crazy nor am I clinically socially isolated. ”
DO YOU HAVE A CERTIFICATE TO PROVE THAT?
“I have a wide circle of friends and colleagues, and a vast extended family. ”
I HAVE A SMALL FAMILY, OR PERHAPS I SHOULD SAY A HALF VAST FAMILY
I used to do surveys of engineers back when when I used to work, in the early 2000, and the most useful survey results were from anonymous surveys using paper forms, not online surveys at work, which many engineers feared, because their online comments about corporate management, that I requested, might be traced back to them.
On line survey typical comment:
‘Engineering VP Joe Shmo should be promoted to corporate CEO’
Anonymous paper survey typical comment:
‘Engineering VP Joe Shmo should be promoted so we engineers can get finally rid of that jerk’
This COVID survey was probably a lot of work, but better than 95% of the COVID articles and studies so far, whether “scientific” or not. It was interesting, and interesting is the most important aspect of good communications. In the climate science field, “scientific study” has sort of become an oxymoron.
Harnsen sez:
” … I am not crazy nor am I clinically socially isolated. ”
DO YOU HAVE A CERTIFICATE TO PROVE THAT?
He’s not crazy, his mother had him tested. (spot The Big Bang Theory reference)
I note lots of variation from place to place.
I’m in a small population area, several small towns, with essentially one hospital. As of Friday, 2% of the hospital beds are occupied by virus patients.
[Yakima at 35 miles has a large hospital; Seattle has many. There may be leakage.]
The county had reported 22 deaths as of August 4, none since.
Some WUWT readers are also following the series at https://wmbriggs.com/
John F Hultquist ==> In a couple of years there will thousands of epidemiological studies and sociological and political studies about the pandemic — post-game analyses. All the issues will be covered. Governors like Cuomo of NY will be exposed as misguided autocrats who caused tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths while writing self-promoting books about how the were “just following the Science.”
Briggs is a must….read his book.
Currently, I do not know anyone directly that has tested and verified COVID-19.
I have heard multiple people state that they had/have COVID-19, but they did not bother getting a test.
Both of my Doctors do not see patients that might have COVID-19.
Both have signs and voice mails, that is a patient thinks or worries that they have COVID-19 they are to vitis one of the local emergency wards.
T this date, I have only known one person, a family member that had COVID-19 and that was back in early March.
He worked in spite of feeling poorly. Came home one evening and told his wife, my cousin, that he was having trouble getting his breathe.
Off they went to the hospital where he waited for hours (not knowing that he had contact direct with a verified COVID-19 patient).
The hospital finally admitted him and within a couple of days moved him to the ICU where he was intubated and sedated. For almost thirty days he was sedated into motionlessness.
Can you guess that they lived in a democrat run state?
He turned the corner and slowly regained health, but it was another couple of weeks before they removed the inserted tube and lessened his sedative.
Then he went into physical therapy and several more weeks before he was allowed to go home.
Bringing us back to the “know some sick people”…
That question really should be stated as tested and verified, since the false positives are so common, people who have COVID-19.
I’ve met too many people who assumed they had COVID-19 and have never been tested. Nor do they report any of the serious COVID-19 symptoms; only the runny nose and sore thr