The deaths were always real. Putting the whole planet on hold because some 80 years old with three associated illnesses died is a bit borderline SF and a bit borderline stupid.
It's not going to be 80 year olds dying if the hospitals are overwhelmed. 40% of people in ICU in italy are 19-40, basically, those who make up the majority of the workforce.
19-40 makes up 0.25% of the deaths (4 in total) [0]
In the US, of people aged 20-44, "only" 2.0-4.2% are admitted into ICU, significant, but making up only 12% of the ICU admissions, and 20% of the hospitalizations. [1]
I think you're confusing "dead" with "in the ICU". If you listen to the various interviews with Italian Drs, you'll learn that to make a recovery from the full-blown infection requires spending weeks on ventilation. So looking at the deaths count does not accurately capture the real problem, which is that you have an accumulated pile of people who are severely sick but will probably make some sort of recovery eventually. In the meantime your health system is offline.
I don’t believe that could possibly be true. The current ICU makeup in the US is 2-4% for ages 20-44. That’s a 10-20x increase you’re proposing. And yes, you can say that they’re triaging, but for this to be possible you’d need truly enormous numbers of infected individuals AND tons and tons of triaging going on which doesn’t feel accurate based on what news says.
It looks startling, but could be true. Reportedly, the health workers in Italy had to do some fairly brutal prioritisation in triage. If you have a lot more patients requiring ICU than you have stations, you end up with a high proportion of younger patients in ICU even if they are a low proportion overall.
Can't find the Italy link, but here's an article talking about hospitalizations and young people including alarming ICU cases: www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/03/19/younger-adults-are-large-percentage-coronavirus-hospitalizations-united-states-according-new-cdc-data/
Quote from the movie The Big Short: "Every 1 percent unemployment goes up, 40,000 people die, did you know that?". That is probably an exaggeration, but I really hope people in power know what they are doing at the moment.
>The deaths were always real. Putting the whole planet on hold because some 80 years old with three associated illnesses died is a bit borderline SF and a bit borderline stupid.
Unfortunately this approach doesn't work unless you somehow deal with the relatives of the millions of 80 year olds who are now pissed off that the government let them die and their bodies rot in the streets, and you arrange for the army for force medical providers not to try to treat some proportion of the dying.
"More than 75% had high blood pressure, about 35% had diabetes and a third suffered from heart disease."
I feel like a huge number of Americans have high blood pressure and heart disease. Seems like it will still be very serious for a large number of people.
>705 were aged 20 to 44, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Between 15% and 20% eventually ended up in the hospital, including as many as 4% who needed intensive care.
That's not a shocking number to you? 15% - 20% of people aged 20-44 ended up hospitalized? Even if no deaths were involved, that many young people ending up in the hospital is concerning.
I would be careful not to confuse correlation with causation here. Most old people have medical conditions. For example, about 75% of older people have high blood pressure [1] so seeing a 75% rate in the virus fatalities should not mean much.
I suspect age and immune function drive mortality, and the other factors are merely along for the ride.
When I studied medicine 15 years ago 130-139 mm Hg was not considered high blood pressure. We were young students and we were toying everyday measuring our blood pressure. Most males had over 130.
"The prevalence of borderline hypertension was calculated by determining the number of persons who had systolic pressures between 140 and 160 mm Hg or who had diastolic pressures between 90 and 95 mm Hg."
This is more inline with what I've been thought in med school in my time.
Don't be ridiculous. You can discuss the distribution of deaths, but the deaths are real.
A 2% death rate is still 2%. That's huge. It still has the potential to overwhelm any country's health system.