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by nkkollaw 2218 days ago
This might be a rant, but it would be awesome if these new findings lead to laws that required doctors to give accurate cause of death for people that also test positive for COVID.

At least in Italy, doctors were pressured to put "COVID" as cause of death of people that were given 10 days to live because of cancer and other diseases, but also tested positive.

Newspapers went as far as saying that a policeman that was shot by a colleague by accident and had been on a coma for 3 months was the country's youngest COVID victim, because allegedly he tested positive (of course, they failed to mention he had been shot and in a coma, other journalists exposed that lie).

From what I read and understood, since in the US hospitals get reimbursed by number of patients doctors came out saying that they were pressured to put "COVID" as cause of death even without testing, just because it was presumed to be COVID because the symptoms matched.

Unfortunately, politicians want power and businesses want to make money—and other people have their own agenda. This pandemic and been spun out of proportion by people that gain from it, at the expense of workers and most importantly small businesses, and at the advantage of China (and perhaps Amazon)—who are the only ones who are actually making money.

I wish the world was less corrupt—or at least people that are given positions of power in good faith.

2 comments

> This might be a rant, but it would be awesome if these new findings lead to laws that required doctors to give accurate cause of death for people that also test positive for COVID.

In England that law already exists. It's called the Coroners and Justice Act. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2009/25/contents

You want to read about the reforms which arose out of the Shipman and Mid Staffs scandals (the Shipman Inquiry and the Francis Inquiry). You can read about those here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/changes-to-the-de...

There are three level of excess deaths in E+W

Those that are defiantly covid

Those that mention covid on the certificate

Those in excess of level of normal deaths over last 5 years

That puts covid deaths at between 40k and 70k. With an IFR across the country of between 1 and 2% based on the latest antibody tests.

That’s disastrous and we can only hope that either the most vulnerable have been disproportionately exposed or the antibody tests are massively overreading false negatives.

Doesn't the third level also include those who died from the side effects caused by the lockdown?
Yes, hence the large gap in death estimation
Yes, in England there is no such thing as dying from old age. But this is still considered an official reason in Italy for example.
The Shipman reforms were repealed by the coronavirus laws!
Noice.
Citation for the shot police officer's name?

People seem to have chosen bad faith attack media and elected bad faith leaders. That's why the US, UK, and Brazil are doing particularly badly.

Yeah, seems like forming a national (or at least regional) consensus around basic facts like "this is dangerous and so we should really self-enforce some sort of social distancing" seems to be the main discriminating factor.

Who'd have thought that being distracted with pointless discussions about what the weather was and where a shooting did or did not happen could be detrimental to your nation's (mental) health? <shrug>

> People seem to have chosen bad faith attack media and elected bad faith leaders. That's why the US, UK, and Brazil are doing particularly badly.

This is something we tend to assume somewhat intuitively, but I'd love to see some actual research on it.

The relationship between weakened trust in media and a societies pandemic response performance is not a trivial research question.

I wouldn't even necessarily trust the premise that overall trust declined. Could as well be perception or based on publisher selection.

... and that didn't jet include seriously operationalizing or discussing the nebulous "bad faith leaders" term or their relationship to pandemic response performance.

> That's why the US, UK, and Brazil are doing particularly badly.

And Russia.

How did you arrive to this conclusion?

A significant number of ill people is only in Moscow and a couple of other cities, and they are doing good if you compare them to other cities in the world with the same population.

This line of thought sounds exactly how the US got into such bad shape with this virus. "Oh, it's just in the cities" Until it's not.
I haven’t kept in touch recently, but for a long time NY alone was responsible for 50% of the total cases and deaths, presumably overwhelmingly driven by the NYC metro. If you ignore that outlier, is the US in dramatically worse shape than other countries? How bad is the spread in rural America?
I can appreciate your logic. But think about total number of cases in the US. If you divide that in half (according to your logic) there would still be 800,000 cases in the rest of the U.S. That's still roughly the same amount of cases in the next 3 countries COMBINED.

Now think about the percentage of world population that the U.S. accounts for. Our infection rate is inexcusable. And getting worse.

There is a significant portion of the country that has politicized a viral infection -- and that line of thinking is just making this a worse situation.

Since at least a few weeks ago when it hit meat processing plants in the plains, extremely bad.
From reports of various people in Russia that had the misfortune to deal with Russian healthcare system.

“Doing good” because doctors aren’t allowed to attribute death to covid is not really “doing good”.

Russia seems to have an odd problem with window safety: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/04/europe/russia-medical-wor...
In Putin's Russia, window open you!
And Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Sweden, Turkey, Iran, etc etc

Does anyone know of any large country that managed to:

- not lockdown

- keep the disease under control

?

Taiwan.

The country has 23M inhabitants, most of them are clustered in a few densely populated metro areas (Taipei, Kaohsiung, Taichung–Changhua, Taoyuan–Zhongli, Tainan and Hsinchu). Taiwan had many daily flights to/from China, including daily directs from Wuhan (stopped 31 December 2019). Taiwan is one of the world's older countries (median age ~43). Taiwan permitted the docking of the Diamond Princess [2] and allowed passengers to disembark in Keelung (near Taipei), on 31 January, before the ship left for Japan. The ship was subsequently found to have numerous confirmed infections onboard. In reaction, Taiwan's government published the 50 locations where the cruise ship travelers may have visited and asked around 600k citizens who may have been in contact with the tour group to conduct symptom monitoring and self-quarantine if necessary. None were confirmed to have COVID-19 after 14 days had passed. (The only advantage Taiwan had was that facemasks were widely used and even expected on public transport for years.) For all those reasons, Taiwan was at unusually high risk from Covid.

Yet, no lockdown.

No country managed the disease better than Taiwan. We should learn from Taiwan. See [1] for an analysis of Taiwan's response from early March 2020.

It is interesting to reflect upon why most countries ignored Taiwan. The World Health Organization's locking out Taiwan on China's request is probably one reason. Is it the only one?

[1] C. Y. Wang, C. Y. Ng, R. H. Brook, Response to COVID-19 in Taiwan: Big Data Analytics, New Technology, and Proactive Testing. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32125371/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_Princess_(ship)

The Taiwanese have been practicing wearing face masks since the early 90's. My first time there in 1991, up to 30% wore face masks when in crowded spaces. My last time in 2018, up to 80% wore face masks when in crowded spaces.
??? Last 3 times I went to Taiwan I didn't see 80% wearing face masks in crowed places. I have pictures from this last December 2019 as well January 2018. Walking around shopping centers, being on the subway, going to night markets, no one is wearing any masks. At least no in Taipei or Dansui
Large country: Vietnam

- More than 2x population of California

- Next to China geographically

- Zero death from COVID so far [1]

- Has a very active campaign on raising awareness for COVID, including the famous COVID song.

[1] https://news.google.com/covid19/map?mid=%2Fm%2F01crd5

Vietnam has used targeted lockdowns. Overall Vietnams strategy was very aggressive on all fronts.

https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/04/21/vietnam-has-reported-...

Given that almost nobody suggested doing nothing, I imagine that a targetted lockdown is really the opposite of a country-wide lockdown. Without elaboration "lockdown" is usually understood as referring to a country-wide lockdown.
AFAIK Germany has done much better than the other ones on your list.
Anders Tegnell, some say the head of Swedish plan against COVID was recently on BBC HARDtalk. You can hear his views on the plan they implemented.
Like the British numbers, the Swedish ones have yet to peak, and they are at 0.4/1000 fatalities (ie four times the German numbers I cited in my sibling comment).

If your primary goal was prevention of loss of life, the Swedish approach doesn't look so hot either.

The primary plan was to keep the load on the health care system within capacity. Preventing loss of life due to insufficient availability of health care. Which according to the models looked like the major contributing factor that could be controlled.
You can’t know whether the lockdown saved lives until after you see whether countries that locked down have another wave of deaths after reopening.

It’s possible that Britain only delayed deaths by a few months, which is why they currently look better than Sweden.

I am struggling to reconcile "the british numbers have yet to peak" with stories like that:

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-disappearing-so-fast-...

As for deaths, they have peaked in early April in England (see first spreadhseet "COVID 19 total announced deaths"):

https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas...

Why do you think Swedish numbers has yet had to peak? As far as I can tell they peaked in first half of April when the infection peaked in Stockholm and since then it has been bad but stable. We might see a smaller peak now in the end of May when it peaks in Gothenburg.
Yeah, your list kind of lacks nuance. Eg compare

    https://covid.observer/de/#daily
to

    https://covid.observer/gb/#daily
and

    https://covid.observer/de/#per-capita
to

    https://covid.observer/gb/#per-capita
The German numbers peaked 2020-04-06, the British numbers have yet to peak. The former are at 0.099 fatal cases per 1000 citizen, the latter at 0.54
Looking at cumulative graphs like that is misleading. It's also impossible to conclude anything about peaking in the UK from the total figures, as the baseline for testing has been changing as the number of tests has increased rapidly in the last few weeks. Fortunately there is one dataset that has remained constant throughout. In the government's daily releases https://www.gov.uk/guidance/coronavirus-covid-19-information... there are "pillar 1" statistics. This number is the hospital admissions that test positive, and it's the only data set that has been gathered in a consistent way throughout. The pillar 1 stats peaked at 5903 new cases on April 5th. Yesterdays pillar 1 new cases were 1277, so the UK cases indeed have peaked and have declined significantly since the peak. They're being a bit stubborn at decreasing below 1000 per day though.
Japan maybe but it's unclear why at this stage.
One important aspect is that in Japan, there were no huge clusters in old folks homes.

There are many others, but this is one of the most important.

Naively, could a factor be that in Japan wearing masks all the time was already normal practice, long before this pandemic?
No, people did not wear masks "all the time" nor did even "most" people wear masks. Go to any image search. Find images before February. (Search Hardly a mask in sight. They are common enough no one finds them strange but they weren't remotely the norm either.

https://www.google.com/search?q=tokyo+crowded+before:2019-12...

https://www.google.com/search?q=tokyo+station+crowded+before...

> And Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Sweden, Turkey, Iran, etc etc

This assertion grossly misrepresents the facts.

Italy and Spain were one of the first countries after China to be massively affected by covid19.

They endured a fast and entirely unexpected rise in infection rates during a period where WHO was still repeating the Chinese regime's claims that covid19 didn't spread among humans.

Still, once they started to track the disease and register hundreds of of deaths in patients infected with the disease, they acted decisively. Not only regarding quarantine and social distancing but also putting up massive field hospitals like Madrid's IFEMA hospital.

Spain and Italy's government did not overreacted or downplayed the threat. The UK, US, Brazil and Russia's government started by either pretending it did not existed, assumed they could ride the wave while doing nothing at all, or that everything would just kill off a bunch of people and vanish without any need to worry. Arguably, the government of Brazil is still in the denial stage.

That approach to an epidemic is world's apart than the approach taken by either Spain or Italy or France or Portugal or Greece or Germany or any other country in the world whose government decided to act responsibly and looking after their citizens best interests.

>They endured a fast and entirely unexpected rise in infection rates during a period where WHO was still repeating the Chinese regime's claims that covid19 didn't spread among humans.

Do you have any evidence from that? China locked down 11 million people in Wuhan on January 23[0] which was a whole week before the first cases showed up in Italy[1].

[0]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-who-idUSKBN1...

[1]: https://www.corriere.it/cronache/20_gennaio_30/coronavirus-i...

There is some current US right-wing propaganda that China was lying to (in some versions, paying off or running) the WHO to intentionally spread the virus. It's effective because most people don't know the difference between "no confirmed spread between humans" (which the WHO said early in the pandemic) and "confirmed no spread between humans" (which they did not, but is what the propaganda claims was said).
I agree about Italy, but I don't agree about Spain.

By March 8th 2020 there were 366 deaths in Italy and over 7000 registered infected, according to: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/

The same day the Spanish government let hundred of thousands take part in the 8th of March International Women's Day rallies all over Spain: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-womens-day-spain-idUSKBN2...

According to the Reuters article there were already 589 confirmed cases in Spain at that time, 202 of them in Madrid.

Since Spain did not react earlier I don't think it is right to say the following about Spain (not referring to Italy here): "Spain and Italy's government did not overreacted or downplayed the threat".

Spain was following the indications of the OMS at that point. The pandemic was not declared until March 11th, three days after Woman's Day.

By default, anyone can rally in Spain at any point. They don't seek authorization for the government, they have it by default. It can only be revoked and not granted. While there probably was some thought given to preventing the rallies, given what the OMS was saying at the time it looked like an over reaction. It was, of course, an error in hindsight, but I don't think it's indicative of a big failure of leadership.

> The same day the Spanish government let hundred of thousands take part in the 8th of March International Women's Day rallies all over Spain: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-womens-day-spain-idUSKBN2....

On March 8th Spain barely registered 1k cases, and counted zero deaths due to covid19.

The first confirmed death in Spain due to covid19 was registered on March 9th.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Spain

It makes no sense to criticize a democratic government to impose emergency measures a kin of totalitarian and oppressive regimes just because there were barely 1k cases of an atypical pneumonia which even the World Health Organization claimed that wouldn not spread between humans.

Italy had 79 total cases on 22nd Feb, a full month after China confirmed H2H and went into full lockdown. China had 10k+ cases by 31st Jan, confirming the exponential growth of the virus. Countries had ample time to come together and act. They were caught blind because they were actively looking away. Look at the entire South East Asia, Taiwan, South Korea to see what proactive measures look like.
Italy began engaging similar proactive measures on 23 Feb, including lockdowns of towns with confirmed spread. We just don't remember it that way because their proactive measures didn't work.
Japan, Sweden, Taiwan.
Sure, here it is: https://www.ilrestodelcarlino.it/bologna/cronaca/muore-di-co... (this is the first result on Google, but it was all over the news).

Title of the article: "Muore di Covid a 30 anni: è la vittima più giovane", which translates into "30-year-old dies of Covid, he's the youngest victim yet".

Article starts with: "Dying younger than 30 for Coronavirus: a cruel fate, that of Michele Grauso, 29-year-old financier (he would have turned thirty in August)."

Second paragraph, finally mentions the small detail that he had also been shot in the head and had been in a coma for 2 years: "He was hospitalized in a vegetative state in a private facility here in the city. A coma from which he had never come out since a partner in 2017 shot him in the head by mistake..."

On TV, most news channels didn't even mention the coma. The family actually complained and it came out.

Not sure if news want to be sensationalistic for clicks, or because they directly get paid to keep the level of panic high by whoever makes money from the emergency (which is many, many people in Italy). Probably both.

There is no doubt fear mongering about this topic exists in the media. This shouldn't be surprising. The death coding is surprising, at least to me. This idea of coding deaths in this way is not limited to Italy, but is happening in many countries including the U.S.

Dr. Deborah Brix replied to a reporter asking questions about death coding methods by saying that the U.S. was using liberal methods. In this article Professor Walter Riaccardi (scientific adviser to Italy’s minister of health), complains about such coding methods:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...

So he'd been alive for two years in a coma? And presumably "stable"? And then contracts coronavirus and dies? It does sound like he'd have still been alive if he'd not contracted the virus.
You're right!

If a lightning hit the hospital and made the power go out and turn his life support off, they would've written he was killed by a lightning.