Does anyone know where to find absolute numbers on age distributions of people currently hospitalized with C19? We’ve seen enough misunderstandings of data in the news that I prefer to see data myself.
(Bonus points for “With-vs-From” data, but I haven’t been able to find that broken out in any public dataset.)
You saying this is a pretty clear demonstration that you're not going to understand the data if it's given to you, which is one reason people haven't dug out the spreadsheets for you.
There’s a very tired conspiracy that people can walk into an ER with e.g., a fatal gunshot wound, get tested positive for COVID, and then we are inflating the numbers and blaming their death on the virus.
Not looking to start or participate in a conspiracy, but I do think it’s valid to ask for both numbers: The number of people hospitalized (or died) who have C19, and the number of people hospitalized (or died) because of C19. Unless the coding systems simply can’t make that distinction, it seems like a no brainer to publish both numbers. The conspiracy theorists lose traction, and we get more data.
Despite this, I see precious few C19 dashboards that show the ratio. We’re lucky to see one that describes precisely what is counted as a hospitalization. We’ve had plenty of time to figure out how to report this, I’m stunned that there isn’t more transparency.
> Unless the coding systems simply can’t make that distinction
They probably can’t, assuming that they haven’t adopted a more complex (and, consequently, probably less reliable at what it purports to represent) diagnostic categorization than is generally used for other purposes in healthcare; the usual systems can distinguish admitting and primary diagnoses and diagnoses that are neither admitting nor primary (though I don’t know that the distinction is in what is shared for public health reasons), but it can’t distinguish between “diagnosis that are part of the reason that they were admitted to or not yet released from the hospital” and “diagnoses that aren’t part of that despite being present”.
At least, that’s my understanding based on a couple decades of contact with health IT systems and the associated data models.
Then you haven't been around long enough to absorb all the perverse incentives there are around how things get coded, and ways to use metrics in novel and completely unintended ways.
My Aunt's friend's liver had failed - I think she was going to get fluid drained off her liver semi-regularly [0], and was getting worked up for a liver transplant. Eventually she started hospice care. This woman tested negative for COVID-19 a week before she died, but the postmortem test came back positive.
My uncle (an MD) blew his gasket, "SHE DIED OF COVID", but I think really she was dying anyways. Maybe the virus pushed her over the edge, but she most certainly did NOT "die of covid". I should look up this death certificate.
The years of life lost to COVID-19 is minuscule - many deaths are simply "pulled forward" by 6 months or a year.
The deaths of teenagers and young adults who kill themselves because of the response to the pandemic are tragic [1, for example]. 60+ years of life lost vs. 0 years lost by my Aunt's friend (who was already on hospice).
> he years of life lost to COVID-19 is minuscule - many deaths are simply "pulled forward" by 6 months or a year.
Imagine your aunt is being transported to the hospice and there is a road traffic accident and she dies in that accident. What killed her, the RTA or her failing liver?
Imagine she gets to the hospice safely, and a negligent nurse gives her a triple dose of some medication and she dies. What killed her, the failing liver or the incompetent nurse?
People seem to misunderstand how cause of death is worked out.
> he years of life lost to COVID-19 is minuscule - many deaths are simply "pulled forward" by 6 months or a year.
We know from the first wave that covid-19 was killing people on average 11 years before they would have died otherwise.
How many children wind up in the hospital from the flu, pneumonia, and so on every year? Those are more deadly to children than covid is. Why are you being made to freak out about this yet you likely have gone your entire life never having a care in the world for children with those other diseases? Without having to change a single aspect of your life to prevent those other diseases? Why is this different?
This is believable if you remember that complication rates are a variable independent from a virus's infectiousness. The more aggressively it spreads, the more likely at least one person will need hospitalisation, even in a virus with a very low complication rate in general. Or, in other words, there are so many children getting it that the 0.002% complication rate or whatever it was starts showing more.
I often wondered if there was a mechanical explanation for this originally. Young children are smaller than adults so aren’t getting covid since they can’t get coughed on, similar to glasses helping prevent spread slightly among the nearsighted. However once a kid gets it, the height differences are removed and so kids get it from each other.
I doubt it, a sneeze is probably heavier than air and would sink so kids would be more prone since they’re closer to the ground and hence would have greater exposure.
Bad news, given that most of the vaccines in the pipeline were not tested on children.
Edit: -1 karma now without any rebuttals. Why? It is true, children were considered a population with the least risk during development of the vaccines.
That means that if we want to inoculate them, new trials must be run, necessarily taking some time. Or we can waive the trials and hope that what works for adults, works for children as well. Possible, but with unknown risks.
Britain kept schools open after the first lock down. That now appears to have been a mistake. I expect they will close them now. In the US we are gearing up to put kids back in school in person despite the UK variant also spreading here. Worse yet is that vaccines haven't been tested in kids.
So as we sit here on a precipice contemplating about what to do, I do know that kids aged 12+ can get the monoclonal antibody treatments so if your kids develop symptoms get them tested so they can be treated.
Younger kids are still SOL I think...
From the CDC, you can turn the plot lines off and on on the left hand side. Focus on the growth rate in pediatric population. The trend in age group 0-4 is disturbing.
Isn't that the cumulative rate? It looks near-linear to me, which would mean consistent growth rate since March.
I think it's read as "how many people in (age group) have been hospitalized with C19" - note that the lines for all age groups are strictly increasing. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
(Bonus points for “With-vs-From” data, but I haven’t been able to find that broken out in any public dataset.)