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Cont: The One Covid-19 Science and Medicine Thread Part 4

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zooterkin said:
Covid hasn’t gone away, and is still killing about 1000 people a week in the UK:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1675920908462989324.html
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That's imho very misleading interpretation. It's half a year .. and it's half a year which typically contains flu season. Without more data, it doesn't say how many were killed by covid, and especially not how many are dying now.
Here in Czech Republic 3 people died of Covid in June. Nobody in 3 weeks. As the summer set it, covid is gone, together with other virues respiratory diseases. I doubt it would be different in UK.
 
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Hmmmm…. I wonder about a couple of things there.

The 2021 excess deaths may have been influenced by mitigation strategies. Presumably the shockingly high number of deaths in the beginning of the month was met with some kind of response (I don’t remember though) suggesting they were lower than they otherwise would have been. And presumably that is a better gauge.

But also the numbers for 2013, 2015 and 2018 were higher than in 2021 and now. What accounted for those excess deaths?

2022 was far lower than most years. Could this represent a year of mortality displacement which subsequently skewed the excess deaths baseline?

I have no idea myself so I would be interested in others who can add their own expertise instead. But the Twitter thread uses a lot of sensationalist language which puts me off (“Do you get it yet?” “It’s horrifying” etc…)
 
Dr.Sid said:
That's imho very misleading interpretation. It's half a year .. and it's half a year which typically contains flu season. Without more data, it doesn't say how many were killed by covid, and especially not how many are dying now.
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It specifically addresses that point.
Here in Czech Republic 3 people died of Covid in June. Nobody in 3 weeks. As the summer set it, covid is gone, together with other virues respiratory diseases. I doubt it would be different in UK.
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Are people still being routinely tested for Covid there? There is very little testing being done in the UK now, so it's hard to say what the numbers of infections are, though the ZOE Covid study is still showing some. The thread also shows there are indications that Covid infection increases the chance of heart problems and strokes, as well as potential damage to any other organ. Covid may be the underlying cause of death by other causes, and the more time you're infected the greater the risk.
 
zooterkin said:
Covid hasn’t gone away, and is still killing about 1000 people a week in the UK:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1675920908462989324.html
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Utter bollocks, and not even close to being supported by the idiotic article you linked to.

In particular, this:

angrysoba said:
But also the numbers for 2013, 2015 and 2018 were higher than in 2021 and now. What accounted for those excess deaths?
Click to expand...

Looks to me like the writer is a sensationalist idiot who is trying to scaremonger on a variety of subjects. OMG WTF...

https://threadreaderapp.com/user/_CatintheHat

Covid isn't killing 1000 people in the world a week now. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
 
zooterkin said:
Are people still being routinely tested for Covid there? There is very little testing being done in the UK now, so it's hard to say what the numbers of infections are, though the ZOE Covid study is still showing some. The thread also shows there are indications that Covid infection increases the chance of heart problems and strokes, as well as potential damage to any other organ. Covid may be the underlying cause of death by other causes, and the more time you're infected the greater the risk.
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No, it shows correlation. Not causation. Might be also effect of vaccination, Biden administration, or paper straws. I mean yeah, it's most likely covid .. but this type of data can't show that.
Also the data end in end of May. It's July.
 
The Atheist said:
Covid isn't killing 1000 people in the world a week now. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
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Yeah, right!

Delayed reporting in many countries makes it easy for The Atheist to come up with claims like this one, so let us look at the facts instead:

Cumulative confirmed COVID-19 deaths (Our World in Data, April 1 to June 23, 2023): From 6.90 to 6.95 million, approximately 50,000 registered COVID-19 deaths in 12 weeks, i.e. considerably more than the 12,000.
In New Zealand alone, a country whose statistics can be assumed to be better than average, the number death toll went from 2,662 to 3,077. 415 COVID-19 deaths, i.e. almost 35 a week.
NZ is not a big country, population-wise, 5.2 million, in comparison to the population of the world: 8 billion.

In other news:
TOKYO -- The number of coronavirus infections has been on the rise across Japan again, and the situation is especially serious in Okinawa Prefecture, with one health care expert saying, "The medical system could collapse as early as next week, where people who need to be hospitalized cannot be admitted."
COVID cases surge in Okinawa amid concern over possible medical system collapse (The Manichi, June 24, 2023)
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In Japan, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare announced on June 23 that the number of new COVID-19 cases reported from about 5,000 medical institutions nationwide for fixed-point observations between June 12 and 18 stood at 5.60 per institution. This is 1.10 times the number reported the previous week, and case numbers have been on an upward trend. The infection situation in Okinawa Prefecture is particularly serious, forcing restrictions on emergency medical services, according to a Mainichi report.
The number of patients in Okinawa Prefecture from June 12 to 18 was 28.74 per medical institution, a 4.73-fold rapid increase in just over a month since immediately after the status of COVID-19 was downgraded to “category 5,” or the same level as seasonal influenza, under Japan’s infectious disease control law.
Japan: COVID-19 surge reported in Okinawa (Outbreak News, July 2, 2023)
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The Atheist said:
Utter bollocks ... idiotic article ... sensationalist idiot ... scaremonger ... OMG WTF...
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The Atheist said:
I note the Catinthehat idiot hasn't bothered revisiting their dire warnings about "arcturus" from April, which they predicted would cause a huge wave of death.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1647260937181691909.html
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The Cat in the Hat seems to be alive and well and very active!

EXCESS DEATHS… a thread🧵
There have been 25,700 excess deaths in the UK so far this year (source: CMI).
That averages out at OVER 1,000 excess deaths a week.
Now I hope you’re sitting comfortably because I’ve been doing some digging & there’s a lot more to this story…
Cat in the Hat (Twitter, July 2,2023)
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Wiki has an interesting article about minimizers:
Minimisation or minimization is a type of deception involving denial coupled with rationalisation/rationalization in situations where complete denial is implausible. It is the opposite of exaggeration. Minimisation, or downplaying the significance of an event or emotion, is a common strategy in dealing with feelings of guilt.
Minimisation (psychology) (Wikipedia)
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Dr.Sid said:
That's imho very misleading interpretation. It's half a year .. and it's half a year which typically contains flu season. Without more data, it doesn't say how many were killed by covid, and especially not how many are dying now.
Here in Czech Republic 3 people died of Covid in June. Nobody in 3 weeks. As the summer set it, covid is gone, together with other virues respiratory diseases. I doubt it would be different in UK.
Click to expand...


Are you sure? In Denmark, we had one of the best months of June in years - holiday-wise, not agriculturally (no rain!) - and yet we still had 48 COVID-19 deaths.
Czechia went from 42,674 on April 1 --> 42,810 June 28. Cumulative confirmed COVID-19 deaths (Our World in Data)
Many countries delay reporting, particularly in the summer months. People are on vacation, and one wouldn't want to scare away those German tourists!
 
dann said:
Are you sure? In Denmark, we had one of the best months of June in years - holiday-wise, not agriculturally (no rain!) - and yet we still had 48 COVID-19 deaths.
Czechia went from 42,674 on April 1 --> 42,810 June 28. Cumulative confirmed COVID-19 deaths (Our World in Data)
Many countries delay reporting, particularly in the summer months. People are on vacation, and one wouldn't want to scare away those German tourists!
Click to expand...

Worldiddata sadly has very unreliable data now. Nobody cares to report it properly. Even local data are quite unreliable. Certainly no local data source shows anything as 136 deaths from April to June. I guess it's caused by exactly what you warn about .. delays.
I'd suggest https://www.covdata.cz/cesko.php .. it's in Czech only but works perfectly when translated with google translate.
 
dann said:
Our World in Data, April 1 to June 23, 2023...
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Edited by sarge: 
edited to remove uncivil content


I used the word "now" which indicates at this time.

Not two months ago, not three months ago, today and from today forward.

Current 7-day average of daily deaths is as I posted, 73. 73 people a day for 7 days is less than 1000.

Edited by sarge: 
edited to remove uncivil content
 
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As mentioned before:
dann said:
Delayed reporting in many countries makes it easy for The Atheist to come up with claims like this one
Click to expand...

So let us look at the available facts again. I have chosen Japan as an example since I already mentioned the current situation in Okinawa:
Cumulative confirmed COVID-19 deaths in Japan May 11 to June 28 (Our World in Data): 74,694 --> 74,694. Seven weeks, zero C-19 deaths!
Hurrah! Japan has achieved ZeroCovid!

It is even more impressive when compared to the situation in January 2023:
In January, Japan logged a whopping 10,124 COVID-19 deaths, the highest ever in the country since the beginning of the pandemic.
Japan’s COVID-deaths are at an all-time high. What’s age got to do with it? (FirstPost, Feb 3, 2023)
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So forget the quotations in post 2,991 about the health-care system in Okinawa being on the brink of collapse. There is obviously no problem, everything is fine, and nobody dies.

Or could, just could it be a question of registering and reporting?
As the category of COVID-19 was changed to a Category V Infectious Disease under the Infectious Disease Control Law, the data for May 7, 2023 is the final aggregate value on this site.
The data on this site has not been updated since the last update date (16:00 on May 9, 2023).
Visualizing the data: information on COVID-19 infections (COVID-19 as of May 7, 2023)
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So this is what we have to look forward to: Country after country will stop reporting their COVID-19 death toll, and The Atheist will continue to report the dwindling world numbers as if they were somehow at least still remotely connected to reality, and in the end COVID-19 will seem to have been nothing but a bad dream.

The Atheist said:
... difficult for non-English speakers to understand tenses ... Feel free to argue the point when you understand.
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Okinawa is on bring of collapse, because it's small prefecture with few hospitals, which are usually not needed, as it's tropical location where respiratory diseases are not a big problem. Especially not during summer. But it's also popular summer destination, and yes, Japan is not over with Covid, and it is actually on (very slow) rise again.
But no other prefecture has issues, as they don't suffer from sudden influx of possibly infected people.
And we were talking about UK, and then the world. Situation in Japan is not typical, and mostly irrelevant.
 
I didn't claim that the situation in Japan (or Okinawa) is typical.
And it is possible that part of the problem is local hospital capacity, but that doesn't change the fact that the "tropical location where respiratory diseases are not a big problem" is now inundated with C-19 cases, and the surge there isn't slow:

The number of new coronavirus cases is rebounding again as Japan deals with its ninth wave of infections, prompting officials in hardest-hit Okinawa Prefecture to urge residents to stock up on food and medical supplies and ask people with mild symptoms to refrain from using emergency hospital services.
According to weekly statistics released Friday by the health ministry, the number of new COVID-19 infections reported from around 5,000 designated hospitals and clinics in the week through Sunday was 30,255, or 6.13 per institution. That’s up from 27,614, or 5.6 per institution, a week before.
In Okinawa, where case levels are the highest in the nation, the number of new cases per institution was 39.48, up from 28.74 a week before and marking an increase for six consecutive weeks.
COVID-19 cases continue to rise, straining health care system in Okinawa (Japan Times, June 30, 2023)
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It is summer in the rest of Japan, too. I doubt that the current surge can be described as "very slow" when the media is already talking about a surfacing ninth wave:
EDITORIAL: Vital information for the public crucial as COVID 9th wave surfaces (The Asahi Shimbun, July 5, 2023)


ETA: Graph (also here if Twitter doesn't work for you.)
 
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1.1 per week was slow rise. 1.6 is not slow anymore. What could be the cause ?
Maybe covid is still kept at bay in Japan using masks alone, and not crowd immunity. Relaxed atmosphere on Okinawa could then lead to change in spread factor.
I doubt it would be people density alone .. Okinawa summer resorts would not beat Tokyo station in the morning. Or maybe there's new variant ?
Could also be simply so many visitors .. I found that Okinawa draws 10M visitors per year, while having just over 1M residents. That could easily lead to doubling number of people in the summer. Which would lead to doubling new infections, and recomputing the numbers to 100.000 wouldn't be easy. Another week should tell I guess.
 
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