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@beosar : the Heinsberg Studie's conclusions were released prematurely. It is not properly peer reviewed or published and questioned/disputed. Not sure if the study has been submitted for review at all or if it was retracted meanwhile, like has happened with other hastily made studies on the matter before.
It is never a good sign if something is published bypassing the peer review process … usually that hype & fail sort of things.
An old buddy of mine banned me, because he was showing me videos of empty hospitals and was saying that it is all fake. So i tried to make him use his brain and he got offended and banned me.
I know real friends do not exist, but it sux to lose a chat pal. Hello loneliness again…
I had to be harsh to him, because he was not having any proofs and he is working in the city hall and he is sharing on his FB that corona is fake, and that people should ignore self isolation, masks and gloves.
I had to be harsh to him, because it is the case when a conspirologist can really harm a lot of people. Because he is working in the city hall and people could believe him. But he is basing his own beliefs in no facts. He just saw some youtubers saying that it is all fake and believed it and now is sharing it all the time on his FB. But people could believe him because he is on an important post.
I mean, sharing conspiracies about Corona is thousands of times more harmful than sharing conspiracies about the Flat Earth. And even more harmful if the conspirologist is on an important post in the city's administration.
Conspiracies are fine and funny to read or even think about… until the moment they become harmful for the public health. Believing in aliens is cool… until somebody creates a cult of people who suicide in mass to can be abducted by aliens(Heaven's Gate)…
(I lost all my respect to him too. A big part of his belief is backed by his EXTREME ignorance. He thinks that if there is not a single case in our 10k people slavic town, the tragedy Spain is going through must be fake too. He doesn't cough, so people in Italy don't cough too. “If i don't bleed, Ebola is fake!”. Deep dense moth****** IGNORANT!!!
Can't wait for the day smart beautiful robots will replace humans!)
NikiTo said:
An old buddy of mine banned me, because he was showing me videos of empty hospitals and was saying that it is all fake.
He has some value in the first statement. Due to whole media boom around it, the hospitals might be empty … not the way he meant though. Thing is, people are scared (honest opinion - while you should be careful, being scared is dumb, it doesn't help), and they refuse to go to hospital, even with something else.
At this point Czechia has some 200 dead with coronavirus as co-morbidity (I don't think we had a case where it was primary reason of death in my country … I know there were a bunch in the world, but in vast majority of cases coronavirus is only a co-morbidity). There are 90k patients treated with cancer each year, 60k are cured under normal circumstances, we lose 30k (that is one life lost every 20 minutes … media coverage is of course only on coronavirus, reporting every single death, and broadcasting every single conspiracy message about how deadly it is - as that keeps people focused on TV screen and they gain money). So why am I saying this?
Due to media broadcasting fear and scaring people all day long, they don't visit hospitals - as they are too scared from coronavirus. You know where this goes - people won't suddenly stop having cancer - they will get into stage where you can't help them anymore because they were too scared to visit a doctor (and some doctors have closed their offices due to this fear mongering).
And this is in every single branch of healthcare. Doctors have been reporting they haven't seen this many appendix ruptures in their lives (and from common operation pretty much without risk … suddenly you have high risk surgery). Patients stating that they are scared from covid, and they wanted to avoid hospital at all costs. And I could go on…
At this point it is quite sure that there will be several times more causalities than to covid due to this panic.
So yes, hospitals are sometimes empty here - which is a bad thing.
@Vilem Otte Yes, he meant hospitals are empty in the bad way - claiming Covid is fake.
Malaria takes hundreds of millions of lives every year, but i guess nobody talks about that, because it happens mostly in the third world.
Yes, it is a complex system. Raising awareness could have counterproductive effect.
I don't like how everybody is expert now on statistics. Lot of experts claim they can predict the numbers of the pandemic. It is like people who gather thousands of people and read their minds. I am like “If you possess any magic skills, you can become the riches person in the world. Even the slightest magic power can make you the richest person on the planet”. And to statistics experts i am like - “If you can predicts complex graphs so well, why don't you trade on the markets?”
By the way, I am not sure what do you mean by co-morbidity. I think that, if a person with weak lungs would have lived two years from now, but because of Corona that person dies two years earlier, i would blame the Covid as the cause. If a person dies in a car accident, it should not be added to the Covid numbers.
Other thing people do is compare Covid to Flu. They say Flu infected much more people, but they forget that the whole world is on some level of quarantine now. Flu infected many millions in conditions of total interconnection of people worldwide. We can not tell for sure if Covid and Flu are equal, because Flu rages freely around while Covid breaks its path in conditions of a global quarantine(a late quarantine, but still).
(Imagine if Internet shuts down… it it happens, we can forget about self isolation…)
(Another thing me and everybody i know, we all noticed in our region. Is that birds were late this year to appear and still low in number. And the most curious thing is we have no flies. Not a single fly to be seen here. Maybe they will come later too. But it is super weird. Another thing to add to the list of anomalies 2020 brought to us)
NikiTo said:
I don't like how everybody is expert now on statistics.
The average person has less than 2 arms.
NikiTo said:
By the way, I am not sure what do you mean by co-morbidity.
Whenever a person dies you have to fill in document about death as a doctor. Apart from patient demographics, the second most important part is ‘Reason of Death’, which have following fields to fill in (their name will differ based on legislation in given country - but groups definitely stay):
Generally groups - 2 and 3 (and sometimes also 4) are called co-morbidities. The codes U07.1 and U07.2 are present only in 2. and 3. … rarely also 4. (in case somebody would F.e. die in car accident but would have positive test) … worldwide there is almost no cases where it was 1.
Each country collects statistics differently - some countries count only 1. and 2. (as far as I know Slovakia does so). There were talks about Italy counting all as coronavirus deaths.
And now, back to the codes I wrote - you probably noticed there are 2 - U07.1 and U07.2 - these are ICD-10 codes for diagnoses. Now comes the fun part:
I have no idea why WHO prescribed the second one (and yes I had added both of them in the database with huge “What the f***?”), but I can confirm it is counted in the statistics in some countries. Keep in mind that symptoms range from asymptomatic, through mild, through flu-like, towards severe (with acute pneumonia and ARDS). How in the world you want to suspect that patient has COVID-19 with this huge range of symptoms? That also points to dozens if not hundreds diseases.
With this range of symptoms you will have huge number of non-clinical patients … if you want to find out how many, you are out of luck. Unless the person required hospitalization, their levels of IgM and IgG will be so low after few weeks - that it is below the error line for those tests (much like for common cold … which is no surprise, as it is also under Coronaviridae family).
…
Comparing this virus with Influenza is simply blind. There are so many different influenza strains (plus it has nasty property that whenever you contract 2 different strains, a new one comes out of cell infected by both), from those with almost non existent case fatality rate … up to those with case fatality rate of over 60% … when treated in ICU with known treatment.
Comparing with any pandemics is also useless … as long as we still have pandemics. Once it goes slowly away in all parts of the world, then we can start summarizing. Up until that point it has a value of every random prophecy.
…
This being said, I'm not underplaying the virus - I do know what I'm supposed to do in such situation. And from first hand experience I know that every viral disease is serious - but doing global shutdowns (which most likely doesn't help that much), adding huge amount of global panic (that never helps), promoting conspiracy theories (some of our news went full Alex Jones style - I'm waiting for the moment they blame aliens for the virus), and fake news - are definitely going to cost us many many more lives.
Note: Sorry for a bit of rant, but I'm one of the people who are one leg in healthcare industry. I'm being kind of annoyed and tired of whole media bubble around this. Every now and then my parents hear something on TV and call me absolutely scared (last time they showed CT of lungs with severe pneumonia and presented it as “Everyone's lungs with COVID-19 end up like this” … showing heavy lung fibrosis that has happened in very few rare cases of COVID-19 … and stating this, is going to scare people to death). All I can say is … thanks media.
@Vilem Otte You are right. The hype is a little bit too much. IIRC an official from USA said he was intentionally over-scaring people for their own good. I think it was that man who said that they will bury the bodies in Central Park. He said he intentionally exaggerated in order to stress the people enough.
I suffer from that cleaning mania. Anything i buy i wash it. I wash the packaging of anything i buy from outside. Or I empty the packaging on a clean table and then throw the packaging away.
And i consider cash money to be the dirtiest thing out there.
I wash my hands all the time.
I think it was time far ago to introduce some basic measures.
For example, some kind of health checks at airports. Machines that take your cash money and give you the change automatically. And meanwhile, the machines disinfect the cash money. In Denmark, at some hotdog street selling points, a machine takes your cash and gives you the exchange. The person who touches your food doesn't touch money. Here in my area, in the slavic part of Europe, i refuse to eat in fast food selling points. They touch both the money and the food.
I mean that - some obligatory good practices from now on. From now on and forever.
A way Covid changed my life just recently was to help me decide what to dedicate my time to.
I am always suffering from the uncertainty of what should i invest my effort into. I want to retake my comics. But Corona showed me that IT is the future. First, IT is easier to work from home or from abroad. Second, if some disaster erases most of humans on Earth, IT will be still needed. Actually the less humans on Earth, the more needed my current programming project is. Some bored SJW could destroy my comics in one instant. But IT will be always needed.
So, because of Covid, i am a little bit more convinced that i need to overcome my frustration with constant debugging and keep working on my programming project. I'm sooo burned now, but i need to keep coding…
Shortage of certain products because people are unreasonably stockpiling and the prices for food are increasing too much.
Work is difficult as staying inside the house for too long means less sun exposure, and it affects me not in the good way.
So, to stay on topic - while it originally seemed that coronavirus won't directly impact me in any major way - I was quite wrong.
First of all, I do have positive cases in my family now (not the closest though). They are located in London. All except for one are had mild, cold-like symptoms, last one had more severe - despite that, UK emergency has denied the treatment (due to no capacity), plus there was nowhere to buy any medications like Paracetamol or Ibuprofen in London (they had some delivered from Czech Republic in the end (no shortages here) - although due to post office not guaranteeing timely-delivery outside of Czech Republic … you have to hand deliver those now, big thanks goes to all truckers who did manage to get package there). Before any questions emerge, at this point they all seem to be doing well.
Second, which personally affected me - my wedding was cancelled (well … rather post-poned to September). Based on what my fiancee said (once we post-poned the date), the virus will probably run screaming away from the surface of Earth within short period of time (no, there really is nothing more dangerous than angry woman).
Jokes aside … please stay safe, especially in areas with overloaded healthcare!
