Best Posts in Thread: Covid spread comparison

All of the numbers make me so curious, for just about any cause of death. If a person has drunk themselves into a stupor for 20 years of their life, and they develop cirrhosis, and are knocking on death's door as a result, but their heart stops as the last symptom leading to their death, is that counted as a heart attack death? How many different ways have people died and had COVID blamed because they were infected, worldwide?

 

The chart is difficult to explain; I don’t know what the data on “cases” ratios are really saying; I do not know much about the test philosophies. For a simple example, if a country tends to test only those people showing symptoms, of course such testing will bring out more positive cases than testing done on a purely random basis across the population. Who knows, (pardon the pun and WHO really doesn’t know), for many countries it may be a mix.

But the one outcome that is free of bias is the total amount of covid deaths in a given country but even there we must assume no bias towards designating deaths as being due to covid for financial reimbursement purposes from government aid programs.

The other factor that is free of bias is total population.

And deaths per total population is, in addition to being the root of our concerns, probably a very good measurement. It may be the most important measurement, all factors considered.

From the chart I am seeing maximum covid death rates in these countries of 700 per million. Many countries are much less.

When I divide 700 by 1,000,000 I get .0007 or .07%.

The number .07% is still very high because we are talking about “deaths”.

I suspect, but have no cites, that it might be similar to motorcycle death rates here. Or perhaps lung cancer or liver disease? Something to be concerned about, YES, but cause for panic NO.


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Here's a comparison that's fairly up to date regarding where most of our countries of origin stand relative to the Philippines.
The further to the right in the graph, the higher the confirmed number of cases per capita, the higher a country sits in the graph, the faster things are getting worse.



Here's where the Philippines sits relative to other countries (again per capita) in East Asia. Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, China and Brunei all have hardly any new cases, so they're crowding out the bottom left corner of the graph.

Lastly, a graph of the worst hit countries on the planet, worst hit defined as either having >2% infected or having high numbers of new cases (per capita). Again, I added the Philippines for comparison, not because it would rank as "worst hit".

 

I generally think this article from WorldCrunch makes sense.


BEATING COVID-19: WHAT THE EAST GOT RIGHT AND WEST GOT WRONG

Last week, with COVID-19 daily case counts hitting new record highs across both the Western Hemisphere and Western Europe, life in the East was remarkably normal. Countries like Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand have managed to stave off both major restrictions and to keep the case death toll at a minimum. In China, where the virus first began to spread late last year, there were exactly 738 cases registered throughout the entire month of October, and the economy is back to chugging at full steam.

Many point to the culture in Asian countries as a key to their success against the coronavirus. Because populations tend to be more collectivist and obedient, and some governments are more authoritarian, the reasoning goes, it’s easier for Asian countries to adopt the draconian measures required to fight the pandemic. Western individualism, meanwhile, is a disadvantage in times when a united, coordinated response is needed.

But citing culture may hide more than it reveals. New Zealand is an open, liberal country, not a communist dictatorship. Taiwan and Japan, too, are thriving democracies. All three countries fare better than the US and parts of Western Europe in various indicators of a healthy free society, such as the Human Development Index.

No, when it comes to limiting COVID’s spread and death count, and preventing the second wave of infections, it is ultimately a question of policy choices made and actions taken. Here’s a look at what the East did right, and what the West got wrong:

Testing, testing, testing
When China (official caseload since the start of the pandemic: 85,940; deaths: 4,634. Many question the accuracy of Chinese government data) discovered six new cases of Covid-19 and six new asymptomatic cases in the coastal city of Qingdao, it moved to test all of the city’s nine million residents — in just five days. It wasn’t a first: China had done the same in Wuhan, population 11 million, and has since also mass screened the western city of Kashgar, La Stampa reports.

• The rate of almost two million tests per day in just one city remains unimaginable in Europe, where countries currently test between 200,000 and 400,000 people per day.
  

European countries had been warned. Just one of many examples: in August, a prominent Italian microbiologist, Andrea Crisanti, had recommended the government quadruple the country’s testing capacity, as he explained in Milan daily Corriere della Sera. What happened to the plan? “It was ignored by the government,” Crisanti said recently.

• At the current rate of testing, it would take health authorities 34 days to test the entire city of Milan, population 1.4 million — and only if they chose to stop testing all other towns in the surrounding region of Lombardy.
  

Be smart: By itself, building capacity wouldn’t have prevented the second wave. Testing campaigns must be strategic and data-driven, although it’s difficult to do that now that France is recording close to 50,000 new cases per day. “You have to test with a purpose,” French epidemiologist Dominique Costagliola told Le Monde.

But Asian countries have been doing this since day one. In South Korea (caseload: 26,271 total cases; 462 deaths), health workers have been using phone location data to identify thousands of people potentially at risk. In Vietnam (caseload: 1,177 total cases; 35 deaths), authorities have focused on high-risk individuals and on buildings and neighbourhoods where there have been confirmed cases.

Act quickly
When Italy announced a ban on gatherings, shut nightspots and high schools earlier in October, not many knew it was copying South Korea, one of the democratic countries most often praised for its effective containment policies.

The difference? On the day South Korean health minister Park Neung-hoo announced the restrictions in late August, saying his people were in “a very dangerous situation”, South Korea reported 332 new cases.

• On 24 October, when Italy closed cinemas, theatres and gyms and mandated high schools to continue remotely for 75% of classes, the country had 19,644 cases and 151 deaths per day — by then, it was too little, too late.
  
  
• In France, introducing measures earlier would have made it “possible to break the dynamic, with less strong measures than those announced today,” said Costagliola. “The longer we delay, the more the pandemic progresses, the more we are in this phase of rapid growth, requiring to act strongly.”
  

Total eradication v. flattening the curve
When to end restrictions is as important as when to introduce them. When the West introduced the first nationwide lockdowns in the spring, scientists, politicians and the media told the public that the restrictions were necessary to “flatten the curve”. The more we practice social distancing, the rationale was, the slower the virus will spread and kill, the more manageable the health crisis will be.

But countries that have succeeded in staving off a second wave of infections have worked to extinguish the virus altogether, not just flatten the curve.

• New Zealand (1,949 total cases, 25 deaths), for example, introduced a national lockdown on March 25, when it recorded 102 cases and 0 deaths.
  
  
• When the lockdown was lifted on June 8, the country had had no new local transmission in 17 days, and all patients had fully recovered. To date, life in New Zealand is almost entirely back to normal, with some social distancing.
  

Tighter borders
Countries such as Italy, Greece, Spain and France, whose economies rely on tourism, rallied to reopen borders and allow international visitors to spend the summer holidays there.

But the most successful countries have reopened their borders cautiously, if at all.

Experts point to Taiwan’s (553 total cases, 7 deaths) border restrictions as among the most efficient: until the end of June, all new arrivals — tourists, business travelers as well as residents — had to book themselves into a hotel to self-quarantine for two weeks.

• The government subsidised the stay, including a welcome package with dish soap, nail clippers and laundry detergent to facilitate the quarantine; food was delivered on their doorstep; a local district office would phone at least once a day to check in and thank them for doing their part.
  

Single-mindedness
In European countries, closing schools and working from home during the second wave seemed like an unspeakable taboo: the countries just couldn’t afford to close down again. All levels of government opposed new closures, even when their countries recorded more than 20,000 new cases every day.

Asian countries such as China and South Korea, instead, have acted decisively at the local level whenever they saw new flare ups. When Beijing recorded 31 new coronavirus cases on June 10, they shut down schools and urged people to work from home. Offices and schools reopened shortly after.

 

@Philpots I am shocked that you stubbornly refuse to show the sources of your information.

In a previous post you falsely stated the the total cases for Florida was only 146,341. This was wrong it is actually 807,412 Your entire argument fails on these false numbers.

Then when a member asked that you provide a source you stubbornly refused.

Then you continue to believe your false information supports this convoluted logic regarding your "research".

Please do not distribute unsubstantiated information on this forum or at least back it up when a member asks for a source.

Unwillingness to quote sources is exactly where quackery comes from.

source:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/?utm_source=DI&utm_medium=referral

 

Thanks for this fact-based post.

 

I am not sure how to deal with “cases”. That must be the worst parameter to use. #Cases has dependencies on what are the total number tested and #cases is proportional to number of tests. The parameter I think we should be primarily interested in is “mortalities” and perhaps “permanent injuries” and their associated rates over time.

In some countries, treatment is getting much better so cases and mortality track at a much lower rate. Plus, this virus, is it getting more contagious? Is that the main reason increase for the cases or us the increased testing? Both, I suppose, making whatever the measurement implies less meaningful.

And even with more “cases”, mortalities seem to be flat or showing a decreasing rate. Might the virus be getting less pathogenic even as it gets more contagious? None if this is very clear except that we don’t have people collapsing in the street and bodies falling off of packed-full delivery trucks on their way to the crematorium as we were led to believe would happen globally. At least that is what the media had us believing in March, and that promoted us to lockdown for 14 days, just to flatten the above curve provided by Dutchie.

But if we are to use “number of cases” as our primary measurement upon which to respond with lockdowns, I think we must admit, it is not a pandemic that we are concerned about, it is a CASE-EDEMIC.


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It is important to accurately separate the “principal morbidity” from the “co-morbidity” if that is even possible. It may not be possible; it is hard to have consistent data with thousands of different doctors signing death certificates and the potentially subjective nature in determining the cause; I have also heard “...died of complications from covid19”. That is a somewhat more accurate term than “co-morbidity”.

Some governments may have political incentive to show low covid19 death rates while some hospitals in the US may have financial incentive to show high COVID19 rates. I think the US CDC is trying to clarify the US situation. If other countries reported it in that way, we might have a more accurate concept of COVID19 deaths and deaths related to it. Right now people are comparing other countries’ numbers to the (very high) US numbers but it doesn’t mean much to me until we know that all death rate reportings are consistent, country to country.


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Quoting myself;

The intent is to set a boundary condition using an extreme term to define my opinion as to what our appropriate action should not be. It is a common method to express one’s thoughts.

I do not believe you or anybody else here is literally “panicking”. Thanks.


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