potholer has another video on the WuhanLab insident clear and entertaining as always.
stefan
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Posts by stefan
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We have two types of nursing in Sweden nursing homes and mobile nurses for weak elderly. These elderly people comprises of 75% of all swedish
corona deaths. It is annoying that they could be avoided by having good nursing safety practices. I think that this problem is similar to many other
countries e.g. we as society tendency to not spend on this group. It has been telling when an ambulance come to get a patient at a nursery, then the ambulance personnel arrived with full safety gears and was met with the nursery personnel with no safety gears at all. It's an outright incompetence from the elderly care units to have not addressed this issue. Anyhow it remind me of the challenger accident where the blame was on the engineer not explaining his data hard enough, although the boss was incompentent as he could not understand statistics, but it is the engineers responsibility to call attention to danger and be persistent. My company is training us into avoiding the Challanger trap constantly as the ask us to report safety risk and not look the other way. Anyhow this means that with a better care, we would be around 100 deaths / milllion atm in sweden which is in the range of Denmark fraction of deaths which did not have the same problem with their nurseries. And considering that the spread was such that trace and track become impossible the outcome is pretty ok.
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Interesting. But not correct!
From worldometer:
Norway: Active cases 7992. Recovered cases 32. Deaths 43.
Those active cases (currently only 18 are classed serious, but as we know with COVID this can change) will either recover or become deaths...
Well something is wrong in the data if what you say is true No Ifr calculation from any country would be valid. I've been following them (death rates lags typically say two weeks, and should be good enough to use for Norway) note Norway have been stationary for a very long time with low number of deaths. Their study was a thorough and that ifr i quite robust measure but I would use 40 something + - 10% as I do not know the time point of sampling. The swedish study I use for basing calculations however is not a proper randomized sample. For that we need to wait. But a perseptive IFR of 0.2% (needed for calculating fraction of people ho got corona oexcludng childs) or even 0.05% if we remove elderly care. for sweden is reasonable as it is coherrent with other calulations. And now that match Norway as well in magnitude which would be reasonable because of similar population, quality of care, health of population (I would say Norwegians are very healthy), genetic composition of the population, and close meaning proably the same strain of the virus. This IFR is also reasonable with the lack of fear for the virus you find here. The problematic cases are very rare in normal population, I know of none at my job, none of my elderly friends or family have gotten it thank god and I only know someone that knows someone that got it and needed medical care. Sure it can be is nasty but people are not afraid which a perseptive ifr of 0.05% would explain. Sweden has a pretty flat population curve. Itally should have a higher ifr because they have a much elderly population and often live generational. Now also note that excluding children is a good measure as children is known not to spread the desease, the cases of teachers getting corona is due to contact with their collegues and not the children. Actually children was exclluded in the calculation I did. If you do that we get in sweden a decrease of about 20% due to 20% lower population count, but because the study was from a sample of the working population a safe measure is to increase it again with 20% to include the old ones in all ifr 0.2% is a good measure to use to analyze e.g. herd immunity. excluding children then Stockholm today have 40% or close to immunity. probaly 25% in the whole country.
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I should point out that in a previous post you said 'children are immune' - No they are not, they are often asymptomatic, which is NOT immunity, it just means they don't always get noticeably sick.
true but I think it's fair to say that they are immune and contribute such to the ifr, so you get an percepted correct ifr from a decition standpoint more then a technically correct one. I think that if Norway with their very good
elderly care could reach a perseptive ifr of 0.05% if they took over our methods.
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For ifr nerds, checkout the Norwegian antibody study. I think they found 2-2.5% has antibodies and they have about 40-50 deaths per million
yields ifr 0.16%-0.25% close to the swedish figure I tried to caclulate above.
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I just spotted an antibody examination in a stockholm hospital that has been going on for four weeks mean lag time is hens two weeks. it takes 3 weeks for the antibodies to develop. but death rates lags as well say 2 weeks. 2 thirds of the fraction death in stockhol gives swedish death rate 2000 was dead two weaks ago that. the investigation found antibodies in 15% of the working population in stockholm or 10% in sweden so if all got it we would have about 20000 deaths. Now this is an underestimattion say that the infection rate for 60 yers old and higher is zero e g non working pop. then we need to increase with 25% so we end at an ifr of 0.25%. If 75% was due to deaths in nurseries and could be avoided by top notch nursing then ifr would be around 0.05% with the swedish approach. Also these ifr figures indicate that today sweden has an infection persentage of about 25% and stockholm slightly below 40%. It is believed that herd immunity kicks in at 40%. Also note kids are immune. I used that they are immune as the working pop which is an overestimation.
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This is a reflection of why Sweden did what it did.
Background
1. Sweden vaccinated to quickly against the swine flue and this is considered as a mistake and therefore calculated that it would not gambling
on an early vaccine
2. The experience was that in Sweden it was not possible to follow the lead of Japan and South Korea. Initial there was tracking done but
it soon got out of hand. I'm sure that we could do better but maybe the strong privacy laws we have need to change. Actually what if the
deathrate was 10%, then you need to Korean style so I think that this need to change.
3. They realized that this is hitting the elderly the most
4. Low death rate among young people
5. Swedish ground laws do not allow for hard lockdowns
6. This is going to take a long time so it's better to get the population on board for the ride and
make sure not overdoing the restrictions so it can be sustainable just so that we do not run out
of capacity in the health care
7. No kids seam to be spreading the virus in china () no such case reports) and almost no cases of kids.
8. elderly people live by them self to a high degree.
So the strategy become, shield the elderly, stay home if sick even mildly, goverment implemented laws so that staying home was no cost
(before we the first and perhaps the second sick day was a loss). Use good hygiene, keep distance, work from home if you can. Elderly
people should not meet family but isolate themself. No crowds. Almost everything recomendations and no fines. Keep lower schools open
and the higher schools will be via internet in order to lower the pressure on the public transportation that is needed for the essential
workers.
I just recently heard that 3 out of 4 of the deaths in sweden is from nurseries, and that is a failure of the companies running the
elderly homes, the nurses did not get any protection wear and no testing was done and of cause as anything with an IQ greater
than a stone would realize you get a corona wild fire in the nurseries. But this is not a failure of the overall rules, but just bad
management in those companies. If you factor out the nurseries then you get the figures of Denmark, but if you want to calculate
the death rate of it then we have at least the same figures as in Norway. Will see the ifr is sketchy in Sweden right now, but with an
ifr of 0.5% we would have around 10% infected in Sweden, Norway has about 2.5% infected. The ICU units has lost 20% patients in a weak in
Sweden the death rates goes down, the cases still remain stable but that's because we are doing a lot more test right now. This comparison
needs to remove the nursiries deaths in denmark and norway as well, but it is known that they do not have the same problem and the elderly
care in Norway is top notch I believe.
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We probably need to
Only crazy people will head for a vaccination for an illness that can be handled with dirt cheap medication - in case you are able to find an independent doctor that not just treats you the FDA/CDC/WHO way = no real medical treatment - send patient home with good wishes, if he is not yet ICU ($$$) ready...
Vaccines need at least 2 years of extended tests until they can be "safely" deployed to a larger set of population.
If COV-19 would be as deadly as SARS/MERS then a speedup would justify the risk. But currently we see only a total mortality between 0.3 .. 0.7% with < 0.1% for people younger than 65. So, still some potential customers that can be "feared" to vaccination...
This is actually a good point. Sometimes a badly tested vaccine may be worse than the sickness. That's the case for the
swine flue vaccine we got in sweden at least the narrative here is like that I do not know the details. And now there
is a strong political push to develop a vaccine in record time, yes, some warning bells are ringing. If I'm 40 and suppose
to take this vaccine for us to reach herd immunity, is it rational to say hey yes, not so sure, I would rather then make really
sure that they really did a top notch job on the testing front and did not cut corners as usually is done when one optimize
tasks and take more risks of ruining the end result (this is a common problem). If I was 95 years old I would probably say
hell yes let's have it and do the rational thing. I think that we are really at risk doing things stupidly here and end up
promoting the anti vaccers which I would hate because then more children will dye in measles ... Anyway if
you still think an early vaccine is better, then should a child get the vaccine?
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They got their data for that study by correlating the number of paralysis cases with the timing of vaccine drives.
They find a correlation, and speculate that its the kids getting vaccinated who are being paralysed. But because they aren't checking the victims vaccination history and comparing with a control set, they have no real basis to state that.
Looks like you didn't bother to read that WHO article properly, otherwise you'd have better idea of the infection mechanism:
https://www.who.int/news-room/…-is-vaccine-derived-polio
And why should I prove anything to India? They aren't labouring under the same misunderstandings, surely.
whoops the fraction of vaccinated are low, let's start a vaccine program ,,, and children get's more sick due to low level of immunity. Correlation needs consideration.
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(And see my earlier post about universal masking ... )But masks may mean people with weak symptoms will go out in the wild to a higher degree. It is not a clear case at least
in Sweden where you dont loose monney by sheltering at home.
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https://www.city-journal.org/c…el-driven-decision-making
Neil Ferguson who headed up Imperial Colleges "COVID-19 Response Team", issued the report that shook the UK with it's predictions of up to 500,000 dead. Hundreds of thousands dead, and hospitals overflowing even with mitigation. Now with things starting to get under control, his models are being put under the microscope, and the author of this article does not like what he sees:
"I’m a virologist, and modelling complex processes is part of my day-to-day work. It’s not uncommon to see long and complex code for predicting the movement of an infection in a population, but tools exist to structure and document code properly. The Imperial College effort suggests an incumbency effect: with their outstanding reputations, the college and Ferguson possessed an authority based solely on their own authority. The code on which they based their predictions would not pass a cursory review by a Ph.D. committee in computational epidemiology.
Ferguson and Imperial College’s refusal of all requests to examine taxpayer-funded code that supported one of the most significant peacetime decisions in British history is entirely contrary to the principles of open science—especially in the Internet age. The Web has created an unprecedented scientific commons, a marketplace of ideas in which Ferguson’s arguments sound only a little better than “the dog ate my homework.” Worst of all, however, Ferguson and Imperial College, through both their work and their haughtiness about it, have put the public at risk. Epidemiological modelling is a valuable tool for public health, and Covid-19 underscores the value of such models in decision-making. But the Imperial College model implementation lends credence to the worst fears of modelling skeptics—namely, that many models are no better than high-stakes gambles played on computers. This isn’t true: well-executed models can contribute to the objective, data-driven decision-making that we should expect from our leaders in a crisis. But leaders need to learn how to vet models and data."
The FHM unit ho handles the outbreak in sweden had a bug in the codeb of one of their models. a couple of hours after publication of at at least two persons contacted them about it an it all got fixed whithin some days with minimal negative effects on the decitions.
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Right so cases (as often quoted) are usually a small proportion of "infections with symptoms". In UK I think it is around 10%. So that (if true - it is not acurately known) turns 3.5/1000 cases into 3.5% infections with symptoms. Or the 0.5 per 1000 death rate into a 0.5 per 100 upper value for IFR. IFR would then go down a bit according to the number of additional completely asymptomatic infections. But remember not all deaths are yet counted, and we know just as cases undercount infections by a lot, deaths recorded from COVID undercount deaths from COVID by a bit (10% - 100%).
To get 1 case per 75 infections as in Sweden (?) you need very good shielding for those most at risk so that a high infection rate of those less at risk can happen, without swamping health systems.
Which, as a understand it, is what Sweden has been able to do... But I have not looked in detail about how well this works.
I don't see such high quality shielding elsewhere, like in US or UK.
THH
shielding is ok in sweden for all old but the one that needs care in nurseries. I think this is s common situation. The difference is that young people probably get it in a higher degree here than e.g. spain. There are efforts to measure antibodies now in a random sample. in a week or so we will know if all this worked or not and get s good handle on things like death rate.
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Wyttenbach:
Many times here you post that 95% of COVID infections are asymptomatic (that is, never have any symptoms).
That is contrary to the evidence so far, as I understand it, which has asymptomatic number between 10% and 50%.
Perhaps you have a different definition of asymptomatic from what is normal? Evidence please, together with a precise definition. Clarifying this might reduce the number of posts saying opposite things.
probable W s definition is regarding beeing a statistic or not 1 out of 75 becomes a statistic in sweden
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I don't think either figures, from Spain, are that accurate yet? Maybe death rate but as you know the devil there is in the detail.
I'd put that a bit high but maybe the large number of retired ex-pats in Spain skew the demographics towards those more susceptible?
yeah, or you are also helped by other antibodies and get very mild symtoms but no corona antibodies. But if a proper sample has been taken then this is the statistic. Anyway this means that it is not over yet in Spain. My exwife told me about cases of people testing positive for corona but nagative for antiboddies (mild case)
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5% of the spanish people have antibodies. means death rate of 1.5%
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In the US, 33% of COVID deaths are now attributable to nursing homes. In New York, the number is 25%: https://nypost.com/2020/04/21/…cy-proves-tragic-goodwin/ I do not know about Sweden, but here nursing homes are where we send our loved ones who are not long for this world. Sounds cruel, but that is a fact borne out by the stats. 53% of nursing home residents die within the first 6 months. Most are gone by month 13.
Similar figures in Sweden and I bet that a good part of the others belong to a group of people that was not following the rules. E.g. being 70 years old and not sheltering at home but dining in a restaurant.
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Sweden is saving 10-30 dollars a day per person by having the kids at school.
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Regarding Sweden.
We in the end expect a death toll of about 0.05-0.1% for corona in Sweden assuming better treatment and protection of the risk groups, a huge bunch of those are very weak old people that will probably not contribute to an excess in death this year because they would pass away other wise in x months time. So the statistic seam to be far away from the horrid 1%. The american figures from the state agency brought up here looks similar in magnitude. This is probably what Sweden will go through, we are 1/2 through yet of this pandemic.
We do see the people avoiding the hospitals also in Sweden. so possible there will probably be an extra death toll because of people avoiding care for
chest pain etc even in Sweden. I have not seen any statistic about this though. Only that my ex-wife, a doctor, claims the ir is very calm.
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Tom britton has done som colloborative works that hints that herd immunity will be reached at 40%. This is something stockholm will reach in june (Currently at 30%) Norway in comparison has something like 3% or such. all these numbers have error bars of cause.
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so with the right treatment the death rates is almost 6 fold decresed. This is great news if it holds water.
