i must be missing something here: how does this guy know there is a sharp rise of healthy people carrying the virus--if they are not showing any symptoms ?
New Scientist reported this last week that Covid-19 was becoming less deadly in Europe but we don't know why. They reckon that the IFR has dropped by 55% to 80% depending on the dataset. It is possible that we are getting better at treating it and maybe dexamethasone has had mode efficacy than we thought. This article appears to be public but I'm not sure it could be behind a paywall I can still see it when I am signed out of my subscription. https://www.newscientist.com/articl...g-less-deadly-in-europe-but-we-dont-know-why/
This is interesting https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985 Published in Nature, nearly 5 years ago. Please note the Change history comment near the end before the conspiracy theories start again.
i think a lot of the reduction in fatalities is because of the large numbers of elderly that died early on because of NHS mismanagement. that situation hasnt recurred.
That’s it. All that are likely to go have gone. Well to a certain degree and in a manner of speaking.
Sorry but I don't agree with that at all, we removed a lot of opportunity for the virus through a lockdown, that opportunity still exists those people are still there, the demographic might have changed for just now but that is temporary.
Either they are getting better at dealing with it in Spain or all that are susceptible have passed on or both.
Or in the current Spanish demographic the still vulnerable are shielding successfully. There are still additional explanations, we don't know about seasonal effects we don't know about the interaction with other viruses doing the rounds at different parts of the year. The estimated IFR from early on was 1% to 1.5% in the early months the CFR was 10% to 16% in many European countries including here, remember the IFR is the real deadliness of this thing, the CFR is always skewed by testing. And I'd like to see a graph like either of these that forgot about the deaths but looked at cases vs hospitalisations. I'd still like to wait a month or two to see what happens now the schools are open as a whole new environment will be opened to this thing. edit: add to that the fact that currently the CFR in the USA is 3% a country where they have done next to nothing and still don't have adequate testing and around about 1000 people a day are still dying. Let's assume they are missing half of the actual real cases through testing that would put the IFR in the USA at about 1% to 1.5% which is still 20 or 30 times more than a typical year of influenza.
Indeed. We shall see. Cross fingers. Here is a viewpoint from quite a reliable source: Four European countries with major second waves of COVID "cases", but no second wave of deaths.
I don’t know about that. Ivor Cummins (unfortunate name I know) is quite on the ball with this stuff.
Summer more people getting sun, more vitamin D generation in the skin, it's wide open another couple of months of data and particularly the hospital situation and I will start to feel good about graphs like these but even then we need to get through a whole winter in the UK. We don't even fully understand why this virus affects people the way it does.
There are people working on that. Working quite hard and independent of this government or any other countries government. Proof of the pudding will be in the eating. Methinks people will wise up to the vitamin d thing and healthier eating. Maybe. So we might well be more resilient as a nation. Mrs Ash knows about the Vit d thing and why and knows what needs to be included in her diet. She does a night shift so the Vit d thing is even more significant. Some observers are beginning to suggest that it is akin to flu but people have been susceptible to it more so in 2020 than at other times in the past. My guess is that there is some merit in that thinking.
I had a Covid 19 test two days ago. Negative. I booked it as I had developed a sore throat along with sneezing and runny nose. Took it as a precaution. Didn’t enjoy it.
There is no evidence that this coronavirus has been in humans prior to 4th quarter 2019, that Nature article from 2015 was interesting because the entire situation was envisaged back then, and the findings about direct transmission from bat to human was very interesting. The chances are that this is still some kind of recombinant event where the RNA gene sequences of two distinct viruses have come together in some host somewhere and propagated from there. And it's definitely not akin to the flu not given the range of physical damage it can cause well beyond the lungs. Vitamin D, I really don't know, I hope that all the things we have discussed are true and bear fruit and it would explain things being better at the end of summer than otherwise expected it would also explain lower CFR rates in some tropical countries, but then again Mexico is the exception to that. I threw this together last night from the Worldometer data, the red ones are CFR 10% or above 10% or above Red 4% to 10% Yellow 2% to 4% Green 2% or less Pinkish The interesting bit is cases as proportion of tests, 1 in 12 tests in the USA are positive, 1 in 4 in Brazil, 1 in 5 in Peru, that tells you that it is circulating a lot in those countries. I just added the "Cases as Proportion of Population" column as that shows you where the virus is more under control.
@oss Your fellow Scot, Dr Malcom Kendrick GP, gives an interesting slant on infection rates and case rates: https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/
