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COVID-19: The CIDRAP Viewpoint
Timely reports on key COVID-19 topics written by CIDRAP and other experts.www.cidrap.umn.edu
And yet the deaths:
That's definitely good news.
Deaths are a trailing indicator... but if people haven’t been paying attention, the deaths continued to drop despite stable levels of new cases for 2.5 months nationally. Utah’s deaths have slightly trended up. But, as of like 4 days ago, there were only 6 countries in the world who had performed more COVID tests than we had just in July alone. The bottom line on this is that when you’re comparing cases versus deaths, the deaths are going to approximate the reality of what’s happening much more so than cases because there’s much more potential noise in measuring cases than deaths.
We’re talking about reliability of measurement and not so much that non-deaths are insignificant. Also, while it’s a good approach to take, you have to also understand the ways in which we’re getting information about non-death outcomes. For instance, you’re not going to hear about anyone getting Guillan-barré syndrome from influenza, or a cold, or a vaccine, but they happen. And they’re devastating when you see them. But your likelihood of hearing about it with COVID is going to be very high. And with nearly 3.5M known cases, there won’t be shortages of anecdotes to publish. That’s not to say it’s insignificant, but you have to understand how the information gets brought to our attention and how it compares to any kind of control.
Seems that many more effects from covid last longer than flu effects and flu sickness seems to be relatively short while covid seems to be a minimum of like 14 days
Sure. And I'd qualify that my comments are mostly within the context of 'what would we uproot society for?'
That's fair.
Yeah, I just think we're not really anchored as a society, or even within ourselves, as to what we're wanting and what goalposts for improvement are. I'd say that this is a bait and switch, but that would imply that this is more sinister than it really is, but I do think it conveys the point, at least superficially. The reasons we responded the way we did are very, very different than the reasons we're now giving for staying the way we are. We got into this for "15 days to flatten the curve" because we didn't want the excess deaths of overwhelming the healthcare system. When the deaths starting taking a huge dive, we pivoted to "OMG look at this guy who was hospitalized for a long time" or "OMG this guy still can't smell." I've made the analogy to the Conley trade previously. We had certain expectations of Conley that clearly haven't played out at all. But we rationalize "hey, look, he's averaging 16 ppg over ____," when in reality, had we been told at this time last year that we'd be sitting there celebrating him scoring "16 ppg over the last ____," everyone would have said hell no to the trade. But when we're facing the reality of us having traded for him, we're trying to save face by rationalizing his play. But that doesn't mean that Conley sucks, that he's worthless, or that there can't be good, just as COVID isn't a hoax, has killed many people, and is not something we should take callously.
