Quote:
Originally Posted by Melkerson
Not only can you likely attribute every excess death to COVID, there's an argument that you might be able to attribute even more than the excess death number to COVID.
Because of COVID, deaths from things like auto-accidents, shootings, etc. all went down from what they would have been in a typical year, which means it would take some COVID deaths to balance out those deaths to get to baseline and then even more COVID deaths to get to our excess deaths number.
There are of course some factors that swing the other way, so this argument isn't quite that straightforward, but using excess deaths as a surrogate for COVID deaths is not really that much of a stretch.
Isn't people not getting access to healthcare - e.g. cancer screenings a pretty big factor though? Also ballooning childhood obesity is storing up problems for the future. At least here in Europe car accidents kill something like 0.02% of the population every year depending on the country whereas the big 4 killers (heart disease, dementia, cancer and stroke) are responsible for most of the 1% of the population that dies each year. Anything that interferes with the survival rate from those ought to have a far greater effect than anything else related to car crashes and so on.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Garick
Sorry, I got antigen and antibody tests conflated momentarily.
Wow, that's a bunch. I wonder how many folks already had it an didn't know because they were asymptomatic/thought their symptoms were allergies, or whatever.
Right. Basically Slovakia is currently in it's first wave; it never really got going in the Spring so the actual first wave is now. Even so, if that many people are testing positive that were being missed before then it would suggest a total number of cases of something of the order of 5 times the official PCR-based count (i.e. if you add in people who were negative in this test but would have been positive on the previous few weekends).
In that case it really changes the ratio between infections and deaths/long covid so you would have to reassess how serious the infection is.
IMHO what is more likely is that this test has a significant false positive rate of maybe a couple of a percent, the actual positives and false positives are roughly equal at 2% each and so a load of people and their families are going to get quarantined unfairly.
That said, the whole population is "unfairly" in lock-down for this week anyway (in the Euro-sense where you can still go to work and still walk your dog) so having maybe 5% of the population "unfairly" in quarantine is a reasonable price to pay if an additional 5% who should be "fairly" in quarantine are actually in it and there are fewer restrictions on the other 90%.
(I get to the 5% numbers from the 2% from false positives plus family members - and also actual positives plus family members)