COVID-19 "fun" facts

This thread is intended as a resource pool for anomalous aspects of the Coronavirus (CV) epidemic. I will start off with three that I consider notable and let the rest of you contribute as you will.

1. Age discrimination - CV seems to leave kids alone. Well, for the most part anyway. As of 23/03/20 the CV has claimed 335 lives in the UK - not a single child under 18. Italy - 4,464 deaths as of 22/03/20, not a single one under the age of 30. Any ideas why this is?

2. Racial discrimination - CV "likes" to kill certain nationals more than others. As of 23/03/20, 6,0776 people have died out of 63,927 infected in Italy (9.5%), whereas in Germany, out of 22,672 infections only 86 (!) have resulted in death (

a reply to: Rolci

age discrimination ?

no- just NO

old gidders - are just waiting for an excuse to die - any excuse will do

how many under 30s - with hip // femur // pelvic fracture die within 12 months of injury ???

how many over 70s - with hip // femur // pelvic fracture die within 12 months of injury ???

thats why they die - from ANYTHING

1. Age differences are probably mostly due to younger people having more robust immune systems.

2. Different countries different counting methods can see where some areas mark any pneumonia death as Co Vid 19. You also have timing maybe Italy is farther along and /or had more people contract it early on.

3. Because these other deaths while tragic are spread out over a wide time frame and don't overwhelm the hospitals' Co Vid 19 is coming in bunches all along with all other traumas and disease hospitals deal with daily now they have to sort through who is really sick tests were/are in short supply etc.

originally posted by: putnam6

1. Age differences are probably mostly due to younger people having more robust immune systems.

Why would newborn babies have robust immune systems? And don't older kids die from pneumonia (not normally caused by CV) all the time??? My son has serious chest infection once every year. (It is a miracle he is still alive after so many serious instances.) Not something adults can claim. Robust immune system? I don't think so. Smells more like of CV having been engineered to target certain age groups and leave others alone. Ordinary flu kills every day too, but none of this age discrimination has ever been present with any of the other strains. Except COVID-19. But why did you need me to point that out?

1. Older people have more preexisting conditions
2. Older people's immune system is weaker
3. This is interesting, Older people react worst because they have a buildup over the course of their lives of many anti-bodies, and so their bodies are over reacting with things like heavy mucus in the lungs with covid-19, so to young people it is just any other nuevo virus they are always getting.

originally posted by: Rolci

originally posted by: putnam6

1. Age differences are probably mostly due to younger people having more robust immune systems.

Why would newborn babies have robust immune systems? And don't older kids die from pneumonia (not normally caused by CV) all the time??? My son has serious chest infection once every year. (It is a miracle he is still alive after so many serious instances.) Not something adults can claim. Robust immune system? I don't think so. Smells more like of CV having been engineered to target certain age groups and leave others alone. Ordinary flu kills every day too, but none of this age discrimination has ever been present with any of the other strains. Except COVID-19. But why did you need me to point that out?

Lol so this isn't fun facts this your theory layout some links and I'll read them have yet to see anything legit saying it's man-made LOL. Every time a new bug or strain comes along its the same bull crap. So you got a point to prove so show me the links and the data. BTW correlation doesn't equal causation

originally posted by: Rolci

Why would newborn babies have robust immune systems?

Why are many kid diseases not very harmful to kids, but if they get the same thing as an adult it can be serious.

a reply to: Rolci

I find it odd that some people have no symptoms and some die or are left with probable lifelong medical issues.

a reply to: Rolci



Ummm...sources please...






YouSir

a reply to: Rolci



Ummm...sooo...which races does...COVID-19 have a preference for....?






YouSir

a reply to: Xtrozero

Older people have pre-existing condition and use drugs which doubles and even triples ACE2 receptors ( the ones COVID likes to company with ). Hypertension is one which treated with ACE inhibitors and increase ACE2 receptors.
Some drugs including ACE inhibitors, thiazolidinediones (a class of antidiabetes medicines) and ibuprofen, have been shown to increase tissue expression of this protein.

The difference in fatality rates in different countries seems primarily caused by testing policy. In those countries where fatality rates are high they are mostly testing medical personnel and vulnerable people with symptoms (or even worse, like in the Netherlands, only those with severe symptoms). In Germany they are testing as many different people as possible, as per the WHO's advice. That way, people who have the disease will know sooner and there will be less instances of people passing on the disease without even knowing it. So Germany has got the situation much better contained than France, the Netherlands, Italy and Spain because of their testing policy. It's also easier to keep the virus away from the vulnerable people if you have a better idea where it is.

In Asia it's also easier contained because more people wear surgical masks and respirator masks, which helps with the spread. In Taiwan, where you see almost everyone walking around with some type of mask, they didn't even have to put the country on lockdown, and they're right next to China. They also managed to keep track of the virus by testing the right people (and not just testing medical personnel and the same vulnerable people over and over again and then saying in the media that the tests are so scarce so we can only test people with severe symptoms, like medical professionals are doing in the Netherlands and nobody says a thing about; the same line is used for protective gear along with the argument that they are of no use if you don't have the right respirator mask for example or don't know how to properly use it, seems to work in Asia though in keeping the spread down). The fatality rate in the Netherlands quickly went from around 3% to 5%, clearly following the path of European countries with similar testing policies like Italy, Spain and France (although in France they do seem to try to test more different people). They also have a tendency to deem older people with little life prospect too vulnerable to waste a hospital bed or IC unit on, even when they're not full yet. I guess that type of judgement won't count when it's someone important, influential or with some clout in society.

They added the Tot deaths/1M pop tab on worldometers.info. Now you can really see what I suspected was the case because of the testing policy: Netherlands got the worst problem after Italy, Spain and Iran, with 16 deaths per 1M pop (counting San Marino as part of Italy). In Switzerland and Belgium they seem to take more effort to test more different people to keep track of the virus and make sure they know they got it. Maybe France will test more different people as well.

Lots of elderly dying in the Netherlands who aren't even hospitalized, and lots of people who didn't receive Intensive Care. Just deemed: 'not worth the effort and waste of capacity', then subtly persuaded to stay where they are, or forego on being put on a medical ventilator (which they by the way have plenty of just over the border in Germany, one wonders if a couple could not be borrowed to deal with the scarcity in places such as Italy and soon, the Netherlands as well; perhaps it's everyone for himself now in the EU? So much for a European Union, so much for unity).

And the UK (at 5 deaths per 1M pop) is hit worse than mainland European countries like Austria, Portugal, Sweden (3), Germany and Norway (2), even though in the cases/1M pop stat it looks like the disease is much more widespread (208 - 537) than in the UK (98), simply because the countries with lower fatality rates are testing the right people, therefore registering more cases and thus their cases/1M pop goes up, but they are doing a much better job at containing the virus and preventing death because of that. If the UK would be testing the right people (comparable to these other countries I mentioned) their cases/1M pop could actually be higher than 500 and for the Netherlands, if one compares to Switzerland could be as high as 1500 (which would give Netherlands 5 times as many cases and put the fatality rate in line with Switzerland, a bit more than 1%). Doing the same with Italy would put their cases/1M pop stat at over 9000 (then they too would have a 1% fatality rate or slightly above that).

Keeping the pubs and clubs open for just 1 more weekend in the UK (2 compared to some mainland European countries) probably also didn't help them very much.

I wonder if someone from the worldometers.info website is reading these boards though, or someone who has picked up my suggestion to add a tab for Tot deaths/1M pop to their table and passed on the suggestion to them. I've been talking about it here on ATS for the past couple of days, and today, suddenly the tab is added. Maybe someone else just had the same idea (realizing that Tot cases/1M pop is unreliable based on testing policy as I explained above, therefore, if you look at deaths, you can get a more accurate country to country comparison based on their varying populations as well as a better idea what the real Tot cases/1M pop is like, including the undetected untested cases if one equalizes the fatality rates everywhere, assuming the same fatality rate for all countries and that the difference in fatality rates in the statistics concerning detected cases is primarily caused by a difference in undetected cases per country).

For example, if you want to get closer to the real Tot cases/1M pop per country, making an educated guess what the undetected cases are per country, you assume the same fatality rate for all countries, for example something close to what it is in Germany now: 0.5% (it's actually a little lower, but this is for easier calculation). Then a number that is closer to the real Tot cases/1M Pop for the following countries becomes:

Italy: 20096 (2% of the pop would be infected with the virus if estimating undetected cases in this manner, only 0.1% detected, i.e. just over a 1000 cases per 1M pop, the currently listed figure at worldometers.info in the Tot cases/1M pop tab)
Spain: 11539 (1.15% of the pop counting possible undetected cases, only 0.08% of the pop for detected cases, a.k.a. 849 detected cases/1M pop)
Iran: 4599 (0.46%, 0.03%, 295)
Netherlands: 3217 (0.32%, 0.03%, 324)
Switzerland: 2818 (0.28%, 0.11%, 1053; notice the much higher detection rates here in comparison with the first number that includes an estimate of undetected cases based on equalizing the fatality rates to one global number, 0.5% fatality rate in this table; Switzerland after all already has a low fatality rate based on detected cases, implying less undetected cases in comparison with countries with a high fatality rate based on detected cases)
France: 2633 (0.26%, 0.03%, 304)
Belgium: 2103 (0.21%, 0.04%, 368)
Denmark: 1104 (0.11%, 0.03%, 272)
UK: 990 (0.1%, 0.01%, 99; so if you use the fatality rate that is a bit closer to Germany's fatality rate concerning known cases, the actual cases in the UK could be 10 times higher than currently detected because of less efficient testing than Germany, and that's counting Germany as slightly having overstated the number of cases currently listed per 1M pop, which is 374, almost 4 times higher than the UK. Using a 0.5% fatality rate for Germany gives them 317 cases per 1M pop in comparison. In that case the UK has more than 3 times as many cases per 1M pop than Germany if Corona is just as deadly in the UK as in Germany and the differences in fatality rates are actually caused by differences in detection and no other influences. Of course this is not the real situation but it helps with comparison and gets the numbers closer to what's actually going on, cause these other possible influences are assumed less impacting for this comparison than succesful detection, less impacting on the fatality rates per detected case that is)

US: 355 (0.04%, 0.01%, 147)

So Germany with 317 is actually still doing better with this disease than the US, even though the number of detected cases per 1M pop for Germany is 374 and the US is 147. Basically what this calculation is doing is estimating the real number of Tot cases/1M pop (detected + undetected) based on number of deaths using a standardized fatality rate to calculate back to a number of cases that would have caused those deaths with that fatality rate. In order to compare countries by using the per 1 million pop method alongside it. Here, I'll type out the calculation for an estimated 'real' Tot cases/1M pop for S. Korea which has the following relevant stats:

Total deaths: 120
Total (detected) cases: 9037
Assumed global fatality rate: 0.5%
Total (detected) cases/1M pop: 176

120 / 9037 = fatality rate based on detected cases / 0.5 (global assumed fatality rate) * 100 (turning percentages into a number that will become a number per 1M pop) * 176 = 467 estimated cases (detected + undetected) per 1 million pop. Or without the commentary:

120 / 9037 / 0.5 * 100 * 176 = 467 (compared to the 176 cases/1M pop listed on worldometers.info for detected cases, which boils down to 0.05% of the population being potentially infected based on currently detected fatality rate and an assumed actual fatality rate of 0.5%, assuming the detected fatality rate differs from that 0.5% because of undetected cases for comparison purposes, and not because the fatality rate is actually different in that country compared to Germany, which comes the closest to 0.5%; also incidentally a more realistic fatality rate for Corona than the 3.7% given by the WHO some time ago for detected cases, which everyone knows, are not all actual cases, i.e. the real fatality rate. As they themselves pointed out then, estimating a 1% fatality rate when undetected cases are estimated and included. Which seems to be a bit too high compared to what we see in Germany, Norway and Austria, where apparently, they do a lot of efficient testing and detect a lot of cases compared to the undetected cases in other countries and they all have a fatality rate below 0.5%, which means the real fatality rate can only be lower cause obviously they can't detect all cases even with heavy testing)

New numbers coming in lead to an estimated Tot cases (undetected + detected) / 1M pop of:

Italy: 22,557 estimated cases per 1 million pop
Spain: 11,983
France: 3373
UK: 1243 (worse than Denmark now)
US: 402
Germany: 372

Numbers based on an assumed global fatality rate of 0.5% (of det. + undet. cases) for all countries and calculating an estimated number of undetected cases based on number of deaths with that fatality rate. Therefore, because the numbers are primarily based on number of deaths, and because they are calculated per 1 million pop, it also shows which countries have been hit the hardest in terms of death (percentage-wise). They reflect the same differences between countries as the statistic "Tot deaths/1M pop" does because of that standardized 0.5% fatality rate. The number of actual deaths per 1 million pop is those numbers * 0.5%. And that just made me realize I could have taken such a simpler route to get to those numbers , although they would not be as accurate making it harder to compare the US with Germany or the UK with Denmark.

Still feeling pretty stupid now. You could take the Tot deaths/1M pop number on worldometers.info and divide by 0.5%, i.e. 0.005. You'll get 22,600 for Italy (but that's the most accurate one, you'll get 400 for both Germany and the US because they're both at 2 for Tot deaths/1M pop, no decimals given on worldometers.info; you'll get 1200 for both Denmark and the UK cause they both have 6 if not considering decimals).

Of course you can do similar calculations with any assumed reasonable global or standardized fatality rate for detected + undetected cases (the big unknown).

a reply to: Xtrozero

What you point out could by more senior Americans die from the flu as well.

respiratory resilience declines with age.

I have had Pneumonia 4 times, and I'm 50+.

Each event was more serious than the last. Y
our lung-health is slowly worn down. By smoking things, by breathing welding smoke, infections, etc.

I'm sure some day the doc will tell me I have CPOD.

Your lung tissue never really regenerates.

So yeah, a newborn is healthier in some ways than I will ever be again in this world

originally posted by: carewemust

What you point out could by more senior Americans die from the flu as well.

I'm pretty sure it is.... Funny how swine flu I think actually attack the young too.

Because Italy and Spain don't have the capacity anymore to take care of the sick, their numbers in my list probably need a modification that considers that their fatality rate is actually higher than 0.5%, even when counting undetected cases.

So I'd probably halve that estimate I gave earlier for estimated Tot cases (detected + undetected) / 1M pop for a more accurate estimate for those countries (Italy and Spain, maybe Iran as well depending on their hospital capacity situation). Any such impacting factors that would indicate that it's not just undetected cases that are keeping the fatality rates per detected case for certain countries higher than Germany's 0.5%, would lower the numbers for any country listed in my comments that has a fatality rate per detected case higher than 0.5%; the higher that fatality rate, the lower the numbers for "estimated Tot cases (undetected + detected) / 1M pop" become, if such factors are a major influence.

Or I could go with my first choice for a global standardized fatality rate of 1% and consider countries as Germany, Austria and Norway as freak incidents. But that would still be a base estimate that doesn't consider variations for countries who cannot take care of their sick.

originally posted by: MotherMayEye
a reply to: Rolci

I find it odd that some people have no symptoms and some die or are left with probable lifelong medical issues.

Odd ...targeted....fussy...

A virus is a living thing right looking to survive at all costs..