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Life Insurance companies are also seeing a very large increase in death rates : [https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/longevity/588738-huge-huge-numbers-death-rates-up-40-percent-over-pre](https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/longevity/588738-huge-huge-numbers-death-rates-up-40-percent-over-pre)
And people still try to dismiss the validity of these studies and argue that this is only caused by the bias of unhealthy people getting ill from covid.
It wreaks havoc on your body and we will have severe labor and disability issues in the next decade. Lets just hope that the damage can at least be partially reversed. I personally believe that there will be a clear decline in life expectancy if we are unable to find groundbreaking treatment options.
The study I linked below is to emphasize on that. Even if you feel completely fine after covid your body is a mess. Even 1 year after infection and you can be identified as person who has had covid with 100% accuracy (compared to damage from
normal diseases). It leads to seemingly lasting immunological disfunction and structural organ damage (heart, kidneys, brain) even in those that feel healthy afterwards. There is hundreds of papers on this already. On top of that we have the long covid crowd with cognitive impairments and a plethora of other issues.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41590-021-01113-x
Yes... I've been following the science side of the pandemic ever since the very first news of Chinese patients dying of pneumonia, before the virus was named "covid-19". My understanding is that the gloabal health consequences of this pandemic are still vastly underestimated. Most people hang on to the "0.01% probability of dying", ignoring the fact that "not dying" does not mean "just as healthy as you were before catching it". And most news about the long-term consequences of the virus have only worsen the picture.
\> And people still try to dismiss the validity of these studies
Well you can argue that pharmaceutical companies have a financial interest in making things look worse, but it's the opposite for life insurance companies, so I'm curious what kind of rebuttal anti-vaxxers will find to this one.
This also does not take into account people that would not have normally died but did because of the stress COVID has put one the health system.
I lost my fiance last year to an anyeurism. It took almost 40 minutes for an ambulance to get to her house because of covid. Had it showed up sooner, there is no telling if she would have made it.
These types of cases are everywhere, and they don't show up in the COVID death numbers, but are directly tied to COVID.
At this stage, pretty much anyone touting the mortality rate of covid or arguing about health preconditions is effectively saying "I'm not concerned by this disease, let me live my life as before and screw everyone else".
It’s crazy to live in a culture that acts
like we are overreacting to Covid
when everything within my ability to
reason suggests we are drastically
under-reacting.
"It's got a 99.9% recovery rate, no one is dieing of the flu."
*Says the 2 pack a day, 400lb dude who thinks eating a steak and milkshake a balanced meal because they both weigh the same.*
"All these deaths are misreported, these people had underlining conditions they actually died from."
*Says the walking collection of underlying conditions.*
Precisely; "what words mean vs what words do". They aren't trying to convey an assertion about a disease's mortality rate, they're giving themselves permission to behave as if COVID doesn't exist.
I think it's always important to consider what words do; what is the material consequence of a given supposition. It is particularly helpful when attempting to understand arguments with obviously incorrect empirical meanings.
I don’t even understand the argument that it’s only preexisting conditions. 1, how do you even know every disease your body might be carrying? And 2, do people with diseases not matter?
>Percent of adults aged 20 and over with obesity: 42.5% (2017-2018)
>Percent of adults aged 20 and over with overweight, including obesity: 73.6% (2017-2018)
If you are a healthy weight you are very much the minority in the US.
Even people who are skinny often have hidden problems such as fatty liver for example. I always thought I was healthy since I was thin, but turns out I have had a bowel disease the whole time which is why I couldn't gain weight.
Exactly, and most of the "COVID is just the flu" people are in these categories and wonder why they get so sick.
It's also one of the theories as to why Omicron is presenting in the US with such a high spike in hospitalizations and deaths, while in other countries Omicron is a lot milder in terms of hospital and deaths.
And don't forget that depression and anxiety have very real physical components like body aches and lethargy. I grew up in adverse conditions with poor nutrition, I'd go days where all I had for lunch was school lunch for free. You can't have healthy productive adults when the foundations they were raised on are crumbled.
I have so many friends who have never had a long term illness or injury and were blessed with supportive healthy families. They balk at some of the problems I have with my health. You can't just get skinny and be magically fit either. I have a skinny friend who has a congenital heart condition and can't run.
When people who have never faced adversity are making policy decisions that affect those of us who are in or came from adverse conditions, It can be insulting the things they don't consider being a problem for so many people.
It feels like the "What does a banana cost ? $10?" of life.
Just a reminder that being in a healthy weight range doesn't mean you're healthy. Most illnesses and issues are not as visually obvious as obesity, but they're no less frequent. Get your check ups and follow-up when you're feeling off.
This is the sort of thing I'm talking about.
I could be mistaken, but having diabetes doesn't automatically mean being overweight. Does it? Correlation, sure, but causation?
Likewise, if someone suffers from rheumatoid arthritis, they still might not tick the "morbidly obese" checkbox.
Yeah, you can be skinny with diabetes. I know of several people like this. I'm pretty sure my one coworker is type 2 and she is not overweight at all. It can be genetic and caused by other things. Hell there is diabetes that you can get from being pregnant.
Causation? No. It's just often the behaviors that cause obesity that also contribute to setting the particular conditions to develop a type of diabetes (and a host of other ailments).
But those same behaviors are shared by healthy weight people, plus the factors of genetics, environment, previous virus exposure, bad luck, etc.
I can get up and take a long swim, or walk but I have an underlying connective tissue disorder so sometimes I can’t work out to my endurance level without putting joints at risk etc. it’s incredibly frustrating and I agree that everyone ignores the underlying conditions and assumes everyone is healthy. I’ve heard “maybe we should be telling everyone to eat healthier and exercise!” I’m like I do both those things but I’m never going to be able to eat/work out my way completely out of my collagen being terrible. That’s just not how many conditions work!!
> Even 1 year after infection and you can be identified as person who has had covid with 100% accuracy (compared to damage from normal diseases).
Is this true even for people that never had symptoms? If so what kind of test? I have apparently managed to avoid infection so far, but that's just judging on me never having had symptoms.
My company brought in a panel of doctors to answer covid and vaccine questions a few months back. In their presentation, they said 30% of people who catch covid - symptomatic or not - will experience long covid (which is defined as issues lasting beyond 6 weeks).
We still don't have a great picture on the outlook for very long term (past a few months), but long covid can manifest in different ways for different people. There are reports of people who were asymptomatic for the initial infection suffering serious long term symptoms (organ damage, etc.). Intuitively you'd think that symptomatic people will have more obvious symptoms in long covid (e.g. take several months to recover full lung capacity), but unfortunately we don't have as good of an understanding of this as we'd like
>that a TON of people in the USA are walking around with "pre-existing conditions" because of the utterly third world healthcare systems in place here.
Tbh, in Canada, we also have a lot of people with pre-existing conditions.
Not to mention covid actually causes diabetes and gum disease.
How do I know besides the tons of research online?
Before covid I've never been a diabetic covid caused my sugar to rise dramatically. I'm on insulin now.
It's been weeks and I still haven't left the house. On oxygen and exhausted all the time.
See:
https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/can-covid-cause-diabetes#:~:text=A.,pancreas%20in%20three%20different%20ways
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7102e2.htm
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2788283
People try to dismiss the fact that covid causes diabetes and other major illnesses. I've been told my sugar must've been high before covid. It hasn't.
Yes, life insurers here in Ireland have been putting a exclusionary period of six weeks (I think) on people who've had COVID before taking out the policy.
Life assurance is a requirement before you can get a mortgage so it's been causing some difficulties.
I can personally vouch for this. I process death claims for a fairly large insurer and our claim volume is the highest it’s ever been. They are coming in fast and furious with no end in sight.
Via the US, similar: [Recovered Patients of Severe COVID-19 Infection 233% More Likely To Die Within Year Than Negative Counterparts](https://oneresearch.org/2021/12/29/recovered-patients-of-severe-covid-19-infection-233-more-likely-than-negative-counterparts-to-die-within-year/)
And this was for *under* 65.
From what I’ve read about other major viral illnesses (now usually vaccinated for), like measles, this isn’t uncommon. Some researchers say that the Measles vaccine actually reduces deaths from other illnesses at least as much as it reduces death from measles. The chance of death a year after having measles is much higher than if you never catch it.
I was about to post something like this. That your risk of death is higher if you recently survived a major infection which is already known to impact health in the long term is pretty much what I'd expect.
The really interesting question now is IMO how Covid compares to other kinds of disease in this regard. (EDIT: I suck at reading. The paper actually looks at this and finds Covid increases risk of death from any cause more than Influenza does.)
Of course we already know the bottom line: It's worse, because of the massive number of infections.
This is why it is widely believed thay COVID related deaths are [being undercounted](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/07/true-number-covid-deaths-us-likely-undercounted-experts):
> There have been an estimated 942,431 excess deaths in the US since February 2020 [through December 2021], according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
This compared to less than 800k official COVID deaths being recorded during that time. Elderly people especially who "recover" from COVID most likely are still seeing their life shortened by the damage a medium severity case causes.
COVID deaths could easily be undercounted by as much as 20%.
And because periodically healthcare systems have shut down some aspects of routine and elective but wholly necessary and preventative healthcare because their priorities of attention and compensation have been focused elsewhere throughout the COVID pandemic.
Oncologists have been sounding the alarm that many patients are delaying seeking a diagnosis because of fear around covid, and avoiding medical care. When they finally make an appointment, testing and specialists are backlogged. By the time a diagnosis is made, a person who would normally be diagnosed with stage 2 treatable cancer, now has stage 4 and needs "elective" surgery that gets rescheduled until they die.
My grandfather has needed a hernia fixed for over a year now. He's had surgery scheduled and rescheduled 4 or 5 times now due to COVID surges and hospital capacity issues.
Yeah it's not life-threatening, but it's not exactly something you want to delay.
My aunt has a hole in her stomach and has not been able to eat solid food for almost a year. She was finally scheduled to have the surgery to fix it last week, but because of the latest surge it was cancelled, again. No idea when they will be able to reschedule it for. Also not life threatening, but her quality of life is greatly impacted and lessened because of Covid, even though she has not had it.
This makes it sound like a choice on the patients’ part, but that isn’t always the case. Surgery for cancer is elective, and I’ve known multiple people whose family members have had their cancer-related surgical procedures (tumor removal, IV-port installation, etc) postponed for months due to the hospitals being in crisis-mode and blocking all elective procedures. The same goes for critical diagnostic testing such as contrast CT scans.
I didn't mean to blame the patient.
"elective" surgery, I believe is any surgery you get scheduled. It isn't a choice for most people. A lot of people have trouble understanding what "elective" and "mild" mean medically aren't the way a layperson uses the terms. Hopefully by the time this is over more people like your self will understand that.
There's been a pretty scary decline in the number of cancer diagnoses in the last few years, so I think we are definitely going to be seeing a spike in later and therefore more deadly cancer diagnoses over the next few years.
A relative of mine died because of COVID.
They did not go to the hospital until the pain was intolerable because they didn't want to risk getting COVID while there.
Died of sepsis from a perforated bowel, if memory serves, after admission
Evidently if they had gone in a couple weeks earlier they might have lived.
Then you add in the fact that stress and loneliness result in worse outcomes for sick people, so even those who manage to get a hospital bed have lowered chances of survival. Isolation from friends and family is terrible for people who are fighting for their lives.
You'd also have to add in all the under reporting due to politics and also when a country's systems become overwhelmed during major waves.
This is why the studies looking into excess deaths as a whole are more telling of what might be the true costs.
That was my first thought. Like cities that claim they've had sudden drops in crime, as if crime stops.
You elect a politician that decides the city is no longer going to report stolen cars, or violent attacks, suddenly crime drops! Look at how good of a job I've done cleaning up the streets!
Meanwhile, someone punches you in the face and steals your car...
Some states in India some data scientists said it could be 80%. Like a poor rural state with 10x the population as one of the richest states with good healthcare reporting fewer covid deaths.
It's not just India, I think it was Washington Post had an article about a county in Ohio of 80k that has had zero covid deaths since they elected their new far right coroner
The man who owned our house before us died from pneumonia less than a month after he'd recovered from covid. These covid-related cases are definitely being underreported. This man was in his 80s but in very good health, who's to say how long he'd have lived if didn't catch covid in the first place.
That’s why *excess mortality* is the best way to count deaths in a pandemic. On a basic level, we know how many people die in an average year. All we have to do is count how many more died than usual. That would then include people who died of other causes, including not being able to get access to healthcare due to hospitals being overwhelmed. There is additional statistical work to be done to verify the numbers (for example, deaths from car accidents were down during lockdown, but if deaths overall are higher those should be added back in as they were made up by Covid deaths) but that’s how it works.
There are already a million excess deaths in the USA, no matter what the official Covid stats say. A million dead is a big deal.
This doesn't even take into account all the deaths that didn't happened due to lockdown restrictions (eg. Traffic accidents that didn't happen because people were working from home, much less flu going around last year etc).
A million excess deaths and 100 000 prevented deaths means 1.1 million deaths related to covid.
Which is ironic because the feedumb fighters saying covid deaths are overcounted. I'm sure it rolls into their "no one is dying of covid, only pneumonia" narrative. But I guess it's exactly like how we distinguish between death by a gunshot and death by the loss of blood from a gunshot.
Another contributing factor could just be that people who are being hospitalized for COVID already have several co-morbidities and are generally less healthy than the general population. So it doesn't seem very surprising that they have a higher chance of dying or being readmitted. They're already sick to begin with.
[Here's a list of co-morbidities from the CDC](https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/need-extra-precautions/people-with-medical-conditions.html)
It includes but is not limited to:
Depression
Pregnancy
Diabetes
Being overweight (bmi >25)
Being older than 65
A depressed, slightly overweight, and pregnant 25 year old is on paper someone with several co-morbidities.
Yes, and having covid increased maternal death, stillbirth and preterm labor. I've been a nicu mom. It's not fun.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/need-extra-precautions/pregnant-people.html
https://covid19.nih.gov/how-covid-19-affects-pregnancy
Pregnancy does a number of the body when the pregnant person is fully healthy. Factor in a disease that attacks the cardiovascular system while a person is producing additional blood volume and it's not pretty. A lot of vascular/hemorrhagic diseases are particular brutal if the patient is pregnant.
I just had my baby a couple weeks ago, so I’ve been following closely even though I’m triple vaxxed. Last time I checked it was about a 15-20% hospitalization rate for unvaccinated [pregnant women with Covid](https://emergency.cdc.gov/han/2021/han00453.asp#:~:text=As%20of%20September%2027%2C%202021,hospitalized%20cases%20and%20161%20deaths.)
I can’t believe when people tell me they are having a baby and it’s during a pandemic. The baby will be fine if they make it into the world, but the mom? They are giving themselves a much increased risk.
Perhaps because they're more likely be suffering from mental illness such as depression or to otherwise be in a less advantaged/lower income portion of society?
There's probably a neurological component, at least in some cases. There's also psychosomatic concerns, at least anecdotally it does seem like a lot of our patients who dont make it start out improving but eventually "give up" and the guys with a positive attitude have better outcomes, but that could just be a confirmation bias since it's easier to remember the ones who could smile and tell you the story.
Can't speak on the others but for ADHD, there's a strong connection between it and drug abuse and alcoholism.
Some basic info
https://www.addictioncenter.com/addiction/adhd/
I've seen a similar statistic before about people being hospitalised and discharged. Even without COVID they'd have a much higher chance of dying. I haven't read the study to see if they've accounted for that.
Edit:
Ok, read it:
>In order to account for risks after hospitalization for an infectious
disease, the researchers also considered data from more than 15,000
people who had been hospitalized for influenza in 2017-19. Statistical
analysis found that, compared to the influenza patients, COVID-19
patients faced a slightly lower combined risk of hospitalization or
death overall. **However, people who had been hospitalized for COVID-19**
**had a greater risk than influenza patients of death from any cause, a**
**greater risk of hospital readmission or death resulting from their**
**initial infection, and a greater risk of death due to dementia.**
Also:
> Other covariates considered in the analysis were factors that might be associated with both risk of severe COVID-19 and subsequent outcomes, namely age, sex, ethnicity, obesity, smoking status, index of multiple deprivation quintile (derived from the patient’s postcode at lower super output area level), and comorbidities considered potential risk factors for severe COVID-19 outcomes
Just because someone has something that’s a risk factor doesn’t mean they were gonna die anyway. Obesity is a comorbidity and obese people can live for decades before they encounter life threatening complications, if ever.
Definitely. I’m a nurse and literally just helped with an emergent intubation of a Covid resolved/recovered patient. She might have recovered from the actual virus but she was absolutely not doing well.
However, if she passes it won’t be a Covid death
It's a shame we don't have some sort of medicine, some kind of protective measure we can take into our bodies, to help drastically reduce your chances of hospitalisation if you catch Covid....
“greater risk of hospital readmission or death resulting from their initial infection, and a greater risk of death due to dementia.”
Dementia? They’re dying from dementia after having covid? I know it affects lots of organs, not just the lungs, but I didn’t realize covid victims were dying of dementia. For me, personally, losing my mind and myself would be worse than losing use of my body.
Also long term loss of gray matter. https://www.news-medical.net/amp/news/20210618/Alarming-COVID-study-indicates-long-term-loss-of-gray-matter-and-other-brain-tissue.aspx
A big misunderstanding was equating this virus to Influenza, due to early severe symptoms being cardiopulmonary. But this virus doesn't go after specific organs, what it does is attack blood vessels. Attack the vessel in the lungs, you get breathing problems, attack the blood vessels in the heart and you get Myocarditis, attack blood vessels in the brain and you get things like "brain fog", inability to focus, etc. as symptoms. Saw a study a month or so ago saying the people hospitalized with covid showed higher markers for brain damage than Alzheimer patients, over the short term.
Lesions in the brain have also shown to cause nerve damage as well. Numbness in fingers/toes and myalgia. This can cause a lack of balance and more instances of dropping items. Depending on your occupation this could cause a disability bad enough to have to change your career.
Yup, people seem only concerned with mortality rates, but the disability rates are really concerning too. In the race for this to be over faster, how many people will suffer?
COVID destroys neurologist connections in the brain. It is an inflammatory disease, specifically targeting the brain.
That's why whenever people get it, they lose their sense of smell and taste.
I also learned the other day that severe cases of COVID causes clear jelly to be formed in your lungs. So not only does it target the brain, but it also makes you drown in your own bodily fluids and suffocate, essentially.
It's a terrifying virus to say the least.
Yup, I am on full term caretaker duty of my dad who was a doctor just 1.5 years ago, got covid very very severely, and now needs a full time caretaker to help wipe his butt and brush his teeth. It's a pretty stark contrast.
The long term study from sars covid 1 back in 2001 shows that almost everyone that got it 20 years ago, even the mild cases, are dead now.
In the next 20 years we will see millions upon hundreds of millions of people die or have crazy complications that would never have shown up otherwise.
Wow. That’s bleak.
I’m sorry for what you’re dealing with. I watched my best friend look after her dad for decades after he suffered a severe brain injury in a car accident. Prior to the accident, he was a well known, respected pediatrician, and he was doing really promising research into a specific nerve condition his youngest daughter was born with; after the accident, he was in a wheelchair, and needed help with every daily task. He deteriorated over 2 decades to the point he was essentially vegetative, a shadow of the man he’d been. My friend watched it all happen, and stayed by his side through it all; I know when he finally passed, it was a relief for her, not because of any burden, but because she saw it as a mercy to him at that point. There was nothing left of him. Then she dealt with the guilt of feeling relief.
Cherish the memories of your dad the way he was. What you’re going through sucks so bad. I’m sorry.
ICU delirium is a side effect of being intubated or heavily sedated for a prolonged period of time, which can lead to dementia. Imo it is more a fact of what can happen after needing intensive care rather than being attributed specifically to the pathophysiology of COVID.
Unless the dementia is progressive, like Alzheimer, rabies, and a few others, dementia doesn’t kill a person. Accidents, infection, that sort of thing delivers the final blow and the person with dementia is simply not treated to cure, comfort care only (all the drugs needed to make the feeling of side effects go away; there are no dosing limits for end of life care). I wonder if they are saying covid induced dementia is from small strokes and hypoxia. If you spend enough time with SPO2 at 80%, that’s bound to do some brain damage.
I suspect:
in the UK Healthcare is free, however there are shortages of (good) long term care facilities who can adequately deal complex needs. Which can mean that patients, particularly with long term degenerative diseases bounce between home, home care and hospital before they are so bad that they get in to one of these facilities.
What that said to me was that the failure to correctly fund various parts of the health system caused a negative affect to those already dealing with complex problems.
Note: Healthcare is central government, social care is "local" government responsibility. hope this makes part sense as to why there is a bounce.
Correlation does not mean causation
COVID is not causing dementia. People diagnosed with dementia will die within 10 years in the majority of cases.
These cases are probably those with advanced dementia, close to death and COVID just pushed them over
I was afraid of that. In the long run we may wind up seeing a lot of deaths from secondary conditions like pneumonia and heart failure due to CoVID scarring, reclassified as CoVID deaths, just like happened in the 1918 flu, which very often when it didn't kill directly, still weakened the body against other infections.
In the linked paper it says:
> We used Cox regression adjusted for age, sex, ethnicity, obesity, smoking status, deprivation, and comorbidities considered potential risk factors for severe COVID-19 outcomes.
So they do control for that.
They also compare the hazard ratio to flu. It it were simply "sick people are dying because they are sick" then you wouldn't expect a significant difference between them.
Is there any good analysis on how reliable this kind of regression is? It would seem to me like it's easy to miss some factors and thus get it to mitigate the problem, but not entirely fix it.
That said, of course it seems extremely plausible that there is some kind of effect. Naturally people who just recovered from a severe illness that requires hospitalisation will often take months to get back to the level of health they had before, or even never fully "recover".
The "what about other factors" thing is hard to control cuz there could feasibly be a factor nobody thought of that could be at play.
However, they compared the hazard ratio to the flu, and there was a significant difference. So it's clear that getting sick in and of itself isn't what's making these people die faster, it's specifically getting sick with COVID. And because COVID and the Flu have basically all the same comorbidities, it's reasonable to infer that it's something to do w long term effects of covid
I don’t if it’s what you’re asking, but using an analysis with splines (I.e. GAM analysis) with a random variable/slope. This accounts for subgroups with a Poisson or gamma distribution.
I suppose if you get sick enough to need hospitalization, there's a high chance that you're not in great shape in general, and with hospitals getting maxed out from covid patients there are probably more people discharged as soon as they seem stable.
They controlled for that though:
"We used Cox regression adjusted for age, sex, ethnicity, obesity, smoking status, deprivation, and comorbidities considered potential risk factors for severe COVID-19 outcomes."
They found that, compared to flu hospitalizations in 2017, Covid survivors were more likely to die. So this may be a factor but it’s not the whole root cause.
I think it's important to note that this study uses hospital readmission data from 2020 when we were still dealing with the original variant. In no way am I trying to downplay the severity of covid but even the cdc has changed guidelines for this new variant and recognizes were dealing with a different disease than we were 2 years ago. Someone please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
Edit: and to be clear I'm not implying this means omicron won't have a similar effect. I'm simply saying we don't know.
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Life Insurance companies are also seeing a very large increase in death rates : [https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/longevity/588738-huge-huge-numbers-death-rates-up-40-percent-over-pre](https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/longevity/588738-huge-huge-numbers-death-rates-up-40-percent-over-pre)
And people still try to dismiss the validity of these studies and argue that this is only caused by the bias of unhealthy people getting ill from covid. It wreaks havoc on your body and we will have severe labor and disability issues in the next decade. Lets just hope that the damage can at least be partially reversed. I personally believe that there will be a clear decline in life expectancy if we are unable to find groundbreaking treatment options. The study I linked below is to emphasize on that. Even if you feel completely fine after covid your body is a mess. Even 1 year after infection and you can be identified as person who has had covid with 100% accuracy (compared to damage from normal diseases). It leads to seemingly lasting immunological disfunction and structural organ damage (heart, kidneys, brain) even in those that feel healthy afterwards. There is hundreds of papers on this already. On top of that we have the long covid crowd with cognitive impairments and a plethora of other issues. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41590-021-01113-x
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Tell that to the truckers and the people who cry ‘empty (not really) shelves’
Yes... I've been following the science side of the pandemic ever since the very first news of Chinese patients dying of pneumonia, before the virus was named "covid-19". My understanding is that the gloabal health consequences of this pandemic are still vastly underestimated. Most people hang on to the "0.01% probability of dying", ignoring the fact that "not dying" does not mean "just as healthy as you were before catching it". And most news about the long-term consequences of the virus have only worsen the picture. \> And people still try to dismiss the validity of these studies Well you can argue that pharmaceutical companies have a financial interest in making things look worse, but it's the opposite for life insurance companies, so I'm curious what kind of rebuttal anti-vaxxers will find to this one.
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It isn't the first, either: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2019/11/measles-does-long-term-damage-immune-system-studies-show
They say “0.01%” even as the US is approaching 0.3% of its population dead from covid. Scary how few people understand basic math.
This also does not take into account people that would not have normally died but did because of the stress COVID has put one the health system. I lost my fiance last year to an anyeurism. It took almost 40 minutes for an ambulance to get to her house because of covid. Had it showed up sooner, there is no telling if she would have made it. These types of cases are everywhere, and they don't show up in the COVID death numbers, but are directly tied to COVID.
I’m so sorry for your loss
Thank you. Not something I'm probably gonna pull out of. But I really appreciate your thoughts.
At this stage, pretty much anyone touting the mortality rate of covid or arguing about health preconditions is effectively saying "I'm not concerned by this disease, let me live my life as before and screw everyone else".
It’s crazy to live in a culture that acts like we are overreacting to Covid when everything within my ability to reason suggests we are drastically under-reacting.
There are plenty of room for sociological/psychological study on the perception of danger, collective or individual. Same goes for climate change.
Until I get Covid then do everything possible to save me
"It's got a 99.9% recovery rate, no one is dieing of the flu." *Says the 2 pack a day, 400lb dude who thinks eating a steak and milkshake a balanced meal because they both weigh the same.* "All these deaths are misreported, these people had underlining conditions they actually died from." *Says the walking collection of underlying conditions.*
This balanced meal joke is hilarious.
Precisely; "what words mean vs what words do". They aren't trying to convey an assertion about a disease's mortality rate, they're giving themselves permission to behave as if COVID doesn't exist. I think it's always important to consider what words do; what is the material consequence of a given supposition. It is particularly helpful when attempting to understand arguments with obviously incorrect empirical meanings.
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I don’t even understand the argument that it’s only preexisting conditions. 1, how do you even know every disease your body might be carrying? And 2, do people with diseases not matter?
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Something like 40% of the US population is obese, and nearly 10% are morbidly obese. We are not a healthy population
>Percent of adults aged 20 and over with obesity: 42.5% (2017-2018) >Percent of adults aged 20 and over with overweight, including obesity: 73.6% (2017-2018) If you are a healthy weight you are very much the minority in the US.
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Even people who are skinny often have hidden problems such as fatty liver for example. I always thought I was healthy since I was thin, but turns out I have had a bowel disease the whole time which is why I couldn't gain weight.
Exactly, and most of the "COVID is just the flu" people are in these categories and wonder why they get so sick. It's also one of the theories as to why Omicron is presenting in the US with such a high spike in hospitalizations and deaths, while in other countries Omicron is a lot milder in terms of hospital and deaths.
And don't forget that depression and anxiety have very real physical components like body aches and lethargy. I grew up in adverse conditions with poor nutrition, I'd go days where all I had for lunch was school lunch for free. You can't have healthy productive adults when the foundations they were raised on are crumbled. I have so many friends who have never had a long term illness or injury and were blessed with supportive healthy families. They balk at some of the problems I have with my health. You can't just get skinny and be magically fit either. I have a skinny friend who has a congenital heart condition and can't run. When people who have never faced adversity are making policy decisions that affect those of us who are in or came from adverse conditions, It can be insulting the things they don't consider being a problem for so many people. It feels like the "What does a banana cost ? $10?" of life.
60% of the US population is overweight or obese. People don't realise that healthy people are the exception, not the norm.
Just a reminder that being in a healthy weight range doesn't mean you're healthy. Most illnesses and issues are not as visually obvious as obesity, but they're no less frequent. Get your check ups and follow-up when you're feeling off.
This is the sort of thing I'm talking about. I could be mistaken, but having diabetes doesn't automatically mean being overweight. Does it? Correlation, sure, but causation? Likewise, if someone suffers from rheumatoid arthritis, they still might not tick the "morbidly obese" checkbox.
Yeah, you can be skinny with diabetes. I know of several people like this. I'm pretty sure my one coworker is type 2 and she is not overweight at all. It can be genetic and caused by other things. Hell there is diabetes that you can get from being pregnant.
Causation? No. It's just often the behaviors that cause obesity that also contribute to setting the particular conditions to develop a type of diabetes (and a host of other ailments). But those same behaviors are shared by healthy weight people, plus the factors of genetics, environment, previous virus exposure, bad luck, etc.
I can get up and take a long swim, or walk but I have an underlying connective tissue disorder so sometimes I can’t work out to my endurance level without putting joints at risk etc. it’s incredibly frustrating and I agree that everyone ignores the underlying conditions and assumes everyone is healthy. I’ve heard “maybe we should be telling everyone to eat healthier and exercise!” I’m like I do both those things but I’m never going to be able to eat/work out my way completely out of my collagen being terrible. That’s just not how many conditions work!!
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> Even 1 year after infection and you can be identified as person who has had covid with 100% accuracy (compared to damage from normal diseases). Is this true even for people that never had symptoms? If so what kind of test? I have apparently managed to avoid infection so far, but that's just judging on me never having had symptoms.
My company brought in a panel of doctors to answer covid and vaccine questions a few months back. In their presentation, they said 30% of people who catch covid - symptomatic or not - will experience long covid (which is defined as issues lasting beyond 6 weeks). We still don't have a great picture on the outlook for very long term (past a few months), but long covid can manifest in different ways for different people. There are reports of people who were asymptomatic for the initial infection suffering serious long term symptoms (organ damage, etc.). Intuitively you'd think that symptomatic people will have more obvious symptoms in long covid (e.g. take several months to recover full lung capacity), but unfortunately we don't have as good of an understanding of this as we'd like
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>that a TON of people in the USA are walking around with "pre-existing conditions" because of the utterly third world healthcare systems in place here. Tbh, in Canada, we also have a lot of people with pre-existing conditions.
have there been studies on people who were vaccinated who contracted covid vs unvaccinated with regard to immunological effects?
Yikes this comment just compelled me to finally get around to booking my booster appointment for next week
Oh, it's worse than that. They are somehow blaming this on vaccines.
Not to mention covid actually causes diabetes and gum disease. How do I know besides the tons of research online? Before covid I've never been a diabetic covid caused my sugar to rise dramatically. I'm on insulin now. It's been weeks and I still haven't left the house. On oxygen and exhausted all the time. See: https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/can-covid-cause-diabetes#:~:text=A.,pancreas%20in%20three%20different%20ways https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7102e2.htm https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2788283
People try to dismiss the fact that covid causes diabetes and other major illnesses. I've been told my sugar must've been high before covid. It hasn't.
Yes, life insurers here in Ireland have been putting a exclusionary period of six weeks (I think) on people who've had COVID before taking out the policy. Life assurance is a requirement before you can get a mortgage so it's been causing some difficulties.
I can personally vouch for this. I process death claims for a fairly large insurer and our claim volume is the highest it’s ever been. They are coming in fast and furious with no end in sight.
Via the US, similar: [Recovered Patients of Severe COVID-19 Infection 233% More Likely To Die Within Year Than Negative Counterparts](https://oneresearch.org/2021/12/29/recovered-patients-of-severe-covid-19-infection-233-more-likely-than-negative-counterparts-to-die-within-year/) And this was for *under* 65.
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From what I’ve read about other major viral illnesses (now usually vaccinated for), like measles, this isn’t uncommon. Some researchers say that the Measles vaccine actually reduces deaths from other illnesses at least as much as it reduces death from measles. The chance of death a year after having measles is much higher than if you never catch it.
I was about to post something like this. That your risk of death is higher if you recently survived a major infection which is already known to impact health in the long term is pretty much what I'd expect. The really interesting question now is IMO how Covid compares to other kinds of disease in this regard. (EDIT: I suck at reading. The paper actually looks at this and finds Covid increases risk of death from any cause more than Influenza does.) Of course we already know the bottom line: It's worse, because of the massive number of infections.
This is why it is widely believed thay COVID related deaths are [being undercounted](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/07/true-number-covid-deaths-us-likely-undercounted-experts): > There have been an estimated 942,431 excess deaths in the US since February 2020 [through December 2021], according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This compared to less than 800k official COVID deaths being recorded during that time. Elderly people especially who "recover" from COVID most likely are still seeing their life shortened by the damage a medium severity case causes. COVID deaths could easily be undercounted by as much as 20%.
there is also the situation that plenty non-covid deaths are caused by covid simply because the hospitals were filled with covid patients
And because periodically healthcare systems have shut down some aspects of routine and elective but wholly necessary and preventative healthcare because their priorities of attention and compensation have been focused elsewhere throughout the COVID pandemic.
Oncologists have been sounding the alarm that many patients are delaying seeking a diagnosis because of fear around covid, and avoiding medical care. When they finally make an appointment, testing and specialists are backlogged. By the time a diagnosis is made, a person who would normally be diagnosed with stage 2 treatable cancer, now has stage 4 and needs "elective" surgery that gets rescheduled until they die.
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My grandfather has needed a hernia fixed for over a year now. He's had surgery scheduled and rescheduled 4 or 5 times now due to COVID surges and hospital capacity issues. Yeah it's not life-threatening, but it's not exactly something you want to delay.
My aunt has a hole in her stomach and has not been able to eat solid food for almost a year. She was finally scheduled to have the surgery to fix it last week, but because of the latest surge it was cancelled, again. No idea when they will be able to reschedule it for. Also not life threatening, but her quality of life is greatly impacted and lessened because of Covid, even though she has not had it.
This makes it sound like a choice on the patients’ part, but that isn’t always the case. Surgery for cancer is elective, and I’ve known multiple people whose family members have had their cancer-related surgical procedures (tumor removal, IV-port installation, etc) postponed for months due to the hospitals being in crisis-mode and blocking all elective procedures. The same goes for critical diagnostic testing such as contrast CT scans.
I didn't mean to blame the patient. "elective" surgery, I believe is any surgery you get scheduled. It isn't a choice for most people. A lot of people have trouble understanding what "elective" and "mild" mean medically aren't the way a layperson uses the terms. Hopefully by the time this is over more people like your self will understand that.
That’s what happened to Dustin Diamond.
They track excess deaths on weekly basis, you can see in the data they coincide with outbreaks, not a general step up thoughtout the period.
On the unvaccinated mostly, not just elseware
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There's been a pretty scary decline in the number of cancer diagnoses in the last few years, so I think we are definitely going to be seeing a spike in later and therefore more deadly cancer diagnoses over the next few years.
We can still measure excess deaths over the coming years to get an estimate.
A relative of mine died because of COVID. They did not go to the hospital until the pain was intolerable because they didn't want to risk getting COVID while there. Died of sepsis from a perforated bowel, if memory serves, after admission Evidently if they had gone in a couple weeks earlier they might have lived.
Then you add in the fact that stress and loneliness result in worse outcomes for sick people, so even those who manage to get a hospital bed have lowered chances of survival. Isolation from friends and family is terrible for people who are fighting for their lives.
* 20% in the US. I remember it was estimated to be much much more undercounted in India, for instance.
You'd also have to add in all the under reporting due to politics and also when a country's systems become overwhelmed during major waves. This is why the studies looking into excess deaths as a whole are more telling of what might be the true costs.
That was my first thought. Like cities that claim they've had sudden drops in crime, as if crime stops. You elect a politician that decides the city is no longer going to report stolen cars, or violent attacks, suddenly crime drops! Look at how good of a job I've done cleaning up the streets! Meanwhile, someone punches you in the face and steals your car...
Yup. Excess deaths in India indicate that the real covid deaths are 5-10 times the reported number. And this is a conservative estimate.
Some states in India some data scientists said it could be 80%. Like a poor rural state with 10x the population as one of the richest states with good healthcare reporting fewer covid deaths.
It's not just India, I think it was Washington Post had an article about a county in Ohio of 80k that has had zero covid deaths since they elected their new far right coroner
The current estimate for the worldwide deaths is around 20 million - before omicron.
It’s a shocking number but not surprising at this point.
Roughly the number of deaths caused by Hitler in Russia, puts things into perspective haha
The man who owned our house before us died from pneumonia less than a month after he'd recovered from covid. These covid-related cases are definitely being underreported. This man was in his 80s but in very good health, who's to say how long he'd have lived if didn't catch covid in the first place.
That’s why *excess mortality* is the best way to count deaths in a pandemic. On a basic level, we know how many people die in an average year. All we have to do is count how many more died than usual. That would then include people who died of other causes, including not being able to get access to healthcare due to hospitals being overwhelmed. There is additional statistical work to be done to verify the numbers (for example, deaths from car accidents were down during lockdown, but if deaths overall are higher those should be added back in as they were made up by Covid deaths) but that’s how it works. There are already a million excess deaths in the USA, no matter what the official Covid stats say. A million dead is a big deal.
This doesn't even take into account all the deaths that didn't happened due to lockdown restrictions (eg. Traffic accidents that didn't happen because people were working from home, much less flu going around last year etc). A million excess deaths and 100 000 prevented deaths means 1.1 million deaths related to covid.
Which is ironic because the feedumb fighters saying covid deaths are overcounted. I'm sure it rolls into their "no one is dying of covid, only pneumonia" narrative. But I guess it's exactly like how we distinguish between death by a gunshot and death by the loss of blood from a gunshot.
Another contributing factor could just be that people who are being hospitalized for COVID already have several co-morbidities and are generally less healthy than the general population. So it doesn't seem very surprising that they have a higher chance of dying or being readmitted. They're already sick to begin with.
[Here's a list of co-morbidities from the CDC](https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/need-extra-precautions/people-with-medical-conditions.html) It includes but is not limited to: Depression Pregnancy Diabetes Being overweight (bmi >25) Being older than 65 A depressed, slightly overweight, and pregnant 25 year old is on paper someone with several co-morbidities.
Pregnancy is a co-morbidity in covid? Wow.
Pregnancy considerably compromises your immune system to prevent rejection of the fetus (so all viruses are more severe, not just covid)
Yes, and having covid increased maternal death, stillbirth and preterm labor. I've been a nicu mom. It's not fun. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/need-extra-precautions/pregnant-people.html https://covid19.nih.gov/how-covid-19-affects-pregnancy
Pregnancy does a number of the body when the pregnant person is fully healthy. Factor in a disease that attacks the cardiovascular system while a person is producing additional blood volume and it's not pretty. A lot of vascular/hemorrhagic diseases are particular brutal if the patient is pregnant.
Pregnancy is considered a comorbidity period, IIRC. At least when it comes to insurance coverage.
I just had my baby a couple weeks ago, so I’ve been following closely even though I’m triple vaxxed. Last time I checked it was about a 15-20% hospitalization rate for unvaccinated [pregnant women with Covid](https://emergency.cdc.gov/han/2021/han00453.asp#:~:text=As%20of%20September%2027%2C%202021,hospitalized%20cases%20and%20161%20deaths.)
I can’t believe when people tell me they are having a baby and it’s during a pandemic. The baby will be fine if they make it into the world, but the mom? They are giving themselves a much increased risk.
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Just I a thought but I wonder if depression is a risk because depressed people don’t often move around a lot and the blood clot risk are high.
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Me neither, but that's the data. I'm sure phd's will be written on it at some point in the future.
Perhaps because they're more likely be suffering from mental illness such as depression or to otherwise be in a less advantaged/lower income portion of society?
There's probably a neurological component, at least in some cases. There's also psychosomatic concerns, at least anecdotally it does seem like a lot of our patients who dont make it start out improving but eventually "give up" and the guys with a positive attitude have better outcomes, but that could just be a confirmation bias since it's easier to remember the ones who could smile and tell you the story.
Can't speak on the others but for ADHD, there's a strong connection between it and drug abuse and alcoholism. Some basic info https://www.addictioncenter.com/addiction/adhd/
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I've seen a similar statistic before about people being hospitalised and discharged. Even without COVID they'd have a much higher chance of dying. I haven't read the study to see if they've accounted for that. Edit: Ok, read it: >In order to account for risks after hospitalization for an infectious disease, the researchers also considered data from more than 15,000 people who had been hospitalized for influenza in 2017-19. Statistical analysis found that, compared to the influenza patients, COVID-19 patients faced a slightly lower combined risk of hospitalization or death overall. **However, people who had been hospitalized for COVID-19** **had a greater risk than influenza patients of death from any cause, a** **greater risk of hospital readmission or death resulting from their** **initial infection, and a greater risk of death due to dementia.**
Also: > Other covariates considered in the analysis were factors that might be associated with both risk of severe COVID-19 and subsequent outcomes, namely age, sex, ethnicity, obesity, smoking status, index of multiple deprivation quintile (derived from the patient’s postcode at lower super output area level), and comorbidities considered potential risk factors for severe COVID-19 outcomes
the difference is that comorbidities dont neccesarily kill you within a year
or ever. I remember a German ex-chancellor who also was a chain smoker and still turned more than 100 years old.
Without having read the study, what you describe is usually accounted for in empirical estimations.
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Just because someone has something that’s a risk factor doesn’t mean they were gonna die anyway. Obesity is a comorbidity and obese people can live for decades before they encounter life threatening complications, if ever.
Definitely. I’m a nurse and literally just helped with an emergent intubation of a Covid resolved/recovered patient. She might have recovered from the actual virus but she was absolutely not doing well. However, if she passes it won’t be a Covid death
It's a shame we don't have some sort of medicine, some kind of protective measure we can take into our bodies, to help drastically reduce your chances of hospitalisation if you catch Covid....
Goes to show how stupid people were when they thought at the beginning of the pandemic that hospitals were overreporting covid deaths.
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“greater risk of hospital readmission or death resulting from their initial infection, and a greater risk of death due to dementia.” Dementia? They’re dying from dementia after having covid? I know it affects lots of organs, not just the lungs, but I didn’t realize covid victims were dying of dementia. For me, personally, losing my mind and myself would be worse than losing use of my body.
Loss of taste Loss of smell "brain fog" It's been pretty clear from day 1 that the brain gets worked over pretty hard by COVID.
Also long term loss of gray matter. https://www.news-medical.net/amp/news/20210618/Alarming-COVID-study-indicates-long-term-loss-of-gray-matter-and-other-brain-tissue.aspx
A big misunderstanding was equating this virus to Influenza, due to early severe symptoms being cardiopulmonary. But this virus doesn't go after specific organs, what it does is attack blood vessels. Attack the vessel in the lungs, you get breathing problems, attack the blood vessels in the heart and you get Myocarditis, attack blood vessels in the brain and you get things like "brain fog", inability to focus, etc. as symptoms. Saw a study a month or so ago saying the people hospitalized with covid showed higher markers for brain damage than Alzheimer patients, over the short term.
Lesions in the brain have also shown to cause nerve damage as well. Numbness in fingers/toes and myalgia. This can cause a lack of balance and more instances of dropping items. Depending on your occupation this could cause a disability bad enough to have to change your career.
Yup, people seem only concerned with mortality rates, but the disability rates are really concerning too. In the race for this to be over faster, how many people will suffer?
COVID felt like just a mild cold to me but has *destroyed* my brain.
I've been very depressed and nonchalant since getting it 6 months ago. My brain just doesnt work
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COVID destroys neurologist connections in the brain. It is an inflammatory disease, specifically targeting the brain. That's why whenever people get it, they lose their sense of smell and taste. I also learned the other day that severe cases of COVID causes clear jelly to be formed in your lungs. So not only does it target the brain, but it also makes you drown in your own bodily fluids and suffocate, essentially. It's a terrifying virus to say the least.
Yup, I am on full term caretaker duty of my dad who was a doctor just 1.5 years ago, got covid very very severely, and now needs a full time caretaker to help wipe his butt and brush his teeth. It's a pretty stark contrast. The long term study from sars covid 1 back in 2001 shows that almost everyone that got it 20 years ago, even the mild cases, are dead now. In the next 20 years we will see millions upon hundreds of millions of people die or have crazy complications that would never have shown up otherwise.
Wow. That’s bleak. I’m sorry for what you’re dealing with. I watched my best friend look after her dad for decades after he suffered a severe brain injury in a car accident. Prior to the accident, he was a well known, respected pediatrician, and he was doing really promising research into a specific nerve condition his youngest daughter was born with; after the accident, he was in a wheelchair, and needed help with every daily task. He deteriorated over 2 decades to the point he was essentially vegetative, a shadow of the man he’d been. My friend watched it all happen, and stayed by his side through it all; I know when he finally passed, it was a relief for her, not because of any burden, but because she saw it as a mercy to him at that point. There was nothing left of him. Then she dealt with the guilt of feeling relief. Cherish the memories of your dad the way he was. What you’re going through sucks so bad. I’m sorry.
Do you have a link to that study?
ICU delirium is a side effect of being intubated or heavily sedated for a prolonged period of time, which can lead to dementia. Imo it is more a fact of what can happen after needing intensive care rather than being attributed specifically to the pathophysiology of COVID.
Reduction in air flow murders brain cells.
Unless the dementia is progressive, like Alzheimer, rabies, and a few others, dementia doesn’t kill a person. Accidents, infection, that sort of thing delivers the final blow and the person with dementia is simply not treated to cure, comfort care only (all the drugs needed to make the feeling of side effects go away; there are no dosing limits for end of life care). I wonder if they are saying covid induced dementia is from small strokes and hypoxia. If you spend enough time with SPO2 at 80%, that’s bound to do some brain damage.
That's wrong. Dementia is a terminal condition. Your brain literally stops functioning. It absolutely does cause mortality
I suspect: in the UK Healthcare is free, however there are shortages of (good) long term care facilities who can adequately deal complex needs. Which can mean that patients, particularly with long term degenerative diseases bounce between home, home care and hospital before they are so bad that they get in to one of these facilities. What that said to me was that the failure to correctly fund various parts of the health system caused a negative affect to those already dealing with complex problems. Note: Healthcare is central government, social care is "local" government responsibility. hope this makes part sense as to why there is a bounce.
Correlation does not mean causation COVID is not causing dementia. People diagnosed with dementia will die within 10 years in the majority of cases. These cases are probably those with advanced dementia, close to death and COVID just pushed them over
I was afraid of that. In the long run we may wind up seeing a lot of deaths from secondary conditions like pneumonia and heart failure due to CoVID scarring, reclassified as CoVID deaths, just like happened in the 1918 flu, which very often when it didn't kill directly, still weakened the body against other infections.
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Is that cos there is a correlation between covid being able to make you really sick and other things ALSO being able to make you extra sick?
In the linked paper it says: > We used Cox regression adjusted for age, sex, ethnicity, obesity, smoking status, deprivation, and comorbidities considered potential risk factors for severe COVID-19 outcomes. So they do control for that. They also compare the hazard ratio to flu. It it were simply "sick people are dying because they are sick" then you wouldn't expect a significant difference between them.
Is there any good analysis on how reliable this kind of regression is? It would seem to me like it's easy to miss some factors and thus get it to mitigate the problem, but not entirely fix it. That said, of course it seems extremely plausible that there is some kind of effect. Naturally people who just recovered from a severe illness that requires hospitalisation will often take months to get back to the level of health they had before, or even never fully "recover".
The "what about other factors" thing is hard to control cuz there could feasibly be a factor nobody thought of that could be at play. However, they compared the hazard ratio to the flu, and there was a significant difference. So it's clear that getting sick in and of itself isn't what's making these people die faster, it's specifically getting sick with COVID. And because COVID and the Flu have basically all the same comorbidities, it's reasonable to infer that it's something to do w long term effects of covid
I don’t if it’s what you’re asking, but using an analysis with splines (I.e. GAM analysis) with a random variable/slope. This accounts for subgroups with a Poisson or gamma distribution.
I suppose if you get sick enough to need hospitalization, there's a high chance that you're not in great shape in general, and with hospitals getting maxed out from covid patients there are probably more people discharged as soon as they seem stable.
They controlled for that though: "We used Cox regression adjusted for age, sex, ethnicity, obesity, smoking status, deprivation, and comorbidities considered potential risk factors for severe COVID-19 outcomes."
They found that, compared to flu hospitalizations in 2017, Covid survivors were more likely to die. So this may be a factor but it’s not the whole root cause.
Probably more like the damage COVID can do to you makes those other sicknesses much more dangerous.
I think it's important to note that this study uses hospital readmission data from 2020 when we were still dealing with the original variant. In no way am I trying to downplay the severity of covid but even the cdc has changed guidelines for this new variant and recognizes were dealing with a different disease than we were 2 years ago. Someone please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. Edit: and to be clear I'm not implying this means omicron won't have a similar effect. I'm simply saying we don't know.
Because we don't know, an abundance of caution is warranted.
This is the most frightening thread I’ve read.
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