How else could deaths be recorded? It would seem negligent to not record someone who died with coronavirus as dying of coronavirus.
Covid-19 causes a range of severity of illness.
If someone is hospitalised for covid-19 they are very unwell -- this is because hospitals are overwhelmed by the number of patients and are only admitting those who are very ill, and also because hospitals want infectious people to stay at home out of hospital as long as possible to reduce the amount of infection being spread.
So, when someone with covid-19 dies in hospital it's almost certain that it's the covid-19 that killed them, even if they would have died later that year of something else.
I'm not sure how much of a blanket rule that is, or to what extent it's masking true numbers, or how it compares with other countries.
it is still counted as a coronavirus death, but somehow it doesn't seem right...
In Bergamo, obituaries in the newspaper went from little more than 1 page per day to about 10 [1] (sorry, link in Italian), so yes, it is much higher than normal. And this was about ten days ago, now I guess it is even worse.
For a hospital that needs to handle the diseased person, recording the most contagious disease makes sense, and acting as relevantly.
For an actuary looking at deaths after the fact, trying to analyse the lethality of diseases, attributing all deaths to the most contagious disease is less sensible.
Not ‘may’ have underlying problems. No less than 99% have other health problems. Around half of the deaths had 3 underlying problems. But we still credit the virus? Not the fact many of these folks have serious health issues?
”As of March 17, 17 people under 50 had died from the disease. All of Italy’s victims under 40 have been males with serious existing medical conditions.”
I have an eyebrow raised.
A death of healthy new born would mean 80 years lost. Death of elderly person maybe 5. You could simple stats by comparing to general life expectancy and more detailed by considering the health condition of the person.
I think the fact that the hospitals are overwhelmed is killing people a lot quicker than they would've taken.
This was also the case in china, but the age structure is different:
"A study in JAMA this week found that almost 40 per cent of infections and 87 per cent of deaths in the country have been in patients over 70 years old."
"An older population skew within the infected population explains most of the disparity in fatality rates between high and low countries. According to a study of the fatalities of COVID-19 cases in Italy, 99% of all deaths had an underlying pathology. Only 0.8% had no underlying condition."
Seems like a perfect storm for the elderly in italy who smoke a lot and most of them having an underlying condition like cardiovascular disease or diabetes II.
True and more complicated than that sounds. I was diagnosed with asthma at 28. A year and a half ago, at age 39, a pulmonary specialist rated my lung capacity at 115% compared to other males of my age and height likely due to exercising through unmedicated asthma. Undiagnosed underlying conditions shouldn’t prevent intentional efforts to be continuously healthy.
Elevated blood pressure, childhood asthma, obesity, diabetes
High blood pressure alone captures 1/3rd of the public, and it qualifies as a underlying condition. 1/2 of the public has "cardiovascular disease". It goes on and on.
It just seems like at this point people are just trying to comfort themselves. A 51 year old gentleman near me passed very quickly from COVID-19 and the report claimed he had a pre-existing condition. Later the wife was interviewed and she described him as completely healthy...but he had bronchitis when he was a child.
I still think it’s important for people to understand that the other conditions do appear the be strongly correlated to severe cases. I don’t think it’s just a false comfort. There is so much misunderstanding out there. Many friends and family I talk to seem to have a distorted view of the realty of what the disease actually is.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-tho...
If you do proper testing, like in South Korea, you detect everybody or almost everybody that has coronavirus, even when they don't have symptoms of the illness. That is 7 to 10 times more people detected(and controlled), that can actually transmit the virus.
In a country like UK, Portugal or Germany they had copied lots of things that worked in Taiwan, South Korea, Singapur or Japan.
Germany could have as many detected cases as Spain, but that will make only 1/10 of the real illnesses cases of Spain.
In a country like Spain or Italy people in charge are so incompetent that they have only reacted when it was too late.
That at the same time forces the entire's population to follow quarantine, because without tests you are blind to the people that has the virus without symptoms.
Spain's Government is today promising a million test kits(broken promises is the seal of Mr Sanchez), in the future, but as of now there are not enough test just for testing all people with symptoms, unless you are a politician or family member of a politician of course.
That is the result of not getting preventive stocks early on. They simply could not imagine(and hence prepare) what has happened and just took zero anticipative actions like buying face masks.
Those politicians have zero scientific or technical preparation, so they could not understand something as simple as an exponential function.
In the case of Spain, they have very well prepared people down the command chain. But the people that takes the decisions are just scientific illiterate.
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus
and they have very good information about testing in each country.
Can you explain further? The responses in these countries have been quite different from each other.
One major problem with this is China's reporting and actual figures.
Here are some stats for Germany [1] as of yesterday:
cases deaths
16,662(+19%) 47(+52%)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_G...
Death pr. infected goes from 0.4% (Germany) to 1% (Diamond Princess) to 7.8% (Iran) to 9% (Italy).
If you have plenty of resources and you do contact tracing you are going to find many cases and the denominator will be high. If you are pressed on ressources and only test people admitted to hospitals with obvious symptions then the denominator will be low.
Demographics, overall population health, polution explains some of it but not a difference of factor 20.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
Italy has one of the highest rate of cases per capita and the highest CFR.
Worth pointing out that the record increase in 630 deaths was the number of two days ago... Yesterday, the increase in deaths was even bigger: 790 (from 4035 to 4825 total casualties).
> "The country's high death toll is due to an ageing population, overstretched health system and the way fatalities are reported"
This can be read with a level certainty that minimizes the seriousness of this virus for English speaking readers that may be faced with making life saving choices over the next week.
Further, the Italian expert interviewed __in the article__ underlines the importance of not searching for explanations, because right now it is hard to be certain.
> “It’s too early to make a comparison across Europe,” he says. “We do not have detailed sero-surveillance of the population and we do not know how many asymptomatic people are spreading it.”
Unfortunately the author chooses to make exactly such a comparison in the fourth paragraph!
> In very crude terms, this means that around eight per cent of confirmed coronavirus patients have died in Italy, compared to four per cent in China. By this measure Germany, which has so far identified 13,000 cases and 42 deaths, has a fatality rate of just 0.3 per cent.
This is a moment where we need very concise and accurate information. Even if this article comes from a reputable source, I find it misses that mark.
I find significantly more enlightening the ISS's (Istituto di Sanità Superiore) info-graphics which are prepared quasi-daily. [1] They are translated into english. [2]
Stay safe out there.
[1]: https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/sars-cov-2-sorvegli... [2]: https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Infograf...
Here the interview:
https://www.huffingtonpost.it/entry/giorgio-gori-chiudete-tu...
And it is very hard not to think that the most plausible explanation for the anomaly is shortage in ICUs.
But people who died without a diagnose for the Coronavirus are deemed to be dead not because of it.
From https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-...
> in the city of Bergamo, there were 108 more deaths in the first 15 days of March this year compared to 2019 (164 deaths in 2020 vs. 56 deaths in 2019) according to the mayor of the city Giorgio Gori. During this period, 31 deaths were attributed to the coronavirus (less than 30% of the additional deaths this year)
> "There are significant numbers of people who have died but whose death hasn't been attributed to the coronavirus because they died at home or in a nursing home and so they weren't swabbed," said the mayor
Granted, the sample and time interval is small to draw conclusions. But we'll know (perhaps when it's too late) what's the real death-toll of the coronavirus is.
tl;dr: The death count is not generous; probably the other way around. By, perhaps, a very big margin.