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No there is no good easy answer. Think of it this way:
As a physician you are treating a person with severe chronic pulmonary disease and congestive heart failure who requires continual high level 02 just to stay alive. He is admitted via the ER and tests positive for the Covid-19. You do your best to treat each disorder but the patient dies. Did your patient die because of Covid-19 or with Covid-19. Remember most people who test posivie for Covid-19 are without symptoms so maybe he died of his underlying disease and not because of the virus. But maybe the virus actually killed your patient.
You can't decide one way of the other. How do you sign out his death certificate and how does the State catagorize his death?
@docjoctoo I edited your post so it would show when I quote
As a physician you are treating a person with severe chronic pulmonary disease and congestive heart failure who requires continual high level 02 just to stay alive. He is admitted via the ER and tests positive for the Covid-19. You do your best to treat each disorder but the patient dies. Did your patient die because of Covid-19 or with Covid-19. Remember most people who test posivie for Covid-19 are without symptoms so maybe he died of his underlying disease and not because of the virus. But maybe the virus actually killed your patient.
You can't decide one way of the other. How do you sign out his death certificate and how does the State catagorize his death?
@docjoctoo I edited your post so it would show when I quote
Last edited by a moderator:
In contrast, Stillwater Public Schools just announced they will be returning to full traditional 5-day scheduling starting next week.
https://sites.google.com/stillwater...ESzItC1HX9R0uCIUF0rrLbTA42GqZrhuHHQPZ6aCH8TX0
https://sites.google.com/stillwater...ESzItC1HX9R0uCIUF0rrLbTA42GqZrhuHHQPZ6aCH8TX0
I'll tell you the story behind the question...unlike the US, Germany doesn't count the death of someone with Chronic Pulmonary Disease and Congestive Heart Failure who dies while they have Covid as a Covid death. This is something my friends in Germany and I have discussed, how to equalize the numbers in a way to look at what is happening in both countries. The 6% is the only thing we have found that puts us close to apples to apples but US total still seems low using that...making our deaths approx 15k and theirs (if equal to our population) approx. 43k. Our thought is that the numbers would likely be fairly equal.
Two things here, assuming I understand you right. First, we've gotten much better at treating the flu, which has been with us for hundreds if not thousands of years. There is a fairly dramatic difference in flu deaths per population if you look across the last hundred years. It also mutates more rapidly than this making it likely harder to treat. Second, as is now cliche, this is a brand new virus and failing to spread out at least the initial infections would overwhelm hospital systems and increase death rates exponentially because the kind of care needed to save lives isn't available. Relatedly, we've already cut the death rate by more than half and we don't even have vaccines, which both prevent infection and lessen disease severity, or many great treatments for after infection. Spreading out initial infections buys time to drive that down. We can argue about when do we reach a sufficiently low population infection and death rates and what tradeoffs are worth it, but I would say even keeping it under 1k deaths per day and keeping hospitals under surge capacity is a pretty low bar that's worth wearing masks and cancelling large gatherings.
