Mirth wrote:
Very interesting Klaus - although one thing I think got overlooked in that interview is that the lockdowns here in the UK were partly to enable building that excess hospital capacity and testing capability.
Mirth: I missed this reply earlier. I'm not that clued in on the UK situation but that sounds reasonable to me. I think the picture that is emerging right now is telling us two things: that covid-19 is a lot milder than the initial estimates during the breakout in Wuhan (in the sense that the majority of the infected aren't even aware that they've had it), and that the capacity of the healthcare system is the single most important thing to keep the mortality rate down during the pandemic; much more important than extreme measures of social distancing.
There was this graph showing excess mortality in Italy, for instance:
The thing that stands out the most is that over half of the deaths in Bergamo aren't covid-19 related. Or maybe a better way of putting it would be: some of them are probably related to covid-19, but not because people were done in by the virus. They died because they couldn't get normal healthcare to treat cancer, fractures, dialysis, heart infarctions, and so forth. If the healthcare system in Bergamo hadn't been so completely overwhelmed a lot of those people would likely still be alive. It also makes you wonder how many people actually die during a lockdown because they're stuck at home and can't get help. There are so many blind spots we're unaware of that are related to the social damage rather than the disease itself.
I should mention that the covid numbers aren't exact; some of the deceased are probably people who never got tested, and Italy also don't factor in deaths in elderly homes as far as I know. But even if you add, say, 20 percent to the covid-19 mortality figures the excess mortality for non-corona cases would still be nearly as big as the number of confirmed covid-19 deaths.
I saw this interesting statistical comparison from a doctor and modeller in Sweden that I think ties into the same thing. The graph is plotting the excess mortality in Sweden. The green line is the average mortality between 2015-2019, the purple line is the 2020 numbers. You've got weeks on the x axis and number of deaths on the y axis:
They think that Stockholm (which is the only region that is bad off) peaked last week and is now on its way down, which likely contributes to the sharp dip that is showing up between week 14 and 15. There has been a small excess mortality so far during the first 15 weeks: we're talking 498 deceased in total (against a population of 10.5 million), but what's interesting is that, over the last week, the mortality rate has actually been dramatically lower than the average for the same week in the previous 5 years.
I think that lends credibility to what Giesecke talked about in the interview: that some of the very sick and very old, people who statistically would have been unlikely to live another year with or without corona, tend to die off early, contributing to an early excess mortality, but once they are deceased the mortality rate will drop for future weeks. Not just the excess mortality, but the mortality rate, full stop. A lot fewer people died between week 14 and 15 in Sweden, despite corona, than during the previous five years on average.
It's going to differ some because of regional circumstances I'm sure, but it seems that as long as hospital capacity is up and functioning, as it has been over here, the excess mortality is probably going to be relatively small seen across an entire year, even in badly infected regions like Stockholm. Certainly not anywhere near the magnitude of hundreds of thousands of deaths like some models predicted; probably not even a tenth of that.
