CV and mad panic behaviour

[capcom]

Remember, the genuine pandemic scientists report that the official figure of about 6 million could be as low as only 30% of the real world total, most think it's around only 50%.

[member=153]LP[/member] ... I never suggested otherwise.  Quite a few countries have lied about the true numbers, of that I have no doubt.

[madbluboy]

ABC Radio Melbourne is running a segment where folk who have lost a family member can put a story to the statistic.  Apart from giving families the opportunity to talk about their lost loved ones, the segment has utterly destroyed the notion that co-morbidity is an equal factor in "deaths with COVID".  It is a fact that folk with "underlying conditions" may have lived for decades with those conditions. 

It's a great opportunity for folk to celebrate and remember the lives of family members who, until now, have largely been reduced to numbers in official statistics.

The average age of the covid deaths in Australia was 83 or 84 which is above life expectancy.

[DJC]

The average age of the covid deaths in Australia was 83 or 84 which is above life expectancy.

The median age of COVID deaths in Australia is currently 82, slightly lower than life expectancy, and significantly lower than it was late last year.

[Lods]

My cousin was due to have a 60th birthday party next week.
Folks were flying in from interstate.
Her son has tested positive so it's off, and the immediate family are isolating.
Air fares and accommodation refunds need to be checked out but the bottom line is that it's caused a lot of disruption for a lot of people...and concern for the family at a time of supposed celebration.
It's not over until it's over

One of the ironies of the situation is that people can suggest it didn't have the impact we were warned about, but was that because we did go hard with some of the strategies including high vaccination numbers before opening up?

[madbluboy]

The median age of COVID deaths in Australia is currently 82, slightly lower than life expectancy, and significantly lower than it was late last year.

How many more decades were they going to live for?

[Mav]

Australian Bureau of Statistics report on Covid deaths misrepresented by rightwing media, The Guardian.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics last week released a new report on Covid mortality in Australia. The data is important – it exposes the inequality in how the pandemic is affecting Australians, with deaths higher among people from lower socioeconomic areas, and shockingly high death rates for people born outside Australia.

Experts told Guardian Australia a key reason for this is Australia’s reliance on migrants to undertake essential, insecure work and a failure of government to engage migrant communities early in pandemic planning.

These are issues rarely heard about from politicians and some media outlets during the pandemic, despite the trends being clear since at least August 2020.

However, rightwing radio hosts and columnists saw something different in the figures – support for an ongoing narrative that lockdowns and other interventions represented an “overreaction” or were the result of a “scare campaign”.

[quotes various media pundits]

Fordham, Panahi, Hildebrand and Murray all got the percentage of Covid deaths with underlying health conditions wrong, citing 91% or 92% when it should actually be 69.5%.

They’ve used the number of cases where only Covid was reported on the death certificate, which is 220 or 8.6% of total Covid deaths in this period, and subtracted this from the total.

However, they should have included a further 560 deaths where another condition was “reported with causal sequence of events only”. This means those people did not have a pre-existing chronic condition prior to the chain of events leading to death, but conditions that developed due to Covid-19, such as pneumonia.

While this may seem a bit complicated, the ABS clearly states within the same report the actual number of deaths with pre-existing chronic conditions in very plain terms: “Pre-existing chronic conditions were reported on death certificates for 1,776 (69.5%) of the 2,556 deaths due to Covid-19 deaths outlined in this report.”

A chronic problem
Another major issue is that several of these commentators imply that deaths are somehow not fully attributable to Covid if people had a chronic health condition.

Again, the ABS report states in clear terms that this is not the case: “The majority [2,556] of these 2,639 deaths were due directly to Covid-19”.

While various health conditions and other factors such as age can put you at an increased risk of dying if you catch Covid, it is an increased risk, not a guaranteed death sentence. To put it another way – if it weren’t for Covid these people would not have died when they did.

It’s also important to realise that a very large number of Australians have chronic health conditions (I’ve got one myself!), so implying that deaths of entirely healthy people are somehow more important is unhelpful.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) estimates that 47% of Australians aged 18 and over had one or more chronic health conditions, and this rises to 60% in the 45 to 64 age bracket, and to 80% for those over 65.

While the AIHW figures include conditions like back problems and mental and behavioural conditions not included in the ABS Covid deaths report, other figures show how widespread these conditions are. One in three Australians have high blood pressure, and a similar proportion of adults are obese. Both are on the list of the pre-existing chronic conditions listed in the ABS report.

The Y2K fallacy
Another issue with several of the opinion pieces is that they make an argument that I’ve taken to calling the “Y2K fallacy“ for lack of a better term.

They’re using the comparatively low number of Covid deaths relative to other deaths over the same period to make the argument that people overstated the seriousness of Covid or the need for various interventions.

However, this ignores the fact that this comparatively low number of deaths has been achieved by interventions including lockdowns, border controls, mask rules and vaccinations, and without these, the death toll would have undoubtedly been higher. One estimate in October 2020 suggested Australia’s interventions may have saved 16,000 lives. The prime minister, Scott Morrison, suggested in May 2021 that Australia had avoided the loss of 30,000 lives.

That’s not to say that every intervention necessarily worked, or that there wasn’t a health and financial cost to strict policies like lockdowns and border controls, but to argue that these death numbers show that we have “needlessly crippled our societies” is misleading in the extreme.

[capcom]

How many more decades were they going to live for?

Why does that matter?  Heartless comment

[LP]

How many more decades were they going to live for?

When you asked that question did you look at your parents and think another year or two doesn't really matter, I know you didn't so why pose it?

[DJC]

https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/covid-19...-australia

The majority (2,556 deaths) of the 2,639 deaths registered with or from COVID to 31 January 2022 were due directly to COVID-19.

[madbluboy]

When you asked that question did you look at your parents and think another year or two doesn't really matter, I know you didn't so why pose it?

My dad died 4 years ago, 60 years old.