Having fun with COVID numbers

Investment Analysis Clubs Macro Economic Trends and Risks
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Since the beginning of the pandemic, I’ve been curious about the fatality rate of COVID-19. Originally, pre-vaccine and therapy, it seemed like the disease was claiming 3%-5% of those infected. Since the beginning, the US has led the world with numbers of cases and deaths, followed by Brazil and Russia.

One of the challenges nowadays is that there is no longer a national effort to test for COVID so many of the cases over the past few months are likely going unreported.

Anyhow, the world has had a reported 632M cases with 6.7M deaths for about 1% fatality rate compared to reported cases.

The US rate: About 97.7M cases and 1.1 M deaths, or about 1.1% fatality rate
Brazil : About 34.9M cases and .7M deaths for about 2% fatality rate
Russia: About 21.5M cases and .4M fatalities or about 1.8% fatality rate
Peru: About 4.2M cases and .22M deaths or about 5%

On the other hand, if you sort by deaths per 100M of population, Peru, Bulgaria, Bosnia and Hungary have all lost .5% or more of their population. The USA is at position 17, but the top “large” country - just edging out Gibraltar and Brazil. And China, with its Zero COVID policy is virtually at the bottom the list.

COVID is still a world-wide risk, but most countrys’ populations (including most in the US) have decided to relegate it to something to be ignored. And, if only those of the low hanging fruit who are left are still at significant risk, maybe that is the right policy. But we’ll continue getting vaxxed and wearing masks when in public - even if we are the only ones in sight still doing so.

Jeff

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Link:

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So that 1% would be an upper bound, with the IFR (infection fatality rate) much lower.

DB2

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The problem isn’t the deaths. I mean, I’ve lost family and a friend, almost several friends (all in their 40s!) to covid. Deaths are a kind of easily manageable problem at society scale.

The problem at society level is long covid, brain damage, vascular damage, kidney damage, etc. Danger of surgeries and of treatments requiring suppressing or wiping immune systems, in the covid era. The problem is the massive burnout of medical staff who are trying their best, at the expense of their own health and sanity, to carry society through this.

Here’s another problem. I am an always masker too. But most people aren’t, where I live. So I won’t work in an office again, I won’t shop in shops. I’ll order online, I’ll work remote. I’ve stopped traveling for holidays since I can’t be sure of the hotel hygiene and who was in the room the previous day. I don’t think I’m the only one doing this.

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Is there science that says you can get infected a day after an infected person left a room?

(Still masking when indoors and likely to come near a live person)

Mike

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If I put my face on a pillow that someone spent the night coughing covid particles into, and if I’m not at a post-vaccine stage where antibodies are extremely high, I would expect to pick up covid.

A pillowcase is not a cndom. Coronavirii generally can survive days to weeks unless exposed to high temperatures or UV. Infectivity is less clear, but why risk it?

I mean, literally the cleaner could have been coughing or breathing covid into the air of the room just minutes before you move in there.

We’ve seen in quarantine hotels under strict controls, that having your door open even for merely seconds when someone with covid is nearby (and has their door open for seconds), is sufficient to allow infection.

"No one was allowed to leave either room, and the doors were opened only for nurse checks and food deliveries – but the doors were not supposed to be opened at the same time. Security camera footage revealed four brief episodes of simultaneous door opening during person A’s infectious period,” the team wrote. Each time lasted just a few seconds. "

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I don’t deny that they believe the transmission happened as they say. (People do lie about lots of things too). But even if true, why did not more transmissions happen like this? I mean massive numbers. So maybe it was a one in a 100 million cases. If it was really this easy to get infected, still today, why are infections, especially severe ones not rapidly increasing in hot tourists areas?

If it is science then there is a repeatable experiment that could be run. Of course it borders on being unethical to do this. But the virus has been shown to not survive on most materials for hours and still exist in enough quantity to infect anyone. If you had to go to a hotel, you could check in then not go into the room for hours.

Mike

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While anecdotal, I spent six months on a cruise ship earlier this year. It started with all passengers and crew proving vaccinations (most had boosters), mandatory masking and distancing and PCR testing every week. Rarely did anyone catch COVID. Then the distancing/masking/testing was lifted and, by the end of the cruise approximately 75% of the crew and the passengers had been infected. We got our second booster about a month into the cruise (a bit of unorthodox behavior when the ship spent a day in Miami) and not only stayed masked throughout, but insisted that those sitting with us during social events did as well. We were among the small number who did not contract COVID aboard.

I would predict that anyone taking a cruise today (which no longer require vaccines/distancing/masking/testing etc.) has an very high probability of aquiring a COVID infection while aboard.

Jeff

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I think that being with lots of people in close quarters along with going to ports and bringing in new crew members is different than a hotel room that has reportedly been cleaned and sitting vacant (probably) for hours before going inside. I’m not saying ZERO chance of infection, but we generally take risks everyday (without really thinking about it) that are higher than getting COVID in a cleaned hotel room…i.e. driving or eating food that could contain high bacteria levels…and lower than getting sick on a cruise.

Mike

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I think the fact that anyone was catching covid at all against a barrage of countermeasures is a testament to how notoriously infectious the disease is.

In another well publicised case in Australia (which at the time had essentially zero cases and thus was a perfect situation to measure infectivity), a person walking around was documented infecting people in merely 1-2 seconds of walking past them. They ate outside a restaurant and transmitted infections to people inside the restaurant.

I sometimes wonder if I was living on another planet in 2020-2022 because the stories I’m talking about (this and the other one) were all over the news for days.

The fact we have 10s of millions dead globally from a disease with a lethality measured at <1% - despite vaccines, and a range of novel treatments - is another testament to the infectivity and danger of the disease.

I mean, this isn’t new. I have people in my own life saying ‘I have no idea how I caught it, it doesn’t make sense?’ or ‘there was a workman in the house without a mask for less than 1 minute, then we went back in later - it was the only possible moment of exposure, and we all caught covid, and we later found out he had an active infection’.

Even if you are in a clean hotel room, and isolate within it for your entire trip (!) - if anyone nearby in the hotel has covid, and you both have doors open even for seconds, that’s enough; it’s proven. In fact these results predate the newest, most hyper-infectious high R0 strains of covid, descendants of omicron. If anything, the situation is far worse now.

Anyway, I’m not interested in arguing about the infectivity potential of the disease; you asked a question and I’ve provided carefully reviewed evidence that proves the answer. As for consequences and ‘risks’, well that’s up to other people to gauge what they consider acceptable. I’ve lost multiple people to this in recent months, whereas I’ve never lost anyone to food poisoning in my lifetime.

We also don’t know the long term effects of this disease e.g. stroke risk, kidney failure risk, earlier onset vascular dementia etc. We do know with certainty that around 15-30% of people get long-term sickness that affects their ability to work. My brother caught it and for months reported problems concentrating and speaking which affected his work. I’m a programmer. If I can’t concentrate, I can’t work.

It’s absolutely not worth risking my health and my career just to take a holiday just now, or to risk working in a shared office alongside a few of the unavoidable covid deniers and anti-maskers.

‘you do you’, as they say

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FWIW, the WHO says there have been 6.5 million deaths world-wide.

DB2

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If you buy that, I have a bridge to sell you.

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“14.9 million excess deaths associated with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021”

Estimates of Excess Mortality Attributable to Covid‐19

“The WHO’s mean estimate for the global number of deaths attributable to Covid‐19 over 2020–2021 is 14.9 million, with a 95% confidence range of 13.3–16.6 million. This is nearly triple the number of reported Covid deaths (5.4 million).”

LUX: Notably, this does not include 2022.

In many countries (the UK for example) there has been a higher death rate in 2022 than during the equivalent 2021-POST-VACCINE periods.

This is despite paxlovid (90% death rate reduction), more ventilators, boosters, infection-acquired immunity, better treatment processes, more knowledge of the virus and so on.

(Vaccinations were first 4-5 months of 2021. Post-vaccine period is therefore approx: April/May 2021 → October 2021 vs April/May 2022 → October 2022).

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths?areaType=nation&areaName=England

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Actually, China’s “Zero COVID” policy has been very effective, compared to other countries, in keeping the number of COVID cases low - at the expense of a significant slice of their GDP and “national dissatisfaction”. They have not achieved Zero, but they have significantly lower infection rates (on a per/million basis) than nearly any other country.

Jeff
(Who visits his bridge from time to time, so doesn’t need another one)

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Do we have any decent data on what the rate of long Covid is for vaccinated people? I feel like the stats from earlier in the pandemic don’t apply very well to someone who’s been vaccinated with the two shot initial series, boosted, reboosted and soon to be reboosted again.

My wife and I were were fairly religious about avoiding exposure for a long time, but have somewhat given up, except in the more dangerous situations like a crowded airplane. We may get it, or may have already gotten it, but we rely on our bodies’ defenses being built up by the vaccinations.

It’s no longer a ‘novel’ coronavirus … nothing like novel anymore for most people. And there’s evidence that the recent common strains have given up some of their virulence in exchange for their increased infectivity: since omicron became prevalent it doesn’t seem to attack the deep lungs in the same way, from what I’ve read.

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The national average wastewater viral load (Covid-19 Wastewater Monitoring | Biobot Analytics) has been on the decline but is still nearly 5 times that of the March low and about even with that of this time last year. I hope I’m wrong, but I’m expecting the old surge to give way to a new surge after Thanksgiving, and this winter’s surge will be at least as big as last winter’s was. I hope that the new variants are less severe. I also hope that any new variants are less likely to cause Long COVID than past variants.

At the moment, there are already big surges of RSV and flu. I’ve read that hospitals are filled with RSV patients. The CDC flu map (https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/usmap.htm) shows flu infections to be in the top tier in Washington DC, Tennessee, Alabama, and South Carolina. This is shaping up to be an extremely nasty flu season given that it’s only early November and not February.

Due to RSV and flu, I’m avoiding junk foods and restaurant foods until next spring. Because I’ve had the updated COVID booster, I see RSV and flu as bigger threats at the moment. However, the fact that RSV and flu are spreading so quickly implies that this winter’s COVID surge will be just as nasty or worse than last winter’s was.

Barring some unexpected miracle, the only way a nasty COVID surge will be averted this coming winter is if RSV and flu infections can somehow lock out COVID infections.

That said, I regard even a “minor cold” as nasty enough and something to avoid, especially given all that’s going on.

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The evening “news” tonight put the “flu/RSV” hysteria right after the “severe weather” hysteria.

Steve

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I seem to recall the early days of Covid when response and news reports of that infection were portrayed as hysteria…and that infection was no worse than the flu. The notion didn’t age well.

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As I mentioned, the official covid-attributed death rate in the UK in the post-vaccine period 2021 and comparable period of 2022 (6 months each), showed a higher number of deaths in 2022.

Despite: new boosters, new medicines (particularly paxlovid which reduces death rates by about 90%), new treatment processes, ‘natural’ immunity, …

Believe whatever you like, but I’ll believe the stats.

The fact that paxlovid has been a magic ‘get-out-of-death-free’ card for covid and yet STILL we have higher total deaths, says to me, this thing is not getting any less dangerous.

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That was one thought leader that was so dismissive. That was quickly followed by touting the panacea of the week, to continue the dismissive narrative.

The media was in full hysteria mode about covid, which they followed with hype about the panacea of the week.

Steve

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