@Creekland , I’m glad you decided to stay safe. Yesterday I checked the website for the school I retired from in 19. Three teachers over 55 are no longer on the roster, and I’m guessing the unfamiliar names are younger new hires. (Teachers are back on campus this week).
I hadn’t thought to look and see who’s there or not… but I’m thinking about it now. I know of the friends I keep in contact with they all need to return (financially) and not one is happy about it. They’re younger and not eligible for full retirement yet. I haven’t officially retired. I told them I want to see what happens and could be back. Since I’m part time except for some full time gigs filling in as needed, I have that luxury. I’ve seen others take official leaves of absence for a year too.
Seems like the same problem as in the US – the “shutdown” was enough to slow the virus spread, but not enough to suppress it enough to keep it from coming back when reopening.
I counted 7 new teachers in our high school. I can’t tell who left. It doesn’t seem like they’ve removed emails because I know we didn’t simply add that many.
Every year we have a couple of new faces (2-4 teachers). Seven seems like a lot, but I can’t say it’s all due to Covid.
ETA: I just counted teacher emails and there are 80 listed. We have approx 10% new this year in our high school regardless of reason. I wonder how that compares.
I really hope others worldwide are looking at what the Germans found in their cardiac study to see if that is typical, an anomaly, or something in between. It would be very helpful to know.
Like, why isn’t somebody doing this yesterday? So infuriating.
I imagine they are. Studies take time.
Meanwhile our local free drive through COVID testing site is shutting down due to the forecasted heat wave.
Because studies take time and money. There aren’t enough people to work on studies, nor enough money to fund all the studies that need to be done.
MODERATOR’S NOTE: Sybylla has not been permanently banned, but has received a two-week timeout for multiple TOS violations.
One has to wonder if the CDC will revise their counts to be more similar to flu counts with “probable” added into “known.”
One also ought to factor in car deaths and similar went down during the shutdown.
I wonder how many “unexplained” deaths there were? Or those chalked up to natural causes that happened to have similar symptoms.
That was something that was asked of me. How many people would die within this time period naturally? Is the death rate now more than it would have been without COVID?
Does anyone know any articles that explain this?
The first clause in the New York Times article, the very first clause, is:
Is the death rate more than it would have been since COVID? Yeah, since March 200,000 more people died than would have naturally been expected.
The death rate for the US for a year is about 1%, so that means that in a year we’d expect about 3.3 million people to die, and in the five and a half months from March to now we’d expect about 1.5 million to die. But we had 200,000 more, extra, excess deaths.
So we’ve had about 1.13 times as many deaths as usual.
Very helpful @“Cardinal Fang” appreciate this!
And I would guess far fewer auto accident deaths than a usual year, since so many fewer people have been commuting or driving on vacations.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm says that about 2.8 million died in the US in a recent year, so pro-rated over 5.5 months would be 1.17 million. So 200,000 extra deaths would mean 1.17 times as many deaths compared to normal (or 17% higher death rate than normal).
Some deaths may not be directly due to COVID-19, but could be due to indirect effects. There could be some because some people were either unable to get needed medical care because the hospitals or ICUs were filled with COVID-19 patients, or were too afraid of COVID-19 to get needed medical care. Economic and other effects of the COVID-19 disruption of society could also have some effect. Car crash deaths are surprisingly up in at least some states, due to people being able to drive much faster instead of being forced to drive slowly due to commute traffic jams.
Fewer drivers, but some of them are driving much faster and therefore crashing harder when they do crash, resulting in increased car crash deaths.
https://www.nsc.org/in-the-newsroom/motor-vehicle-fatality-rates-jump-14-in-march-despite-quarantines
And the NY Times article - which I don’t think is behind a firewall - shows that the extra deaths tend to mirror when states were having their major issues with Covid from earlier to now.
It definitely seems like there’s a bit of an undercount.
Not being able to know all who die from flu, the CDC assumes probable deaths and includes those in their numbers each year (giving an estimate).
I’m wondering if they will do the same with Covid.
I’ve noticed people driving like maniacs lately. I guess just because they can.
They do - fewer police out. It’s been that way for a few months now, or at least I read about it much earlier. There has even been a higher percentage of fatal accidents due to it, but fewer deaths overall from driving because there were fewer accidents during the shut down. The higher percentage didn’t make up for fewer accidents.
I don’t know if those numbers have leveled back out with the US opening up and people traveling more, but there was a significant difference earlier in the pandemic.
I only pop in occasionally. I tend to get anxious. I know @Creekland son was sick roughly the same time my daughter was. I need to scroll back through to see how his situation unfolded.
@suzyQ7
Your question about non hospitalized sick people and longer term effects- In 2 days it will be 5 months since my 24 year old very active daughter came down sick. Her symptoms lasted a few days, included fever, chest tightness, tummy trouble, and loss of smell. She was back to work after completing quarantine. She has been confirmed to have antibodies.
She daily continues to have shortness of breath, lung pain at moderate and sometimes mild exertion, and diminished lung capacity. She has had a few episodes at work of intense pain that scared the bejesus out of her. Work has been very kind. Scared them too!
Last week she had a CT scan. Fortunately no damage or scarring showed in her lungs. She was told that in a perfect world the next step would be to see a pulmonary specialist. However due to coronavirus, the specialist who came to the island monthly is no longer coming. Puerto Rico is shut and it makes no sense to fly to hot spot Miami. Maybe once hurricane season is past we can get her up here for an appointment at Mayo.
She has found facebook groups for Long Haul people. There have been several with similar situations to hers. Many people are worse off. She appreciates the support they give each other.