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The Koreans are saying that infection and recovery does confer immunity. What they can't say (obviously) is for how long.
Today's scare story is about Covid-19 causing strokes in healthy people. It is based on a report from the New England Journal of Medicine which details the cases of five people, ages 33 to 49, in New York City who had strokes and subsequently tested positive for Covid-19. All of them had large-vessel strokes outside of the hospital before experiencing other severe symptoms of the virus; one of them has since died.
What is a healthy person? There was a recent article in the UK about a 'healthy' 37 year old man succumbing to the virus. That was the headline. I bothered to read the article. His wife said he was healthy, but he suffered from Type 2 Diabetes and had a heart attack four years earlier. Healthy? Public Health England classifies Type 2 Diabetes as 'a serious medical condition' and it is a known factor increasing the chances of serious symptoms and death to the current virus. As for the heart attack we don't have any other information, but the death of any portion of your heart muscle hardly contributes to better health.
Try and fine a statistic for the average age of those dying in the UK. If you find the number put it in this thread.
I have seen articles giving statistics on the numbers of confirmed cases requiring hospitalisation, requiring intensive care, and of the latter the numbers dying. I have found statistics based on gender and race. I have found all sorts of statistics and analysis. There is an acknowledgement that older people are more likely to die, but that average? The last statistics giving an average age for fatalities which I have found were those published by the Italians weeks ago. Why?
There is a 'project fear' being run to help the authorities maintain lock downs and particularly cajole younger people into compliance. In the UK that is frankly insulting. The vast majority of people here appreciate the severity of the disease and how easily it is transmitted. Failing to publish all information, and publishing idiotic headlines about 'healthy' people, who clearly are not, in the assumption that many won't actually read the entire article, is not helpful and makes people suspicious and cynical of the press.
Yes its called sensationalism to increase ratings and profit.
And the campaign has been so effective in scaring the sh*t out of people at low risk that, as we look to try to slowly open up the country towards the end of this month, we see things like this.
"Prof David Spiegelhalter, a leading statistician who chairs the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge University, said: "I think we do need to have some sort of campaign to encourage people who are very low risk to get out and start living again, when we are able to."
Very low risk means just about all healthy people under 50, you know, the ones who keep the economy moving.
In other news, the children of 'key workers' were supposed to be able to attend school, nursery, kindergarten, etc. Less than 10% have done so far.
Millions more workers have availed themselves of the Treasury's furlough scheme, because they can and because they too have had the crap scared out of them and choose not to work, but to stay at home (often looking after the kids).
No medical journal is part of a scare tactic or anything. They are scientific journals that are peer reviewed presenting data for discussion.
The problem is that news media does not understand what they are reading, and they cherry pick data.
There is no scare campaign going on to control people. That can be chocked up in tin foil hat category.
We are operating in a knowledge vacuum, hopefully we can gain the needed knowledge to handle this thing soon without too much more disruption.