In the last 12 months, fact checking has gone from a fun hobby where you can make fun of Big Walnut to something that can have serious consequences for people’s longevity. The scientific myths of 2020 might help your government decide how to respond to a global epidemic.
I used to be able to check facts about hair dye instead of COVID-19. Me is the source. I think it is less fun to check facts than it was last year.
Enjoy it. Some of the biggest myths about COVID-19 are still being spread. I thought I would finish the year by looking at some facts that are well-demonstrated about COVID-19.
The death rate of COVID-19 varies by age. In a paper I and my colleagues showed this. It was shown that at the age of 35, 1 in 2,700 people who get COVID-19 will die of the disease. FACT 1: COVID-19 IFR is very high.
Fact 2: Covid-19 is more lethal than influenza. By age, the IFR of COVID-19. Us.
There is a graphic showing the difference in IFR between the two. We have known for a while that COVID-19 is more dangerous than flu. The two diseases are not that different for younger people, but for older people it is much worse.
False positives are very rare when it comes to testing for COVID-19. It is almost certain that true positives are more common than false ones, unless you have fewer than 1 million people in the country. There is a very low rate of false positives when testing for coli-19.
The casedemic is a myth. I am sorry. An outbreak is happening in the Australian state of New South Wales. There were 94 positives from the tests we ran. The false positive rate would be 0.068 if every one of those positives was a false positive.
It is important to say that every country is different, and so it is possible that some deaths may be misclassified. Most of the deaths that wereTRIBUTED to COVID-19 were in the U.S.
Fact 5: Covid-19 is a real disease. There is a lot of evidence that this is not an issue in the developed world. Not counting all deaths caused by COVID-19 as COVID-19 deaths is a bigger problem.
There is no increase in suicides as a result of lock downs. There are conspiracists who still spread the lie that COVID-19 is a hoax. It is not.
Good news is what this is. Pexels People were certain that the suicide rate would go up because of the lock downs. We haven’t seen such increases so far. There are issues with mental health associated with lockdowns, and it is likely that the Pandemic will have an impact on suicides, but so far the published data do not show increases in suicide numbers associated with lockdowns
The impact of implementing restrictions to prevent the spread of COVID-19 is not a simple calculation. The International Monetary Fund has shown that there may be a net benefit from a lock down. There may be a net disadvantage in some cases. It is very difficult to pin down a good or bad, no matter how much people want it to be simple. The impact of government restrictions is related to this.
The best evidence shows that 20% of the people with the disease will be completely free of symptoms. We don’t know how much these people can spread the virus. The peak of infectiousness is when someone is most likely to pass on the disease, and it is around the time that they start experiencing symptoms. Someone who is currently not showing any symptoms may still be very infectious if they go on to develop symptoms later. Positive cases of COVID-19 are important to isolating. FACT 8: COVID-19 can be spread as widely as possible.
Some people’s t-cells react to the disease without them being exposed, which is why a popular myth is that we are all immune. If you want to understand why this is flawed, you should read this thread by Professor Crotty, who made the initial findings about t-cells that got everyone excited. T-cells are not a factor in pre-exiSTING IMMUNITY.
As time goes on, this fact is becoming less true, but even with the massive outbreak in the United States and Europe, the number of infections is still well below the 60– 70% threshold that we would need for a pandemic. Less than 20% of the population in the US had been exposed by December, despite record hospitalization and death numbers. Most places in the world are still well below her.
Is COVID-19 less likely to kill you now than it was when it first appeared? It is almost certainly. How much less lethal is the disease? That is a very difficult question to answer. It is difficult to know how much Covid-19 will be abolished in March 2020.
Everyone became overnight epidemiologists earlier this year. Everyone became a virologist because of the latest conspiracy theory that all COVID-19 positives are false positives. Professor Ian Mackay of the University ofQueensland wrote an excellent piece on why you shouldn’t worry about cycle threshold values and the like. The cycle strength of the tests is not an issue for false positives.
This is a point that is often made by denialists, but it is something that is obvious. Life would return to normal if we did not take action on COVID-19. Having an out-of-control epidemic raging through your population and filling up ICU beds also has consequences for the economy, as the report referenced above shows. You can’t compare government action to life as USUAL.
As an Australian, I’ve seen people across the world say that it’s impossible to control the virus and we should all stop trying. There are many examples from our region of the globe, including Vietnam, Taiwan, Thailand, and Australia, where the wave of the Pandemic has been reduced to a slow trickle. The Australian state of New South Wales was in the news last week because it had a day with 30 new cases. There are lock downs that reduce the number of case numbers. Government action can keep case numbers low.
The story of excess mortality for Taiwan vs the United States is its own thing. Our world in data It’s clear that it’s possible to control the virus even long-term through the use of restrictions, even if you don’t define them as work.
The paper looked at public statistics on mortality in the U.S. during 2020. The daily deaths attributable to COVID-19 were the highest of any cause for several months of the year, and overall it was the third leading cause of death behind heart attacks and cancer. COVID-19 was only officially the cause of death for 40% of the excess deaths in young people during 2020, but it is likely that this is due to undercounting and that COVID-19 was the primary cause of excess deaths in younger age groups. Covid-19 was the leading cause of death in the United States by the end of 2020.
It’s hard to say how much COVID-19 has changed the lives of people who survive the disease. There are indications that the number of people impacted in this way is non-trivial, and may represent a large portion of the people that recover from COVID-19. Fact 16 states that the long-term cumulative impact of Covid-19 is unknown.
New Zealand, with arguably the toughest COVID-19 restrictions in the world, recorded fewer all-cause deaths in 2020 than ever before. The all-cause death rate appears to have been reduced during the New Zealand lockdown, which would be impossible if there had been untold tragedy. New Zealand has recorded fewer all-cause deaths in the past.
People still think that old people are all on death’s door, so here are the facts from the United Kingdom. You would expect to live an average of another 9 years if you are 80. If someone dies at the age of 80 due to COVID-19, it will shorten their life by an average of almost a decade. The lifespan for an 80 year old is 9 years.
Again, this is not a contentious point. The question is how often and how long it will take for re infections to happen. Thankfully, every indication at this point is that reinfections are relatively rare, which is great news for vaccines which will probably provide long- lasting protection. FACT 19: Indispensable Errors.
We know a lot about COVID-19. Pexels There are still many unknowns.
There are a lot of trade-offs when it comes to COVID-19. It is important to remember that none of these facts makes a government restriction a given. It is almost certain that a lockdown will be a terrible path to take.
This article is not about giving you answers to everything, because that is impossible. We don’t know that much about COVID-19, so people who express total certainty tend to be wrong a lot. The science done this year has been absolutely incredible, but there are questions about everything from school transmission to the precise infection-fatality rate for each place in the world We may never have perfect answers to all questions, but we do know some things and I have tried to sum them up here for you.
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