At least bad for the fearmongers. 10/20/20 NPR:
Two new peer-reviewed studies are showing a sharp drop in mortality among hospitalized COVID-19 patients. The drop is seen in all groups, including older patients and those with underlying conditions, suggesting that physicians are getting better at helping patients survive their illness.
"We find that the death rate has gone down substantially," says Leora Horwitz, a doctor who studies population health at New York University's Grossman School of Medicine and an author on one of the studies, which looked at thousands of patients from March to August.
The study, which was of a single health system, finds that mortality has dropped among hospitalized patients by 18 percentage points since the pandemic began. Patients in the study had a 25.6% chance of dying at the start of the pandemic; they now have a 7.6% chance.
That's a big improvement, but 7.6% is still a high risk compared with other diseases, and Horwitz and other researchers caution that COVID-19 remains dangerous.
I remember reading this and thinking that, once again, a reported doesn't understand precentages.
ReplyDelete"Dropped by x percentage points" is a horrible way to put it. I'd say that it dropped abut 70%, not 18 points.
That said... I don't know of anyone who sees this as bad news. That fewer people are dying is bad news?
COVID19 is still a big problem. It is less deadly than it was when the NE was shipping COVID19 patients into nursing homes. But it's still deadly enough - thousands per week in the US alone is not a trivial number. The sickness rate is much higher, and that's very expensive, not to mention that a lot of those who are hospitalized and survive have long term problems.
I predict that the death rate will drop a bunch more in a few months - if the monoclonal and/or polyclonal antibodies work (as they appear to), and - very importantly - enough are available (they are very time consuming and expensive to make).
In the mean time, I am very limited in my activities, as are millions of us who are at significant risk due to age and other issues. This is not a small problem.
By the way, Idaho's rate of new cases is almost as high the worst we had here in Arizona, and Montana's is well above out peak. Be careful!