He's even admitted it himself he's a troll. Otherwise, we'd get a "yeah I got that Avenatti thing pretty ******* wrong" at the very least.
The Coronavirus thread
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He's even admitted it himself he's a troll. Otherwise, we'd get a "yeah I got that Avenatti thing pretty ******* wrong" at the very least.
Tibs, you ain’t black. But you is retarded.
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Hahahahaha..ahhhh..hahahaha...November..hahahahaha...We're not doing voting by mail to cheat for you. Better get your ******* mask on and saddle up for your next 4 years of Trump.
Biden probably has to be told his name every morning. He's a shitbag creeper.
The eloquent Creepy Joe farting in an interview with the criminal Tom Wolf. Look at the reaction on Wolf's face. LOL.
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Yea, Joe Biden... the guy who said December 7th was D-day? Or Joe Biden that called a woman a lying, dog faced, pony soldier? Or maybe lying Joe Biden? Let's see:
Lied about his helicopter being "forced down" near OBL's lair in Afghanistan.
Lied about being a coal miner. In 1998 he said ancestors were coal miners. All lies and even plagiarized a British politician named Kinnock. Who BTW, he stole an entire speech from.
Lied about being shot at in Iraq. A mortar landed hundreds of yards away but nowhere near Biden.
Lied about participating in sit ins at segregated restaurants. He even claimed to organize a boycott of a restaurant. All lies. He wasn't even aware of the issue until later.
Lied about being on a fully academic scholarship, top half of his class and graduating with 3 degrees. ALL lies. He graduated 76th out of 85 students, partial scholarship and only graduated with one degree.
He stole 5 pages... let that sink in... 5 pages from a published law review article without citation and had to beg not to be expelled.
Last year Biden "borrowed" work from others in his "climate" plan. He literally copied and pasted entire sections of other's work and claimed it as his own.
Biden lied when he told people he became a professor. He gave speeches but he's never been a professor nor has he ever taught a class.
I could go on but everyone knows he's a pathological liar. This probably stems from the fact that he's intimidated by intelligence. Which is why he wrote in his book that "he lied about his college accomplishments because one of his supporters sounded like he questioned my intelligence.
Lied about his helicopter being "forced down" near OBL's lair in Afghanistan.
Lied about being a coal miner. In 1998 he said ancestors were coal miners. All lies and even plagiarized a British politician named Kinnock. Who BTW, he stole an entire speech from.
Lied about being shot at in Iraq. A mortar landed hundreds of yards away but nowhere near Biden.
Lied about participating in sit ins at segregated restaurants. He even claimed to organize a boycott of a restaurant. All lies. He wasn't even aware of the issue until later.
Lied about being on a fully academic scholarship, top half of his class and graduating with 3 degrees. ALL lies. He graduated 76th out of 85 students, partial scholarship and only graduated with one degree.
He stole 5 pages... let that sink in... 5 pages from a published law review article without citation and had to beg not to be expelled.
Last year Biden "borrowed" work from others in his "climate" plan. He literally copied and pasted entire sections of other's work and claimed it as his own.
Biden lied when he told people he became a professor. He gave speeches but he's never been a professor nor has he ever taught a class.
I could go on but everyone knows he's a pathological liar. This probably stems from the fact that he's intimidated by intelligence. Which is why he wrote in his book that "he lied about his college accomplishments because one of his supporters sounded like he questioned my intelligence.
And that fart was definitely a shart. He **** his Depends, no doubt in my mind.
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I'm not 100% sure about this. The place i work for has about 12 homes in western Pa and none had a case of Covid. We required a negative test to take any admits from hospital and any dialysis patients we immediately moved to private rooms. We were not ordered to take anyone. My GFs home which is a totally different company did get it in her home and it wiped alot out. However it did not come from the hospitals. They are also down to about 50% of capacity and they are not allowed to take admissions per the department of health. As for the CMS memos there are a ton and the guy in the video certainly picked a very small excerpt which is misleading in my opinion. I can only speak for 12 homes of my company and my GFs, but there has been no negative feedback or forcing of these homes to take residents
WPA was generally spared from the bloodbath of our nursing homes. The place in Beaver, Gibsonia, and Glen Hazel got hit hard.
The eastern part of the state took the brunt. It was a miracle that my 92 yo mother survived. Her area was one of the hardest hit, but they reacted quickly. A home I worked at while in school lost over 20. Wolf ****** up. He has blood on his hands. He is now sucking Biden's dick for a post in his admin. Shameful, pathetic, and corrupt.
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My administrator came from the Beaver place. I know they got hit hard, but were they forced to take positive people. I know the PADOH also whacked them pretty good, but I do not know how everything got to that point
If this has already been posted, apologies, but excellent article from Forbes:
The Most Important COVID-19 Statistic: 43% Of U.S. Deaths Are From 0.6% Of The Population
Avik Roy Forbes Staff
Americans are vigorously debating the merits of continuing to lock down the U.S. economy to prevent the spread of COVID-19. A single statistic may hold the key to resolving this debate: the astounding share of deaths occurring in nursing homes and assisted living facilities.
2.1 million Americans, representing 0.62% of the U.S. population, reside in nursing homes and assisted living facilities. (Nursing homes are residences for seniors needing help with activities of daily living, such as taking a shower or getting dressed, who also require 24/7 medical supervision; assisted living facilities are designed for seniors who need help with activities of daily living, but don’t require full-time on-site medical supervision.)
According to an analysis that Gregg Girvan and I conducted for the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, as of May 22, in the 39 states that currently report such figures, an astounding 43% of all COVID-19 deaths have taken place in nursing homes and assisted living facilities.
Let that sink in: 43% of all COVID-19 deaths are taking place in facilities that house 0.62% of the U.S. population.
And 43% could be an undercount. States like New York exclude from their nursing home death tallies those who die in a hospital, even if they were originally infected in an assisted living facility. Outside of New York, more than half of all deaths from COVID-19 are of residents in long-term care facilities.
70% of COVID-19 deaths in Ohio, 69% in Pennsylvania
Prior to last week, Ohio reported that 41% of COVID deaths were taking place in long-term care facilities. But updated disclosures last Friday, taking deaths prior to April 15 into account, upped that share to 70%.
In Minnesota, 81% of all COVID-19 deaths are of nursing home and residential care home residents. The region from the eastern seaboard from Virginia to New Hampshire has been especially hard-hit.
Nearly one-tenth of all New Jersey long-term care residents have died from COVID-19
Another way to cut the data is to look at nursing home and assisted living facility deaths as a share of the population that lives in those facilities. On that basis, three states stand out in the negative direction: New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.
In Massachusetts and Connecticut, COVID deaths per 10,000 nursing home and assisted living facility residents were 703 and 827, respectively. In New Jersey, nearly 10 percent of all long-term care facility residents—954 in 10,000—have died from the novel coronavirus.
Nearly one-tenth of New Jersey nursing home & assisted living residents have died from COVID-19.
The tragedy is that it didn’t have to be this way. On March 17, as the pandemic was just beginning to accelerate, Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis warned that “even some so-called mild or common-cold-type coronaviruses have been known for decades [to] have case fatality rates as high as 8% when they infect people in nursing homes.” Ioannidis was ignored.
Instead, states like New York, New Jersey, and Michigan actually ordered nursing homes to accept patients with active COVID-19 infections who were being discharged from hospitals.
The most charitable interpretation of these orders is that they were designed to ensure that states would not overcrowd their ICUs. But well after hospitalizations peaked, governors like New York’s Andrew Cuomo were doubling down on their mandates.
As recently as April 23, Cuomo declared that nursing homes “don’t have a right to object” to accepting elderly patients with active COVID infections. “That is the rule and that is the regulation and they have to comply with that.” Only on May 10—after the deaths of nearly 3,000 New York residents of nursing homes and assisted living facilities—did Cuomo stand down and partially rescind his order.
Cuomo’s change of heart came too late for Maria Porteus. Her father, Carlos Gallegos, died of COVID-19 in a Long Island nursing home in April that adhered to Cuomo’s mandate. “It’s a slap in the face,” she said, “because he’s not taking responsibility for what happened to my father and so many others.”
Contrast the decisions by governors like Cuomo with those of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. In Florida, all nursing home workers were required to be screened for COVID-19 symptoms before entering a facility. On March 15, before most states had locked down, DeSantis signed an executive order that banned nursing home visitations from friends and family, and also banned hospitals from discharging SARS-CoV-2-infected patients into long-term care facilities.
“Every day on these calls [with hospitals], I would hear the same comments and questions around, ‘We need to get these individuals returned back to the nursing home,’” said Mary Mayhew, who runs Florida’s Agency for Healthcare Administration. “We drew a hard line early on. I said repeatedly to the hospital, to the CEOs, to the discharge planners, to the chief medical officers, ‘I understand that for 20 years it’s been ingrained, especially through Medicare reimbursement policy, to get individuals in and out. That is not our focus today. I’m not going to send anyone back to a nursing home who has the slightest risk of being positive.’ What we said constantly is let’s not have two cases become 20 or five become 50. If you don’t manage this individual as you return them back, you will have far more being transferred back to the hospital.”
Florida also prioritized long-term care facilities for personal protective equipment, or PPE, with the understanding that it was just as important, if not more so, to protect workers at nursing homes and assisted living facilities. “If I can send PPE to the nursing homes, and they can prevent an outbreak there, that’s going to do more to lower the burden on hospitals than me just sending them another 500,000 N95 masks,” said DeSantis.
While it is too late for thousands of nursing home residents who have already died, there is still time to protect the millions who remain, by learning from Florida’s example.
First, every state that has mandated that nursing homes accept actively infected COVID-19 patients should immediately rescind and reverse that mandate.
Second, as Florida has done, we must restrict visits to nursing homes by family and friends for at least the next several months, with the possible exception of those who can prove that they are not actively infected with the novel coronavirus.
Third, we must prioritize nursing homes and assisted living facilities for personal protective equipment, at an at least equal level of priority as hospitals and other first responders.
Fourth, we must test all nursing home workers and residents for active infections, using RT-PCR tests and other FDA-authorized methods of detection.
Fifth, we must strive wherever possible to ensure that nursing home staff are working at a single facility; it is likely that staff working at multiple facilities are helping to spread the infection. Infected nursing home workers and residents should be quarantined at an off-campus facility. States could contract with now-empty hotels to assist with this process.
Sixth, the eleven states that thus far have refused to report COVID nursing home deaths—Alaska, Hawaii, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas, Missouri, Michigan, and Vermont—need to start reporting their death tolls in long-term care facilities. The federal government has instituted such a requirement for nursing home deaths occurring after May 5, but as Ohio teaches us, it is also important to get the data from the previous several months.
Michigan, in particular, has had a significant outbreak of COVID-19, and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer recently extended the state’s economic lockdown through June 12. Transparency into fatalities at long-term care centers in Michigan is essential for assessing the wisdom of her policy.
The optimistic take: Those outside of nursing homes are at lower risk
There is one silver lining—or perhaps bronze lining—to the COVID long-term care tragedy. The fact that nearly half of all COVID-19 deaths have occurred in long-term care facilities means that the 99.4 percent of the country that doesn’t live in those places is roughly half as likely to die of the disease.
Many European countries have struggled with the same nursing home problems that we have. But based on the mounting evidence that serious illness from COVID-19 is concentrated in the elderly, Switzerland and Germany have reopened their primary and secondary schools. Sweden, for the most part, never closed them to begin with. Germany has kept most of its factories in operation, and Sweden’s restaurants remain open. All of these countries have stable-to-declining rates of hospitalization and death from COVID-19.
The results in these countries should give us increased confidence that measured steps to reopen the economy can work here.
State governments bear much more of the responsibility for the depth of the COVID-19 pandemic than many Americans appreciate. But that also means that states have the opportunity to learn from their own mistakes and do the right thing: by protecting vulnerable seniors, and letting millions of Americans get back to work.
© 2020 Forbes Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2020/05/26/nursing-homes-assisted-living-facilities-0-6-of-the-u-s-population-43-of-u-s-covid-19-deaths/
The Most Important COVID-19 Statistic: 43% Of U.S. Deaths Are From 0.6% Of The Population
Avik Roy Forbes Staff
Americans are vigorously debating the merits of continuing to lock down the U.S. economy to prevent the spread of COVID-19. A single statistic may hold the key to resolving this debate: the astounding share of deaths occurring in nursing homes and assisted living facilities.
2.1 million Americans, representing 0.62% of the U.S. population, reside in nursing homes and assisted living facilities. (Nursing homes are residences for seniors needing help with activities of daily living, such as taking a shower or getting dressed, who also require 24/7 medical supervision; assisted living facilities are designed for seniors who need help with activities of daily living, but don’t require full-time on-site medical supervision.)
According to an analysis that Gregg Girvan and I conducted for the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, as of May 22, in the 39 states that currently report such figures, an astounding 43% of all COVID-19 deaths have taken place in nursing homes and assisted living facilities.
Let that sink in: 43% of all COVID-19 deaths are taking place in facilities that house 0.62% of the U.S. population.
And 43% could be an undercount. States like New York exclude from their nursing home death tallies those who die in a hospital, even if they were originally infected in an assisted living facility. Outside of New York, more than half of all deaths from COVID-19 are of residents in long-term care facilities.
70% of COVID-19 deaths in Ohio, 69% in Pennsylvania
Prior to last week, Ohio reported that 41% of COVID deaths were taking place in long-term care facilities. But updated disclosures last Friday, taking deaths prior to April 15 into account, upped that share to 70%.
In Minnesota, 81% of all COVID-19 deaths are of nursing home and residential care home residents. The region from the eastern seaboard from Virginia to New Hampshire has been especially hard-hit.
Nearly one-tenth of all New Jersey long-term care residents have died from COVID-19
Another way to cut the data is to look at nursing home and assisted living facility deaths as a share of the population that lives in those facilities. On that basis, three states stand out in the negative direction: New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.
In Massachusetts and Connecticut, COVID deaths per 10,000 nursing home and assisted living facility residents were 703 and 827, respectively. In New Jersey, nearly 10 percent of all long-term care facility residents—954 in 10,000—have died from the novel coronavirus.
Nearly one-tenth of New Jersey nursing home & assisted living residents have died from COVID-19.
The tragedy is that it didn’t have to be this way. On March 17, as the pandemic was just beginning to accelerate, Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis warned that “even some so-called mild or common-cold-type coronaviruses have been known for decades [to] have case fatality rates as high as 8% when they infect people in nursing homes.” Ioannidis was ignored.
Instead, states like New York, New Jersey, and Michigan actually ordered nursing homes to accept patients with active COVID-19 infections who were being discharged from hospitals.
The most charitable interpretation of these orders is that they were designed to ensure that states would not overcrowd their ICUs. But well after hospitalizations peaked, governors like New York’s Andrew Cuomo were doubling down on their mandates.
As recently as April 23, Cuomo declared that nursing homes “don’t have a right to object” to accepting elderly patients with active COVID infections. “That is the rule and that is the regulation and they have to comply with that.” Only on May 10—after the deaths of nearly 3,000 New York residents of nursing homes and assisted living facilities—did Cuomo stand down and partially rescind his order.
Cuomo’s change of heart came too late for Maria Porteus. Her father, Carlos Gallegos, died of COVID-19 in a Long Island nursing home in April that adhered to Cuomo’s mandate. “It’s a slap in the face,” she said, “because he’s not taking responsibility for what happened to my father and so many others.”
Contrast the decisions by governors like Cuomo with those of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. In Florida, all nursing home workers were required to be screened for COVID-19 symptoms before entering a facility. On March 15, before most states had locked down, DeSantis signed an executive order that banned nursing home visitations from friends and family, and also banned hospitals from discharging SARS-CoV-2-infected patients into long-term care facilities.
“Every day on these calls [with hospitals], I would hear the same comments and questions around, ‘We need to get these individuals returned back to the nursing home,’” said Mary Mayhew, who runs Florida’s Agency for Healthcare Administration. “We drew a hard line early on. I said repeatedly to the hospital, to the CEOs, to the discharge planners, to the chief medical officers, ‘I understand that for 20 years it’s been ingrained, especially through Medicare reimbursement policy, to get individuals in and out. That is not our focus today. I’m not going to send anyone back to a nursing home who has the slightest risk of being positive.’ What we said constantly is let’s not have two cases become 20 or five become 50. If you don’t manage this individual as you return them back, you will have far more being transferred back to the hospital.”
Florida also prioritized long-term care facilities for personal protective equipment, or PPE, with the understanding that it was just as important, if not more so, to protect workers at nursing homes and assisted living facilities. “If I can send PPE to the nursing homes, and they can prevent an outbreak there, that’s going to do more to lower the burden on hospitals than me just sending them another 500,000 N95 masks,” said DeSantis.
While it is too late for thousands of nursing home residents who have already died, there is still time to protect the millions who remain, by learning from Florida’s example.
First, every state that has mandated that nursing homes accept actively infected COVID-19 patients should immediately rescind and reverse that mandate.
Second, as Florida has done, we must restrict visits to nursing homes by family and friends for at least the next several months, with the possible exception of those who can prove that they are not actively infected with the novel coronavirus.
Third, we must prioritize nursing homes and assisted living facilities for personal protective equipment, at an at least equal level of priority as hospitals and other first responders.
Fourth, we must test all nursing home workers and residents for active infections, using RT-PCR tests and other FDA-authorized methods of detection.
Fifth, we must strive wherever possible to ensure that nursing home staff are working at a single facility; it is likely that staff working at multiple facilities are helping to spread the infection. Infected nursing home workers and residents should be quarantined at an off-campus facility. States could contract with now-empty hotels to assist with this process.
Sixth, the eleven states that thus far have refused to report COVID nursing home deaths—Alaska, Hawaii, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas, Missouri, Michigan, and Vermont—need to start reporting their death tolls in long-term care facilities. The federal government has instituted such a requirement for nursing home deaths occurring after May 5, but as Ohio teaches us, it is also important to get the data from the previous several months.
Michigan, in particular, has had a significant outbreak of COVID-19, and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer recently extended the state’s economic lockdown through June 12. Transparency into fatalities at long-term care centers in Michigan is essential for assessing the wisdom of her policy.
The optimistic take: Those outside of nursing homes are at lower risk
There is one silver lining—or perhaps bronze lining—to the COVID long-term care tragedy. The fact that nearly half of all COVID-19 deaths have occurred in long-term care facilities means that the 99.4 percent of the country that doesn’t live in those places is roughly half as likely to die of the disease.
Many European countries have struggled with the same nursing home problems that we have. But based on the mounting evidence that serious illness from COVID-19 is concentrated in the elderly, Switzerland and Germany have reopened their primary and secondary schools. Sweden, for the most part, never closed them to begin with. Germany has kept most of its factories in operation, and Sweden’s restaurants remain open. All of these countries have stable-to-declining rates of hospitalization and death from COVID-19.
The results in these countries should give us increased confidence that measured steps to reopen the economy can work here.
State governments bear much more of the responsibility for the depth of the COVID-19 pandemic than many Americans appreciate. But that also means that states have the opportunity to learn from their own mistakes and do the right thing: by protecting vulnerable seniors, and letting millions of Americans get back to work.
© 2020 Forbes Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2020/05/26/nursing-homes-assisted-living-facilities-0-6-of-the-u-s-population-43-of-u-s-covid-19-deaths/
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Just a reminder post of the eloquence of Joe Biden. There is a treasure trove in the Biden Gaffes thread.
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I know my home went on lock down early. We did screening for like a week then just shut it down. I want to say we locked down on the 14th of March. I know a lot of homes in my area did the same. We deal mainly with excella health and a bit with AHN now, and neither one of them gave us any trouble about our procedures. Our census has been steady around 105 / 120 throughout and alot of our empty beds are due to people who can't have roommates because of dialysis or they are on our 14 day quarantine floor.
True dat.....It has been pretty clear for years that tibsy is a paid troll, I hear unka George even sends him on cruise ship appearances.
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Low virus rate leaves Oxford vaccine trial with 'only 50% chance'
Great news. The facts keep ruining the narrative -
Fauci in April - Fauci says second wave of coronavirus is 'inevitable'
Fauci in May - Fauci Says Coronavirus Second Wave ‘Is Not Inevitable,’ Stresses CDC Guidelines
We destroyed the economy and ruined millions of people's lives based on opinions from people like this clown.
Great news. The facts keep ruining the narrative -
Fauci in April - Fauci says second wave of coronavirus is 'inevitable'
Fauci in May - Fauci Says Coronavirus Second Wave ‘Is Not Inevitable,’ Stresses CDC Guidelines
We destroyed the economy and ruined millions of people's lives based on opinions from people like this clown.
https://www.aier.org/article/focus-on-the-covid-19-death-rate/
A piece in the American Institute of Economic Research:
Quite long but worth the time.
In the saga of the virus and the lockdown, the wisdom of the crowds, that is the wisdom of each of us, was thwarted by bad data, perhaps intentionally bad. On the other hand, the ersatz wisdom of the collective bureaucracy in federal, state and local health agencies was based on crafted data. In the end data didn’t matter, as the bureaucracies were more concerned with their natural territorial imperative, which is to rule and control.
The most frightening aspect of the coronavirus-19 (COVID-19) epidemic in the US is that it brought about exaggeratedly heightened fear of death. That fear, once magnified to proportions which become palpable to the individual, became the basis for dreadful economic and medical policies from governments and crushed the natural optimism of the public.
In early days, we were caught in a squeeze of conflicting information. Was COVID-19 a bioweapon gone rogue and destined to indiscriminately wipe out young and old? Or, was it another bad flu or perhaps an extremely bad flu? After all, initial information showed the victims were concentrated in a nursing home in Kirkland, Washington.
No cases were reported amongst the homeless on West Coast streets. No deaths among children were reported. And in the closed world of cruise liners and later a military ship, there were lots of early cases and some deaths. As time passed, there was little more bad news. We should have been suspicious of the data.
We were mainly focused on the case fatality rate (CFR: deaths as a percent of diagnosed cases) which were frighteningly high. We worried about the infection fatality rate (IFR), but there was too little data and testing available to have any idea how many people were or ultimately would be infected.
But those concepts – CFR and IFR – are not the most important strategic measures of the severity of the disease. It is the death rate, properly defined and understood, that should matter for long-term policy makers, our erstwhile more level-headed thinkers, in determining policy.
In the past few weeks, we have obtained more useful data in the US. There were secrets lurking in the data, waiting to be uncovered, that could help ascertain what was really happening. The purpose of this report is to do just that – to ascertain what the data are telling us. It also gives us the basis for judging the appropriateness of past and present policies
So, let’s begin with a simple question: what is the relevant death rate due to COVID-19? There are many definitions in the epidemiological world such as the CFR and IFR mentioned above. My focus is on the overall death rate – actual and projected. Until we have more widespread testing for COVID-19, we cannot know with any accuracy how many people were infected by the virus. We cannot know what proportion of the population has some sort of natural or acquired immunity.
We do not even have accurate data on how many people have died from COVID-19 alone versus COVID-19 plus some other complications that were already present such as diabetes, morbid obesity and prior respiratory complications, any one of which might equally have been the proximate cause of death. There is ample evidence, especially in the Northeast region that there has been “over classification” (a euphemism for data bias). We do not have the demographic details for those infected and those who died. But we do have death data, and it is more accurate than the number of cases and the number of infections.
To understand how our minds have been misdirected in understanding the real risks associated with COVID-19, let’s begin with a brain teaser. It will awaken our numerate minds in preparation for understanding the data deception and misunderstandings that prevail.
When is 1.7% greater than 98.3%?
In the bizarro world of COVID-19 reporting that is the case – 1.7% is greater than 98.3%. Specifically, deaths among a narrow 1.7% group of the population are greater than deaths from the other 98.3%. Numerically a death may be a death, but from a policy point of view, to be blunt about it, not all deaths are the same.
Fact #1: 1.7% of the population in the US resides in long-term medical care facilities (LTMCFs) and total 5.7 million.
Fact #2: The residents of LTMCFs accounted for 38,800 or 53% of all COVID-19 deaths (based on recent data). The rest of the country, the 98.3%, have experienced approximately 34,600 deaths, or 47% of the nation’s total COVID-19 deaths.
The Death Rate at LTMCFs Is Stunning
That means the death rate, deaths expressed as a percent of those living in medical care institutions, is 0.682%, more than 50 times the death rate of the rest of the population at 0.012%. The death rate for the overall populations is 0.022%.
That should leave you speechless.
We have a COVID-19 problem, but we have an even greater and more serious LTMCF problem that is clouding our understanding of the contagion and therefore what our best public health policies should be. Shutting down the economy, the world wherein the 98.3% live and prosper was too draconian. The feared overloading of the hospital system with emergency patients, which was short-lived, was disproportionately coming from the residents of LTMCFs, not the general public.
The data have been there all along, but they were not properly collected, catalogued and analyzed.
Much of the data in this report came from a landmark study by Gregg Girvan and Avik Roy of the Foundation for Research of Equal Opportunity. Their work was based on data collected through May 10th, 2020 for most states. Since their publication, revisions have been incorporated as states have corrected or updated their data since the original report. The calculations given above are imputations from the updated data.
At this point, we do not know what the ultimate count of deaths and the death rate will be, but what we have in hand are statistics that are very indicative and telling of the gross misunderstanding that the public and federal, state and local decision-makers have been working with on which to base their decisions.
Long-term medical care providers to the aged and medically infirm (per the Girvan-Roy study) consist of: Nursing homes and skilled nursing facilities; Assisted living facilities, i.e., residential care communities or personal care homes; Adult day service centers; Home health Agencies; and Hospices.
The first two medical care providers for seniors are referred to as long-term medical care facilities (LTMCF) and are the source of the data. Data for the other three elder care facilities are not collected or were not available for the Girvan-Roy study. In fact, it has been acknowledged that there continues to be underreporting of deaths related to LTMCFs. Some providers are just not reporting. In other cases, the residents die in hospitals and they are not categorized as LTMCF deaths. Nonetheless, the data are sufficient to draw some useful if not stark observations.
What about the Flu and Pneumonia Death Rates in Earlier Years?
To even better understand these death rate figures, it is useful to put them into the context of what we know about death rates from the flu before the arrival of COVID-19. Is the COVID-19 death rate worse, better or about the same as prior flu seasons? We should expect the rates to be worse because there is no vaccine whereas most people get a vaccine shot for the routine flus that are expected each year.
In 2017 the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported that annual deaths from all causes were 2.8 million or 0.866% of the population. The leading causes of death, in order of magnitude, were heart disease, cancer, accidents, respiratory disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, flu & pneumonia and suicide.
Just looking at the Flu & Pneumonia (FP) cause, in 2017 it accounted for 55,672 deaths or 0.017% for the population as a whole. Death from FP, as you would expect, fell hardest on people over 75 totaling 38,078 deaths. That translates into a FP death rate of 0.180% for those over-75 group, which is a little more than 10 times the death rate for the overall population. For the rest of the population under 75 the death rate was only 0.006%, or or 1/30th of those over 75 (0.006% vs 0.180%).
Data from CDC and FreeOpp.
What this means at this point is that in the aggregate the overall COVID-19 death rate is slightly worse than the flu death rate in a prior year (0.022% vs 0.017%). However, for seniors in LTMCFs, the COVID-19 death rate is 100 times greater than the flu and pneumonia DR was for those under 75 in 2017 (0.682% vs 0.006%) and nearly 4 times greater than those over 75.
In summary the COVID-19 death rate is far more skewed to those older than 75 and those residents in medical care facilities for the aged.
Source
What Does the Future Hold?
Looking ahead we obtained the most recent forecast from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. They are considered by many medical professionals as the most thorough modelers. On May 18, 2020 the IHME released the results of the third run of its new model. They predict that by August 4, 2020 a total of 143,357 Americans will die of COVID-19. That forecast nearly doubles the number of COVID-19 deaths. It is worth noting that each run of the model has produced lower forecasts for future deaths. There are detractors of their modeling procedures, but it is the best we have at the moment.
One interesting medical research report suggests that a significant portion of the population has natural immunity to COVID-19. In the May 14 edition of Cell, published by Elsevier, the researchers found:
T cell responses were detected in 40-60% of unexposed individuals. This may be reflective of some degree of cross-reactive, preexisting immunity to SARSCoV-2 in some, but not all, individuals… suggesting cross-reactive T cell recognition between circulating ‘common cold’ coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2.
This might be why there are so many reports of asymptomatic cases of COVID-19. That also may mean the IHME forecast will be revised down even more.
However, COVID-19 has brutal consequences for people over 75. That detail cannot be minimized. But what policies would that suggest?
Did We Adopt the Right Policies?
What do these data suggest about the medical and economic policies that have been adopted by the federal, states and local governments?
The carnage of COVID-19 is concentrated in elder care facilities not in the population at large. The policies and procedures, including lockdowns and state-of-the-art personal protection practices for those facilities, should have been more thoroughly thought out based on useful data.
Keep in mind, about 70% of the elder care facilities are for-profit. Yet they are not free-market enterprises; enterprises free to do what they think is best. These for-profit facilities are licensed and regulated by the several Departments of Health of the states. They do what the state tells them to do.
The governors and mayors, and their medical and science advisers, made the decision to pack them in, force them to house and retain infected and returning infected patients. They chose to divert PPE supplies to hospitals, not the elder care facilities. This characterization is based on reports in the press. One certainly hopes there were some communities that did a better job. There is reason to believe that is the case because some assisted living facilities have reported no deaths.
As COVID-19 deaths mounted, not a word was officially spoken about where they were occurring. Fear was stoked that it was a population-wide epidemic. We should ALL lock down.
What a costly mistake, a mistake that continues to this day. Governors and mayors with fresh data insights into the truth still want to be central planners and determine which businesses can re-open and to what degree, who should still shelter or socially distance. They send out teams to draw circles in the grass defining where groups can camp out and place police monitors in all the parks to warn people to stay within the circles. At this point they are just imaginary prisons, but they are prisons.
Madness, sheer madness.
Though that is an easy and superficial observation to make, what is really unsaid, and not easy to admit, is that large numbers of politicians and bureaucrats have revealed their true nature. Speeches decorated with declarations of “better safe than sorry” and “planning is better than no planning” reveal they are authoritarians by nature; central planners of the worst kind.
In conclusion, the relevant death rate for policy purposes has been obscured. The consequence has been inappropriate policies. They have resulted in a bizarro world of highly restricted commercial functioning and immense economic destruction, alongside no evidence that lives were saved and growing evidence of second-tier loss of life resulting from lockdown.
A piece in the American Institute of Economic Research:
Quite long but worth the time.
In the saga of the virus and the lockdown, the wisdom of the crowds, that is the wisdom of each of us, was thwarted by bad data, perhaps intentionally bad. On the other hand, the ersatz wisdom of the collective bureaucracy in federal, state and local health agencies was based on crafted data. In the end data didn’t matter, as the bureaucracies were more concerned with their natural territorial imperative, which is to rule and control.
The most frightening aspect of the coronavirus-19 (COVID-19) epidemic in the US is that it brought about exaggeratedly heightened fear of death. That fear, once magnified to proportions which become palpable to the individual, became the basis for dreadful economic and medical policies from governments and crushed the natural optimism of the public.
In early days, we were caught in a squeeze of conflicting information. Was COVID-19 a bioweapon gone rogue and destined to indiscriminately wipe out young and old? Or, was it another bad flu or perhaps an extremely bad flu? After all, initial information showed the victims were concentrated in a nursing home in Kirkland, Washington.
No cases were reported amongst the homeless on West Coast streets. No deaths among children were reported. And in the closed world of cruise liners and later a military ship, there were lots of early cases and some deaths. As time passed, there was little more bad news. We should have been suspicious of the data.
We were mainly focused on the case fatality rate (CFR: deaths as a percent of diagnosed cases) which were frighteningly high. We worried about the infection fatality rate (IFR), but there was too little data and testing available to have any idea how many people were or ultimately would be infected.
But those concepts – CFR and IFR – are not the most important strategic measures of the severity of the disease. It is the death rate, properly defined and understood, that should matter for long-term policy makers, our erstwhile more level-headed thinkers, in determining policy.
In the past few weeks, we have obtained more useful data in the US. There were secrets lurking in the data, waiting to be uncovered, that could help ascertain what was really happening. The purpose of this report is to do just that – to ascertain what the data are telling us. It also gives us the basis for judging the appropriateness of past and present policies
So, let’s begin with a simple question: what is the relevant death rate due to COVID-19? There are many definitions in the epidemiological world such as the CFR and IFR mentioned above. My focus is on the overall death rate – actual and projected. Until we have more widespread testing for COVID-19, we cannot know with any accuracy how many people were infected by the virus. We cannot know what proportion of the population has some sort of natural or acquired immunity.
We do not even have accurate data on how many people have died from COVID-19 alone versus COVID-19 plus some other complications that were already present such as diabetes, morbid obesity and prior respiratory complications, any one of which might equally have been the proximate cause of death. There is ample evidence, especially in the Northeast region that there has been “over classification” (a euphemism for data bias). We do not have the demographic details for those infected and those who died. But we do have death data, and it is more accurate than the number of cases and the number of infections.
To understand how our minds have been misdirected in understanding the real risks associated with COVID-19, let’s begin with a brain teaser. It will awaken our numerate minds in preparation for understanding the data deception and misunderstandings that prevail.
When is 1.7% greater than 98.3%?
In the bizarro world of COVID-19 reporting that is the case – 1.7% is greater than 98.3%. Specifically, deaths among a narrow 1.7% group of the population are greater than deaths from the other 98.3%. Numerically a death may be a death, but from a policy point of view, to be blunt about it, not all deaths are the same.
Fact #1: 1.7% of the population in the US resides in long-term medical care facilities (LTMCFs) and total 5.7 million.
Fact #2: The residents of LTMCFs accounted for 38,800 or 53% of all COVID-19 deaths (based on recent data). The rest of the country, the 98.3%, have experienced approximately 34,600 deaths, or 47% of the nation’s total COVID-19 deaths.
The Death Rate at LTMCFs Is Stunning
That means the death rate, deaths expressed as a percent of those living in medical care institutions, is 0.682%, more than 50 times the death rate of the rest of the population at 0.012%. The death rate for the overall populations is 0.022%.
That should leave you speechless.
We have a COVID-19 problem, but we have an even greater and more serious LTMCF problem that is clouding our understanding of the contagion and therefore what our best public health policies should be. Shutting down the economy, the world wherein the 98.3% live and prosper was too draconian. The feared overloading of the hospital system with emergency patients, which was short-lived, was disproportionately coming from the residents of LTMCFs, not the general public.
The data have been there all along, but they were not properly collected, catalogued and analyzed.
Much of the data in this report came from a landmark study by Gregg Girvan and Avik Roy of the Foundation for Research of Equal Opportunity. Their work was based on data collected through May 10th, 2020 for most states. Since their publication, revisions have been incorporated as states have corrected or updated their data since the original report. The calculations given above are imputations from the updated data.
At this point, we do not know what the ultimate count of deaths and the death rate will be, but what we have in hand are statistics that are very indicative and telling of the gross misunderstanding that the public and federal, state and local decision-makers have been working with on which to base their decisions.
Long-term medical care providers to the aged and medically infirm (per the Girvan-Roy study) consist of: Nursing homes and skilled nursing facilities; Assisted living facilities, i.e., residential care communities or personal care homes; Adult day service centers; Home health Agencies; and Hospices.
The first two medical care providers for seniors are referred to as long-term medical care facilities (LTMCF) and are the source of the data. Data for the other three elder care facilities are not collected or were not available for the Girvan-Roy study. In fact, it has been acknowledged that there continues to be underreporting of deaths related to LTMCFs. Some providers are just not reporting. In other cases, the residents die in hospitals and they are not categorized as LTMCF deaths. Nonetheless, the data are sufficient to draw some useful if not stark observations.
What about the Flu and Pneumonia Death Rates in Earlier Years?
To even better understand these death rate figures, it is useful to put them into the context of what we know about death rates from the flu before the arrival of COVID-19. Is the COVID-19 death rate worse, better or about the same as prior flu seasons? We should expect the rates to be worse because there is no vaccine whereas most people get a vaccine shot for the routine flus that are expected each year.
In 2017 the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported that annual deaths from all causes were 2.8 million or 0.866% of the population. The leading causes of death, in order of magnitude, were heart disease, cancer, accidents, respiratory disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, flu & pneumonia and suicide.
Just looking at the Flu & Pneumonia (FP) cause, in 2017 it accounted for 55,672 deaths or 0.017% for the population as a whole. Death from FP, as you would expect, fell hardest on people over 75 totaling 38,078 deaths. That translates into a FP death rate of 0.180% for those over-75 group, which is a little more than 10 times the death rate for the overall population. For the rest of the population under 75 the death rate was only 0.006%, or or 1/30th of those over 75 (0.006% vs 0.180%).
Data from CDC and FreeOpp.
What this means at this point is that in the aggregate the overall COVID-19 death rate is slightly worse than the flu death rate in a prior year (0.022% vs 0.017%). However, for seniors in LTMCFs, the COVID-19 death rate is 100 times greater than the flu and pneumonia DR was for those under 75 in 2017 (0.682% vs 0.006%) and nearly 4 times greater than those over 75.
In summary the COVID-19 death rate is far more skewed to those older than 75 and those residents in medical care facilities for the aged.
Source
What Does the Future Hold?
Looking ahead we obtained the most recent forecast from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. They are considered by many medical professionals as the most thorough modelers. On May 18, 2020 the IHME released the results of the third run of its new model. They predict that by August 4, 2020 a total of 143,357 Americans will die of COVID-19. That forecast nearly doubles the number of COVID-19 deaths. It is worth noting that each run of the model has produced lower forecasts for future deaths. There are detractors of their modeling procedures, but it is the best we have at the moment.
One interesting medical research report suggests that a significant portion of the population has natural immunity to COVID-19. In the May 14 edition of Cell, published by Elsevier, the researchers found:
T cell responses were detected in 40-60% of unexposed individuals. This may be reflective of some degree of cross-reactive, preexisting immunity to SARSCoV-2 in some, but not all, individuals… suggesting cross-reactive T cell recognition between circulating ‘common cold’ coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2.
This might be why there are so many reports of asymptomatic cases of COVID-19. That also may mean the IHME forecast will be revised down even more.
However, COVID-19 has brutal consequences for people over 75. That detail cannot be minimized. But what policies would that suggest?
Did We Adopt the Right Policies?
What do these data suggest about the medical and economic policies that have been adopted by the federal, states and local governments?
The carnage of COVID-19 is concentrated in elder care facilities not in the population at large. The policies and procedures, including lockdowns and state-of-the-art personal protection practices for those facilities, should have been more thoroughly thought out based on useful data.
Keep in mind, about 70% of the elder care facilities are for-profit. Yet they are not free-market enterprises; enterprises free to do what they think is best. These for-profit facilities are licensed and regulated by the several Departments of Health of the states. They do what the state tells them to do.
The governors and mayors, and their medical and science advisers, made the decision to pack them in, force them to house and retain infected and returning infected patients. They chose to divert PPE supplies to hospitals, not the elder care facilities. This characterization is based on reports in the press. One certainly hopes there were some communities that did a better job. There is reason to believe that is the case because some assisted living facilities have reported no deaths.
As COVID-19 deaths mounted, not a word was officially spoken about where they were occurring. Fear was stoked that it was a population-wide epidemic. We should ALL lock down.
What a costly mistake, a mistake that continues to this day. Governors and mayors with fresh data insights into the truth still want to be central planners and determine which businesses can re-open and to what degree, who should still shelter or socially distance. They send out teams to draw circles in the grass defining where groups can camp out and place police monitors in all the parks to warn people to stay within the circles. At this point they are just imaginary prisons, but they are prisons.
Madness, sheer madness.
Though that is an easy and superficial observation to make, what is really unsaid, and not easy to admit, is that large numbers of politicians and bureaucrats have revealed their true nature. Speeches decorated with declarations of “better safe than sorry” and “planning is better than no planning” reveal they are authoritarians by nature; central planners of the worst kind.
In conclusion, the relevant death rate for policy purposes has been obscured. The consequence has been inappropriate policies. They have resulted in a bizarro world of highly restricted commercial functioning and immense economic destruction, alongside no evidence that lives were saved and growing evidence of second-tier loss of life resulting from lockdown.
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Ahhh, look 'lil SteelChip is waking up to a new world, realizing there are people - Steelers fans, no less /gasp! - who hold liberal, progressive views. That not everyone regurgitates right-wing talking points in a Trump echo chamber like this. 'He's a paid troll, hang him high!' Your incessant, unhinged posts are a true indication of your level of immaturity. Can't debate or argue a topic? Attack and slander the messenger! Heck, what do I know? Maybe you are thirteen or fourteen, as your posts seem to indicate.
That is an excellent and DAMNING article for policy makers, fear mongers, the MSM and Libs Like Tibs (LLTs) everywhere.
This whole **** has been implementation of Rahm Emmanuel's edict - Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste.
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Tibs isn't going to comment on the facts. He just drops in to talk about posters, ***** about Trump, post articles that he hasn't read, post liberal memes and stir the pot. I can tell he isn't dumb. But he's a troll.
You can? What's your secret?
Holy ******* ****, how the **** did you manage to keep a straight face while typing that bullshit. That is seriously one of the most hilarious things I have ever read on this board.
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I could be wrong....
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He didn't. I guarantee you he was giggling like a little kid when he typed it just thinking of the reaction he was going to get. Sadly I think it's the only joy he gets at this point. It must be a sad existence to have TDS.
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100,000 people die of hospital acquired infections every year. No headlines or photos of the dead. No breathless newscasters shaking their heads and blaming anyone.
Strange.
Strange.