You know, I really wish I had the time or energy to start using data mining techniques, especially such techniques that employ neural networks, to analyze the enormous amount of data about COVID-19. I strongly suspect that at this point we have the data to know a lot more than we do.
There is no such thing as “analyze the enormous amoung of data about COVID-19.” There is also no such thing as “analyze the enormous amount of data about COVID-19.” What the post intends to say is “analyze the enormous number of data about COVID-19.”
You would hope, but even with EMRs there are still lots of issues collecting the data. Just do our study of 700 patients it required about 15 med students putting in a lot of time. EMRs just are not set up for extracting a lot of the data you want. A see have discussed many times, their primary purpose is billing and making administrators happy. Just as an example some of the patients we extubated had to be re-intubated. There was no way in EPIC to extract that. Med students had to track through the record of any pt who was intubated by hand to see if they were extubated then intubated again at a later time. Also, the places that were the busiest that could generate the most data were so busy it was hard to also work on doing studies so they have been limited to the easy stuff you can extract out of EMRs which wont be that helpful.
Query- many people like to talk about focused lockdowns. Have you seen any real plans on how to do this? I see an occasional idiot who knows nothing about medical care spouting out stupid stuff in blog comments, but haven’t seen anything written by anyone knowledgeable. Mind you they dont have to be a doctor, there are lots of kinds of experts out there, but they need to know how nursing homes actually work, what the labor force for medical care is like, the finances, testing, the intensity of care for older pts, how long it takes to train, the availability of PPE etc.
I would also like to see what age cutoffs they would like to set. (People who are immunosuppressed like former transplant pts are just going to be bubble people I guess.) The average age of the admitted pt in our study was about 63.5. That means that half of those admitted for a lengthy admission were under that age. Should we use 55? Over 20% of our labor force is over 55. What do we do with people over the age we set? Force them to retire? Work from home if they can? Why would businesses want to keep people who can only work from home?
So if you see something, something intelligent , pass it on with comments.
Steve
IMO very little intelligent planning is being done full stop. People are lining up behind their preferred strategies without thinking much farther than that.
‘IMO very little intelligent planning is being done full stop. People are lining up behind their preferred strategies without thinking much farther than that.’
I would amend the second sentence to say their preferred POLITICAL strategies. Because it was political from day one. Recall the shrieks of xenophobia when OMB shut down air travel from China 1/31/20.
There are lots of people doing data mining on COVID-19. Whether they are inputting accurate data is another story, between China’s lies, false tests, inflated numbers of tests, and bogus diagnoses. Plus those who are pushing for drugs like the chinese-patented Remdisivar are going to skew their data against non-patented drugs, and vice versa. To sum it up, I don’t think there’s much reliable analysis out there and we may never get it for years to come.
The only experience I have with focused lockdowns is at my mother’s facility. For a while they were not allowing any visitors at all, and dinners instead of being served at the communal dining room were delivered in shopping bags to their rooms to cut down on contact with waitstaff and each other. They are allowed to leave the facility but my mother and her companion have done so only a couple of times. They apparently have relaxed the rules enough to allow infrequent visits, which I do for about one a week for maybe five minutes but with no physical contact. Everybody’s healthy at the facility from what I have been told. But I can’t say if the strategy is working because it is an active adult and those who are really ill are all in the satellite assisted living facility. I don’t know how they are faring.
“Recall the shrieks of xenophobia when OMB shut down air travel from China 1/31/20.”
Going back and looking at that very few people made that claim. There was a lot more criticism over it being a half assed approach since Americans could keep flying back and forth to China. Slightly more Americans visit China every year than Chinese visit the US.
Steve
Might check this study out:
https://covid.joinzoe.com/us