At The Daily Sceptic Will Jones asks an interesting question, “Why Did the Coronavirus Suddenly Cause Thousands of Deaths in Spring 2020 When it Had Been Hanging Around Quietly All Winter?”. For those who find the piece too long to read, he basically makes a two points. SARS-CoV-2 had been circulating since no later than October 2019:
So the evidence all points to a picture of SARS-CoV-2 being widespread in the winter of 2019-20 but not being the dominant virus, circulating at a low level, before exploding into a large outbreak – and getting into the care homes – in the spring. It was thus this explosion in spread that primarily caused the explosion in deaths (though some were caused by poor treatment protocols of course, and a sizeable number of care home deaths were due to mistreatment of residents). The deadliness of the virus didn’t change a great deal; the IFR didn’t suddenly leap up; it’s just that suddenly many more people were catching it and spreading it, and it was getting into many more care homes. (Discharging hundreds of infectious hospital patients into care homes to free up beds won’t have helped with this of course.)
but it took quite a while for the number of deaths to ramp up.
I think he substantiates his first point pretty will but I don’t find his second point particularly convincing. I suspect that’s an illusion caused by exponential growth.
As far as I can tell there’s one conclusion that should be drawn from that—the policy responses aimed at containing the spread of the disease couldn’t have worked by the time they were put in place and with how porous they were. They would need to have been put in place almost six months earlier than they were and, for various reasons, that information was just not available then. File that under “lessons learned”.
I had mine in November, 2019. Dry cough. Something in my chest. Horrible drowsiness. Missed a week of work due to the drowsiness. Felt like a strange sort of flu. Went to the Doc-In-A-Box. Doctor said “Viral, but not like anything I’ve ever seen. Go home. Treat symptoms.” I saw that doctor again about a year later. Suggested I may have had covid. She said almost certainly; all the doctors at the clinic had noticed a strange sort of croup-type illness about the same time. My wife nursed me, but never developed symptoms. We were both crawling with antibodies the following May. Week of November 12, 2019. Austin, Texas.
As became apparent in pretty early days, and as I repeatedly observed, this was an above typical mortality disease primarily of age and the immunocompromised. (And that didn’t take much insight, just a willingness to take the politics out of it.)
And it should be no surprise that spread would therefore be catastrophic in the institutions, which you allude to with the porous comment. Add to that the so-called necessary workers and we weren’t really serious about spread containment. The bottom line is that only what amounts to a quarantine of elderly institutions would have been feasible. That raises ethical issues.
The hysteria that resulted in policy being applied like peanut butter over the entire nation (and world) was a cost benefit nightmare we will still be paying for decades from now.
I’m not sure, but I may have had a similar experience to the one Doc Taylor had. I’m glad he did well, not unexpected. And until Omicron, I was fine as well. I got Omicron, despite vax, and then got what is now acknowledged as a real phenomenon: vax shingles.
I’ve said it so many times. Once again won’t hurt. This was a disease not of real medicine, but largely of politics.
The guy really doesnt offer an explanation that makes sense. It was here for 6 months before it made it into care homes? Not believable. Care homes in most large cities use lots of part time/per diem so they have lots of different staff cycle through them and prior to covid most of them had minimal protocols or ones aimed at flu, which is much less infectious. No one sent pts back to nursing homes until the hospitals were already full and desperate for beds so the surge was already well under way and the large majority of those were sent back after a time we no longer consider infectious.
So he is correct that ventilators were not causative. I dont think any treatment protocols I ma aware of were causative per se for death and certainly not for spread. He does miss out that treatment did get better relatively quickly so that the death rate by June/July 2020 was about 30%-50% lower than what is was in March and it continued to creep down a bit more. So if he thinks IFR is 0.3-0.4 then double that to approximate what it was early on. So I think the answer is we dont know.
“This was a disease not of real medicine”
I guess it looked that way from the golf course. In real life it was awful, especially early before we came up with better care. Yes it was mostly older people, but about 1/4-1/3 were not. Roughly 500.000 deaths per year. We have not had an infectious disease like this in 100 years. We have had others more deadly, but not so infectious and pretty deadly.
Ultimately each state made its now decisions. States that minimized responses had higher death rates.
Steve
I agree that we don’t know and may never know. However, I’m not sure I agree with this statement:
IMO it would be more accurate to say that treatment protocols changed AND the death rate declined. I don’t know if we’re really sure that the change in the treatment protocols caused the decline in the death rate.
Disagree some. Steroids blunting the inflammatory effect were clearly causative. Proning clearly helped oxygenation as did the non-invasive ventilatory methods which allowed people to survive until they began healing on their own. We also stopped shotgunning everything we could think of at the pts. Early on everyone got HCQ, Viet C and D, zinc, Azt and whatever anyone could think of plus the early experimental expensive stuff that never panned out. I think the large majority of the early drop was due to refinements in treatment.
Later, I think you can make some variants were less toxic and maybe you can make the case that when hospitals weren’t overflowing and we weren’t recruiting in non trained docs and nurses to work in the ICU pts got a better level of care may have been factors.
Steve
I forgot the obvious. In the studies that showed steroids were effective they had contemporaneous controls, randomized. The death rates for the control groups were consistent with what everyone else was seeing at the time the studies were done. Couple that with eh fact that the physiology and pharmacology were also consistent with he results and that is about as good as you can get.
Steve
OT- If you didnt see it very nice piece contrasting the Russian way of war vs Ukraine. Russian trolls might call it propaganda but in this case it is absolutely true. An expensive, ineffective use of missiles to appease hard-liners that mostly killed a few civilians.
Steve
https://archive.ph/qQYzf
Thinking about how unlikely it is Ukrainians have become so adept so quickly using new warfare technology.
Very likely the Russians are right, they are fighting Americans.
Not that quickly. After Crimea Ukraine decided to train pretty hard with NATO troops, including US, to develop better fighting methods. Russia is still fighting the same way it has for years. There also has to be a huge morale differential. Ukraine is fighting off invaders who kill civilians. Russia cant really provide a coherent reason to its troops for being there. Even an 18 y/o poor conscript has to wonder about killing all fo the Ukrainians to protect them from supposed Nazis.
Steve