Lowkey the “Avy to post” comment of the year

I'm in agreement that the language in the article is misleading. The article is stating that pneumonia, influenza, ARDS, are underlying conditions that patients have had prior to their diagnosis of covid, which is false, as these result from the virus, and is what is killing these patients. Like what @str8dollaz has stated previously, the 6% that have covid listed alone as the cause of death is the result of bad charting.
I'm not denying that there are other comorbidities, i just wanted to focus in on the ones I listed because the article does not do a good job of differentiating "underlying" from "caused by". You dont see patients relaxing at home in ARDS and only going to the hospital because Covid exacerbated their condition. And it is possible for these patients to go into ARDS as a result of the other diseases like you stated, those should all be charted alongside the ARDS/pneumonia as well. I dont necessarily believe that the correction in the op is incorrect, as the CDC table is showing these diseases as comorbidities, one just needs to think about the data for a second and separate which diseases are caused by covid, and which ones are not

Also, I dont believe anyone was trying to correct the CDC's data, just moreso explaining why the article is incorrect

all of the things you listed are not contagious diseases (with the exception of the flu, there is a vaccine out there yet people still refuse to take it. Additionally, the general public did not do a good job at hand hygiene prior to the pandemic, which would have prevented many of the yearly cases imo).
yes they are problems in their own sense, but it truly is not comparable to a disease that is highly contagious.
also, capitalism in america trumps all, so these businesses dont give a f*** about how many people die as a result of their product, as long as theyre able to make a profit at the end of the day

you realize 75% of what you just said is completely for companies making more money

tell em bro. tired of idiots comparing covid to cigs, road accident

@thebootywarrior

The article is stating that pneumonia, influenza, ARDS, are underlying conditions that patients have had prior to their diagnosis of covid, which is false, as these result from the virus, and is what is killing these patients. Like what str8dollaz has stated previously, the 6% that have covid listed alone as the cause of death is the result of bad charting.

This is truly unbelievable. It's like you didn't even read any of my post. That's not how comorbidity data works.

the article does not do a good job of differentiating "underlying" from "caused by".

That's not how comorbidity data works.

You just needs to think about the data for a second and separate which diseases are caused by covid, and which ones are not

Thats not how comorbidity data works.

@RASIE

I see what you’re saying, and I feel like we’re largely arguing the same point. I suppose I could have explained more about how people with underlying medical conditions are more prone to the complications that I listed. But again, my post was strictly targeting the article that was misrepresenting the CDC data, I wasn’t targeting the data itself.

Maybe “catalyst” would have been a better word than “cause” in these cases where people with Covid develop respiratory failure, etc. But the fact of the matter is that most of these patients would not be in severe respiratory distress had they not contracted covid. It’s not just a coincidence that all these people with Covid are ending up intubated and on pressors in the ICU.

Now THAT makes a lot more sense

I'm not discrediting the CDC data, that is objective data, rather im talking about the news article

Sorry fam ive been busy for a bit!

Comorbidities, which includes everything on the CDC's chart in the left column under "Total COVID deaths as of," are just medical conditions that a person has — diseases, various injuries, deficiencies, abnormal biology, and even certain genetic traits — and how each of them interact.

In the CDC's Covid Comorbidity chart, you're looking at a very big list of conditions that were observed and previously known in 94% of the US deaths in this week-old chart alone.

“Conditions", including things like car accidents, suicide, and other non-biological things, though they are rather small in the data. So when they see disparities between the number of patients with certain conditions who have died from Covid, they can look at the symptoms of whatever conditions they have and better a***yze whether a condition just makes someone more susceptible to covid, or if a condition becomes exasperated when Covid is acquired because it has similar symptoms. The latter is a mutual exchange most of the time: both covid and the other condition are strengthened by their interaction — which is why that, yes although Covid is the catalyst (as @str8dollaz said) that kick things into higher gears, it's not necessarily always the one that wins out.

An easy comparison would be if you drank alcohol mixed into an energy drink like Monster. Alcohol travels through blood in order to reach the liver and you get drunk; Energy drinks are made of ingredients that specifically head straight to the stream and start sprinting. So combining the two means you can get drunk way faster than you realize (and its easy to poison yourself), AND the energy drink is keeping you awake when the alcohol is trying to make you pass out.

And you can think of the list of conditions that put people at increased risk of severe illness from Covid as the “alcohol + energy drink” combo of this pandemic.

So what about this 6% number? That’s just the number of people who got Covid where no comorbidities were found. Now this is an important distinction between @str8dollaz correction in OP, and how comorbidity is used. The 6% are “condition free” people who contracted Covid, which then died from its standard symptoms.

If you get Covid and have no other conditions, the pneumonia/ards you develop from Covid are just symptoms, not comorbidities. Just like if you drank alcohol by itself, the effect of drunkeness/nauseau/hangover are not comorbidities of alcohol ingestion. They’re the baseline consequences. Comorbidities are two separate things that happen to meet and then interact to have a different result than they would have by themselves.

One more example:

So my husband have been a bit overweight for years. We found out a week ago that he's developed type 2 diabetes. These two things are now comorbidities — they're also on the severe interaction risk group. So if my husband got Covid, he'd probably have a tough time (but he might not — not every interaction hits everyone identically).

Here's a 1 min video I just found from a few months ago talking about India's comorbidity finding thats extremely simple to understand too:

The chart also isn't meant to convey in any manner "who shouldn't worry about Covid" or saying "oh all young folks are fine". It's just a representation of who might need to take more extreme precautions, while everyone else remains as cautious as they've always been to prevent spreading it to others who can spread it to those in extreme risk. The whole point is the same thing we've been following: keeping as many people safe as we can and not needlessly spreading to others.

And I'm sure if you're familiar with America, then you might recognize why not just the eldery are at extreme risk since obesity and diabetes are among highest risk factors... Which is even more of a reason to understand what comorbidity entails and how Covid's interaction with things already present in a lot of our population is a serious issue in this pandemic.

Yeah you’re completely right, and i think in reality this has only become an issue because this is one of the only times anyone has ever paid attention to these statistics. Unless you’re a researcher in the field, even if you’re able to quote say, cancer death statistics, you’d likely never question how the number was calculated.

The difference now is that people are seeing this big flashing covid deaths number every time they watch the news, and for better or worse they are interpreting that as people dying in a hospital bed having battled covid for a week or two. It’s hard to say how you avoid the number being overstated given the points you’ve made, but i do think the media knows that’s how it will be interpreted and hasn’t done anything to clarify what that number actually entails (may be that the government is actually at fault if they didn’t explain this and the media was as unaware as the public).

Just feels like it’s contributed to a s*** situation, cos having to revise the figure down allows all the “it’s not that serious we are being lied to” people to feel vindicated, because actually they are technically (a real stress on that word lol) correct - not sure if it’s linked but we had 10,000ish people protesting about the covid “hoax” in London this week.

I think quite a while back, one of the first cases we had that was supposedly a young and healthy person with no underlying conditions (so was obviously big news) turned out to not actually be covid related - iirc correctly it was a young woman who killed herself but don’t quote me on that.

Aside from that i haven’t seen any well publicised examples of the falling off the cliff scenario, but when they changed the methodology the number of cases decreased by about 5,000 (more than 10% of the total) so statistically there must be examples of it.

Interestingly RE the “what happens after 29 days” question you asked, it seems like its possible that if someone got a positive test on day 1, ended up in hospital on day 7 and was on a ventilator for 23 days after that, they might not be counted which seems mad

The article directy quotes the cdc data — its other things written by the author are bad.

What they were saying was that the respiratory failure, ARDS, and pneumonia listed among other comorbidities in the CDC chart “can’t be pre-existing since they are caused by Covid." They were under the impression that comorbidities included the regular symptoms of Covid by itself.

Look at the post that I assume influenced the OP correction:

In the first sentence Dollaz uses a verbatim quote from the CDC (in the paragraph before their comorb-chart) from the top of the article, and then essentially says it’s bullshit.

His reasons for this is:

• “COVID causes the morbidities” — which is a misunderstanding of morbidities in disease risk prevention/treatment, and a misunderstanding of how to read the data in the CDC chart.

• “You don't walk into the hospital with underlying respiratory failure and then just happen to get covid afterward.” — He’s “right” in this case: you indeed don’t walk into the hospital with respiratory failure, then catch covid, then die. You have a condition that causes casual or chronic respiratory symptoms (see multiple of my posts ITT for a list of those specific conditions), then you catch Covid, and go to the hospital and die of respiratory failure.

I’m honestly not sure what was so outrageous or difficult to understand about that idea, and the only thing that explains it is just not knowing what that chart’s dataset and terms are denoting.

• “If someone comes into the hospital with absolutely no medical history and has covid and ends up taking a turn for the worst, it's because they are developing respiratory failure or something from the covid.” — Again, he is indeed “right” here: this is exactly what the CDC’s data told them happened to that 6% from that new total that week.

But do you see how Dollaz is speaking from the position that COVID is the only thing causing anything here? If you’re sick and come into the hospital, you already have Covid... If you come to the hospital with Covid and die, that’s only cause you had Covid. That's bad.

Do you see the issue here in regards to the CDC Chart that the article misinterprets? It’s exclusively about morbidity data and their role in Covid’s risk factors. On top of that, the entire basis of his correction can only have been made by ignoring the majority of the list in that article:

How many people who read this thread and know far less might see this “correction” and read the article, hopping on the train of mocking replies and trivializing the seriousness of morbidity and pre-existing conditions. Because someone deemed a medical professional said “you can’t have underlying respiratory failure if you don’t already have Covid” and that the article is “100% false” (when in reality the information it referenced was fine, it was the article’s language that had major problems).

Btw I was wrong about him being right on that second point:

"You don't walk into the hospital with underlying respiratory failure and then just happen to get covid afterward."

You literally can do this if you have influenza or pneumonia but not covid. This actually just happened to my father-in-law 2 months ago (he didn't die thankfully). And look what's sitting at the top of that high risk list.

@s

Feel like it's worth mentioning that my knowledge of morbidity is from my husband, who's been social worker and the director of a psych hospital for 20 years.

Morbidity in mental illnesses is more general: People who have eating disorders make them prone to depression. Depression is more likely to develop anxiety, which makes them more likely to develop psychosis, etc etc. Mental health morbidity is a big game of "stop another illness from developing".

And morbidity in general medical conditions works the same way, such as the various conditions that can lead to other things like obesity and diabetes to hypertension or w/e.

But i the case of novel disease prevention and risk/treatment, you have your novel condition (Covid) and you "set it against" all other known conditions and observe interactions (data), so you can determine the different risk levels for people to be aware of.

@s

S*** bro just delete the damn thread is really any reason it HAS to remain open? Lol

@str8dollaz Just wanted to say that I have no ill will towards you or anything of the sort fam. Its all love on my end and if I ever came across as rude or antagonistic, I really do apologize. Cause this is the last topic where people should be behaving like that

❤️

Oh yeah no worries, it’s all love on my end too ❤️

I’m gonna be honest, I don’t have the energy to respond to everything lol.

But I do want to say that I definitely have a very good understanding of managing morbidities in disease prevention/treatment, if I didn’t I wouldn’t have a job lol.

Also, as an example of how devastating covid can be, I’m literally taking care of a patient right now who is 18 years old, had zero diagnosed medical conditions, and now has acute respiratory failure due to covid. Imo he’ll probably be fine in the end, but just an example to not underestimate covid, anyone could take a turn for the worst with it

Don't close this thread. This thread has honestly educated me a lot