We're far from understanding the health and safety impacts of quite a few inter-related factors over the last couple of months. Many people point to the danger of increased alcoholism--not to mention more immediate outright suicide--from the lockdown combined with joblessness, but that's still an awfully fuzzy, speculative, unquantifiable picture. There's also a concern about deferring non-emergency procedures long enough to be nearly as dangerous as ignoring emergencies, but again, we're still guessing there.
I've been wondering about the bullets we may have dodged from hospital-acquired infections and simple medical error. There's also clear reason to think that extreme social distancing has blown a giant hole in normal seasonal rates of sometimes deadly respiratory illness. This chart is pretty amazing:
4 comments:
Well, yes, except that at the same time, Kung Flu deaths jumped. Since there are serious questions about "cause of death" one could speculate that CCP Virus is a diagnosis where Flu-A/B might have been more accurate.
I wouldn't say "except," I'd say "and." There are a lot of things changing, in both directions.
Drug addiction, for instance, may be taking a hit. https://hotair.com/archives/jazz-shaw/2020/04/20/know-pandemic-really-hurting-right/
I think there’s a chance that NYC choices about how to code deaths are significantly raising the perceived death toll from this thing. They’re out of line not just with the rest of the country, but are multiples higher than bad outbreaks in Italy and Spain.
A lot of people are getting lessons in just how much unknown/uncertainty there is in a lot of modern science, especially medicine, during this pandemic.
There are so many questions and so few definite answers.
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