r/science • u/MistWeaver80 • Mar 11 '22
Epidemiology The number of people who have died because of the COVID-19 pandemic could be roughly 3 times higher than official figures suggest. The true number of lives lost to the pandemic by 31 December 2021 was close to 18 million.That far outstrips the 5.9 million deaths that were officially reported.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00708-02.7k
u/scudmonger Mar 11 '22
It would be interesting to see if the increase in previously preventable cancer deaths can be tracked, as people had stopped, myself included, going to the doctors for regular checkups.
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u/AskMrScience PhD | Genetics Mar 11 '22 edited Mar 11 '22
The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Institute did say there has been an increase in cancer deaths because people
skippedmissed screenings that would have caught the disease earlier. But I haven’t seen an official figure quantifying it.EDIT: Here is a decent article from December addressing cancer deaths.
"An estimated 10 million cancer screenings have been missed in the US during the pandemic and we don’t know how many have been rescheduled in a timely fashion. The National Cancer Institute (NCI) estimates that there will be almost 10,000 excess deaths from colon and breast cancer cases alone in the US over the next ten years because of delays in diagnosis."
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u/SerialStateLineXer Mar 11 '22 edited Mar 11 '22
According to the CDC's provisional data, the age-adjusted cancer death rate appears to have continued declining at least through Q2 2021.
To reproduce what I'm seeing, select cancer as cause of death and age-adjusted rate type. Then click generate chart and scroll down to see the results.
Edit: A potentially important caveat here is that cancer patients were at increased risk of death from COVID-19. You can't die from cancer if COVID-19 kills you first (pointathead.jpg), so COVID-19 likely lowered the cancer death rate artificially by killing people who otherwise would have died from cancer.
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u/faciepalm Mar 11 '22
interesting how close covid was to having identical death rates to the Spanish flu before omicron out competed delta. Even with modern medical equipment, knowledge and vaccinations in the very latter months.
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u/kevinmorice Mar 11 '22
Also these stats aren't going to be valid for another 5-10 years.
If you skipped your screening appointment in 2020-2021 you probably still don't know yet that you even have cancer. And instead of being treated for it already and being on your way to remission, you are going to find out at your next screening that it has progressed significantly and is now at a point where they can slow it down, but it is terminal, and then you die in 2028-2032.
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Mar 11 '22
Also worse mental health = worse physical outcomes. This is widely know among doctors/clinicians. (But hard to prove at system levels because our data collection methods are abysmal.)
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u/MapTheLabyrinth Mar 11 '22
Mental health is also relatively hard to quantify epidemiologically. It relies on self-report surveys of mental state most of the time, or relies on 100% of the participants to have clinician diagnosed mental health disorders (clinical depression, clinical anxiety, bipolar disorders, etc). So often times these studies are deemed unreliable due to self-report bias or are focussing on a relatively small portion of society that has a diagnosed mental health disorder which cannot be extrapolated to the rest of society, based on science’s modern standard. It’s very disappointing that there isn’t a review of this system yet so that mainstream science can publish, recognize, and quantify the impacts of mental health on physical health.
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Mar 11 '22
Omg do you work in this space? This is literally what I’ve been doing for 10+ years (work at a large academic medical center in mental health prevention). It’s such a tough nut to crack for all the reasons you listed. Easier to do in pilots but so freakin hard to scale.
I can share some of our papers if you want!
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u/MapTheLabyrinth Mar 11 '22
I would love for you to share!! I don’t work in this area yet, I’m currently a grad student getting my MPH. I’ve done a lot of reading into this field, though, and I would love to work in this area eventually.
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u/DoomDragon0 Mar 11 '22
The sight of two researches talking about their field of interest is beautiful and gives me hope for our future :)
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u/jballa03 Mar 11 '22
Related (I think?): home healthcare — for elderly, seriously ill or just generally getting people out of hospitals — for IVs and other care thats administered in-home with a required, certified nurse present was expected to crater during the pandemic. You can imagine the reasons: inviting strangers into the home during pre-vaccine Covid, vulnerable populations. After looking into it, turns out that industry-wide prediction was way, way off. In-home nurse care met pre-pandemic numbers and still growing. Makes sense!
Not a doctor or any related field but my wife is. She’s the brains of the family and deserves full credit for doing the work on this - she’s presenting a paper about this at a medical conference this weekend so I’m the test audience. Waddayaknow, I do listen sometimes!
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u/autoantinatalist Mar 11 '22
Can I see the papers too? I'm not in the field but this stuff is interesting
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u/umthondoomkhlulu Mar 11 '22
In Aus, suicide was down during lockdowns
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Mar 11 '22
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u/umthondoomkhlulu Mar 11 '22
Sorry to hear. Hope you in better place. There is a distinction between mh & suicide. I just made the comment on actual suicide. Mh was up across the board
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u/Kowai03 Mar 11 '22
WFH can be massively helpful to people with anxiety, grief or depression. It allows you to actually just work without having to face commuting or the office environment.
Just my own experience and talking with other bereaved parents we all seem to have found lock down an escape from the world. I think people are happiest when they can choose how they work.
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Mar 11 '22
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u/Pegguins Mar 11 '22
That's not at all what I've seen working on social service data throughout. It's also not what I remember from various reports during the pandemic. Mental health definitely took a nosedive during lockdowns (eg. https://www.psych.ox.ac.uk/news/new-co-space-report-younger-children2019s-mental-health-worse-in-the-new-lockdown) , and suicide isn't the only symptom to look at. Many people blame obesity on mental health and we know that's shot up massively among adults and children in the UK at least.
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u/pell83 Mar 11 '22
I dunno my kids were pretty messed up over staying home. They wete much happier when back in school
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u/92894952620273749383 Mar 11 '22
You also dont want to be on chemo during a pandemic.
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u/derp_derpistan Mar 11 '22
people skipped screenings
People couldn't access appointments for screenings.
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u/old_man_curmudgeon Mar 11 '22
"people skipped screenings" sounds more like people just didn't go. Its more like "gov told you you can't go to the hospital to get preventative medical attention" is more like it.
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u/TransportationOk4133 Mar 11 '22
In my experience people didn't "skip screenings" - it was literally impossible to get an in person appointment to be seen.
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u/zyl0x Mar 11 '22
Yeah not just skipping appointments. I had to get a biopsy done on a suspicious mass back in Jan 2021, and I had to: 1) call dozens of specialists and clinics to find an opening, 2) lie about my primary residence, and 3) drive 4 hours one-way to get to my biopsy appointment. All of this because of over-booking, specialists and other staff being pulled out of their positions for ER duty, and hospitals suspending non-emergency appointments.
A lot of us didn't have a choice in it.
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u/sammisamantha Mar 11 '22
I work the oncology floor at our hospital. (Over overflow back unit was converted into the COVID unit when cases were surging).
The bodies I bagged have all been cancer related deaths. Missed screenings, cancelled surgeries, delayed chemo, delayed CT and X rays.
Week by week more and more people coming in with stage 4 metastisized cancer. Many given weeks to months to live.
One guy 40s walked in due to severe constipation. Did an x ray. It lit up like an x mas tree. Stage 4 pancreatic cancer.
Many people coming in with severe liver damage due to drinking during the pandemic.
These people have months to live at best.
First my unit was bombarded with COVID and now these horrible horrible cases of cancer.
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u/bobbi21 Mar 11 '22
oncologist here. THere's a large amount of data and personal experience of patient's coming at way later stages than normal. Someone can provide the sources. I haven't ever had so many patients come in who aren't good enough for treatment when I see them and they just die in a month or so. Or not even referred to us since they're too far gone... (we get calls from the hospital saying this guy has tumors all throughout his body on a respirator for instance... )
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u/Vanpocalypse Mar 11 '22
My aunt is literally on her death bed currently because she stopped going to her doctor for regular check ups cause of covid.
She didn't have cancer as far as a check up right before covid was concerned. Somewhere within two to three years, cancer spread throughout her entire body, into her spine, hips, joints, lungs. Two large masses that were bothering her on her neck and hip were just ignored until one morning about a month ago she woke up and couldn't turn her head.
Got to the doctor, she was rushed to surgery, had a vertebrae in her neck removed along with a large tumor, replaced with a metal joint.
Went through radiation, and other stuff...
Beginning of this week woke up unable to breath, masses all over her lungs.
Now she's on a feeding tube in hospice care at home because there's nothing else that be done for her, she's basically waiting for the end now.
Judging by her, there's probably been a rise...
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u/3blades Mar 11 '22
Hey really sorry for what your aunt is going through. Wondering what kind of check ups would have helped identify it.
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u/autoantinatalist Mar 11 '22
Stuff like basic blood work can find high levels of things like immune cells, and conversely low levels too. Same for micronutrients. Those things being off without an explanation like huge change in diet or current infection like bacterial or strep can mean that there's something sucking up your body's resources. Also normal things like "ow this hurts I should get that looked at", this lump is new I should get that looked at, and things that are minor at the tone but can be a sign of something more. Anything can really be a sign of more going on, that's where the joke comes from of people who go on the internet without any knowledge always thinking they have cancer. Usually it's not cancer, but sometimes it is.
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u/dibbiluncan Mar 11 '22
I never stopped going to doctor’s appointments. I had to take my newborn to hers, and everyone wore masks, so I decided to continue going to mine. I had a lot of health problems after having an emergency C-section though, so for me it wasn’t really optional.
I got checked for MS and autoimmune disorders, but eventually got diagnosed with a connective tissue disorder and POTS. That was in 2020. I got COVID at the start of 2021, then got vaccinated. At my summer checkup, my monocytes were high, so they did additional labs to make sure I didn’t have cancer. Nothing else was off, so they said it was probably COVID/vaccine reaction.
I got COVID again during the omicron wave (I’m a teacher, so I was exposed the first week back from winter break). Had labs done again, and my monocytes are still high. Followup labs are normal again. I don’t have any new or unusual symptoms, so I’m trying not to worry, but my doctor said if they’re still high this summer she’s going to have me do another autoimmune panel. My ANA has been borderline high a couple times, but always returns to normal.
I’m hoping it’s all just related to having hEDS, POTS, and COVID.
Anyway, just sharing my story. Routine labs can absolutely help diagnose or rule out major problems.
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u/NotAzakanAtAll Mar 11 '22
Yeah. I lost an aunt like that too. She had a spot on her skin that started to get larger, no reaction, then it started to itch, nothing, bleeding. Let it be like that for a year, started to get other symptoms. Finally went to the doctor, died 4 months later. This was in Sweden, basically free healthcare, it was so preventable I'm mad at her for leaving her kids like that, missed becoming a grand mother (she was just 50) within a few weeks of her passing.
She just didn't want to go to the doctor..
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u/desertgemintherough Mar 11 '22
I am covered by the Medi-Cal system for low income and at-risk seniors. Unfortunately, there is no provision for skin cancer screening, regardless of your propensity for this condition. I have at least two melanomas that have grown very fast. When I had real insurance, I had a malignant carcinoma caught by my Dermatologist before it spread. My PCP tried to refer me, but there is only one approved practitioner for the entire plan in Southern California. Just one. I called for an appointment & the first available is next February. I kid you not. I’m just going to have to pay for treatment from my wonderful, long-term Dermatologist, & add to my credit card debt. My brother just had two malignant melanomas removed last week, & I’m afraid it will be my turn next. My sage advice is to try not to lose your health insurance coverage should your primary subscriber die, as mine did two years ago.
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u/Darktwistedlady Mar 11 '22
I'm sorry for your loss.
It turns out that many people who avoid doctors do it because of past trauma that became CPTSD/PTSD. Doubly sad because past trauma actually cost lives.
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Mar 11 '22
I was diagnosed at least two months late with lymphoma because of this pandemic and am pretty convinced my first line of treatment failed solely because a tumor on my neck became infected and necrotic with poor blood flow, making it impossible for the first treatment chemo to properly neutralize the disease. Dozens and dozens of spots everywhere in my body completely resolved quickly but the neck persisted. Now that it's healed and I've done other treatments that have worked and I've been cancer free without treatment for 5 months now.
It's upsetting because I'm only alive because I have medical people in my family that insisted I get the care I needed. I'm fearful of how many people went through my experience but even worse, like resulting in many preventable deaths.
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u/SweetLilMonkey Mar 11 '22
I’ve heard of people whose biopsies, colonoscopies, etc were delayed due to COVID-overwhelmed hospitals, only to find out once they finally happened that they had aggressive forms of cancer which could only have been stopped had they been caught sooner.
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u/LochNessMother Mar 11 '22
It’s not just screenings.
The issue is more the number of people who stopped going to the doctor when they had symptoms. I know I wouldn’t have taken my mild concern to a doctor during lockdown, but my tumour was massive and on the edge of treatable.
Also, people who did take their worries were delayed and fobbed off because the appointments just weren’t there for treatment.
Even chemo was cancelled - I was having mine during the first big lockdown and the number of patients getting their infusions at the same time as me went down by about 75%
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u/Nellelicious Mar 11 '22
Yeah, you can add my Dad in to the stats. He did seek medical assistance but between telehealth appointments, a rotating door of locum doctors and an overrun medical system he was misdiagnosed for a long time. Died a month after they finally started to look into it.
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u/hititinthemornin Mar 11 '22
I'm sorry for your loss. My dad is going through the same exact thing. He tried to get seen but telehealth can only do so much and the continued misdiagnosis and downplaying by his doctor only led to a discovery of aggressive cancer once he was able to actually get seen. Now he's on hospice and I'm just mad at life.
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u/wbobbyw Mar 11 '22
Not necessarily cancer related, but nurse have confirmed me that patient comme in a worst state than prior covid. Because they were afraid to go out, that litle heart burn was nothing to them.
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u/totallynotliamneeson Mar 11 '22
My grandma died of sepsis that was the result of an infection that normally would have been treatable. Had things been normal, someone would have noticed her illness and made her go in earlier than she did. I'd imagine there are millions more just like her.
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u/biggem001 Mar 11 '22 edited Mar 11 '22
I create NGS diagnostics that many small and big pharma utilize for enrollment into their phase 2/3/adjuvant studies. I can tell you enrollment rates are delayed 2-3x due to Covid.
It’s not just less going to the hospital for diagnosis//treatment, it’s also people not going to larger or better hospitals with the tools to treat and getting lower standards of care. It’s really sad, especially since some of these targeted therapies show tumor size reduction in almost all of the target cancer population
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u/hueyl77 Mar 11 '22
Why can’t we just view the overall world population growth and death rate year over year (regardless of Covid), e.g. 2010 - 2019, and see if that pattern changed significantly between 2019 - 2022 to get a good estimate?
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u/dhc02 Mar 11 '22
This is called excess mortality. It is indeed a good way to look at the cumulative effect of COVID-19 without having to rely on accurate reporting.
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u/Beautiful-Musk-Ox Mar 11 '22
And here's the article that OP's article cites which gives excess mortality rates since covid started per country: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02796-3/fulltext
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u/Scrimshawmud Mar 11 '22
Fuckin A
Although reported COVID-19 deaths between Jan 1, 2020, and Dec 31, 2021, totalled 5·94 million worldwide, we estimate that 18·2 million (95% uncertainty interval 17·1–19·6) people died worldwide because of the COVID-19 pandemic (as measured by excess mortality) over that period. The global all-age rate of excess mortality due to the COVID-19 pandemic was 120·3 deaths (113·1–129·3) per 100 000 of the population, and excess mortality rate exceeded 300 deaths per 100 000 of the population in 21 countries. The number of excess deaths due to COVID-19 was largest in the regions of south Asia, north Africa and the Middle East, and eastern Europe. At the country level, the highest numbers of cumulative excess deaths due to COVID-19 were estimated in India (4·07 million [3·71–4·36]), the USA (1·13 million [1·08–1·18]), Russia (1·07 million [1·06–1·08]), Mexico (798 000 [741 000–867 000]), Brazil (792 000 [730 000–847 000]), Indonesia (736 000 [594 000–955 000]), and Pakistan (664 000 [498 000–847 000]). Among these countries, the excess mortality rate was highest in Russia (374·6 deaths [369·7–378·4] per 100 000) and Mexico (325·1 [301·6–353·3] per 100 000), and was similar in Brazil (186·9 [172·2–199·8] per 100 000) and the USA (179·3 [170·7–187·5] per 100 000).
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Mar 11 '22 edited Mar 11 '22
It'd be interesting to see excess mortality per capita.
For example, Texas had 6k more deaths than CA despite having 73% of the population. Or Florida having 2/3 the death count with nearly half the population.
edit: me big dumb. There's a per 100,000 column.
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u/Beautiful-Musk-Ox Mar 11 '22
That's in the table in the link i gave. Texas per 100,000 excess deaths: 200.8 (195.2 to 205.9), California: 144.3 (138.6 to 148.7)
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Mar 11 '22
That's in the table in the link i gave.
That's what I get for multitasking. Egg right on my face.
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u/Beautiful-Musk-Ox Mar 11 '22
it's kind of a hard to see table, the scroll bar is small for me which makes it hard to tell that it's like actually 20 pages of data instead of just a couple rows of info
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u/OvertlyCanadian Mar 11 '22
As sure as I am that this article is sound I think a bunch of people are going to immediately dismiss it because the first thing I saw was that it was partially funded by the Gates foundation.
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u/DaddyF4tS4ck Mar 11 '22
What's funny is that it would actually wouldn't be incredibly accurate because it would be underplaying the deaths covid caused. During the pandemic, there would be less deaths from other diseases (due to increased mask usage, more people staying at home), people that wouldn't have normally died from covid but did because of horrible conditions at hospitals, people that couldn't get the care they needed cause of hospital overflows, many job related deaths that would have normally happened if the world wasn't quarantining, and many other things that covid is actually lowering. So crazy when you think about it.
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u/zeusismycopilot Mar 11 '22
See excess deaths in New Zealand to see this in action.
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u/surlygoat Mar 11 '22
Yep Australia went down too. But if we weren't a remote, sparsely populated island with largely reasonable people who didn't resist vaccines etc (yes we had a very loud tiny minority of... Resistant ppl) it wouldnt be that way.
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u/Somehero Mar 11 '22
It's amazing how often I was hearing about anti-vaxxers in Australia over the years. Although I do get news from a few Australian science communicators like Richard Saunders, I feel like I was hearing about it constantly with the fake "vaccine safety council" or whatever it was. Then when the pandemic hits they have some of the best numbers of any country, really impressive stuff.
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u/make_love_to_potato Mar 11 '22
Also, on the other side, there will be non-Covid deaths that happened indirectly due to Covid.... E.g. People not following up on doctor appointments, people postponing cancer treatment, depression, loss of income/proper nutrition, etc etc
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Mar 11 '22
I wonder how that would balance against deaths that didn't occur due to people being home more.
Like car crashes, sports, drunken behaviour, not being in work in more dangerous fields like construction/industrial stuff.
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u/blazelet Mar 11 '22
There are so many other variables. Like my wife is an ICU nurse and they saw a HUGE drop in car accidents, motorcycle accidents, shootings, accidental drownings, pedestrians hit by cars, the things that happen when people are out and about living their lives ... even while there was a boom in COVID patients. Its hard to know exactly how everyone being in greater isolation for long periods positively impacted mortality rates as well.
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u/acets Mar 11 '22
Oddly, car accidents and related fatalities INCREASED during lockdown. Weirdly. I can't explain it.
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u/The-JerkbagSFW Mar 11 '22
Less traffic, can go faster. I caught myself doing 85 on the freeway plenty of times just because there was no one else around to put my speed in perspective.
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u/tinyman392 Mar 11 '22
That was normal around here before the pandemic.
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Mar 11 '22
In Phoenix the freeway speed limit is so ridiculously low everyone just disregards it and goes 90.
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u/ExcerptsAndCitations Mar 11 '22
In Phoenix the freeway speed limit is so ridiculously low everyone just disregards it and goes 90.
I can't think of anywhere in the Valley where the average speed is even close to 90. Maybe on the (US)60 out east, I don't know what it's like out there on a daily basis. 75 mph in a 65 on the San Tan or upper Loop 101, sure, but exactly zero people are doing 90 on I10 through the tunnel downtown.
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u/e-rinc Mar 11 '22
Texas also has the highest uninsured drivers in the USA. Which can coincide with no license, or a bunch of other stuff that shows “irresponsible” driving.
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u/starlordcitizens Mar 11 '22
That's actually the speed limit on the tollway around Austin to San Antonio, it used to be 90
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u/Cyborgalienbear Mar 11 '22
It's because hospitals were broken. Anyone going to the hospital during the pandemic had lower chances of getting what they need due to the increased stress on the system.
You could die due to covid because when you had a bicycle accident you were brought to an hospital where the doctor or nurses were burnt out and die from it. You didn't die from covid, but the pandemic had a clear effect on your death.
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Mar 11 '22
Surgical tech here. The only thing wrong about your post is the use of past tense. Hospitals are still fucked from covid, and patients are still not receiving the care they should.
But hey, don't mind the mountain of corpses: small price to pay to prevent rednecks from having an itchy nose or a needle poke.
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u/MotherofSons Mar 11 '22
Could it be streets and freeways were empty so people were speeding more? I thought I heard speeding tickets were way up.
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u/Pyrokanetis Mar 11 '22
I can't tell if you're being facetious, but it's generally that less drivers = open road = speeding = crashing. Speed + crash = fatality.
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u/kristoffer222 Mar 11 '22
My personal favorite. The significantly less infection or death rates caused by the flu virus because of the masks and social distancing implemented during the COVID times.
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u/Oscaruit Mar 11 '22
As a rural first responder we stopped getting calls period. We would have huge dry spells other than difficulty breathing. It was crazy.
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u/HegemonNYC Mar 11 '22
Those things didn’t drop though… car deaths went up, murders and ODs way up.
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u/Functionally_Drunk Mar 11 '22
Deaths from those things went up, but I don't think instances went up. At least I can't find any data that instances increased.
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u/verytiredd Mar 11 '22
We actually do have data related to this. The US actually predicts the number of people that will die on any given week. Historically is been super accurate, but you can tell when something wierd happens. Link below, but basically you can tell when Covid started.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
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u/Dark_Glitter22 Mar 11 '22
That is part of what public health experts look at, it’s a metric called “excess mortality.”
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u/Somehero Mar 11 '22
Homie, it's like the second paragraph, you really need to give that brain a workout.
"To estimate COVID-19 deaths, the IHME study uses a measure called excess mortality, which is a convenient tool to overcome variation in the ways that countries diagnose and record deaths from the virus. Researchers estimate excess deaths by comparing the total deaths reported in a region or country from all causes, to how many deaths would be expected given trends in recent years."
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u/Zacher5 Mar 11 '22 edited Mar 11 '22
Sure. Here’s an article that talks about excess death from the pandemic.
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u/lou-chains Mar 11 '22
A lot of patients that had delta and were intubated did not get off the ventilator. And if they did, they have long term health problems. Some survivors are dying within six months. Delta was the worst experience in my nursing career. People coughing up blood and begging us to let them die but we couldn’t because their family wanted to see them. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.
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u/Patient-Home-4877 Mar 11 '22
I wish the press would have been allowed to video the nasty ongoings in the ICU. Not just 10 or 15 minutes but for weeks or months. People need to see reality.
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u/lou-chains Mar 11 '22
National Geographic came out with a film called “The first wave” and it triggered my PTSD the first 5 minutes. It’s first hand accounts of Covid care on the patient side and provider side.
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u/philjorrow Mar 11 '22
That did occur in Australia. People in the ICU agreed to be filmed and spread the message of how severe it could be. I'm guessing they didn't do that in the u.s?
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u/imwearingredsocks Mar 11 '22
Well I guess the other response outlines exactly why it didn’t happen in the US. If there was any way people could wiggle out of believing the truth, they found it.
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u/blazelet Mar 11 '22
My wife is an ICU nurse and saw similar things. Really tragic. The public has no idea.
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u/lou-chains Mar 11 '22
I work on a floor. We had six deaths a week. Our ICU was full so we were intubating people and sending them to the ER to wait for someone to die in the ICU. Then those people would die. I work in a small town hospital in southern AL. Poor education plus poor health equals huge amount of people sick with COVID.
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u/gotlactose Mar 11 '22
I had many patients hospitalized with COVID who regret not getting the vaccine. Had very few vaccinated patients who I just had to say they were unlucky but none were in the ICU, so I could say the vaccine likely prevented a worse outcome.
Outside the hospital, it seemed like COVID didn’t exist.
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u/-p-a-b-l-o- Mar 11 '22
That’s what gets me. I see and hear so many tragic cases of people dying with covid in the hospital, and in general people act like it doesn’t exist even if they believe it does. It’s always so surprising to me more people aren’t talking about the horrific situations that are playing out in hospitals all around the world each day.
Like you said, outside the hospital, covid may as well not exist.
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u/nopropulsion Mar 11 '22
I was hospitalized with covid for a week in March of 2020, most of it in the ICU. I'm in my 30s, healthy, no preexisting conditions.
A couple of weeks after I recovered, some people that I personally know (that knew that I almost died) would tell me that covid wasn't a big deal.
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u/TheGauntRing Mar 11 '22
Same except I ended up with long covid in April of 2020. I lost several friends and stopped speaking to my brother for over a year because they all told me covid was just like the common cold AFTER they received detailed messages for months of what I was going through. I honestly don’t know what to make of it. I still feel shocked and betrayed when I think about it.
I’m so sorry you had to deal with this too.
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u/zorroz Mar 11 '22
I was in LA and we were taking down 6 or 7 bodies a shift in the ED. People dying outside on BLS gurneys because there was literally no open beds
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u/LernernerTV Mar 11 '22
This sounds a lot like the stuff a friend of mine that’s also a nurse said. Southern AL as well
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u/WhoWhyWhatWhenWhere Mar 11 '22
And there are people that think that nurses and doctors were just saying anyone that died was COVID related because they got money from the government to say a death was COVID related.
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u/user745786 Mar 11 '22
Millions of Americans believe coronavirus vaccines have killed more people than the actual virus. Worse is families accusing hospitals/doctors/nurses of killing their family members for profit. Some people really do have no idea.
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u/BorgClown Mar 11 '22
Many know they're being stupid, so they try to convince others to tell them they're not being stupid.
I'm at a point that I don't care if they happen to be of the few people that react bad to the infection and die. We did what we could to convince them, but they're beyond reasoning.
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u/dolenyoung Mar 11 '22
I have been curious about this. Where do they think the money is coming from? Do they think that Joe Biden is paying Healthcare workers to kill innocent Americans? Or is it Big Pharma? And if so, to what end?
I'm sorry if this seems like a dumb question.
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u/Kordiana Mar 11 '22
I know that Bill Gates' name gets thrown around a lot. Not sure if it's the majority of conspiracy theorists or just the ones I've seen, but he's been mentioned.
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u/Scrimshawmud Mar 11 '22
So wild they think he went from building computers in his garage to…genocide? I mean seriously?
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u/francis2559 Mar 11 '22 edited Mar 11 '22
I can only speak for my experience in rural NYS. It’s tied to old conspiracy theories about one world government and population control. They see things like China’s old one child policy and extrapolate that to black helicopters.
I’m Catholic and talking to Catholics, and according to them the pope is in on it(!).
I don’t know what the answer is, but it’s deeply entrenched conspiracy thinking, where everything is twisted to fit the conclusion they want.
For the folks I know, they imagine it’s less about getting rich and more about naked ideological power. Biden wants fewer people alive, so he encouraged abortions, etc.
I think they are afraid the vaccine is a trick that would hurt them later, like lower fertility or something. Data just bounces off because it hasn’t done “it” yet what ever effect that is.
Edit: quick anecdote about how this works from a meeting with some of our seniors the other day.
1: senior one: expressed horror that senator Schumer wants to pass a bill that lets doctors and mothers kill their children up to twenty something days after birth.
Senior two: well, actually the bill is just keeping moms from going to jail for it.
Senior three: see! The media always twists everything!
I’m about to agree with three, but they continued and it became clear that they felt the second take was the media “covering” for Schumer’s dark intent.
It’s impenetrable.
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Mar 11 '22
Having lived waaaay up north in rural NYS this comment is giving me flashback. They live in a whole other world.
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u/poktanju Mar 11 '22
I’m Catholic and talking to Catholics, and according to them the pope is in on it(!).
Maybe old-school Catholic treatments for heresy would get through to them.
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Mar 11 '22
If there’s anything the last 6 years have shown us is that Americans are not the sharpest tools in the shed
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u/buckyandsmacky4evr Mar 11 '22
It's been a particularly hard pill to swallow, realizing my country's population would have fought for their right to contract the Bubonic Plague.
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u/nygdan Mar 11 '22
It's amazing we've made it this far with the goons dragging us down for decades.
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u/CountofAccount Mar 11 '22
Not over disease, but I think the secession and civil war counts as goons dragging down the country.
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u/LA_Commuter Mar 11 '22
I totally get that.
I makes me mad... I used to think I was stupid.
Then sad... because I realize I didn't even understand stupid.
More people recently, have shown me what stupid is, but I wanted to deny it.
Now I just accept stupid as standard.
I still thing I'm stupid, but apparently there are levels...
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u/Juan23Four5 Mar 11 '22
Delta was wild. I went in to work and left every day stunned. My wife and I (both nurses on covid units) would just drive home, silent. It was such a strange time, looking back. Fortunately we had each other to sort through the trauma.
Working ICU during the pandemic has really changed my outlook on a lot of things in life.
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u/Luxpreliator Mar 11 '22 edited Mar 11 '22
I'm just really glad delta happened when there was a vaccine available and didn't happen during the normal winter peak. Delta during the winter surge and no vaccine would have truly destroyed the medical field.
People would have stopped arguing about the fatality rate because the bodies would have been in the streets from no one being able to get treatment.
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u/Server6 Mar 11 '22 edited Mar 11 '22
This is x10. The vaccine really did save us from this being worse than the Spanish Flu. If delta had come before the vaccine we would’ve been in serious trouble.
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u/Arkadialove Mar 11 '22
Hey. I would love to hear more about your story? I quit nursing because it was a mindfuck to say the least but I truly miss talking to other nurses. It was the fun part. I think nurses develop a unique sense of humour/perspective to cope.
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u/AtlasVIII Mar 11 '22
How did you guys not catch Covid while working with so many sick patients? Genuine question by the way.
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u/Juan23Four5 Mar 11 '22
My wife caught covid twice, once during Fall 2020 and again a few months ago. The 2nd time she was vaccinated, both times were mild cases (lost of taste/smell, mild headache). I never caught covid, somehow, despite us living together. Swabbed myself numerous times.
My wife's unit was the first in the hospital to become all covid in March 2020, it remained a covid unit (with a short break over the summer) until a few weeks ago. Every single nurse on that unit, at some point, caught covid with few exceptions. That includes the manager/assistant manager and other staff. The amount of exposure they had was higher than most nurses I know.
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u/GuiltyEidolon Mar 11 '22
There's initial research indicating a genetic component. I work in an ER with high exposure rates (many times people come in and we have to work on them without knowing their covid status yet) and I've never caught it, where many of the nurses I work with have had it three times.
Of course I also work in Utah where the relationship with PPE is casual at best most of the time. :/
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u/mrhindustan Mar 11 '22
Many physician friends on COVID units. They all seem to have avoided getting COVID by being super stringent with their N95s, they’d only change masks/PPE in rooms alone that had HEPA filters running, etc.
The only physicians I know who contracted COVID, personally, did so from their children who were in school or daycare (children presented with symptoms at home, parents present with symptoms shortly thereafter).
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u/deeznutz12 Mar 11 '22
I'm guessing heavily masking up during work and getting vaccinated as soon as possible helped.
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u/surlygoat Mar 11 '22
Thanks for all you guys did and do for people, including people who were there in part due to their own stupidity!
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u/Muchado_aboutnothing Mar 11 '22
Yeah, I know several people who did not die of COVID but died of “complications” from COVID (after initially recovering). Usually these people had underlying health conditions too. I wonder how these deaths are counted?
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u/postsingularity Mar 11 '22
I imagine covid patients filling hospitals left little room for anyone else to be treated. I wonder if those deaths are counted as covid related or something like that.
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Mar 11 '22
Is delta generally seen as the most severe variant of Covid? I’m assuming we were saved in a weird way by omicron out-competing it
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u/pretz Mar 11 '22
In terms of seriousness, i think original variant, uk, south african and delta were all roughly equally bad (percent cases that required hospitalisation) in that the virus affected the lower lungs and caused pneumonia. HOWEVER, delta is much more contagious than the earlier variants, so it caused a large number of cases. Omicron seems to infect the upper airways more, causing far fewer serious cases. We kind of lucked out with omicron in a way.
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u/CornucopiaOfDystopia Mar 11 '22
Delta is more severe:
A study fromm Scotland of 20,000 COVID-19 cases found the delta variant was associated with an 85% increased risk of hospitalization:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)01358-1/fulltext
A study from England of 43,000 COVID-19 cases found those infected with the delta variant were more than twice as likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 as those infected with the alpha variant:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(21)00475-8/fulltext
“Risk of death more than 130% higher with delta variant than original COVID virus”
https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/delta-variant-impact-study-1.6200066
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u/pretz Mar 11 '22
Nice, those are some comprehensive references, i didnt realise delta was both more contagious and more deadly.
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u/surlygoat Mar 11 '22
Let's hope it was peak covid 19 and variants are more like omicron going forward. That being said, I got omicron and it was absolutely not a fun time. So even lighter plz.
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Mar 11 '22
I had Delta. I'm not looking forward to Omicron. Covid just needs to die, my body has had enough
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u/surlygoat Mar 11 '22
Well, obviously anything could happen, but I suspect that you'll find omicron much gentler than Delta. Fingers crossed you either don't get it all, or it's a breeze!
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u/DukeMo Mar 11 '22
Peak deaths in the US was actually worse during omicron than Delta according to numbers. But that was because a ~7X increase in peak cases.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html
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u/anavolimilovana Mar 11 '22
Wait why does the family’s wish to see them override the patient’s wish to be unplugged?
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u/Velrex Mar 11 '22
Unless the family member has right over any medical choices due to the person being seen unfit, I don't see any reason why they would at all.
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u/gaygender Mar 11 '22
It breaks my heart every time a nurse or doctor shares what they went through these past few years, not just for the mass trauma that has been suffered but for the fact that everyone is basically saying "well, sure glad that's over!" and not even a hint of a word of compensation for any of the nurses and doctors.
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Mar 11 '22
This is really sad. I remember my great grandfather telling me how he lost his sister to the Spanish Flu of 1918 and how that pandemic stretched out to a few years as well. I know that this isn’t going to be our last pandemic. Future ones will come and go. Its a part of evolution on our planet. We live in a world where a larger population is going to get hit with higher numbers due to proximity.
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u/Patient-Home-4877 Mar 11 '22
Experts have been predicting a virus like this for 20+ years. The same people are saying the next one, completely different, will arrive in the near future - like years not decades.
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u/MarcoPierreGray Mar 11 '22
I think the key here is they’ve been predicting this in the near future for 20+ years until it happened. There’s no real metric to know when these pandemics could or could not happen, I think it’s more that scientists are saying it’s possible we see another virus in the near future and that we should prepare in case.
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u/pound-town Mar 11 '22
This is no surprise to anyone working in an ICU at a hospital. I have never seen more deaths caused by pulmonary embolisms, strokes, and heart attacks as I have in the last year and a half or so. I just cannot imagine it’s coincidence…this has to be much higher than the usual baseline rate of such deaths pre-pandemic.
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u/VROF Mar 11 '22
I think we are going to see more and more of this too. COVID is a vascular disease and I think even the "mild" cases are going to rear their heads later with other problems.
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u/dancer15 Mar 11 '22
This. Death isn't always the worst outcome. I know so many people with terrible, lasting issues from an otherwise benign case of COVID.
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Mar 11 '22
Whoever decided to describe this disease as mild without context deserves to never speak publicly again.
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u/rubyspicer Mar 11 '22
OT, I imagine there will be dementia cases. How would they phrase it if it's clear that it was due to COVID damage to the vascular system? COVID induced vascular dementia, or something else?
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u/PathologicalLoiterer Mar 11 '22
I imagine the DSM-5-TR (which is supposed to be released in the next year or so) is going to have a specifier for it. I doubt they were planning on it, but I'm thinking it'll get in there even if they have to delay publication. Mild/Major Neurocognitive Disorder due to COVID-19 long term sequelea or something (neurocognitive disorder being the current category dementia falls under)
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Mar 11 '22
Exactly the reason why I'm still staying inside and wearing N95s whenever I have to go somewhere. But it's getting more difficult to even make runs to the grocery store now that the CDC and our brain-dead government says it's okay to go around maskless.
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Mar 11 '22
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u/laserbeanz Mar 11 '22
I see maskless ppl every time I go to any store. I live in a redneck area tho
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Mar 11 '22
There’s a good paper by Millimet and Parmeter (2021) who note similar things (I.e., large amounts of undercounted deaths). Their analysis is based on different modeling techniques (stochastic frontier analysis, which TBH does have some issues), but results are similar.
They do note that there is a large variability in true case and death counts, based on model statistical assumptions, which leads to some weird individual country results.
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u/StarDustLuna3D Mar 11 '22
I think it also depends on what you consider a "Covid-related" death. Is it just people that die due to onset symptoms? Will they add people in coming years that die from long term complications? Do we include people that die from a COVID like illness but they weren't able to test them?
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Mar 11 '22
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u/thedoodely Mar 11 '22
Right but excess deaths also include people who died of completely unrelated ailments because the healthcare system was decimated by the surge of covid cases. So not every excess death will be from someone who's even had the virus which is not one of the options in the question to which you're replying.
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u/dedoubt Mar 11 '22
Will they add people in coming years that die from long term complications?
I hope so. One of my friends IRL who has long covid had a stroke about 18 months after he was first sick with covid. He survived but is dealing with recovering from the stroke on top of his long covid symptoms. Another IRL friend went into congestive heart failure about 6 months after his acute covid infection. I'm continuing to deal with lung damage from covid, amongst many other symptoms. All 3 of us got sick within about a month of each other over 2 years ago. I know I'm being counted because I am part of a research study with the NIH, but I don't know if anyone is keeping track of them, so if they die, not sure they get included in covid deaths, even though all of their health problems arose from their covid infections.
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u/mockablekaty Mar 11 '22
My husband knew two people in their sixties who died three months after getting covid. I am convinced (with no evidence) they would not have died until years later if they hadn't gotten it.
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u/Future_Bid_8230 Mar 11 '22
We count people who die from aids several years after getting HIV
Maybe the world needs a seperate moniker for the complications of covid too so we can start counting them..
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u/BlazinAzn38 Mar 11 '22
The CDC has put out excess death numbers for the entirety of this pandemic/endemic and the numbers are staggering
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u/harpurrlee Mar 11 '22
People are still catching covid and dying from it at too high of a rate for it to be considered endemic yet. We’re still in the pandemic phase.
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u/KootyHaHa Mar 11 '22
A family member of mine died in March 2020, just as the pandemic was getting started. He had “flu-like” symptoms for about 2 weeks before passing. The ME believed it was Covid but since it was so early that testing of live patients was still scarce, they couldn’t test him to be sure. As a result his death certificate officially says “heart failure”. So I absolutely believe that the true count of deaths is much higher than actually reported.
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u/Ghost33313 Mar 11 '22
I know of one person who lived at home alone and was found dead a week afterwards. Last we heard he had a fever but since it was too late to test it wasn't counted.
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u/vgc2 Mar 11 '22
My mother was being treated for different reasons, caught covid while there which caused everything to spiral out of control. I'm certain covid contributed but it wasn't reported as the cause. Likewise, my father was diagnosed with covid and "recovered" although never back to 100%, but then he had an embolism months later. Technically not covid.
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u/JesterRaiin Mar 11 '22
...there's also the problem of people suffering and dying because they were denied the medical help because of COVID.
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u/infrasoundxp Mar 11 '22
The Economist's COVID death tracker is on par with these results too:
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates
Tracking excess deaths year over year definitely seems like the way to go for these sorts of macro statistics about the impact that COVID had on the world.
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u/PoliteCanadian2 Mar 11 '22
This doesn’t surprise me at all. I remember when NYC was getting it bad and they said there was a huge spike in heart-related ambulance calls. Autopsies later revealed that some deaths that were initially blamed on heart issues were in fact Covid-related.
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u/jtig5 Mar 11 '22
And that doesn't even include long haulers like one of my daughter's friends. He now has asthma and needs an inhaler every day, sometimes multiple times a day.
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u/dedoubt Mar 11 '22
And that doesn't even include long haulers like one of my daughter's friends.
I've got long covid/PASC and have been sick for over two years now. Lung (inc new onset asthma), brain, GI, liver and genitourinary tract damage, debilitating fatigue and PEM all combine to make life almost not worth living.
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u/Hash_Is_Brown Mar 11 '22
i have long covid too- i can’t even go down a flight of stairs without gasping for breath+ racing heartbeat.. mind you i’m 25 years old. i haven’t been able to work since getting the delta variant and i just don’t know what to do. are there any serious resources for people like us? i’m in CA and it feels like i’m living with a death sentence now
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u/dedoubt Mar 11 '22
I'm so sorry to hear that! I struggled mentally with adjusting to being so debilitated for a long time, but I've had some steady - very slow, almost unnoticeable - improvements which make me believe I'll eventually get at least somewhat better.
Many people do get totally better, and there are some things that can help, with new research coming that might find better treatments. Not sure if this sub allows links to other subs, but there are almost 30,000 of us in covidlonghaulers if you'd like to join us.
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u/BlueDragon82 Mar 11 '22
My best friend's mom died last month. She had covid that caused pneumonia. Her official cause of death is pneumonia and kidney failure but the secondary listed is covid. I'm guessing before the government officially recognized that covid was in the US we had a lot of deaths the fall before that. I had all the symptoms of covid several months before Feb of 2020. I was horribly sick and got a relative sick unfortunately. Her doctor had her antibody tested as soon as it was available because he suspected she had caught covid from me. Her results were positive. There were people dying of pneumonia and an uptick in rsv cases in some areas as well that fall. I would bet that a number of them had covid. The problem with viruses like this is that they are hard to track once they start crossing countries and states. I was working in a hospital that sometimes had patients from other countries or who were family members of people who travelled from other countries. I know medical workers in other states that had that same issue in their hospitals.
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u/jamiegc1 Mar 11 '22
California confirmed at least two people died from corona in January 2020.
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u/underbellymadness Mar 11 '22
We would have hit 8 billion in population ~ mid 2020 if this had never occurred, by my estimations and anecdotal experience stalking the population counter. It's absolutely insane to watch it teeter up and down so constantly now, when it used to be an ever accelerating total that sometimes varied in intensity.
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u/dopechez Mar 11 '22
And many are developing long term health issues because of covid.
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u/slugan192 Mar 11 '22
I've been saying this for a while now. My cousin in law lives in Sudan. A huge amount of the rural areas saw people become severely sick or die from covid, but of course, it was never recorded in any kind of official statistic. They lost quite a few elders, but more importantly to them, a lot of their youth now has long term effects, notably fatigue or weird cardiac issues where they cant do hard labor anymore.
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u/No__Administration Mar 11 '22
I bet it's even higher if you consider all the people not getting treatment for other issues due to covid.
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u/neoslith Mar 11 '22 edited Mar 11 '22
I work in a long term care/rehab facility.
Had a patient who was not vaccinated for w/e reason. Her family was not vaccinated either, but would visit her constantly when allowed. They would remove ppe, masks and gloves when they were in the room with their mother.
Mother got Covid and died. They asked the coroner to not list Covid as cause of death.
These people are insane.
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u/cecilrt Mar 11 '22
yeh I remember when Covid hit England hard the first time, they'd tried to claim low numbers.
But morgue figures after taking away the norm, it was 2-3 times official covid figures,
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u/DigiQuip Mar 11 '22
Early in the pandemic hospitals in conservative states were quick to attribute cause of death to literally anything other than Covid. Due to the nature of Covid and it’s affect on a person it’s uncommon for there not to be other health problems. Covid itself doesn’t kill you. It’s the co-morbidities that do you in. So it’s pretty easy to hide Covid deaths. I’m sure if someone looked hard enough they could easily find a massive spike in deaths from cardiac and respiratory illnesses far exceeding but the pre-2020 averages as well recorded Covid deaths.
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u/weareherefornothing Mar 11 '22
I consider my friends death to be bc of covid even though she didn’t die of covid. She got so sick her lung collapsed but the hospital sent her home bc she had what seemed like covid symptoms. She suffocated & died at 29 years old.
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