link to previous thread 1: https://nick.magpies.net/bb/viewtopic.php?t=86949
link to (the start of the last page of) previous thread 2: viewtopic.php?t=87401
link to (the start of the last page of) previous thread 3:
viewtopic.php?t=88152&start=2985
link to (the start of the last page of) previous thread 4: viewtopic.php?t=89343&postdays=0&postor ... start=2970
I'll leave it to David to "christen" the thread with a preferred name.
Coronavirus 5 - Last Blood
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stui magpie
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stui magpie
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Here's my nomination for a thread sub-title: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWNI8z0eJQE
Disposing of a couple of misapprehensions:
1. It doesn't really matter about old people dying of COVID because they were going to die anyway.
I've noticed some reasonably bizarre misunderstanding of life expectancy tables in this context.
If you are a male and die of COVID at, say, 83 years of age, it is certainly true that you had already lived to average life expectancy. What people don't seem to appreciate is that life expectancy is contingent on age, so when the "average male life expectancy" of 83 years is stated, what it means is the life expectancy of a male child born now, not the life expectancy of a person who has already lived for a lengthy period. So, the life expectancy of a male who is actually 83 years old, now, is another 7 or 8 years. Of course, if the person is a male aged 90, they still have a life expectancy of about 4 or 5 further years.
On a related note, one needs to understand what "life expectation" signifies. However it happens to be calculated in a specific context, it is always just a measure of central tendency. That is, half of the people of any age in any cohort will outlive their life expectancy (and half won't). In any event, every person who dies of COVID has their life "cut short" in the straight-forward sense that, having lived to that age, at the moment before they contract a terminal case of COVID, they had a life expectation of several years (yes, even if they were 100, their still had a life expectancy of nearly 3 years).
As I've mentioned previously, most causes of death affect older people. That shouldn't be a surprise to us - it is, in our common experience, mostly older people who die.
It is probably also worth observing that we are all, in one sense, dying, at all times. None of us is immortal. If we had been having this conversation 150 years ago, we would all have laughed at the notion of a disease that "only kills people over 60" - because the life expectancy then in Australia was about 35 years. These things are contingent. The entire point of medicine and public health is to put off the point by which, collectively, we can expect to die and, in the meantime, to reduce the extent to which various conditions affect our "quality of life" (however one wishes to measure that).
2. It doesn't really matter if people with pre-existing chronic conditions die because they were going to die anyway.
About half of the Australian population lives with one of 10 serious "chronic conditions" and about 20% live with more than one. I'm not sure what people think when they see that "another person with a chronic medical condition has died of COVID" because it seems to be an unexplained shorthand. I think, though, that the expression may conjure up notions of seriously ill people who may drop at any moment - say, a a person with an aggressive, metastasising cancer that has left them with a few months to live or Camille coughing up tubercular blood delicately into a handkerchief. In fact, most people with a "chronic condition" are not, in the ordinary course of events, going to die any time soon.
Take cancers, just as an example. One man in every 8 will get prostate cancer. It's the second-leading cause of cancer death in males. The average age of diagnosis is about 66 and most (but, of course, not all) people who get it live a long time, even if it eventually kills them. Anyone who has a prostate cancer and dies of COVID had a "pre-existing chronic condition" - but, for the most part, none of them was otherwise at risk of imminent death. Drawing a dreadful straight line of simplification through a complex area, cancers tend to kill younger folk earlier and older folk later. But the mental model we have of people with cancer who get COVID is probably more like the "pancreatic cancer, 6 months" case than the "prostate cancer, don't make plans to live past 120" case.
There is a whole area of study about "burden of disease" that you can examine, if you want, through the Commonwealth Government's Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. A good place to start might be here: https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports-data/he ... e/overview
The point to take away, really, is that the expression "person with a serious underlying pre-existing medical condition" tends to makes us think of some tiny fraction of the community that we've mostly never met and that are on their last legs, anyway, whereas, in fact, it includes just about every second one of us.
Disposing of a couple of misapprehensions:
1. It doesn't really matter about old people dying of COVID because they were going to die anyway.
I've noticed some reasonably bizarre misunderstanding of life expectancy tables in this context.
If you are a male and die of COVID at, say, 83 years of age, it is certainly true that you had already lived to average life expectancy. What people don't seem to appreciate is that life expectancy is contingent on age, so when the "average male life expectancy" of 83 years is stated, what it means is the life expectancy of a male child born now, not the life expectancy of a person who has already lived for a lengthy period. So, the life expectancy of a male who is actually 83 years old, now, is another 7 or 8 years. Of course, if the person is a male aged 90, they still have a life expectancy of about 4 or 5 further years.
On a related note, one needs to understand what "life expectation" signifies. However it happens to be calculated in a specific context, it is always just a measure of central tendency. That is, half of the people of any age in any cohort will outlive their life expectancy (and half won't). In any event, every person who dies of COVID has their life "cut short" in the straight-forward sense that, having lived to that age, at the moment before they contract a terminal case of COVID, they had a life expectation of several years (yes, even if they were 100, their still had a life expectancy of nearly 3 years).
As I've mentioned previously, most causes of death affect older people. That shouldn't be a surprise to us - it is, in our common experience, mostly older people who die.
It is probably also worth observing that we are all, in one sense, dying, at all times. None of us is immortal. If we had been having this conversation 150 years ago, we would all have laughed at the notion of a disease that "only kills people over 60" - because the life expectancy then in Australia was about 35 years. These things are contingent. The entire point of medicine and public health is to put off the point by which, collectively, we can expect to die and, in the meantime, to reduce the extent to which various conditions affect our "quality of life" (however one wishes to measure that).
2. It doesn't really matter if people with pre-existing chronic conditions die because they were going to die anyway.
About half of the Australian population lives with one of 10 serious "chronic conditions" and about 20% live with more than one. I'm not sure what people think when they see that "another person with a chronic medical condition has died of COVID" because it seems to be an unexplained shorthand. I think, though, that the expression may conjure up notions of seriously ill people who may drop at any moment - say, a a person with an aggressive, metastasising cancer that has left them with a few months to live or Camille coughing up tubercular blood delicately into a handkerchief. In fact, most people with a "chronic condition" are not, in the ordinary course of events, going to die any time soon.
Take cancers, just as an example. One man in every 8 will get prostate cancer. It's the second-leading cause of cancer death in males. The average age of diagnosis is about 66 and most (but, of course, not all) people who get it live a long time, even if it eventually kills them. Anyone who has a prostate cancer and dies of COVID had a "pre-existing chronic condition" - but, for the most part, none of them was otherwise at risk of imminent death. Drawing a dreadful straight line of simplification through a complex area, cancers tend to kill younger folk earlier and older folk later. But the mental model we have of people with cancer who get COVID is probably more like the "pancreatic cancer, 6 months" case than the "prostate cancer, don't make plans to live past 120" case.
There is a whole area of study about "burden of disease" that you can examine, if you want, through the Commonwealth Government's Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. A good place to start might be here: https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports-data/he ... e/overview
The point to take away, really, is that the expression "person with a serious underlying pre-existing medical condition" tends to makes us think of some tiny fraction of the community that we've mostly never met and that are on their last legs, anyway, whereas, in fact, it includes just about every second one of us.
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David
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Thank you all for your submissions. After an intensive consideration process lasting at least twenty seconds, I have decided to honour one of cinema's true visionaries and on-screen peace-makers, Sylvester Stallone, by naming this thread after the fifth and final instalment in his geopolitical documentary series Rambo. I hereby declare this thread open, and look forward to another 200 pages of misplaced optimism, acrimonious disagreements, wild speculation and crushing reality before we get to do it all over again.
"Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence." – Julian Assange
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#26
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#26
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What'sinaname
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stui magpie
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Replace GOP with Democrats and you're still correct.#26 wrote:^ Unfortunately it doesn't matter to his base how demonstrably wrong he was about things. The GOP are like a footy to team to their fans and the fans will keep supporting them no matter how poorly they perform.
Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down.