4,200 children have lost a parent to Covid in New York State.

[ChavvySexPond]

Why do you think 4.200 children in New York State have lost a parent to Covid pushing them into single parent poverty or the care system?

And do you think it will happen here? Or are we protected by having the National Health Service?

uhfnyc.org/news/article/uhf-report-4200-children-nys--lost-parent-covid-19/

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/champ.gothamist.com/champ/gothamist/news/more-children-ny-state-have-lost-parents-due-covid-19-911-attacks

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.thecity.nyc/platform/amp/health/2020/9/30/21494764/thousands-of-new-york-children-lost-a-parent-to-covid-19-study-finds

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-8791297/amp/More-4-000-New-York-children-lost-parent-coronavirus-report-finds.html

I don't see how Refractory is derailing anything? Its a discussion.

@MaxNormal

see their post of 21:40:10

They asked a question

"how am I supposed to feel about the 9 million people, mostly children, who die of starvation in developing countries every year?

What would you like me to do about these things?"

I suggested an answer.

It was a perfectly reasonable response and gave some much needed context to the numbers.

Didn't say safe.

IMO it's about avoidable deaths.

If we all wore masks indoors all the time, our death rate would be way lower. There are several studies that show that countries that adopted universal mask wearing early have death rates many hundreds of times lower than the uk (e.g. S Korea where deaths are still under 500 whilst we're at 45,000 or more despite the fact that they got the virus much earlier than us).

Wearing a mask is not difficult, plenty of children all around the world, including in many states in the US (so a culture where mask wearing not the norm) do it all day in school with absolutely no problems whatsoever.

How will the children in this country feel if they are bereaved due to covid and they know that there's a very good chance their parent would have survived if everyone else would have just worn a mask? If the government had mandated masks in schools? The science is pretty clear, sooner or later they'll know this.

How do you ever get over that and not hate the people around you glibly going on about 'it's just the flu' and 'I can't possibly wear a mask'.

Wearing a mask really isn't difficult, it's not painful or hard in any way.

However, a large number of people in the UK are too selfish to wear a thin piece of fabric over their nose or mouth to save someone else's parent or, indeed, the economy.

So, we're fucked basically.

@MaxNormal

It was a perfectly reasonable response and gave some much needed context to the numbers.

For context, here are some more numbers

210, 000 coronavirus deaths in the US so far

out of 7.47 million confirmed cases

(the numbers vary slightly from different sources.)

I make that a case fatality rate of 2.8%.

Even in the context of this, 4,200 children losing a caregiver in 1 city is a surprisingly high number. (and we can expect more such deaths in New York)

There are 1 million dead worldwide (35 million confirmed cases, so a CFR of around 3%)

We can reasonably anticipate millions of deaths worldwide in people infected by coronavirus.

That's the context.

Not much point having a “context battle” as there is always a return for that one! Eg For context, a surprisingly high proportion of people won’t have the slightest suspicion they ever had coronavirus, because they had such mild, or even non-existent, symptoms. That’s one of the reasons, after all, that school teachers find the whole thing so concerning - being surrounded by people who can have the virus without having obvious symptoms and nobody being particularly certain how easily these people pass the virus on. Also for context, hundreds of millions of people in the world suffer from hunger or malnutrition and it is thought that a child dies from hunger or malnutrition every 3 seconds.

So, why not leave it as, yes, we know coronavirus is yet another threat to the world we could do without, and no, we do not want healthcare systems overwhelmed by it, but also, unfortunately, no we almost certainly cannot get rid of it altogether, so some people will die of it (and millions dying of it worldwide is still not, in context, a frightening number given our apparently incredible tolerance for death by starvation. What is really worrying people in the West is deaths closer to home).

Don't confuse CFR with IFR, if you look at the latter, ie the true infection to death ratio, it's way lower than that, around 0.4% I think is current best estimate.

Millions of people die of lots of things worldwide annually.
1 million in car accidents, 1.2 million of HIV, over 5 million children annually mostly due to the impacts of poverty.
So yes, context.

@MaxNormal

Don't confuse CFR with IFR, if you look at the latter, ie the true infection to death ratio, it's way lower than that, around 0.4% I think is current best estimate.

I didn't confuse CFR with IFR thanks.

I was talking about CFR because we have those figures reliably to hand. We don't really know total infection rates. So in that sense, not more accurate.

CFR is not useful at all. I'm sure it was up at 33% in Italy at one point which is clearly nonsense.

@MaxNormal

CFR is not useful at all. I'm sure it was up at 33% in Italy at one point which is clearly nonsense.

CFR however relates to the figures we have - IFR is largely guesswork as to the numbers of untested people with infection in the community.

IFR also varies a great deal (relating for example to the sort of population that has been infected, and factors such as age and access to healthcare).

I think rates that I have seen for the UK have tended to be 0.5-1.0%, but we have had a fall over the summer in mortality, probably because younger people were getting infected, and we may well see a rise as cases increase further.

@Walkaround

So, why not leave it as, yes, we know coronavirus is yet another threat to the world we could do without, and no, we do not want healthcare systems overwhelmed by it, but also, unfortunately, no we almost certainly cannot get rid of it altogether, so some people will die of it (and millions dying of it worldwide is still not, in context, a frightening number given our apparently incredible tolerance for death by starvation. What is really worrying people in the West is deaths closer to home).

Well partly that we can envisage ourselves dying of it yes, but also these are to a significant extent preventable deaths as we understand pandemics and infection in a way that people didn't in the 14th century. We know what the infection agent is, and we are understanding increasing amounts about transmission. We have improved survival because of treatments and if we are lucky we may even have a vaccine quite soon.

We need to get as many people as possible through the winter (this is assuming we don't want the old and clinically vulnerable to get killed prematurely) and also minimize damage to society economically and in terms of job losses. It is a balancing act but I think this is the challenge. if we pretend the pandemic isn't happening and allow a full blown surge in cases I think that will be very bad for society and business.

I think intelligent application of the science is the way forward.

I would love to answer that question.

First, it's not a race to the bottom. We shouldn't be looking for reasons not care. If you're saying 'Well I can't care about everything so why start here?' that's just so far from my own value system that I'm not sure how to answer. If you're saying 'There are bigger injustices to care about, why not let this one go and focus on the starving children' I would encourage you to absolutely focus on the starving children. But be aware that Covid-19 is worse for them than anyone else. So caring deeply about famine is not an excuse to take Covid-19 lightly (or encourage a narrative that does) because it is going to play havoc with vaccination programmes in developing countries and will have so many other knock on effects. Plus mandatory lockdowns prevent people from working-all reasons to do everything we can to prioritise Covid-19 vaccination programmes, treatments, research and aid to developing countries as well as doing all we can to prevent it becoming endemic in our own countries.

What would I like you to do about these issues? Whatever is possible for you. There is always something you can do, even if it just to refrain from being a bigger part of the problem than you need to be.

@herecomesthesun - you see, I completely agree with you, and isn’t your latest way of putting it a better way of getting agreement and behaviour change than trying to frighten people with numbers that are easily picked apart and relate to a different country that has dealt with covid 19 differently from us, anyway? Because it seems to me that scaring people into behaviour change only works when they see a threat as being immediate (ie when it’s really too late and hospitals are close to being overwhelmed again). And tbh, if that did happen again, I think enough people might then feel so despairing and convinced that we will never get over this pandemic that it still won’t really make them change how they behave.

So, realistic optimism is far better to encourage in people than either denial or self-centred, short-term panic (no-one can panic for as long as this pandemic is going to last!).

I'm not trying to frighten anyone.

There seems to be a line of thought that if we just pretend covid isn't a threat it will go away. Some people were very keen to cling to this in the summer and I can see why, because it would be so lovely to wake up and find this was all over. Unfortunately, this didn't fit with what we know of the virus, and our government lost several months when we could have been planning, for a safe return to schools for example.

The figures also point us to the reality we are likely to face in the winter. It is really hard to keep in mind how cases can rise with this sort of situation. So it's important we brace ourselves as a society for a difficult time ahead. I think we need to be clear what is most important to us and prioritise. We need to take risks around keeping work going and educating our children. We might need to socialise only very carefully and sparingly and we might need to diversify in terms of business.

But, again looking back to the fourteenth century, we have survived much worse than this and we will again.

@herecomesthsun - more people I knew over the summer were taking the viewpoint that the threat will never go away so we have to learn to live with it, and they were either not willing to live with it in the way they were being asked, because they didn’t think it would be effective anyway, or were fed up of people who didn’t even want them to live with it in ways they actually were allowed (eg re holidays, etc). So, you could say it was more of a loss of faith than anything else. I don’t think I have spoken to anybody whatsoever in real life who thinks it’s all over, or thinks it isn’t a risk at all. As for those most likely to die from it, which includes my own parents, they have openly said they would far rather die from covid 19 than die isolated from everyone they love because they are old. What am I supposed to say and do about that? Tell them not to be selfish and risk clogging up a hospital bed that a younger vulnerable person might want?!

Most people would consider the death of a 90-year-old to be normally less tragic than that of a much younger person.

However, it is misleading & potentially disablist to quote the total deaths for under 60s or whatever age,
but excluding all those with any existing condition, as if they should just be dismissed

All Covid deaths within your selected age group should be counted.

The NHS statistics for Covid deaths with "existing conditions" includes ALL the conditions they monitor,
not just those that significantly increase risk, or indeed increase risk at all
So it includes e.g. those with autism, LDs, past treatment for MH as well as asthma

The NHS statistics include people with conditions that DO increase risk,
e.g. T1, T2, kidney problems and a multitude of other conditions that are NOT terminal.
but people normally live several decades with some of these conditions; they study, work and bring up families

e.g. NHS figures for total deaths with existing conditions to 30 September include e.g.

1,213 received past treatment for MH
527 LDs and / or autism
1,849 asthma

https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/10/COVID-19-total-announced-deaths-1-October-2020-weekly-file-1.xlsx

That’s why “Don’t Kill Granny” doesn’t work - because it is often the case that granny would rather die of coronavirus than die in loneliness and isolation.

I see parents ignoring social distancing every day when dropping their children off at school. Staff inside the school rapidly forget what 2m distance from someone else actually looks like and need constant reminders. Children mix together in school, at clubs, on playdates, and on each occasion one or more adults forgets to comply fully with their risk assessments. Children don’t socially distance at all. Adults can’t do their jobs whilst physically distancIng from young children. Young children share their saliva and bodily fluids in ways only intoxicated teenagers or adults tend to, and not only on occasions when the adults caring for them are wearing PPE. When it comes to mask wearing: filthy, multiply re-used disposable masks held in grubby hands when not on the face are common. Yet rates are currently much lower in the South than the North, despite no doubt this sort of behaviour being common to both. Nobody really seems to understand exactly what works and what doesn’t, or at what point measures that help at lower levels cease to be effective at wider community circulation. Severely limiting the lives of young people for an indeterminate term is pretty abhorrent, though, especially when adults fail to fully comply with their own risk assessments, themselves, and the young are the ones with the burden of paying the costs of all this in the very long term.