Ah, this is the perfect summary to explain to people when they ask "why are you still wearing a mask? COVID is over" or similar queries invalidating my caution around this virus.
Worth noting is it was the 4th-leading cause of death in 2020 and 2021.
Not sure why this is being downvoted into oblivion, as I regularly get some hassle from people about my strict adherence to wearing a mask indoors around people, and the more I can say beyond "I don't feel like getting COVID", the better. Otherwise I have to go into a story about how, directly via COVID infection, a friend's mom died, a coworker's wife is left wheelchair-bound and can't even complete a phone conversation without being left breathless, one of my favorite musicians has called it quits after a complete loss of hearing in one ear.. etc... As a programmer I highly value my clarity of thought and am not going to risk that because people apparently feel the need to bother me about being cautious. Honestly cannot figure out why anyone feels the need to even comment on it, as it has no effect on them, and in fact helps keep them safer.
This is just something to think about. After I was called back in to the office and started seeing people more often I came down with what I would have sworn was covid three times. Absolutely the worst flu-like symptoms I'd ever had that I could recall, each affecting me in a novel way, but negative on covid each time.
They could have been false negatives, of course, but I suspect I just hadn't been training my immune system for many months and it wasn't prepared to handle the normal cold or flu viruses I would normally be able to handle otherwise. Since that period of time, I haven't come down sick since.
Not saying that covid is nothing to worry about, but it's something you might want to consider down the road. I don't know your situation or what health concerns you might have, but being too protective can have it's downsides as well.
There is no scientific evidence for being able to "train your immune system". There is plenty of evidence the opposite happens. Covid especially can cause permanent immune damage.
We have an innate immune responses and adaptive immune responses. Innate immune responses look for common attributes of certain pathogens and then trigger an adaptive immune response if needed. Adaptive immune responses are highly specific to certain pathogens and can provide long lasting immunity to some of those pathogens, such as measles. How would vaccines work if we only had innate immunity?
So being exposed to certain pathogens can trigger a lasting effect, the length of which depends on the pathogen. If that effect has gone away or lessened severely over many months then it makes sense that only the innate immune response would be available against those pathogens, and the adaptive response would need to be learned again.
There's actually pretty good evidence that being overly clean and sterile is bad for an immune system. Yes, getting exposed to highly dangerous diseases like Ebola, polio, measles, small pox, etc. is bad, covid with a vaccine doesn't really rise to that level.
People shouldn't bother you about wearing a mask, or bother storekeepers who request patrons mask, but a reason to push back on state-mandated masking isn't that COVID isn't serious (it clearly is), but rather that the empirical evidence for masking, especially vs. the new strains, is quite weak
>the empirical evidence for masking, especially vs. the new strains, is quite weak
If you're wearing an N95 or KN95 the filtration efficacy is quite high. Most of the mask studies looked at whether mask policies lowered covid.
If you wear a mask in class but then take it off in the cafeteria or outside of school, the mask no longer has an effect.
If, however, you wear a mask with high filtration efficacy while outside of the house, that's a different story. To my knowledge we have no challenge trial of people wearing such a mask when exposed to an infectious agent.
It is folly to ignore the physical mechanism of such masks when reasoning about them, and defaulting to only considering the studies we have, which simply cannot measure efficacy when the mask is worn.
N95 vs. KN95 seems like an instructive example: people equate the two based on the effectiveness of the filtering media, but the salient difference is in the attachment mechanism --- most KN95s are ear-loops, and don't achieve especially tight coverings (similarly: the reuse concerns about N95s are less that the filter media can't be "recharged" or whatever, but rather that the elastic gives out).
At any rate: masks as worn in the real world seem pretty performative, for a variety of reasons.
If you're wearing them carefully, that's great, and I appreciate it. Nobody should be messing with you regardless.
You can look epidemiologically at this stuff and see that states with laxer regulations fared pretty well in the early COVID years, and appear to have fallen off only with the introduction of vaccines, which really seem like the high-order bit of COVID control.
Completely agree that an ear loop is less effective than a headstrap. The question is: by how much?
This beard length mask study is a good source of data. They actually measured fitted filtration efficacy at different beard lengths, including zero beard.
N95 was near 100%. KN95 was between 80-90% (surprisingly, higher with a small bit of beard, around 0.5-1mm).
Now, you could certainly argue that 80-90% filtration is performative, but on what evidence?
We know from hepa filtration studies that lowering the concentration of virus in the air lowers infection amongst those in a room. So from physical mechanisms we would expect that reducing inhaled virus by 80-90% should likewise reduce risk of infection.
I don't know! But in mandatory masking regimes, ordinary people do a clownish job of masking (and some of the masking rules are themselves clownish, as with the "mask until you get to the dining table, and then unmask as soon as the water arrived", which was very much the regime in Chicago when dining opened back up in 2021).
The bigger point would just be to look at the epidemiology. I get that questioning masking pattern matches to COVID nihilism. I'm not a COVID nihilist. It was a big deal for me and I take it seriously. But the data I see suggests that the most significant bit in controlling it is ensuring people are vaccinated, and that most of the rest of the controls don't seem to do much.
One problem with "look at the epidemiology" as an approach is that the virus is such a moving target. I'm citing these figures from memory, so apologies if I mangle them, but with OG covid you could mask up properly and spend an hour in an enclosed space with viral particles in the air and have a low risk of infection, while with omicron you had maybe five minutes masked the same way before you'd catch an infectious dose.
More generally, the trouble with evaluating masking is all the confounders. I spent the early pandemic in Japan, where ubiquitous masking was a highly effective barrier to spread. One reason it may have worked as well as it did is that people talked less with the masks on. But there were already strong social norms against talking in confined public places, and the public health authority stressed airborne spread. How much did that contribute?
I feel like the mask issue is irretrievably lost at this point in the US, but it's important to stress that in places like Japan and Taiwan it worked quite well, at least until omicron got so infective that even stringent adherence was no longer adequate. But there's no way to untangle it from the changes in social behavior that accompanied it, some of them a physical result of the masks (less talking), some due to social signaling aspects of mask wearing, and many unrelated.
I don't know what's "performative" about it. The respirator has a clear mechanism of action. They filter out almost all airborne viruses and are even better at filtering bacteria (which are larger). They also have the side benefit of making the wearer not want to eat airline "food" which I've noticed leaves me feeling better when I arrive. They are designed to be worn effectively even by illiterate manual laborers, so it's not as if you need to be a PhD to get one on your face.
What I like about wearing a mask on a plane is that I rebreathe some exhaled moisture.
Though I did a flight in mid 2020 and I'd inhale, move mask, take bite/sip, exhale while putting mask back, and then breathe normally through mask. Was probably a bit unnecessary when the flights were basically empty, but reduced-risk eating/drinking is possible.
I noticed something similar: no nosebleeds. I have only taken a few flights in the last several years though and I can't rule out that maybe the 737 MAX has a more humid interior atmosphere or something like that. But before I started wearing masks on airplanes I used to shoot saline spray up my nostrils every hour to keep the nosebleeds away.
Yes they are effective, but don’t forget that they’re not perfect - your eyes and ears remain as access ports for the virus even when wearing a mask. Probably eyes is the biggest after respiratory because glasses have been shown to decrease infections if I recall correctly.
Just that the sequence of events is "I'm told masks prevent COVID" => "I was wearing a mask and got COVID" => "masks don't stop COVID" (or it happens to a friend or a friend of a friend etc). You have to explain that masks help prevent it but aren't perfect because your eyes & ears remain open (my hunch is that it's likely the eyes as the next major transmission vector so glasses or full goggles would be almost fully effective).
Well, first off I'm going to say "citation needed", but secondly, I haven't had a single transmissible illness since I started wearing KN95 whenever I'm around people indoors. This includes going to crowded markets, trans-continental flights, a recent concert... Of course, wearing some flimsy loose thing that barely even covers your face (like those "surgical" masks that are typically handed out) is certainly going to be of limited usefulness. A decently-fitting N95/KN95 , well.. it works.
> I haven't had a single transmissible illness since I started wearing KN95 whenever I'm around people indoors
You mean you haven't gotten ill since you started being hyperparanoid about getting ill? Sure, that's not really surprising. Tying the result specifically to the masking itself is still speculative though, as would be generalizing your specific case to the whole population, eg. as you say, "decently fitting N95" is probably key, but how many are going to be that vigilant?
This really gives off to me the same vibes as when doctors were up in arms that washing hands before surgery couldn’t possibly have an effect on the outcome.
We know that such viruses have to enter your body through eyes, ears, nose or throat or there’s no way to get an infection. Why do you think it’s so surprising that blocking access to your respiratory system by a filter that is small enough to exclude the virus (whether cold, flu or COVID) prevents you from getting sick?
Furthermore, if I recall correctly there’s studies showing efficacy of having even a basic cloth covering helps because the thickness of the material means that even if the virus is small enough to get through, the probability of crossing all the layers through the cloth is harder. Picking up illness from contact with a surface -> touching your face is a much more difficult infection vector than the direct access port available through the communication ports on your head.
> We know that such viruses have to enter your body through eyes, ears, nose or throat or there’s no way to get an infection. Why do you think it’s so surprising that blocking access to your respiratory system by a filter that is small enough to exclude the virus (whether cold, flu or COVID) prevents you from getting sick?
I never said it would be surprising, I did however say that taking that seemingly plausible argument and immediately concluding that masks would meaningfully reduce infections in a whole population is premature. As you just said, viruses enter the body through multiple mucous membranes, so if everyone who wears masks doesn't wear them properly, or still touches their eyes and doesn't sanitize their hands properly before eating, the effect of masks could still be minimal.
> Furthermore, if I recall correctly there’s studies showing efficacy of having even a basic cloth covering helps because the thickness of the material means that even if the virus is small enough to get through, the probability of crossing all the layers through the cloth is harder
It's important to keep in mind that 50% of studies in medicine fail to replicate. Don't put too much stock in "I saw a study".
> Picking up illness from contact with a surface -> touching your face is a much more difficult infection vector than the direct access port available through the communication ports on your head.
Is it? Do you have empirical data to support this claim? I'm sure it seems plausible to you, just like it seemed plausible to those old doctors you mentioned that a gentleman's hands were always clean, but I think the real lesson is that we should rely on empirical data and not only on seemingly plausible arguments from seemingly plausible assumptions.
Which isn't to say that advising people to wear masks is necessarily a bad idea either, but there's a world of difference between "this seems like a good idea if you're cautious or want to reduce your changes of getting sick" and "you're a terrible person if you don't do this because this is proven to work".
> Is it? Do you have empirical data to support this claim?
Yes. There’s all sorts of papers to this effect. The primary transmission vector by far is nose and mouth and masks are very well established to substantially reduce infection rates. Glasses also reduce rates but not as much. The claim that studies are frequently not replicated is a good general rule of thumb. It just don’t apply to COVID where there have been many many studies on the efficacy of masks. Not to mention many studies prior to COVID on influenza, SARS and other respiratory/airborne viruses. Sure, studies can always be better and all studies have flaws, but there’s overwhelming evidence afaik that masks are highly effective. I’ll let you do your own arxiv/pubmed research to find the studies because they’re quite easy to locate.
It’s a fair argument about whether masks at population scale / mark mandates are effective because people do fail to wear them properly and frequently. So it’s hard to estimate the true efficacy of masks in the wild, but it’s definitely well above 0 where we have fairly good A/B examples between populations that did adhere to masking and those that didn’t and corresponding COVID infection and hospitalization rates. This stuff really shouldn’t be so controversial.
> so if everyone who wears masks doesn't wear them properly, or still touches their eyes and doesn't sanitize their hands properly before eating, the effect of masks could still be minimal.
That’s not an accurate representation of the research afaik. The infection rates for contact based COVID in particular is vanishingly small. Like maybe the virus can survive on surfaces for a bit but there’s no evidence that it’s at all a meaningful infection vector. Same goes for hand sanitization. I could be wrong but my understanding is that the dominant vector by far for COVID is aerosol transmission. My uneducated hunch is that that this is also likely generally true for most other viruses like the common cold and flu - contact transmission maybe happens but nowhere near at the same rate as for direct inhalation.
> but there's a world of difference between "this seems like a good idea if you're cautious or want to reduce your changes of getting sick" and "you're a terrible person if you don't do this because this is proven to work".
I think you have displayed why you’re so resistant to the suggestion that masks are highly effective and it’s nothing to do with the science. It’s that you feel that people recommending masking have placed a value judgement on people who don’t and I totally get that. But notice I did nothing of the kind. All I’m saying is that the efficacy of masking is very well established. The value judgement piece has nothing to do with science and as anyone who tried to be super strict about it hopefully learned during the pandemic is that strict adherence is very difficult. But similarly the lasseiz faire “but mah rights” crowd swung too much in the other direction and didn’t even try. And yes, it’s also been established that communities that didn’t mask as effectively had more COVID infections and deaths because of hospital overwhelms. It’s also interesting that the anti-mask and anti vaccine crowds seem to have a lot of overlap. It’s an identity thing and science can’t resolve identity issues. Same reason fundamentalists go for the god of the gaps theory - it’s hard to admit a mistake and easier to believe that support for your position remains in the gaps that existing science research inevitably has.
If it turns out in the future that masking is ineffective and there was some massive flaw in all the studies attempting replication, I’ll gladly I admit I was wrong. But I’m the absence of any information, it’s stronger to assume that masks are effective because we know it’s a respiratory and airborne illness and it stands to reason that masks would inhibit the mechanism of action. That we do have studies around this and the majority support that properly worn masks are effective is bonus gravy. But again. Identity issues are not solvable through scientific research or we wouldn’t have flat earthers and people who believe the Bible instead of evolution.
> The primary transmission vector by far is nose and mouth and masks are very well established to substantially reduce infection rates.
Which doesn't at all explain all of the studies that found little to no effect to pervasive masking. If the effect is as strong as you're suggesting, then even partial masking would show an effect, even at population levels. This issue is simply not as settled as you're portraying.
> It’s that you feel that people recommending masking have placed a value judgement on people who don’t and I totally get that. But notice I did nothing of the kind.
This thread started on this premise, and I replied along those lines, and then you replied to me. I've made no assumptions about you other than you're clearly pro-mask and convinced by the evidence, and the only position I've staked is that the evidence is plausible but not as clear as you and others have been portraying.
> Which doesn't at all explain all of the studies that found little to no effect to pervasive masking
Not sure what you're referring to here. Statistically, there will always exist studies that show the null result. That doesn't mean that there's no evidence of effect. There's been lots of repro.
Here's a link you can use to start exploring this topic with links to studies:
I'm sure you can find other studies. But ultimately clearly no amount of information here will change your conclusion that there's no evidence that masks are effective so I don't know what more to say here. Good luck.
There is a lot of empirical evidence supporting the effectiveness of masks against COVID-19, and I would not call it weak. In my own quest for actual research instead of single data points ("I never mask and have never gotten COVID"), I found that out of 27 peer-reviewed studies, 22 of them show masks are effective: https://github.com/mbevand/masking-effectiveness
Public health authorities didn't exactly cover themselves in glory from 2020-2022. Scientists did! But there's a world of difference between a public health practitioner and a microbiologist or physical chemist or chemical engineer.
Are you suggesting that microbiologists, physical chemists, and chemical engineers now claim that properly fitted N95 masks are ineffective in reducing the transmission of current strains of COVID?
The air on a plane circulates and causes illness to many people, like people who have had plastic surgery are advised not to travel too soon for fear of infection.
The basic advice is to unmask when it is okay to use your laptop. The plane is cruising and cabin air is completely exchanged with outside air every 2 minutes. The biggest risk, according to the article, is when the plane is on the ground.
I'm not seeing the purpose of your comment. You make an unsupported assertion ("Masks don't prevent Covid") and then invalidate my lived experience with some arbitrary speculation. "Probably had COVID"? Okay? I don't believe I have. Not sure what you're expecting to get out of this, should I just stop wearing masks because HN rando harassed me about it like I already experience in-person for the past X years?
They don't prevent covid. Everyone gets covid. Just like everyone gets the common cold, with or without a mask. Even if they worked for a time, it wouldn't be ideal to wear them permanently, as your quality of life would be permanently degraded and your natural immunity deficit would continue to grow to the point that ordinary diseases would seriously harm you.
They significantly reduce the risk. It does not become zero but if masking means I get COVID once every three years rather than twice a year I'll happily take it.
> The proportion of COVID-19 deaths among older Canadians aged 65 years and older rose to 91.4% in 2022, approaching early pandemic levels. This increase was largely felt by seniors aged 80 years and older, who experienced a 78.2% increase in COVID-19 deaths from 2021 to 2022. In contrast, deaths due to COVID-19 decreased to 8.6% for those younger than 65 years in 2022.
So this is hitting 80+ people the hardest, then 65+... but under 65 has gone down.
In my country if somebody died with COVID, then COVID was found as the reason of death. Hospitals had additional bonuses for writing COVID into reason of death. Therefore I read such statistics with a grain of salt.
Regardless of one's opinions on if MAID is a good idea, it seems unfair to regard it as a "cause of death". Wouldn't that be more correctly attributable to the underlying condition?
But that's not helpful for driving any kind of informed opinion or public health policy.
It'd be like classifying nearly all deaths as caused by "cardiac arrest" even though that's the natural end state of most other causes of death.
I might accept your argument in the small fraction of cases where natural death is not "reasonably foreseeable" (since that requirement was dropped in 2019).
The medical certificate usually has an immediate cause and a spot to write underlying causes. It goes to the local government and is used for things like life insurance, lawsuits, etc.
If there’s a concern at the policy level, usually you’d have a separate monitoring system.
Driving policy with population stats is not really the gold standard, in spite of what was communicated to the public during the pandemic. Usually you’d want to run some kind of controlled experiment or very rigorous observational study. That’s where the bulk of the success stories in medicine have come from historically.
There are situations where that statistic/categorization is meaningful, but not in this context of trying to rank different causative diseases and public health risks.
For example, imagine that 99% of all the euthanized are people who chose it after a diagnosis of the "Insane Agony Virus."
Obviously we would want all those mortal data-points to get counted as reasons to fight IAV, even if only a tiny number of people died because the virus finally turned their brain to mush after weeks of thrashing about on a table in mind-breaking pain.
Because secondary effects are impossible to untangle or verify.
Maybe IAV is just a made up term that people use, or far more people believe that they have IAV than is actually the case, or that they are wrongly convinced that IAV is incurable or untreatable, or the medical system has been perversely incentivized to encourage medically assisted suicide in the case of IAV diagnosis, or it's actually the case that it's not IAV causing the agony but actually a prescription drug side effect that interacts with the brain in such a way as to invoke IAV in certain cases, etc etc. None of that is science, of course.
Separately, there should be a list of rationalizations for victims that undergo medically assisted suicide. And it should be analyzed to find ways to reduce the number of suicides.
I read that as "What-If Something Completely Different Instead", rather than engaging with the point being highlighted by the hypothetical.
The correct breakdown depends on goals. If someone is stabbed with a knife, the important cause(s) of death won't be "because a lot of cells couldn't synthesize ATP anymore", and probably not " saying the wrong thing to Stabby McStabberson."
Midazolam, Propofol and Rocuronium or Cisatracurium overdose at 13,241 is an acceptable cause of death. You'd best consider COVID-19 to be asphyxiation, low blood oxygen or natural causes.
You can say the same thing in regards to how the CDC lumps suicide into "gun violence" deaths but don't blame sleeping pills, ropes, driving cars off bridges, or whatever OTC drug one can buy to reach the same conclusion. Weaponizing data is a government statisticians job.
Admittedly I'm just guessing here, but I strongly suspect that suicide by OTC drugs are indeed counted as drug overdoses by government statisticians, which seems like it would be the correct analogy?
> Drug overdose deaths are identified using underlying cause-of-death codes from the Tenth Revision of ICD (ICD–10): X40–X44 (unintentional), X60–X64 (suicide), X85 (homicide), and Y10–Y14 (undetermined). Drug overdose deaths involving selected drug categories are identified by specific multiple cause-of-death codes. Drug categories presented include: heroin (T40.1); natural opioid analgesics, including morphine and codeine, and semisynthetic opioids, including drugs such as oxycodone, hydrocodone, hydromorphone, and oxymorphone (T40.2); methadone, a synthetic opioid (T40.3); synthetic opioid analgesics other than methadone, including drugs such as fentanyl and tramadol (T40.4); cocaine (T40.5); and psychostimulants with abuse potential, which includes methamphetamine (T43.6). Opioid overdose deaths are identified by the presence of any of the following multiple cause-of-death codes: opium (T40.0); heroin (T40.1); natural opioid analgesics (T40.2); methadone (T40.3); synthetic opioid analgesics other than methadone (T40.4); or other and unspecified narcotics (T40.6). This latter category includes drug overdose deaths where ‘opioid’ is reported without more specific information to assign a more specific ICD–10 code (T40.0–T40.4) (4,5). Among deaths with an underlying cause of drug overdose, the percentage with at least one drug or drug class specified is defined as that with at least one ICD–10 multiple cause-of-death code in the range T36–T50.8. Two additional categories were added based on CDC’s Opioid Overdose Indicator Support Toolkit (6): drug overdose deaths involving natural, semi-synthetic, or synthetic opioids, including methadone (T40.2–T40.4); drug overdose deaths involving natural and semi-synthetic opioids, and methadone (T40.2–T40.3). These new categories, which are a combination of existing categories, are not displayed on the default figure to facilitate ease of display of the main drug categories, but are accessible through the drop-down box that allows for selection of specific drug categories.
Who dies of influenza? Very old people. Same for covid. Perhaps what we're seeing in these statistics is that the grim reaper may have changed, but he's still gonna get you at end of life.
Meanwhile, the official tally of Chinese deaths sits at ~122,000 total [0]. I wonder when, if ever, we will know the true number, especially after the "zero Covid" policy ended.
Hospital admissions are up to 3x the August-September low. Deaths are way down, though. The vaccines really do work against deaths, and the newer variants are less lethal.
Understanding of long COVID at the cellular level is just beginning, but there is progress.[2]
I never tested positive for COVID in the entire 3.5 years of this crap ... until last month. I have had 4 rounds of the vaccine and didn't ever get it in prior winters even when it was in my house (daughter had it before) -- but didn't get my booster in time this fall to do anything about the rather insane wave making its way through the population right now (thanks Doug Ford, you incompetent buffoon). And so I got it, and so did everyone else in our house
And it was rather brutal-awful. Enough so that I felt the need to get on anti-virals. 3 weeks later and I'd say I'm only really recovered right now.
Point being, it seems the vaccinations unfortunately need repeated application, and what's making the rounds right now is nothing to scoff at. For some people, it's mild. For others, pretty awful.
I wasn't vaccinated (waiting on novax) and the first time I got omicron and it was awful. But I was recovered in a week. By the time novavax was released I had natural immunity. Got it next year too and it was gone in 2 days, I only knew I had it since I lost my smell.
People that got infected once got it really bad the first time and subsequently recovered quickly. Hope that's the case with you too.
A month late getting booster shots into pharmacies and blatantly corrupt games played with sole sourcing the contract to a single pharmacy chain, which itself caused a pile of doses to expire and be thrown out.
> The vaccines really do work against deaths, and the newer variants are less lethal.
Non sequitur with no evidence. New variants being less lethal is the only consideration. Sweden famously had no lockdown, and the total death rate (feb2020-nov2023) is 25,590 despite no vaccines and no lockdown when it was most lethal.
In my country if somebody died with COVID, then COVID was found as the reason of death. Hospitals had additional bonuses for writing COVID into reason of death. Therefore I read such statistics with a grain of salt.
Not at all. As someone who has family in hospitals I can say that this happened. At least in my locality.
Can you claim the same using your experience?
That is why I can say these things with total certainty. Conspiracy theory is a derogatory term to dismiss any critical voices.
In essence saying that something is "conspiracy theory" is meaningless, and it itself does not say anything. It does not provide evidence, nor logical thinking. It is represents non-cricital thinking towards things.
Is the ~30th cause of death in Canada. In US it's the ~3rd. Why the order of magnitude difference? Is US healthcare 10x more incompetent or are these stats massaged?
> Analyzing medical death rate data over an eight-year period, Johns Hopkins patient safety experts have calculated that more than 250,000 deaths per year are due to medical error in the U.S. Their figure, published May 3 in The BMJ, surpasses the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) third leading cause of death — respiratory disease, which kills close to 150,000 people per year.
> The Johns Hopkins team says the CDC’s way of collecting national health statistics fails to classify medical errors separately on the death certificate. The researchers are advocating for updated criteria for classifying deaths on death certificates.
It's possible that more low-probability-of-success heroics are attempted in the US (especially on the elderly). It would line up with the system level incentives differences between the two places and it would produce the difference you mention.
I wouldn't be surprised if many people in the US just don't go back to the hospital when they get infections etc from surgery because of the medical bills.
I think something like this is most likely. It's rare in Canada for legal action to be taken (or to succeed) for these kinds of things.
Though I wouldn't rule out accessibility of care as being in Canada's favour, even with our rather awful doctor and nurse shortages right now. It would be interesting to see these stats broken down by region.
Healthcare everywhere is rationed. But in Canada it is mostly rationed on a medical priority instead of ability-to-pay priority.
It's extremely well known that this is a common objection to such claims. You'd think that if the data truly was died FROM covid, they would bend over backwards to make that really clear, in order to shut up "deniers". The fact that they don't mention or clarify the issue in anyway is pretty telling. I tried looking through the related sources and found nothing useful to clarify.
Your theory is trivially debunkable by the numbers in the table.
The individual casues of death on in 2022 sum up to 334,121. The total number of deaths for the year is indicated as 334,081. If they're double/triple-counting ailments, they wouldn't match up. (I preusme the mismatch of ~40 is a typo or something in one of the rows.)
Is it? The official Canadian definition calls for a “clinically compatible disease”, and “discretion may be used”. COVID also only needs to be a “contributing factor”.
You're very, very selectively quoting. Here's the full bit:
> A probable or confirmed COVID-19 case whose death resulted from a clinically compatible illness, unless there is a clear alternative cause of death identified (e.g., trauma, poisoning, drug overdose).
> A Medical Officer of Health, relevant public health authority, or coroner may use their discretion when determining if a death was due to COVID-19, and their judgement will supersede the above-mentioned criteria.
> A death due to COVID-19 may be attributed when COVID-19 is the cause of death or is a contributing factor.
Basically, if you test positive for COVID and die of pneumonia or sepsis, they're comfortable calling it a COVID death... but "discretion may be used" by the coroner to override that assumption in either direction. That's sensible; they have more specific info than a general guideline.
As the third paragraph also indicates, "due to COVID" is different from "cause of death".
The full quote is worse! You did read the definition in my original link of a “probable case”, right? You can be a “probable case” if you have similar symptoms and were near a known case.
>”due to COVID” is different from “cause of death”
Yes, in this wording “a death due to COVID may be attributed…” is the bit that goes on the death certificate. Reading the full sentence, it clarifies COVID has only to contribute to a death for it that to be recorded as COVID death.
Reading these official definitions, if you die with a raised temperature and a cough, and were near other COVID cases, that’s all that is needed to be a COVID death.
There are plenty more articles about it. This isn’t a Covid denier conspiracy theory or antivax narrative, it was widely reported on throughout 2022 that people were operating under very different definitions of what counts and that some provinces/networks/hospitals/physicians were erring on the side of caution and calling everything short of suicide a Covid death. Quite a few revised their numbers once the media covered it, which is good, but whether that was only reflected on dashboards or was revised downstream I’m not entirely sure.
UK not Canada, but it was literally the official metric used during the pandemic - “death within 28 days of a COVID test”. Does what it says - no more, no less.
I have a bunch of citations below refuting his claim, but it's currently almost dead due to downvotes. Bummer some people would rather keep spreading falsehoods.
Canadian hospitals and provinces explicitly made statements Late 2022/Early 2023 saying they were revising their definitions of a Covid death and going to recalculate previously published figures after stories blew up of the exact type of cases I mentioned. People were getting death certificates for loved ones with Covid listed as the cause of death when it was simply and provably not true, even if they did test positive.
Here in New Zealand someone died of a gunshot wound, and it was recorded as a Covid death because they were Covid position. It's easy to forget the immense hysteria of 2020.
I'd be shocked if this was anywhere near reality. Covid hasn't been an issue any of the hospitals that I work at to the point that many doctors and nurses don't even bother with N95 masks when seeing covid patients.
It's more likely this is people dying with covid and not from covid. If someone covid positive has a stroke or heart attack which column is that being written in?
I have had to write my share of death certificates, and most docs will write the easiest thing that gets the corner off their back. These statistics may be broadly true
medicine is unlike technology in that it has a much much higher level of human error in data points (intentional or not).
> Covid hasn't been an issue any of the hospitals that I work at to the point that many doctors and nurses don't even bother with N95 masks when seeing covid patients.
Damn, where are you at? Got ~75 hospital and care home units in active COVID-19 outbreak right now in Toronto. And outbreak doesn't include people that arrived with it, just spread within the unit.
Wastewater numbers clearly show extremely high # of cases.
And anecdotally - I just got it 3 weeks ago, along with my whole household (Hamilton area), after avoiding it for the entire time prior to this. My elderly parents got it a couple weeks before that. Coworkers of mine got it. It's all over the place right now.
Just got back from the family dr's office today. The doctors were all in masks. The nurses weren't bothering.
For a variety of reasons - higher uptake of vaccinations (~85% vs ~70%), universal health care coverage, stronger worker protections, better compliance with stronger public health rules and restrictions, lower obesity rates (~30% of adults vs ~40%) - one might suspect that they shouldn't match US numbers.
Broadly, I guess I just feel non-specifically like a bunch of articles about COVID in the US in 2020 aren't especially germane when discussing COVID in Canada in 2022, when so much about the situation is so radically different.
* Identical anti-vax culture and rural-vs-urban divide
* worker protections aren't that much stronger, and the impact on a mega-contagious disease is dubious
* health care coverage isn't universal but is based on the province, and only applies to things inside of a hospital + some other stuff like midwives
* and obesity rates on the old / elderly may be very similar -- since those are the ones who are dying; I'm from the US but in Canada and I see plenty of fat older people but fewer fatass kids.
* also leaving out things like Canada's insanely high COL and associated challenges like heating costs, serious issues with transport and accessability -- if you're in a big city you have good healthcare, but if not then good luck, and a population skewed to the Boomers just like the US who are, again, the ones who are mostly dying from the disease -- it's the older folks.
Worth noting is it was the 4th-leading cause of death in 2020 and 2021.
Not sure why this is being downvoted into oblivion, as I regularly get some hassle from people about my strict adherence to wearing a mask indoors around people, and the more I can say beyond "I don't feel like getting COVID", the better. Otherwise I have to go into a story about how, directly via COVID infection, a friend's mom died, a coworker's wife is left wheelchair-bound and can't even complete a phone conversation without being left breathless, one of my favorite musicians has called it quits after a complete loss of hearing in one ear.. etc... As a programmer I highly value my clarity of thought and am not going to risk that because people apparently feel the need to bother me about being cautious. Honestly cannot figure out why anyone feels the need to even comment on it, as it has no effect on them, and in fact helps keep them safer.