Juno News - April 05, 2020


ESKENASI: How many deaths are we expected to accept?


Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

190.11581

Word count

1,658

Sentence count

3


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Dr. Peter Donnelly talks about the coronavirus outbreak in Ontario and why the focus on the fatalities and fatality rates is misleading, and why there is so much panic about them. Why is there so much emphasis placed on the fatality rate and why is there all this panic?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 there's two questions that we need to keep in mind when we're discussing the coronavirus
00:00:08.980 the first is why is there such a focus on the fatalities and the fatality rate and second
00:00:14.840 why is there all this panic now in order to do that i wanted to pull up some of the numbers so
00:00:19.000 we can sort of just go over what it is that we're actually talking about now i want to pull up the
00:00:23.340 ncov 2019 website that i often pull up and sort of go over again why it is important to look at
00:00:29.640 these numbers what they say and what they don't say so again the website tallies total confirmed
00:00:34.720 cases total deceased serious and total recovered they come to a fatality rate of about six percent
00:00:40.340 the issue is that the six percent is arrived at by simply calculating what percent of a million 82
00:00:47.220 is 58 000 that's six percent the issue is that without knowing the infection rate so how many
00:00:53.380 people are actually being infected then the fatality rate is somewhat useless because it's not actually
00:00:59.620 the true fatality rate since way more than a million people have this disease now there have
00:01:04.340 been a number of countries such as iceland has done some testing and a number of other places where
00:01:07.980 people have had the virus may not even have known that they had the virus because they were asymptomatic
00:01:13.120 which means that they had no symptoms at all they didn't you know they didn't have any shortness of
00:01:16.880 breath they had no issue they maybe had a you know mild cold like something but they they didn't
00:01:21.580 chalk it up to covid19 and so those people are not reporting and as we'll see a little bit later on
00:01:26.620 from ontario there's not really a way to know even by the government's own recommendations what the
00:01:31.580 true infection rate is so that causes a major problem and any then projection of numbers and
00:01:39.080 fatality rates is going to be wildly wildly off balance that brings me to dr peter donnelly's press
00:01:46.040 conference on friday where they discussed the projections of fatalities that ontario might have
00:01:51.400 on april 30th so there's a couple of issues before i get to the numbers though i want to talk about
00:01:56.280 how they're arriving at the projections and so donnelly himself says um it's not true that mortality
00:02:01.540 projections for ontario were delayed he says the projections are not dependent on testing data but
00:02:05.900 are rather based on the global experience of covid19 thus far again if you're not testing people
00:02:11.820 you don't know how many people will have it you don't know the fatality rate you don't not
00:02:16.320 necessarily know the infection rate it's going to be very very hard to draw concrete numbers
00:02:21.260 because your your projections can be wildly different if you simply change one of the
00:02:25.300 factors if you change the infection rate if you change the total confirmed rate if you change the
00:02:29.540 death rate all these numbers are going to make the result totally totally different and so this
00:02:34.540 focus on the numbers is really just questionable now let's go to the numbers actually now ontario
00:02:42.240 has this chart and right away you probably notice a couple of problems the same as i did just by
00:02:47.000 looking at it now i want to start on this side with problem number one that is full future
00:02:52.860 intervention they are projecting that by april 30th we'll have 200 uh 200 fatalities so my question
00:02:59.260 is what does full future intervention mean we're already on a pretty you know pretty high state of
00:03:05.900 of quarantine um you know some people are even in in uh like an enforced quarantine mandatory lockdown
00:03:10.760 so what does that mean what's going to be different are we talking about martial law are we talking
00:03:14.700 about people getting tickets are we talking about something else you know what does it mean for a
00:03:19.740 full intervention compared to what it is that we're doing now because i know to a lot of people
00:03:23.680 it feels pretty damn full so that's the first issue but second is this number here on the left
00:03:30.120 6 000 it says we're gonna experience 6 000 deaths in ontario if we do no intervention but this number
00:03:37.880 is entirely misleading because right now we are on the current intervention strategy which me which
00:03:43.160 they're projecting 1600 deaths this current intervention versus no intervention is not even
00:03:51.040 possible because right now we are already into april we cannot suddenly go back to no intervention
00:03:58.120 because people are going to social be socially distant people are not going to go to the movies
00:04:02.980 they're not going to go to bars restaurants and all these other places so i don't quite understand
00:04:07.400 what no intervention means my only thought on this number is that this number is simply there to scare
00:04:13.260 people who want to go to the park or who want to try and have some semblance of what life used to be
00:04:18.400 like before because they're simply getting sick of it because they've already been home for weeks at a
00:04:22.440 time so this number is a bit disingenuous in my opinion to put up on this chart now i understand that
00:04:29.540 it's obviously true that if we go back to doing whatever we were doing before that more people will die
00:04:34.280 but this brings me to the other question why all the panic we need to look at a couple more numbers
00:04:41.680 before we get there but it's an actual serious question why is there all the panic and overarching
00:04:47.420 how much death are we willing to accept now i i don't mean to be crass people die and that is
00:04:54.680 you know a terrible it's a terrible tragedy whenever anyone dies but the question really is how much death
00:05:00.860 are we willing to accept so let's look at some of the other numbers around the world and see just
00:05:06.600 kind of compare it to the ontario number so here we had south korea which did probably the most testing
00:05:11.840 and the earliest testing of their population so they had as of friday april 3rd they had 10 000 or so
00:05:18.220 confirmed cases and you can see that they are being tested so let's just say that rounded up to about
00:05:22.600 450 000 or so um by the time by the time it's all done 450 000 they're testing about 17 18 000 people
00:05:29.500 per day so their death rate was on this amount was 1.72 so if we take the numbers and we hold them
00:05:38.920 true for ontario which is projected to have uh 1600 deaths by april 30th that would mean that we are
00:05:45.480 going to have 93 000 confirmed cases if our death rate is anywhere close to south korea's um if it's
00:05:52.560 66 again it's it's going to be you know about 30 000 let's just say but that's that's nowhere near
00:05:58.280 what we have right now again if we're looking at the um at the most recent numbers again as of as a
00:06:03.200 friday it is uh 3200 people infected on ontario so that's the issue but again how much death are we
00:06:13.080 actually willing to risk how much death are we willing to suffer if we look at the cdc website these
00:06:18.260 are the 2017 2018 numbers for influenza which is the flu um they are recording that there were an
00:06:25.360 estimated 45 million people sick with influenza 21 million uh influenza associated medical visits
00:06:32.720 so going to a doctor or something like this 80 uh 810 000 influenza related hospitalizations
00:06:38.640 and 61 000 influenza associated deaths so this is just the flu this is sort of your every year
00:06:45.780 standard kind of thing now i know that 2017 was 2017 18 was a bad year but this is the flu this is
00:06:53.000 a thing that goes on every year and yet there isn't this level of panic this is not to mention
00:06:59.200 the secondary deaths that are going to happen or the um people that are going to die because they're
00:07:05.500 not getting the medical care because we shut everything down so people cannot go to the doctor
00:07:09.080 as normal people cannot get the same medical treatment as normal because almost everything is
00:07:13.180 shut down and prioritizing and focusing on on covid 19 if we look at stats can for the uh leading
00:07:19.640 causes of death so number one we have uh malignant neoplasms which is cancer um down here number two
00:07:25.300 uh heart disease uh forgive me this chart is is not in order i don't know why um but we have here
00:07:31.860 influenza again the number six leading cause of death in canada with uh 8 500 people being killed
00:07:36.560 now if we look at the financial side again sort of the the flip side then we have here a report
00:07:43.300 according to bloomberg um 200 2.13 million canadians are out of work since march 16th or 11 percent of
00:07:52.200 the total workforce now this is most definitely going to lead to bankruptcies a chain of bankruptcies
00:07:58.420 a chain of people losing their finances unfortunately likely and sadly a chain of suicides this is not to
00:08:06.060 mention you know possible other collapses you know a domino effect on bankruptcies and financial
00:08:12.640 implications which will then cause people to have much more negative health income uh health outcomes
00:08:17.080 this is also connected to the fact that the government is going to lose millions and millions
00:08:22.520 billions actually billions and billions of revenue dollars which otherwise could be spent on social
00:08:28.440 programming like health care so again how much death are we willing to accept where are we willing to
00:08:35.480 accept the risk it's a very very serious question stay safe wash your hands and we'll see you next time
00:08:41.960 have a great day