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


Transcript

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