This article raises some interesting points. Have death rates from COVID-19 gone done since March?https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/10/20/925441975/studies-point-to-big-drop-in-covid-19-death-rates …
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Looking at the results table, something immediately springs out. The denominator here - the number of patients being admitted by week - has changed DRAMATICALLY over timepic.twitter.com/5yPTtA3VeV
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Perhaps more worryingly, that precipitous drop from 25% death rate to 7.6% cited in the news article appears to be based on...a single week of data. If you move back two weeks, there's no drop in death rates at all!pic.twitter.com/2JFezlEklb
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There also isn't really any trend here - a nonsignificant drop from 23% to 21% over two months, and then a sudden halving of the death rate in just one week, which corresponds to a sudden decrease in the average age
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Moving on, we have the second paper cited in the NPR article, which looks at a very large sample of people who were admitted to ICU in English hospitals for COVID-19https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.30.20165134v2 …
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This study found that if you take the average death rate of these patients from the 'peak', it decreased in a linear fashion each week, and thus COVID-19 is getting less lethalpic.twitter.com/tkUdISvTfr
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But why did they choose the 'peak' week? It wasn't the first week of data collection, and it's a bit arbitrary to only start counting from the worst week in the whole dataset
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Indeed, if we extend the analysis back even just 3 weeks, the relationship disappears almost entirely and suddenly there's been very little difference since March!pic.twitter.com/8tGKmYXi7g
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I would go so far as to say that this study implies that any differences in ICU mortality in England due to COVID-19 are ~almost certainly~ down to admission criteria (which were strained during the peak in early April)
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So, back to the question at the beginning of the thread: are your chances of dying from COVID-19 lower today than they were in March? Honestly, while we'd hope so, I'm not sure we can conclude much either way
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End of conversation
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