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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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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Wait, they didn't even adjust for the age of the patients hospitalized? You can't be serious. Or else they can't be serious.
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Thanks for taking all this time to read our study! The timing of this story is unfortunate because we have an expanded, updated paper coming out next week with more data (through end august), more patients and more robust conclusions. will link to it as soon as available online.
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Great study and Poisson data viz, Leora! I was wondering the same thing: do changes in mortality reflect improving hospital capacity and resources? Also, the level of acuity of who is admitted likely changed with increased capacity. Looking forward to seeing the updated paper.
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Why are you ignoring the previous week w/ very low adjusted mortality (10%) & older patients (mean age 61), or 18% 3 wks earlier? A simple sample size weighted regression supports their claim of decreasing mortality (P=0.02). I don't think findings can be dismissed so quickly.
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One can question their model for adjustment (details not provided in paper) but can't dismiss data out of hand when it's actually 3 low weeks suggesting lower mortality.
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