The study that's linked to to verify the statement above is this one, and it's an interesting piece of research looking at some hospitals in NYC and the people they admitted for COVID-19 over time https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.11.20172775v1.full.pdf …
-
Show this thread
-
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
2 replies 4 retweets 48 likesShow this thread -
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
2 replies 14 retweets 97 likesShow this thread -
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
4 replies 2 retweets 52 likesShow this thread -
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 …
1 reply 2 retweets 27 likesShow this thread -
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
1 reply 1 retweet 25 likesShow this thread -
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
1 reply 1 retweet 36 likesShow this thread -
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
2 replies 5 retweets 66 likesShow this thread -
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)
6 replies 7 retweets 74 likesShow this thread -
Replying to @GidMK
Begging your pardon but there is evidence to contradict your supposition from the ICNARC dataset. No changes in demographics over time that would imply change in admission criteria. Markers of how sick patients are (APACHE score, PF ratio) not greatly different
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
I published these tweets before the ICNARC data came out
I do think that analysis suffers from similar weaknesses tho, it's really hard to disentangle the differences in the patient population from the death rate
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.