Covid-19 seems to hit a population by first of all killing all the people who are pretty ill even without covid-19. Lots of people die from covid-19, but those people would probably have died later that year anyway, so there's not much excess mortality.
Then, like all winter time respiratory illness it kills people who have comorbidities that probably wouldn't have killed them without covid-19. The people with moderate but well controlled asthma or diabetes -- the chronic conditions that we don't think of as life-ending.
Then the ICUs start feeling pretty overwhelmed, and the ages of the people dying gets lower, and they have fewer and less severe comorbidities. Maybe only a small percentage of these people die, but covid-19 infects so many people that this small percentage of a very large number ends up being pretty large.
This is the point healthcare systems start building field hospitals in sports halls or convention centres. It's when they requisition ice rinks to act as temporary morgues. They start locking down movement just to try to reduce this very large number of people getting infected.
ICU doctors and nurses are now overwhelmed, and they're improvising PPE out of binbags. They're reusing PPE using weird new sterilisation techniques. Other HCPs have less access to PPE, because it's all been used up. Where they would have had FPP3 and eye-shields they now have a plastic apron and a loop surgical mask.
And they're faced with something they feel like they should be familiar with (pneumonia is pretty common) but which doesn't act like other types of pneumonia. Here's one example, but there are loads more: https://twitter.com/iamyourgasman/status/1241267189048578048
> When I was in med school you didn't die because of the flu.
The real situation is a bit more complicated than that, isn't it? Plenty of people die from flu, and it's the flu that kills them, and we have medical statisticians who can tell us what the excess mortality is each year.
Then, like all winter time respiratory illness it kills people who have comorbidities that probably wouldn't have killed them without covid-19. The people with moderate but well controlled asthma or diabetes -- the chronic conditions that we don't think of as life-ending.
Then the ICUs start feeling pretty overwhelmed, and the ages of the people dying gets lower, and they have fewer and less severe comorbidities. Maybe only a small percentage of these people die, but covid-19 infects so many people that this small percentage of a very large number ends up being pretty large.
This is the point healthcare systems start building field hospitals in sports halls or convention centres. It's when they requisition ice rinks to act as temporary morgues. They start locking down movement just to try to reduce this very large number of people getting infected.
ICU doctors and nurses are now overwhelmed, and they're improvising PPE out of binbags. They're reusing PPE using weird new sterilisation techniques. Other HCPs have less access to PPE, because it's all been used up. Where they would have had FPP3 and eye-shields they now have a plastic apron and a loop surgical mask.
And they're faced with something they feel like they should be familiar with (pneumonia is pretty common) but which doesn't act like other types of pneumonia. Here's one example, but there are loads more: https://twitter.com/iamyourgasman/status/1241267189048578048
> When I was in med school you didn't die because of the flu.
The real situation is a bit more complicated than that, isn't it? Plenty of people die from flu, and it's the flu that kills them, and we have medical statisticians who can tell us what the excess mortality is each year.