I did see that Italy is now putting into action their plan to not treat people over the age of 80 or with a high level of comorbidities (which basically means leaving them die what sounds like an awful death).
The decision re: comorbidities is made off of the linked scale, with a score of 5 or greater being too high. I currently get a score of 2 (1 pt each for T1D and CTD), and autoimmune diseases are not on the list besides diabetes. It’s largely assessing vascular, respiratory, and kidney health, as well as factoring in whether someone has cancer and their age: https://www.mdcalc.com/charlson-comorbidity-index-cci
Wikipedia also breaks the numbers down by département:
There is a lot of discussion of individual cases in there. The French stats; 8% “serious or critical” match those in Italy but not Spain (only 3% serious or critical) or the UK (1%, but a much smaller total number so far).
The figure in the US is 0% “serious or critical”, but the US has about the same number of cases as France. This illustrates the danger in these figures; there are differences in what gets reported (we know some US patients are on ventilators and differences in what counts as “serious or critical”; the US has 12 out of 4000 patients classed “serious or critical”, France has 400 out of 5400.
The numbers also reflect the progression of the disease and, perhaps, how soon patients are assumed to be recovered. China has 33% of active cases “serious or critical”, but 5% of all cases resulted in fatalities.
My question was specific to cases under age 60 and the claim in reports that these represent over 50% of ICU hospitalizations in France. Could you direct me to where in the link you posted that those specific cases are referenced?
We have counted this evening 300 serious cases in intensive care. We have serious cases also amid adults and let me remind you that more than 50% of people in intensive care are under 60," Jerome Salomon said at a news conference on Saturday.
Translation by CNN, I believe. It was widely reported in the US press. The comment was made on March 14. RTL offers this:
Their version of part of the relevant phrase:
Ce sont 12 décès supplémentaires par rapport à la veille, et “plus de 300 cas graves” sont en réanimation, a-t-il poursuivi.
I can’t find the full version in French; there may be a video on a French news site somewhere.
I have been home with my daughter (age 16) for 2 weeks now while she “self-monitors” after arriving back home on 2/29 from a month in Italy. She and I go for daily walks (while wearing imaginary 6 foot hoop skirts to keep our distance from others), but don’t step foot indoors anywhere except our home. All 20 students and 2 chaperones from my daughter’s trip came through the two weeks healthy, thank goodness, but in MA all of our schools are now shut down and many other places of business closed, etc. My husband is working from home. We’re expecting this to be our new normal for awhile.
We are continuing the “isolation” for myself and kids and husband will go to grocery store for targeted runs and that is it. We are in Boston and in the center of the Biogen outbreak (parents from each of my girls’ schools are ill as well as possibly a spouse of a colleague at my husband’s (very small) company). It’s really scary and we’re determined to do everything we can to not contract it.
Thanks for all of this good discussion from such a smart (and funny!) group of good people. xo - Jessica
This info is so confusing to me; just last week it was recommended to TAKE ibuprofen and Naproxen as if they were some kind of antidote for our immune systems.
A timely quote from one of the thousands of articles out there right now:
"Harlan Krumholz, a professor of cardiology and outcomes research at Yale Medical School, cautioned that comparing countries is a tricky endeavor. “We don’t know numerators or denominators. The information is not comparable,” he said.
He said that the best information was probably from South Korea, because it tested so many people. “Everywhere else is biased,” he said, depending on who is doing the testing, who is considered severe enough to be hospitalized and how you determine whether a death is related to the virus or not.
He worries that insufficient data is hampering doctors, scientists and public officials, making it more difficult to have a real-time understanding of the extent of the disease and the most effective ways to respond.
“We should be able to do this,” he said. “This is revealing our great ignorance in the midst of an information age.”
