re: Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) ***W.H.O. DECLARES A GLOBAL PANDEMIC***

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By your estimation how much are the flu deaths inflated?

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This question is hard to answer because it isn't specific enough. Better questions would be "What percentage of deaths attributed to the flu, with positive flu tests, would've occurred had the flu not been present?" and "What percentage of deaths attributed to the flu had no positive test for the virus?"

The answer to #1 is pretty low, the answer to #2, I agree, is much higher than people realize. However, the denominator (total flu cases) is equally as inflated so the mortality rate kind of still makes sense.

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Do you agree with my assessment of the flu numbers?

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I don't see any problem with them, no. It should be noted though that "flu tests" are FAR from perfect and doctors often still diagnose flu with negative tests, sometimes correctly and sometimes incorrectly.

It's a shite system.

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healthcare analytics

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Tableau, Powerbi? R or Python?

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He doesn’t need to contradict his statements to congress in order to do that.

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Nah nah nah. You don't get to use skewed statistics to endorse your narrative then dismiss it for others. Either the data is sound and supports the findings or it's flawed and needs to be cleaned or omitted.

SQL/Teradata > Tableau/Power BI/Powerpoint. Lots of Excel squeezed in there from legacy work mostly.

Part of my job is to consume large (hundreds of millions of rows) amounts of data and synthesize it into small, concise dashboards and presentations for our executives.

Like predicting the financial impact of CMS policy changes regarding joint replacement reimbursement and where those procedures can take place. That's just one example.

I've done a couple of projects to help predict the revenue from flu in our markets so we could adjust budgets as well. We use demographic data, population health data, hospital data, etc. to create some models which are pretty solid (conservative estimates always).

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Do you have a source for the several thousand dollar claim? I haven't seen that anywhere. Not saying you're wrong, I just haven't seen it.

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Not necessarily just the test, but going to the hospital if you feel like you might've been exposed often will lead to multiple tests, possibly an overnight stay, etc. Miami Herald wrote a story of one man who was on the hook for about $1500, I think. NYT had one on a man who and his daughter who were quarantined after returning from Wuhan. They were hit with $4,000 of bills, and they didn't have a choice but be quarantined. Probably a great trade to get out of China, but people who read these things aren't going to be encouraged to come forward.

Anyone know how they actually treat this crap? Is it like the flu and they give you a steroid shot in the arse? How is it actually treated?

Anti retro virals. Pills.


Although if you are on the bad side of the odds, the bigger thing you want access to is a bed by a ventilator.

Some interesting news from China that might explain the difference in CFR (but more info is needed; small sample):
LINK

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*Researchers from Beijing and Shanghai studied 103 samples of the coronavirus

*They found two strains of it, named them L and S and found L was most common

*L is also the most aggressive, but it has become less common since early January

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Researchers say there are now two types of the same coronavirus infecting people – and most people seem to have caught the most aggressive form of it.

At least 94,000 people have been infected around the world and almost 3,200 have died, while 50,000 have recovered from the disease.

The team of experts from Beijing and Shanghai said 70 per cent of people have caught the most aggressive strain of the virus but that this causes such bad illness that it has struggled to spread since early January.

Now an older, milder strain seems to be becoming more common.

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A British scientist who was not involved with the research said it was too early to say how accurate the claim of the virus splitting into two was.

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Of course, caveat is that they've only tested 103 samples of the virus. But it could help explain lower numbers of fatal cases.

Hopefully someone is working on this and we'll hear more soon.

Interesting look at how much data Singapore has released on this. So much transparency. Some will probably argue too much transparency.

LINK

I mean if you have to self quarantine and are an hourly worker how long you think that cashier at Walmart gonna stay home. She gotta pay rent too and ain't got health insurance. She gonna go back to work and touch everyone's food and give out change and receipts. That's how it's gonna spread and how it is gonna hurt. Slow burn.