TROUBADOURS OF TRAGEDY..... LISTEN TO THE DOCTORS WHO ARE LOOKING AFTER PATIENTS RATHER THAN NUMBER CRUNCHERS

American Epidemiologists, in anthropological parlance, are referred to as, those troubadours of tragedy. Always ready to incite fear, they might begin an article with” in 2040 there would be 500 million people with Diabetes! Rather than what we must do NOW to prevent Diabetes!

They have not changed their ways this time around either.

I will point out certain data which very few  of the American networks or articles would tell you .

It is the RATE of Change .. and as you can see, even in countries hard hit as Italy and Spain, the tendency is down. In countries such as Germany and Israel, where early, massive testing as well as confinement rules were enforced, the rate of death has been consistently low.

 Germany did a fantastic job, after seeing a rise of death rate for two weeks, they instituted a heavy social distancing schedule, no more than two people to gather and look at the fantastic results. Both Germany and Austria is thinking of relaxing rules within the next few days 

 Israel did a fantastic job of lockdown and social distancing considering that they had to curfew on the most important family holiday of the year, Pesach. They always had more people leaving the hospital than entering them or dying .

 Italy and Spain suffered a lot of deaths but even then once the rules were observed, the rate of recovery dramatically rose and rate of death decreased. 

In all these countries, it is almost universal testing and in Germany the so called Corona-Taxis ferried doctors and nurses to the HOMES of the vulnerable people and they were tested and taken to quarantine or hospital

Even in the USA with so much doom and gloom there are glimmers of hope.

From New York Times:

In some hard-hit places, glimmers of hope

Across the country, reports of new cases and deaths continue to pour in and new hot spots continue to emerge. But there have been signs that the period of explosive, unchecked spread of Covid-19 might be slowing in some places.

In California’s Bay Area, where strict social distancing rules were implemented early in the pandemic, many new cases continued to be reported, but without the extreme spikes seen in places like Detroit and New York.

In San Francisco, the rate of new infections has been fairly level, with an average of a few dozen each day since March 22. In nearby, harder-hit Santa Clara County, more than 1,400 cases had been identified since late January, but only once had more than 100 new cases been announced in a single day.

And in King County, Wash., which includes Seattle, there are also signs that infection rates could be leveling off. After exponential growth early in the pandemic, the daily number of new cases has hovered between 100 and 270 for three weeks.

Even with hundreds of new cases and dozens of new deaths being announced statewide most days, Washington’s prognosis has improved to the point that Gov. Jay Inslee redirected hundreds of ventilators from his state to places like New York that faced a more dire situation. And on Wednesday, he announced that an Army field hospital erected next to Seattle’s CenturyLink Field would be removed.

“These soldiers uprooted their lives to help Washingtonians when we needed them most,” Mr. Inslee said. “Since then, it’s become apparent that other states need them more than we do.”

As you can see the table below, all over the USA the rate of Covid-19 is dropping and as I mentioned in another blog.. Blacks are disproportionately affected more than the Whites and Gracias a dios! Mexican-Americans are less proportionately affected.

(look at the prevalence per 100.000  and death rate in both California and Texas where a lot of Mexican Americans are)

 Even when you look at various counties within a state, such as Florida, the tendency is downwards

why are the Troubadours of Tragedy so silent about these things?

Paying tribute to Dr. Esteban's work in California, I checked on the statistics from UK 

of the patients admitted to Intensive care Units 

both Blacks and Asians were over represented.UK population of Blacks 3 % ICU population 12 %; Asians comprise 4.2 % of the population, 14% of the ICU population. This is just for Covid-19.

Interestingly enough 40 per cent of the patients admitted to ICU in UK were obese, i.e., BMI of greater than 30 kg/m2.  73 % Male and 27 % Female.

Now all of us will hear more about cytokine storm and that it is actually this exuberant immune response is the cause of the deterioration rather than the viral infection of the Lung tissue ... Interesting times and a bit dangerous.. 

( PS I call them troubadours of tragedy, a name I came up with? I am not sure, after listening to my teacher Ronnie Frankenberg discussing a wonderful field work of the well known Medical Anthropologist Dr Robert Hahn, who followed four Internists around and wrote an erudite article about it: A World of Internal Medicine: Portrait of an Internist)

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