Talking Numbers and Preventing Deaths

Let’s talk numbers

There is an infodemic going on and it is easy to get lost in the numbers. Let’s try and keep it basic. What two numbers do we really care about?

The number of cases in hospital and the number of deaths. If you follow these two numbers you will be able to appreciate trends which will give you a better sense of safety especially those numbers close to where you live.

Quite frankly the “number of cases” is a worthless number. Why? Because it depends on how many sick people got tested. If everyone doesn’t get tested that  number tells you nothing. When there is more testing there will be more ‘cases’ and when fewer people get tested there will be less.

On Saturday there were 1500 people in hospital, today 1460. A nice trend but not huge.

The number of deaths is a grim reminder of the seriousness of this condition. Isn’t it incredible that we now measure success by how many people died?

Sometimes you have to go back to basics to make sense of it all.

It sounds easy for people to say what should have been done and what should be done now. But believe me it’s the basic measures and simply following epidemiological guidelines that will get us through this.

Watch this clip from the BBC News.

Is it not amazing what people with little or no resources were able to achieve yet we, the ‘most powerful, richest’ country on earth have left 92,000  and counting dead bodies in our wake?

Now I want to talk about ventilators vs testing. 

Do you remember when there was all the brouhaha about who had enough ventilators and why New York didn’t need 30,000?

It costs $20,000 to $50,000 to make a ventilator and that doesn’t take into account the oxygen and all the pieces of equipment and highly trained personnel that go into making them actually work. Third world countries know they cannot afford ventilators. If you dropped off a 100 in the Navajo Nation health clinic they wouldn’t know how to use them. It would have to come with staff and PPE’s and so on.

It took a presidential decree to convert car manufacturer factories into ventilator producing plants so the country could get 'enough' ventilators.

It cost $1 to $5 (worst case scenario) to make a corona virus test kit. You do the math! The only life a ventilator saves is the one person on it at the time and then it needs to be disinfected and recalibrated, you get the idea.

The first day in an ICU bed in the United States costs $10,794 and tapers to $3968 per day by Day 3.

The average stay in the ICU with Covid-19 is between 8 and 14 days.

A regular bed hospital stay costs  $1488.

I know, its enough to make your head spin!

Do we get it yet?

Please follow the prevention measures I have been discussing in these emails. Believe me: Money and time spent on prevention is 100s of times more valuable than chasing cures.