Tag Archives: old age

Covid-19 in long term care homes reveal this virus is a low threat to the general public

Seattle, Washington was ground zero for Covid-19 in the US and most cases in Washington State (see image below) were known to be associated with long term care homes from the very beginning. This has turned out to be true virtually everywhere in the world. This means the risk of this coronavirus to the general population is even smaller than has been assumed by health advisors. However, because numbers of care home deaths and confirmed cases are inconsistently reported worldwide, governments almost everywhere have been reluctant to lift restrictions on movements of people who do not live or work in these well-defined hotspots of Covid-19 infection.

Seattle Times 18 April care home deaths vs community

I live in Victoria and travel to Seattle fairly often, in part because the cheapest and fastest way to Alaska and the rest of the US is via Seattle. Because of its physical proximity, I have kept a close eye on the virus situation in Seattle. In addition, a good friend of mine in Victoria had a relative in the Kirkland Life Care Centre in Seattle, which recorded one of the first deaths in the US. His ‘insider’ information tells us some interesting things about why long-term care facilities like these are being hit so hard by Covid-19. I thought it might be worth sharing what I’ve learned about this developing story.

UPDATE 25 April 2020: US Medicaid officials have summarized (as of April 23) Covid-19 deaths and confirmed cases in long term care facilities (by state) for those that report this data. They point out that until April 19, long term care homes were not required to report cases or deaths to the CDC and state [my bold]:

Our data collection effort finds that in the 23 states that publicly report death data as of April 23, 2020, there have been over 10,000 reported deaths due to COVID-19 in long-term care facilities (including residents and staff), representing 27% of deaths due to COVID-19 in those states. Our data also finds that there have been over 50,000 reported cases, accounting for 11% of coronavirus cases in 29 states. In six states reporting data, deaths in long-term care facilities account for over 50% of all COVID-19 deaths (Delaware, Massachusetts, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Colorado, and Utah; Table 2)…The total cases and deaths from reporting states accounts for just over half (53%) of all cases, and 81% of all deaths. Given that not all states are reporting data yet and the continual lag in testing, the counts of cases and deaths are an undercount of the true number of cases and deaths in long-term care facilities.

Also, the State of Massachusetts is one of those that do report long-term care facility deaths and associated cases, pdf here for April 24.
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Ian Stirling’s latest howler: “the polar bear who died of climate change”

Will wildlife biologist and Polar Bear Specialist Group member Ian Stirling now say anything – no matter how unscientific – to garner more sympathy and media attention for polar bears? It appears so.  [see followup post published Aug. 11, here]

A tabloid-style picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words article appeared in the environment section of the UK newspaper The Guardian yesterday (August 6, 2013) with a picture of a dead polar bear meant to wring your heart. The picture is a vehicle for statements from Ian Stirling and others that this polar bear died from climate change. A longer article was alongside.

The caption below the photo of a dead polar bear (animal tragedy porn) is this:

This 16-year-old male polar bear died of starvation resulting from the lack of ice on which to hunt seals, according to Dr Ian Stirling.”

Many folks have been asking questions about this and so have I.

I suggest this is what really happened: the polar bear biologists working in Svalbard earlier this year knew this bear was going to die back in April when they captured him – they simply waited, with a photographer on hand, until he died. It was an orchestrated photo-op.

[Update, Aug. 8, 2013: I suggest it was not necessary for anything more to happen to “orchestrate” this photo than for the researchers who captured the bear in April to tell colleagues and local tour boat operators (who always have avid photographers on board) to “keep an eye out for a dead bear, we don’t think this guy is going to make it.” However, very little real information is provided. Who knows when (or from whom) we’ll get the whole story — if ever? That’s why anecdotal accounts like these aren’t “evidence” of anything, in the scientific sense. That’s the real take-home message here.  If this dead bear was being presented as scientific evidence, we’d have been given all the details, including necropsy results, local ice conditions, precise dates, locations, and photos of any other bears that were seen that were in poor condition. In other words, a proper scientific report. ]

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