Yeah - if someone could point me to a nursing home where 5% of the population died in a week in December/January I'd believe it - anecdotes about people being having the flu in the winter isn't the most convincing.
Sure, if we were talking about mortality rates but we’re not. we’re simply talking about prevalence of COVID prior to the major breakout of February and beyond. These are two completely different things to be looking at.
I’ve worked in nursing homes during that time of December where people were dying. Did we think to send bloodwork off to test for some novel coronavirus? Of course not. Secondly, using the example of a nursing home as the sample population is silly as they are not the ones who were traveling. It’d be their family members and caregivers who traveled and then brought the disease into the facility.
I'm not sure what your counterclaim is? There are no samples in America tested from that time period that would show that there was Covid nor is there any statistical evidence that would suggest there was Covid.
It’d also be kind of hard to go back and rerun tests for people during those months, which shows why it’s very difficult to pinpoint when this disease started to really spread. I mean, if France and China both had cases during the month of November and December, you’d be hard pressed to say it’s not possible there were similar cases in the U.S albeit undiscovered.
If there was a year-on-year increase of 1-2% in nursing home deaths for a month or two, would that register with anybody? Maybe they would have noticed if a lot of people were being put on respirators? But if no one knew about COVID they would probably just chalk that up to it being a bad flu season.
Looking much higher than that. 80+ is 15-20% and 70-79 is 8% (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...). It'll be concentrated more in people with pre-existing conditions so I expect nursing homes would see greater figures than that.
> Statistics from Kirkland now appear to tell the national story. Of 129 staff members, visitors and residents who got sick, all but one of the 22 who died were older residents,
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/11/nursing-home...
So we're not talking about one or two deaths but a large proportion of your residents suddenly getting ill in the same way and of those a large proportion dying over a short period.
The percentages you're citing are from the Chinese CDC [1] and represent the case fatality rate. They don't represent the infection fatality rate, let alone the overall population mortality. There's a big difference between these numbers which has been repeatedly ignored in the popular media, they keep on taking the scariest one (CFR) and presenting it in an unbalanced context. [2]
(To be fair, CFRs are the numbers we are the most certain about, but when you cherrypick the worst ones like the newspapers do they're also the scariest and least useful.)
The working definition of CFR in the Chinese study is basically people who saw a doctor, were suspected or confirmed of having COVID, and then died. But many other people would have caught the disease and not been seen by a doctor. Most of them would have been milder cases and they wouldn't have died. Key point is this number is not at all indicative of total Covid-related mortality in an exposed population.
The Kirkland story is really tragic, but it's just one data point and doesn't prove that ~15% of all nursing home populations will die. The conditions in other nursing homes could be very different, in fact that nursing home in Kirkland has since been investigated and fined $600,000 for unsafe practices [3].
[1] http://weekly.chinacdc.cn/en/article/id/e53946e2-c6c4-41e9-9...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_fatality_rate
[3] https://komonews.com/news/coronavirus/kirkland-nursing-home-...
however, some may stay longer, but then they have to worry about their condition worsening and eventually not allowing them to do ADLs (bathing, eating, dressing) on their own. the average length of stay before disablement is close to two years [2]
1: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1532-5415....
2: https://academic.oup.com/biomedgerontology/article/74/6/917/...