Seriously ill Covid-19 patients double in vaccine pace-setter Singapore

news.trust.org

5 points·AndrewBissell··4 comments

This is a great example of how misleading relative change can be. Double of 1 is 2. Double of 27 is 54.

Stats like this should be presented in absolute numbers and given in context with comparable historical norms, e.g. deaths by other or all causes.

What I really want to know is how the likelihood of death by covid is related to likelihood of death by say, for example, car.

ICU units aren't being overrun by car accident victims, and they haven't had to rent out refrigeration trucks to contain their corpses, so my gut instinct says Covid is quite a bit more likely to kill than car accidents in at least some (if not all) states.

That's not a very scientific method, but it seems likely.

Same analysis error. How many beds are there total in a given hospital is the right question.

Looks like _all_ community hospitals in the US have about 100,000 beds (including all types of ICU beds, even pediatric for example) https://www.aha.org/statistics/fast-facts-us-hospitals

Spread this out to cover the entire number of community hospitals ~5000, and that means if 5 families of 4 people get sick in any community, the hospital will be "overrun"

Conveniently, I just saw: https://twitter.com/bryanrbeal/status/1437551640559620098

Reply on news.ycombinator.com