Probably we will see more than usual, from other causes that benefit from early detection such as cancer. People avoiding hospitals during the pandemic is probably going to have a bit of an aftereffect.
The second metric is obviously more important, but when a pandemic as an Ro of more than 1, any increasing number of cases is a huge issue. Hence why the hospitalizations are on the way up, which is also reported in that article..
Hospitalization lags cases, and deaths lag hospitalization.
So if you're seeing many cases, that's a bad sign for the future, and it takes a while to figure out for sure.
In a global pandemic, it's best to be safe on these things, because the alternative is that you celebrate early and look like a tit (not to mention all the deaths).
Specifically, it's an effect of mistaken predictions about COVID. COVID is still with us and people have stopped avoiding the hospitals now, unfortunately, the backlog isn't clearable except by people dying whilst waiting for treatment (in the UK at least).
Those hospitalisations cause pressure on healthcare systems, which means that people without covid-19 but with other life threatening respiratory problems are at increased risk of death.
It’s not just about the specific mortality of the disease. The virus is bad enough that a significant quantity of people need hospitalization. COVID patients in the hospital take a long time to recover or die. So if you fill a hospital to the brink with COVID patients, it takes a while for that capacity to be released.
If the pandemic is left unattended, there won’t be space in the hospital for heart attacks, stroke, car crashes, or any number of other treatable conditions. Mortality for everything goes up.
From what I've read the lethaliy is higher both because they can't test enough people (meaning that they tend to only test the more severe cases) and also because the hospitals were overwhelmed (meaning they can't provide appropriate treatment for everyone).
Beyond that, deaths lag behind hospitalizations by several weeks for obvious reasons -- most people who get sick enough to die from the virus will end up going to the hospital first.
Since natural immunity is durable, an unmitigated pandemic would be over sooner. So in many circumstances the hospitals would be overloaded for less total time and thus lead to less non-covid excess deaths.
Here in Canada, excess deaths in 2020 for the 15 to 64 age range has been abnormally high, starting in March. Yet, unlike older age groups, the level of excess does not follow the pattern of reported COVID infections. That looks like deaths from lockdown and delayed medical care.
I personally know people who, for example, put off getting potential cancers checked out due to fear of covid. Similarly, I had to convince some people to go to the hospital for potentially serious non-covid symptoms who were afraid to do so because of covid.
I mean, the low case rates could be due to the lockdowns, not sure about mortality rates unless you're comparing it to places where the ICUs have become overwhelmed.
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