Alexander Koryagin to Anton Shepelev:

>  AS> It is not so simple, because many deathds due to COVID-19
>  AS> have been caused by various compications and aggravations of
>  AS> pre-existent chronic illnesses, often on the background of a
>  AS> weak immune system. Are you familliar with the chaos theory
>  AS> and its herarchy of causes?
>
> You don't hear me -- I have already told you that flu also
> aggravates many chronic illnesses, but nobody blames flu for
> deaths from that many illnesses. Present day statistic about
> covid19 deaths is not correct.

I am sorry. Now I see what you mean and wonder how you know that
the death-attribution (what is the right term?) methods for the
common flu and for COVID-19 are so very different?

Another question -- do I understand your paragraph above as
implying the World Health Organisation, and the governments of all
the affected states are in collustion about using widely different
standards for accouting deaths due to COVID-19 and due to all other
diseases?

> I told you that WHO ordered that covid19 deaths to be counted
> differently than deaths of flue/pneumonia.

I missed it. Where did you say that? Did you provide a reference to
an official WHO regulation?

>  ak>> Now Russia also began count it in such a way,
>  AS> What way, exactly?
>
> If a person dies and he has been tested positively - this death is
> counted now as a death of covid.

What -- even if he poisoned himself (God forbid!) with a cianide?

>  ak>> and death toll in Russia began growing quickly. It is a
>  ak>> dirty trick.
>
>  AS> You seem to imply that we have changed the method of
>  AS> calculating deaths due to COVID-19. If so, what evidence do
>  AS> you have of it?

> Read it in Russian: https://www.svoboda.org/a/30574844.html

Although I am chary of reading such openly rusophobic resources,
this article was not bad. It even has a very good explanation and
justification of the new death-accounting method. I have no
objections. It is not a dirty trick, as you call it, but a way to
account deaths that would not have happened then and there if the
person had not contracted the virus. Even with the corrections for
this method of calculation, the author of that article esitmates
the lethality of COVID as up to 10 times higher than that of the
common flu.

>  ak>> Another factor is that there are huge masses of
>  ak>> infected/recovered people who don't know that they were
>  ak>> infected/ill with covid19, so they are out of statistics.
>
>  AS> If so, how do you know that they exist?
>
> The US does numerous tests for covid19 antibodies - the marks
> that a person has recovered from the virus. The tests show that a
> huge number of people have such antibodies and their illness was
> not registered when they were ill.

Very well, but how come these people are "out of statistics", if
they have been tested?

Even if the statistics is lagging and suffers from systematic
error, incomplete coverage, and incosistent methods between
countries, it is still a useful indicator of the development of the
pandemic because the error, although unknown, is stable in time.

>  AS>> Vast majority of them is without symptoms or almost without
>  AS>> them.
>
>  AS> Yes, I have heard of the symptomless development of the
>  AS> infecion, but is reported to be around 25%:
>
>  AS> https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-asymptomatic-spread.html
>
> Up to 50% here:
>
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/50-percent-of-people-with-covid19-not-aw
are-have-virus

No problem, let it be 25-50%. Still not "a vast majority", but a
pretty high ratio anyway.

>  AS> It not a "vast majory", as you say.
> I summed "without symptom + those with mild symptoms". People
> with mild symptoms also don't go to the hospital.

OK, now that approaches that "vast majority" of yours. I am
starting to understand.

>  ak>> So we should isolate old or sick people and let other
>  ak>> people live a normal life.
>
>  AS> Do you realise how hard it is to isolate the old from the
>  AS> young? Do you propose a network of concentration camps?
>
> Nothing will change. ;) Now old and young are locked in the same
> flats. ;-\

I don't see how that anwers my question.

>  AS> Do you realise that
>  AS> it is not only old people that die by COVID? The first
>  AS> reporter of the beginning pandemic, now China's and the
>  AS> World's hero Li Winliang, died of the virus at 33:
>
> Every rule have exceptions.

These are not, strictly speaking, exceptions. The relatively low
(yes statistically stable) death rate among the young is not a
reason at all to risk their lives. They may be "exceptions" to some
cabinet statistician or a soulless government official in Sweden,
but they are dearly loved ones to their friends and relatives. What
will you say to them -- I am sorry, but your brother died because
he turned out to be an exception to our staticical distribution?

>  ak>> In this case the average year death toll will be as a
>  ak>> normal death toll from flu/pneumonia.
>
>  AS> First, what makes you thing so? Second, it is atrocious to
>  AS> sacrifice even a single human life, regardless of statistics.
>
> Every years tens of thousand people dies from cold.

They freeze to death?

> It is cynical, but it is a "normal" number.

I beg your pardon: what is cynical about the statistics of deaths
from cold?

>  ak>> Under the constitution people can be ordered such things
>  ak>> only after Emergency status has been introduced in the
>  ak>> country.
>
>  AS> Interesting. But it is a poor constituion that does not let
>  AS> the government to defend its people from a pandemic without
>  AS> an all-out emergecy.
>
> Law is law.

Tell, if you know, whether the police have the right to limit the
freedom of movement and travel of a man infected with some
super-lethal and super infectious disease, such as the black pox?
IMHO, they are oblived to do so in order to protect the other
people's rights for life. What do you think?

Is it only the Russian "liberals" that turn to constituion when
everybody's first and foremost care should be of their own and
other's health?

> If there is the state of emergency the authority has right to
> demand people to comply with their orders, but people and
> business will get many possibilities to reduce its losses! As a
> force major, they could suspend rental, credit payment --

I think it would be *much* harder on the economy. Money is not made
out of nothing -- not rubles anyway.

> it is awful when people are prohibited from working but they
> should pay everything as usual.

In Russia, those prohibited from working are guarranteed to
receive theor usual monthly salary throughout their forced absence
from work due to the pandemic. Rent and credit relaxations are also
enacted.

> A swinish situation.

Is it any better in other countries with the lockdown?

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