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
AS>>> of pre-existent chronic illnesses, often on the
AS>>> background of a weak immune system. Are you familliar with
AS>>> the chaos theory and its herarchy of causes?

ak>> You don't hear me -- I have already told you that flu also
ak>> aggravates many chronic illnesses, but nobody blames flu for
ak>> deaths from that many illnesses.
ak>> Present day statistic about covid19 deaths is not correct.

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

Some Americans see it this way: https://fxn.ws/2JKBDDX

Reading:

> Dr. Deborah Birx, the response coordinator for the White House
> coronavirus task force, said the federal government is continuing
> to count the suspected COVID-19 deaths, despite other nations
> doing the opposite.

> "There are other countries that if you had a pre-existing
> condition, and let's say the virus caused you to go to the ICU
> [intensive care unit] and then have a heart or kidney problem,"
> she said during a Tuesday news briefing at the White House. "Some
> countries are recording that as a heart issue or a kidney issue
> and not a COVID-19 death.

To decide whether it is correct or not, one has to ask the doctor:
would that person have died then and there of their heart or kidney
condition had they not contracted COVID-19? If the answer is no,
then we may blame COVID-19, as the the major cause of death. Since
the new virus is more deadly than flu, it is only meet to give it
more weight over other factors in the attribution of death.

Any death is due to the failure of one vital organ or another. Both
seasonal flu and COVID-19 cause death by agrravating a pre-existing
weakness in the organism. If one follows this logic of yours to the
end, one shall conclude that no one has every died by flu or by
COVID-19, which is, obviosly, wrong. Everybody dies becuase their
brain stops working!

>  ak>> Read it in Russian: https://www.svoboda.org/a/30574844.html
>
>  AS> Although I am chary of reading such openly rusophobic
>  AS> resources, this article was not bad. It even has a very good
>  AS> explanation and justification of the new death-accounting
>  AS> method. I have no objections. It is not a dirty trick, as
>  AS> you call it, but a way to account deaths that would not have
>  AS> happened then and there if the person had not contracted the
>  AS> virus. Even with the corrections for this method of
>  AS> calculation, the author of that article esitmates the
>  AS> lethality of COVID as up to 10 times higher than that of the
>  AS> common flu.
>
> Who can know "covid19 style" flu death rate if flu was never
> accused for chronic people deaths? Most sick people with variety
> of illnesses have poor immunity, they often catch cold, pneumonia
> and they die. But it is the main chronic illness that had
> diminished their immunity, not flu! The same can be told about
> covid19.

Yes.

> 
>  ak>> The US does numerous tests for covid19 antibodies - the
>  ak>> marks that a person has recovered from the virus. The tests
>  ak>> show that a huge number of people have such antibodies and
>  ak>> their illness was not registered when they were ill.
>
>  AS> Very well, but how come these people are "out of
>  AS> statistics", if they have been tested?
>
> Now there is only a rough approach -- the results of antibodies
> tests are approximated to all the population.

Great, so they are *not* our of statistics after all, are they?
Futhermore, it is in our official news that 40% of cases are
detected by testing people who evince no symptoms, so we *do* test
apparently healthy people and include them into statistics.

>  AS>>> Do you realise that it is not only old people that die by
>  AS>>> COVID? The first reporter of the beginning pandemic, now
>  AS>>> China's and the World's hero Li Winliang, died of the
>  AS>>> virus at 33:
>  ak>> Every rule have exceptions.
>
>  AS> These are not, strictly speaking, exceptions. The relatively
>  AS> low (yes statistically stable) death rate among the young is
>  AS> not a reason at all to risk their lives. They may be
>  AS> "exceptions" to some cabinet statistician or a soulless
>  AS> government official in Sweden, but they are dearly loved
>  AS> ones to their friends and relatives. What will you say to
>  AS> them -- I am sorry, but your brother died because he turned
>  AS> out to be an exception to our staticical distribution?
>
> Well, if people think as you they will stop the world every
> winter to isolate people from tens of thousand deaths from cold
> disease.

Wrong. I think as I do, yet I don't try to isolate my elderly
relatives every winter.

> It is demagogy, and it is funny to hear it.

Demagogy implies a loggical fallacy. Where is mine? All I say
follows from a sober analysis of cause and effect, which you seem
to simplify to binary (boolean) statements that are either true or
false. Every event is conditioned by an infinite multitude of
causes extending infinitely both back in time and down into lower
orders of the physical world. Well, some say the latter extension
is not infinte and build Thomaic (of Aquinas) proofs of God on that
premise...

>  ak>> Every years tens of thousand people dies from cold.
>  AS> They freeze to death?
>
> In English the word "cold" is also an illness. Usually it is flu
> or acute viral respiratory infections.

OK. So how do the doctors know they die from cold, and not from the
failure of a vital organ (heart, brain)?

>  AS> Tell, if you know, whether the police have the right to
>  AS> limit the freedom of movement and travel of a man infected
>  AS> with some super- lethal and super infectious disease, such
>  AS> as the black pox? IMHO, they are oblived to do so in order
>  AS> to protect the other people's rights for life. What do you
>  AS> think?
>
> I think that doing it without law opens a vast possibilities for
> law violation. Under cover of high words they can do whatever
> they like. It must not be so.

It may be so, yes, but what do you say about my specific example of
a man with black box demanding and executing his constitutional
freedom of movement?

>  ak>> it is awful when people are prohibited from working but they
>  ak>> should pay everything as usual.
>
>  AS> In Russia, those prohibited from working are guarranteed to
>  AS> receive theor usual monthly salary throughout their forced
>  AS> absence from work due to the pandemic. Rent and credit
>  AS> relaxations are also enacted.
>
> You are probably from the Moon -- people survive in Russia as
> they only can,

Russia has declared a lock-down with the retention of the full
salary. It does not sound like survival. I for one feel rather
uneasy because I can't work from home so much and so well as have
done in the office, yet my salary is the same. I am ashamed. But
don't starve.

> and the vast majority of Russian economy is grey.

I know there is grey economy, but how do you know most of it is
so?

> Banks also don't give credits to everybody in need -- they are
> not a charity. Putin also refused to give money from state
> reserves to people who lost jobs.

What a minute -- he has increased the unemployment compensation, he
is spending trillions of rubles to help small businesses stay
afloat. He has initiated help to a select hundred or so large
stragetical enterpiese all over Russia lest people lose their
workplaces.

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