https://youtu.be/KzKvIYwqQkE

It you spend 10-15 minutes watching a COVID-19 video today, watch this one. I can't recommend it highly enough.

It might change everything you think you know about COVID-19 being a lung disease following in the pattern of what I'll call SARS-1.

This video is part of a series done by Dr. Mike Hansen.

Thanks for sharing that video, Daniel.
Indeed I find it very informative.

Thanks for posting the video. Disturbing and fascinating all at once.

Yes, I've read several run-downs of the multitude of systemic damages wreaked by the COVID-19 virus (and watched the video).

On the surface of it, it sounds like the ghastliest bug ever to invade its human hosts. I wonder, though, if part of the horrific discoveries we're making about its many modes of attack, isn't in large part a function of our more advanced techniques of exploring them, including via autopsy. Being able to keep victims alive longer too.

What if the nightmare flu of 1918 had been treated as much in depth before and after death? Might we have found as many pathways it was capable of making towards death and damage in victims? The latest horror of this new pandemic is of sick and dead children manifesting all the symptoms of Kawasaki Syndrome - just the newest example of a pathology (and in a new demographic). Maybe if humans were always kept alive long enough with a complex pathogen we'd keep finding just as many organ systems under attack.

Thought provoking post, Amanda.

You've clearly done a lot of research on COVID-19..

Enjoy wouldn't be the right word but I'm appreciating your posts on this.

https://youtu.be/y6h8TIxeg1g

This is the next video in Dr. Hansen's series. It's more cheerful (if I can use that word).

It explains clotting again in a general way but it also gives an overview of how many people who get SARS-CoV-2 will get sick (and how sick) and the death rate. Also, it explains the ways the virus is spread in exact detail.

I found this video encouraging. You can get Sars-CoV-2 but the death rate seems pretty low to me (of course, I mean the total death rate).

This Dr. is exceptional. He's triple Board certified. He mentioned them in another post. It went by so fast, I didn't remember them. Then the rest of the video was like a science class and I had to turn it off. I'll rewatch it.

I wanted to get this one posted before I forgot.

Thanks for the follow-up video, Daniel.

Yes, the contents are far more encouraging.

Marilyn vos Savant has said she believes no one should graduate from High School without taking a Statistics course. Being able to process information like this is a good enough reason - out of self-defense, including mental health.

We've all learned in spades in recent years that the news media are not just informants but business people, news-mongers. Now that paper editions are going extinct, and with them most of their profitable ad revenue, news sources need to find a way to sell their product like any other business.

That means more than ever "No news is good news".
Their attention-getting methods include some degree of catastrophising in their choice of contents, headlines, and language. We really need to ground what we read in an insistence on authenticity of sources and numerical "facts", in a context of probability and frequency.

They don't make it easy, but if we don't make an effort to uncover this context (if only by comparing sources and presentation), we can drive ourselves mad. That's especially true in what can turn into a national "Chicken Little" phenomenon - also contagious. "Going viral" in modern parlance.

Separately, a personal anecdote.

Even with a statistics course behind me I seriously investigated a double mastectomy ages ago, because of all the news items describing the various risk factors for breast cancer. I saw I had almost all, and adding them up, ought to preempt the disease. A kindly surgeon disabused me in a conference, explaining that the studies I referenced (all from reputable news sources) were based on a conventional assumption of the women's living to 120 and with no other diseases. Also, they weren't to be added up.

So, way to go, Marilyn vos Savant!
Thanks for helping ground us, Daniel. And also for the compliment earlier.

All that said about the importance of statistics, I can't help wondering what the purpose of this study was and how these patients were selected .
That's especially important given the tiny sample size in the context of what the speaker describes as thousands of autopsies. Pausing to study the abstract he skims over, the only hint of selection criteria for the patients was "the first consecutive Covid-19 positive deaths". So, it was THAT random?