July 15, 2020

The American way of life is under assault.  Businesses are going under because of renewed closure orders, people’s freedom to breathe fresh air is being infringed, and America’s great sports culture is being curtailed—as witnessed by the recent decision of several college conferences to either cancel or restructure the 2020 football season.

These tectonic shifts in our national structure have rarely happened in our history, occasionally occurring only in times of war.  We don’t shut down the country when the flu kills 30 to 50,000 people in a given year.  We don’t limit people’s rights under the U.S. Constitution for month after unending month or effectively shut down the educational system for weeks on end due to an outbreak of some disease.  So, why are we doing it now?  The answer seems to be the level of deaths.  Not deaths, mind you, but level of deaths.

As stated above, the common yearly flu can lead to tens of thousands of deaths.  Nearly 80,000 Americans died with influenza-associated symptoms during the 2017-2018 flu season, according to the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).  However, America’s institutions and economy were humming along during that same time period, with no hint of restrictions or closures of any kind.  So, again, why now?

It appears that the early predictions of extreme numbers of deaths (some suggesting millions of U.S. deaths) were the cause of governments taking the unusual precautions we’ve witnessed.  One can argue in retrospect whether state and federal measures over the last several months were warranted given the current reported number of COVID-related deaths, but the fact remains that our way of life is being completely overturned due to reported or perceived numbers of deaths.

It would seem, then, that it may be time to take a very close look at the risk factors that lead to COVID deaths.  That is what we propose to do in the following sections of this article.

Size of the Study

As reported in the July 9 edition of The New York Times (hereinafter, The Times), a British team of researchers, led by Oxford University’s Dr. Ben Goldacre, published a paper in the journal Nature in which they provided findings concerning the leading risk factors for COVID-related deaths.  There have been many studies performed in recent months that have attempted to increase our understanding of the coronavirus pandemic, but the study performed by Dr. Goldacre’s team boasts one, critical, differentiating factor: it is based on more than 17 million cases.  This purports to be the largest COVID-related study yet undertaken.

Methodology of the Study

Size is one thing, but study parameters, accuracy, reliability and applicability are also important factors to consider.  According to The Times, the Goldacre team began their study with the following process:

The researchers mined a trove of de-identified data that included health records from about 40% of England’s population, collected by the United Kingdom’s National Health Service. Of 17,278,392 adults tracked over three months, 10,926 reportedly died of COVID-19 or COVID-19-related complications.

So, the first thing we can conclude from the above excerpt is that the study did not include children, which is somewhat unfortunate as their inclusion may have been revelatory as to a possible divergence in the death percentages, symptomology and risk factors for the two age groups.  A second conclusion we find from this excerpt is that the death rate is nearly negligible.

According to The Times, “some experts pointed out flaws in the researchers’ methodology that made it difficult to quantify the exact risks faced by members of the vulnerable groups identified in the study. For instance, certain medical conditions that can exacerbate COVID-19, like chronic heart disease, are more prevalent among black people than white people.”

Findings of the Study

With that bit of background, let’s get into the findings.  According to The Times, the Goldacre study came to the following conclusions:

• Patients older than 80 were at least 20 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than those in their 50s and hundreds of times more likely to die than those below the age of 40.  The scale of this relationship was “jaw-dropping,” Goldacre said.
• Additionally, men stricken with the virus had a higher likelihood of dying than women of the same age.
• Medical conditions such as obesity, diabetes, severe asthma and compromised immunity were also linked to poor outcomes.
• A person’s chances of dying tended to track with socioeconomic factors like poverty.
• Roughly 11 percent of the patients tracked by the analysis identified as nonwhite. The researchers found that these individuals—particularly black and South Asian people—were at higher risk of dying from COVID-19 than white patients.  That trend persisted even after Goldacre and his colleagues made statistical adjustments to account for factors like age, sex and medical conditions, suggesting that other factors are playing a major role.

According to Avonne Connor, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, the study’s findings closely coincide with data “observed around the world and are not necessarily surprising.”  Responding to the study, and attempting to address the racial component of the findings, The Times went on to assert the following:

In the United States, Latino and African American residents are three times as likely to become infected by the coronavirus as white residents, and nearly twice as likely to die.

Despite this, a recent report showed that, while 40 states are seeing a rise in case counts, with some surging dramatically, one of the places where COVID deaths have noticeably plummeted to 0 over the last few days is Washington DC—a city that has a combined African-American and Latino population of 57 percent.

While case numbers continue to climb, it appears that the COVID death rate may be easing.  As evidence of this, the July 3 edition of The Times contained this headline: “U.S. Coronavirus Cases Are Rising Sharply, but Deaths Are Still Down.”  This would seem to be good news, at least for the time being, and we can only hope that the death figures will continue to trend downward.  If they do, governments and institutions may want to review their current measures responding to the virus.

We at MiraMed Global Services partner with hospitals across the country and hope that this new study will be helpful to you for the purposes of protocol assessment and financial planning.  Please reach out to us at info@miramedgs.com if we can help you with staffing, consulting or other business solutions.