Social networking is a powerful tool for freedom of speech. Sadly, it doesn’t check the intelligence of people sharing their opinion. I got tired of comments like “Covid-19 is the same as the flu” or “It is nonsense to pay so much attention to Covid-19 when the death rate is 0.9%” or even worse “Using math I can say that it should be half of the country sick if there are 3000 people sick every day. And I do not know any of them.”
People, please be data-driven before writing your comments under any article. I guess that person who wrote that the 0.9% mortality rate is meaningless did not calculate it by himself or did that incorrectly. If you would take the number of dead people from Covid-19 and divide it by all infected people in Lithuania then you would get 0.9% - that is correct.
However, this is not the number you should be checking as we do not know what will be the ending of cases for people who are still being treated. What we should do instead is to calculate the proportion in the set of recovered and dead people. In that case, we get 2%. And even if you want to write a comment that 2% is a small or large percent you need to know the total number. At the moment, there are more than 130 000 people who had or have Covid-19 in Lithuania. Hence if the mortality rate stays the same and there will be no new cases starting tomorrow – more than 2500 people will still die from Covid-19.
After reading a lot of “smart and brainy opinions”, I started doubting myself - maybe I have no understanding of the whole situation in Lithuania regarding Covid-19. I decided to compare 2019 and 2020 years of mortality data from the statistics department.
So firstly, I tried to compare the reasons why people die. However, I couldn’t find this data for 2020, but I have it for 2019. If we would make a hypothesis that 2019 and 2020 numbers are around the same level, we can take 2019 reasons with numbers and add Covid-19 data. In this situation, the picture would be like the one below.
For some, this graph shows that Covid-19 takes a big part in why people died. The other will say, that there are many more consequential illnesses. However, this is not the main reason why Covid-19 is so dangerous. The graph below shows death numbers each week in 2019 and 2020. I separated 2020 into two lines. One is total numbers each week while the other is deaths from other illnesses (Covid-19 deaths excluded). It was unexpected to me that it is such a significant difference between 2019 and 2020 numbers. We can see that week 31 is a point when the death numbers start increasing
So the biggest issue with Covid-19 is not the direct deaths, but the fact that it can destroy the health care system for all the people. Furthermore, it is even harder to rebuild because these are hidden issues.
Hopefully, people who know their rights will understand their duties as well. So that all of us can enjoy the life we were used to.
