Health – Covid complications

I’m over Covid-19 and all the implications, aren’t you? It seems that the social and especially mental health costs are not really being considered in the bigger picture of this. I’m appalled at the misinformation that the media are delivering to us. I am also concerned about the lack of investigation for information outside of the Government-led directive. But my biggest frustration is the complete lack of doing anything to really help reduce the risk factors associated with complications of having Covid-19.

The first disturbing piece of information we were given was a misleading and completely inaccurate death rate. It seems that whoever was presenting these figures forgot about primary school maths – fractions, to be precise. To find a percentage for death rate relative to the amount of cases, we need two figures; the number of deaths and the number of infections. Sounds easy enough right? One problem, we don’t know the amount of people who are infected. While in New Zealand we may be nearer to knowing the actual number of infections than in other countries we still don’t know of all the cases. It has been conservatively estimated that 50 per cent of people with Covid-19 are symptom free. This presents a huge problem when we can’t test the entire population to see who actually does or doesn’t have the virus, and we are just testing the sick. The end result of knowing all the cases is a death rate much lower in reality than what is being displayed by the media.

The global mean death rate (through antibody studies) is around 0.3 percent. These figures come from Professor Ioannidis of Stanford University. This is still probably a higher rate than is really occurring but is more accurate than anything else that we are hearing. In case you thought that Professor Ioannidis’ research may just be a biased one-off, there have been over 45 different studies to date investigating this.

But a bigger concern to me is the seeming disinterest to address the changeable risk factors for complications for Covid-19 sufferers. Any guesses to what these preventable factors are? Answer: cardiovascular disease (CVD), obesity, hypertension (high blood pressure) and diabetes. Dr David Katz, a medical doctor and preventative medicine specialist from New York states that a person with CVD has a 10 times higher risk factor of dying than a healthy person. Furthermore, diabetes that is well controlled (versus uncontrolled) can reduce the risk of a bad outcome by four times. These are diseases that can be improved by modifying lifestyle factors; that is, diet and physical activity.

So why isn’t the Government rolling out a health initiative to correct these two mammoth health concerns? Not only would we see the benefits for people’s general health (increased quality and length of life and reduced stress on health care), but we could also reduce the amount of complications, such as deaths from Covid-19. Seems like a win-win to me.

Eugene Sims, Warkworth Natural Therapies
www.wnt.co.nz