• afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    I did do the math on it and the second guy only had a 1 in 3630 chance of dying of natural causes in that time window.

        • bolexforsoup@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          2 months ago

          You don’t just take the entire population and calculate the odds that they will contract and/or die of something. For instance, I could trivialize bike injuries/deaths in the US because countless people do not commute regularly on their bikes. Hell tens of millions don’t even have one and haven’t ridden a bike since they were children. The stat isn’t super useful unless we are discussing how many regular cyclists get hurt. Otherwise countless non-cyclists dilute the useful information - if they don’t ride bikes, they aren’t at risk at all. And that’s not even taking into account locale. Different population densities,topographies, etc. have different risks. But we can set that aside for now as I think you likely get what I’m driving at there.

          MRSA affects more specific demographics and conditions. Somebody who is older who contracts pneumonia and enters a hospital is far more likely than the average population to contract it - and it has a 10-20% lethality which is extremely high - so their risk has to be assessed in that context.

          If we only compared it against the general population, then hospitals would simply go “well in the grand scheme of things not many people die of MRSA.“ When what they’re (correctly) saying is “if you are elderly and have pneumonia we need to really watch out for MRSA.” Because that is a real risk.

          At 45 he’s not elderly but he’s within the range we see with MRSA unfortunately and pneumonia is a huge trigger for it (compromised immune system open to secondary infection). It’s incredibly resistant to antibiotics/cleaning supplies and is a real killer. Because hospitals clean so much it’s actually more likely to happen there than in “the real world“ because it gets selected out.

          So he isn’t super young (least contributing factor), he has pneumonia (big contributing factor), and is in a hospital (where it almost exclusively occurs). His odds were higher than that of the general population the same way if you go skydiving you have a higher chance of dying from falling to your death than the average population.

    • OpenStars@discuss.online
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      2 months ago

      We do ourselves no favors by sounding like conspiracy nutjobs who are uninterested in facts. When they go low, we should retain the high road, imho.

      Edit: this… basically means tangentially what I had intended to say, so it is better off to be deleted, though I will leave it as strikethrough for the historical record (I really hate all those “deleted” messages, and don’t want to contribute one of my own too!).

      • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Yeah yeah I suck, get in line and take a number. Now, will attacking me bring those two murdered men back to life?

        • OpenStars@discuss.online
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          2 months ago

          I apologize for my wording - I agree with you that I was out of line. There was some point I was trying to make, about the need to be cautious with our wording, but somehow I ended up doing the exact thing I was trying to warn about, didn’t I? Fwiw I don’t actually think that you suck at all - I was just really, Really, REALLY bad at expressing myself there.:-) Thank you for not returning the favor in like manner.