Yes if you’re including the entire population which is not how stats works as his demographic is exponentially more at risk than many others (age, onset of pneumonia, etc)
Yes if you’re including the entire population which is not how stats works as his demographic is exponentially more at risk than many others (age, onset of pneumonia, etc)
afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 6 months ago
lemmy.world/comment/9809397
I admit I am not a stats guy. Please tell me what I did wrong in my math. Totally open to being corrected here.
bolexforsoup@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 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. The stat is only useful when discussing how many regular cyclists get hurt.
MRSA affects more specific demographics and conditions. Somebody who is older who contracts pneumonia and enters a hospital is far more likely than the regular 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.
afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Ok can you give me an actual number?
bolexforsoup@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 months ago
I wasn’t going to say anything, but it does irritate me when people ask me to go do their research for them and then ghost after. At least have the decency to say you didn’t read it or blew it off.
bolexforsoup@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 months ago
For what? I’ve already written out the numbers in multiple comments. 50,000-100,000 cases a year, 5,000-10,000 deaths a year. Not everyone gets pneumonia every year, not everyone is equally healthy/unhealthy or has other factors that can make it more likely, not everyone is the same age, etc. So you can’t just apply this to the entire country. What the exact number is is not critical to understanding that. For the same reason not everybody has to worry about being killed on their bike on the way to work. Because not everybody rides a bike to work.
The number of cases and the number of deaths associated, as well pneumonia/MRSA infection/ while hospitalized, is well documented. You can find stuff from the NIH and beyond about this. It’s a very serious issue that hospitals have never been able to truly fix. A cursory search would show you this, I’m sure there are a dozen major articles you could find in no time.