Coronavirus

[SarahsDad]

According to this site Coronavirus Update (Live): 82,166 Cases and 2,804 Deaths from COVID-19 Wuhan China Virus Outbreak - Worldometer the spread of Coronavirus continues to be extremely predictable and is reaching a plateau worldwide. It's mortality rate is significantly but not astronomically higher than influenza at 2-3%.

As a physician, I reviewed this data 2 weeks ago and predicted little effect on the economy and the stock market. What I miscalculated was the amount of fear, uncertainty, and doubt (a different kind of FUD ) that would captivate the worldwide media and especially here in the US. So perception becomes fact. Fear causes irrational shutdown of factories, travel, etc which leads to the inevitable economic slowdown.

What is lacking is the "big picture" perspective. This is from the CDC for the US. Preliminary In-Season 2019-2020 Flu Burden Estimates

So if you fear Coronavirus, you should fear Influenza several orders of magnitude more. Even with a vaccine, there are 500k times more people with influenza in the US than with Coronavirus (60 vs 30M). There would have to be over 500k cases of Coronavirus in the US before the number of Coronavirus deaths surpassed influenza deaths (based on 2-3% mortality rate). Given that the graph above appears to be leveling out at 100,000 cases worldwide, that scenario seems extremely unlikely.

Coronavirus is likely to be with us for quite a while (at a low penetrance), but it's overall economic impact, I believe, will ultimately be minimal, IF the FUD can be controlled.

 

[mblakele]

NHK and FT are reporting that an Osaka tour guide who worked in Wuhan may have relapsed, testing positive a second time after contracting the virus, then apparently recovering. As the article points out, this could be reinfection — or it's a false negative and she never really "recovered". NHK reports that the woman requested re-testing: to me that reinforces the idea that her initial "recovery" was a false negative test result.

Japanese woman treated for coronavirus tests positive again
Subscribe to read | Financial Times

Prefectural authorities announced last night that one of Japan’s first cases of coronavirus, a woman in her 40s who worked as a tour guide for tourists from Wuhan, had tested positive four weeks after she was discharged from hospital and three weeks after a previous negative test. It is possible that the disease lingered in her body or that she was reinfected at a later date. Her case shows the potential for false negatives, a further challenge to preventing the spread of the disease.​

 

[mblakele]

As several folks have pointed out, this may be a case where the social-political reaction is worse than the disease.

At what point should authorities give up on quarantine and switch to other measures?

 

[davepsilon]

As several folks have pointed out, this may be a case where the social-political reaction is worse than the disease.

At what point should authorities give up on quarantine and switch to other measures?

What other measures would you have them do?

 

[mblakele]

What other measures would you have them do?

I left that vague to encourage discussion of the main question. But I was thinking of the sort of hygiene we encourage every flu season: everything but the vaccine that we don't have.

https://www.infectioncontroltoday.com/hand-hygiene/prevention-key-during-cold-and-flu-season

Practice Good Health Habits

 

[powertoold]

So if you fear Coronavirus, you should fear Influenza several orders of magnitude more. Even with a vaccine, there are 500k times more people with influenza in the US than with Coronavirus (60 vs 30M).

This coronavirus seems to be much more contagious than the flu (best example comes from the diamond princess ship). One of the major reasons for the plateau is the lockdown in many parts of China and actions taken in affected countries.

Sure, the flu currently has more severe stats, but we can see how coronavirus can get out of control really fast, in a way that would trump the flu stats without proper measures.

 

[elasalle]

Dr. Marc Speigel

 

[Causalien]

According to this site Coronavirus Update (Live): 82,166 Cases and 2,804 Deaths from COVID-19 Wuhan China Virus Outbreak - Worldometer the spread of Coronavirus continues to be extremely predictable and is reaching a plateau worldwide. It's mortality rate is significantly but not astronomically higher than influenza at 2-3%.
View attachment 515515
As a physician, I reviewed this data 2 weeks ago and predicted little effect on the economy and the stock market. What I miscalculated was the amount of fear, uncertainty, and doubt (a different kind of FUD ) that would captivate the worldwide media and especially here in the US. So perception becomes fact. Fear causes irrational shutdown of factories, travel, etc which leads to the inevitable economic slowdown.

What is lacking is the "big picture" perspective. This is from the CDC for the US. Preliminary In-Season 2019-2020 Flu Burden Estimates
View attachment 515526

So if you fear Coronavirus, you should fear Influenza several orders of magnitude more. Even with a vaccine, there are 500k times more people with influenza in the US than with Coronavirus (60 vs 30M). There would have to be over 500k cases of Coronavirus in the US before the number of Coronavirus deaths surpassed influenza deaths (based on 2-3% mortality rate). Given that the graph above appears to be leveling out at 100,000 cases worldwide, that scenario seems extremely unlikely.

Coronavirus is likely to be with us for quite a while (at a low penetrance), but it's overall economic impact, I believe, will ultimately be minimal, IF the FUD can be controlled.

It's interesting to see physicians with this arguments as well.

What if you ignore China's data all together and only considers the cases outside of China as I believe most of China is the original strain of the virus. Is the rest of the world in an exponential climb?

Now what if China's true numbers are ~400k infected and ~30k death so far. Does your opinion on this virus change?

 

[Causalien]

NHK and FT are reporting that an Osaka tour guide who worked in Wuhan may have relapsed, testing positive a second time after contracting the virus, then apparently recovering. As the article points out, this could be reinfection — or it's a false negative and she never really "recovered". NHK reports that the woman requested re-testing: to me that reinforces the idea that her initial "recovery" was a false negative test result.

Japanese woman treated for coronavirus tests positive again
Subscribe to read | Financial Times

Prefectural authorities announced last night that one of Japan’s first cases of coronavirus, a woman in her 40s who worked as a tour guide for tourists from Wuhan, had tested positive four weeks after she was discharged from hospital and three weeks after a previous negative test. It is possible that the disease lingered in her body or that she was reinfected at a later date. Her case shows the potential for false negatives, a further challenge to preventing the spread of the disease.​

There is more and more evidence of mutated strains it seems. Reinfection by a mutated strain is the most likely scenario.

 

[mblakele]

There is more and more evidence of mutated strains it seems. Reinfection by a mutated strain is the most likely scenario.

Well, the NHK report suggested that it was probably a simple reinfection. They quoted an expert who said that sometimes viral infections don't produce sufficient antibodies to deter reinfection by the same strain. I found that plausible: I've heard of similar behavior with seasonal flu. Originally I suggested a simple false negative test result — those happen.

Can you elaborate on why do you think "reinfection by a mutated strain" is the most likely scenario? Why do you think that's more likely than a false negative test result? Why do you think it's more likely than a simple reinfection?

EDIT: here's a link to the NHK story

Woman treated for coronavirus again tests positive | NHK WORLD-JAPAN News

[...]

An expert on infectious diseases at Osaka University says people who are infected develop antibodies, so they can usually avoid re-infection by the same virus.

However, if there had not been enough antibodies, that individual could have been prone to re-infection or viruses that had been undetected in the body could have multiplied.​

 

[dw4ngg]

According to this site Coronavirus Update (Live): 82,166 Cases and 2,804 Deaths from COVID-19 Wuhan China Virus Outbreak - Worldometer the spread of Coronavirus continues to be extremely predictable and is reaching a plateau worldwide. It's mortality rate is significantly but not astronomically higher than influenza at 2-3%.
View attachment 515515
As a physician, I reviewed this data 2 weeks ago and predicted little effect on the economy and the stock market. What I miscalculated was the amount of fear, uncertainty, and doubt (a different kind of FUD ) that would captivate the worldwide media and especially here in the US. So perception becomes fact. Fear causes irrational shutdown of factories, travel, etc which leads to the inevitable economic slowdown.

What is lacking is the "big picture" perspective. This is from the CDC for the US. Preliminary In-Season 2019-2020 Flu Burden Estimates
View attachment 515526

So if you fear Coronavirus, you should fear Influenza several orders of magnitude more. Even with a vaccine, there are 500k times more people with influenza in the US than with Coronavirus (60 vs 30M). There would have to be over 500k cases of Coronavirus in the US before the number of Coronavirus deaths surpassed influenza deaths (based on 2-3% mortality rate). Given that the graph above appears to be leveling out at 100,000 cases worldwide, that scenario seems extremely unlikely.

Coronavirus is likely to be with us for quite a while (at a low penetrance), but it's overall economic impact, I believe, will ultimately be minimal, IF the FUD can be controlled.

2% is 20x more than 0.1% death rate for the flu. So, it’s a bit too early to say the economic downturn was caused by FUD alone.

Quarantines may have helped China cases plateau (plus maybe misleading numbers).

The longer incubation period and ease of spreading may have it play out differently in other countries, where massive coordinated lockdown isn’t as easy to execute.

If in two weeks, things haven’t escalated exponentially, I would agree with you.

 

[Singuy]

2% is 20x more than 0.1% death rate for the flu. So, it’s a bit too early to say the economic downturn was caused by FUD alone.

Quarantines may have helped China cases plateau (plus maybe misleading numbers).

The longer incubation period and ease of spreading may have it play out differently in other countries, where massive coordinated lockdown isn’t as easy to execute.

If in two weeks, things haven’t escalated exponentially, I would agree with you.

Like how the U.S is not really in a lock down and there are how many today after finding the first case a month ago? 1 --> 53....oooo..scary and super infectious unlike the flu...

 

[Nuclear Fusion]

There's a lot of disinformation about the coronavirus right now - I've seen regular TMC posters posit that the coronavirus has a 2-3% mortality rate, while in reality it's probably below 1% - maybe as low as 0.5% in countries with good health care systems.

I had my coronavirus corrective comments deleted as well, so the policy is consistently enforced. There's a coronavirus thread.

https://www.who.int/docs/default-so...0221-sitrep-32-covid-19.pdf?sfvrsn=4802d089_2
2.9% in China. 1.1% outside China

 

[Unpilot]

https://www.who.int/docs/default-so...0221-sitrep-32-covid-19.pdf?sfvrsn=4802d089_2
2.9% in China. 1.1% outside China

Estimated Influenza Illnesses, Medical visits, Hospitalizations, and Deaths in the United States — 2018–2019 influenza season | CDC

Context matters.

 

[ReflexFunds]

Daily graphs. We'll probably get more than the 2 currently from Japan as a later update. Lots of new cases in Italy and South Korea, but IMHO it's good to see how quickly they're tracing out new potentially infected people. Iran's still en route to be Pre-Containment Wuhan 2.0, and an active seeder.

Lots of global growth, due to Italy and Iran. Of the countries in particular that I might want to add to the list, Bahrain in particular has a lot of cases - 31 in the past two days. Overwhelmingly they're people who traveled to Iran, which is the main reason I haven't done so already. But that's a lot of cases to not have its own line. Kuwait is another similar case - 21 in the past 2 days, 15 of those today.

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I really appreciate these charts @KarenRei thank you. Would it perhaps be possible for you to also include the first chart in table form with your updates so I can track the precise numbers?

 

[KarenRei]

I really appreciate these charts @KarenRei thank you. Would it perhaps be possible for you to also include the first chart in table form with your updates so I can track the precise numbers?

First chart in table form? Oh, the spreadsheet that generates the charts? How should I post it?

 

[HG Wells]

Note This is just a guess on my part.

The woman who is positive a second time after recovering from the virus is interesting in another way.
It means the test kit is actually looking for the virus and not looking for antibodies.
If it was looking at antibodies people would remain positive after recovering.

A test kit that shows previous exposure would be helpful for tracking historical cases.

Woman treated for coronavirus again tests positive | NHK WORLD-JAPAN News

 

[Fact Checking]

https://www.who.int/docs/default-so...0221-sitrep-32-covid-19.pdf?sfvrsn=4802d089_2
2.9% in China. 1.1% outside China

Again, that's wrong, because the Chinese data is skewed by the Hubei data where severe cases are over-represented due to the overload of the health care system, and the international mortality data is significantly skewed by the Iranian data, who are reporting 19% mortality rate, likely an under-reporting error ...

If we correct for those obvious sampling artifacts by taking out Hubei and Iran then the Chinese mainland mortality rate with over 13,000 cases is 0.8% at the moment, and the international mortality rate for over 3,500 cases is 1.0%. Since at least 80% of the cases have mild symptoms, many of whom don't get into hospitals let alone get tested for the virus, all these statistics are still overestimating the true mortality rate.

Then we have very well controlled cases like the Diamond Princess, with 705 infections and 4 fatalities - a 0.6% fatality rate in a demography that is skewed toward the elderly (average age of cruise ship passengers is around 47 years, while average age in developed countries is around 37 years) - i.e. this too is likely overestimating the true whole-population mortality rate.

See this latest summary of the data, if you want to check the numbers yourself.

If these trends continue then I'd expect coronavirus mortality among all infected to be lower than the 0.6%-1.0% observed, and higher than that of the common flu of 0.13%.

Please stop spreading disinformation.

edit: I re-calculated all the numbers with the very latest data and updated the figures.

 

[ReflexFunds]

First chart in table form? Oh, the spreadsheet that generates the charts? How should I post it?

Just a screenshot is probably easiest, otherwise a Google doc i guess if that won't take long.
Thanks again!

 

[KarenRei]

Okay, will try to remember to do that evening. Though I'd rather not have to upload it to a google doc every day.