Coronavirus

[nwdiver]

Wuhan today is far from Wuhan in January in terms of testing capacity, social distancing, hand hygiene etc. R0 will be much lower, likely below 1. Read this article:

Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance

Lockdown and print money then Netflix and chill.

 

[dhanson865]

If you need a pick me up I suggest you watch this video of two small ones discussing the current events.

Babies chatting about the rona : funny

 

[PhaseWhite]

..... if a population goes 14 days without a new infection it's gone from that population....

Sorry for my short reply if it wasn't clear, my hypothesis is the data from China is not complete. There's cases in Wuhan that are not known, or perhaps even some that are, that are not reported.

 

[nwdiver]

Sorry for my short reply if it wasn't clear, my hypothesis is the data from China is not complete. There's cases in Wuhan that are not known, or perhaps even some that are, that are not reported.

That's why you lockdown. Yes... the fact they haven't found any in 3 days doesn't mean it's gone it means those people just don't have symptoms which is the purpose of the lockdown. People aren't 'carriers' so far as we know there isn't a typhoid Mary. After 14 days it's ~gone.

 

[dhanson865]

..... if a population goes 14 days without a new infection it's gone from that population....

How long someone is actively sick can vary so the decision on when to release someone from isolation is made on a case-by-case basis in consultation with doctors, infection prevention and control experts, and public health officials and involves considering specifics of each situation including disease severity, illness signs and symptoms, and results of laboratory testing for that patient.

Current CDC guidance for when it is OK to release someone from isolation is made on a case by case basis and includes meeting all of the following requirements:

• The patient is free from fever without the use of fever-reducing medications.
• The patient is no longer showing symptoms, including cough.
• The patient has tested negative on at least two consecutive respiratory specimens collected at least 24 hours apart.

Someone who has been released from isolation is not considered to pose a risk of infection to others.

Quarantine means separating a person or group of people who have been exposed to a contagious disease but have not developed illness (symptoms) from others who have not been exposed, in order to prevent the possible spread of that disease. Quarantine is usually established for the incubation period of the communicable disease, which is the span of time during which people have developed illness after exposure. For COVID-19, the period of quarantine is 14 days from the last date of exposure, because 14 days is the longest incubation period seen for similar coronaviruses. Someone who has been released from COVID-19 quarantine is not considered a risk for spreading the virus to others because they have not developed illness during the incubation period.

As seen above, just because you lock a group down for 14 days doesn't mean everyone in that group has gone through the entire cycle.

Say patient 32,255 gets infected on day 0, goes into quarantine on day 1, doesn't show symptoms until day 14, if you just let them out without testing or any decision making process they go around spreading the virus that they can have until Day 30 or even longer. And really they just need to have it for one interaction with one uninfected person to start the cycle again.

So you can't just let EVERYONE go after 14 days, you can however start testing, picking and choosing who to let out after 14 days. Even then you will have infected left in your original pool of patients.

 

[nwdiver]

So just because you lock a group down for 14 days doesn't mean everyone in that group has gone through the entire cycle.

Say patient 32,255 gets infected on day 0, goes into quarantine on day 1, doesn't show symptoms until day 14, if you just let them out without testing or any decision making process they go around spreading the virus that they can have until Day 30 or even longer. And really they just need to have it for one interaction with one uninfected person to start the cycle again.

So you can't just let EVERYONE go after 14 days, you can however start testing, picking and choosing who to let out after 14 days. Even then you will have infected left in your original pool of patients.

That's a good point. 14 days is for quarantine assuming no infection. If you're sick I think you can be infectious for weeks so the lockdown probably needs to be as long as 2 months.

 

[MassPlay]

Measuring days is pointless as a guarantee of no more infections. Two consecutive negative tests with strict contact monitoring and re-testing as needed is required, otherwise this will just oscillate in a range for a year or more due to community infection...

 

[nwdiver]

Measuring days is pointless as a guarantee of no more infections. Two consecutive negative tests with strict contact monitoring and re-testing as needed is required, otherwise this will just oscillate in a range for a year or more due to community infection...

There's 11M people in Wuhan and China has done <500k tests so far. That's simply impossible. Also by the time you tested the 11 Millionth person one of the first people you tested could have been infected. Counting days isn't perfect but it's more effective.

 

[Causalien]

So when I posted the dataset from worldometer, I mentioned that while the rate of daily increase appears to be slowing, that could be an artifact that not enough testing is occurring. And that is, in fact, what appears to be happening. While the daily new cases graph is more or less exponential, the number people being tested isn't:

View attachment 523876

So, as many people have suspected, looking at "# of cases" really doesn't tell you much since it is warped by the number of tests we are doing.

Ppl keep using % increase slowling down and that log graph to show the disease has peaked. I think some ppl are subconsciously manipulating presentation to show a reality they want.

Testing will eventually be limited to testing throughput at which point the daily tested increase will be a constant. But % wise it will go down because each day the denominator you divide by gets bigger as you add previous day's cases to it.

 

[MassPlay]

There's 11M people in Wuhan and China has done <500k tests so far. That's simply impossible. Also by the time you tested the 11 Millionth person one of the first people you tested could have been infected. Counting days isn't perfect but it's more effective.

That level of testing is not impossible at all with properly designed and self administered test kits and online reporting of results. 11M kits is peanuts for high throughput labs with targeted tests and full automation. These aren't mixed samples like crime scenes on CSI that you've been watching, the analysis spectrum is extremely narrow.

Mapping people's travel/contact/infection patterns help manage infection of previously tested. We're not there yet, but improvements are being made rapidly in the kits and how they're being processed in the labs. This notion of "just tough it out for 14 days and we're all good" has to end because its just not reality.

 

[nwdiver]

This notion of "just tough it out for 14 days and we're all good" has to end because its just not reality.

That's literally how every other pandemic has ended. SARS and MERS weren't declared gone after they had tested millions of people. They were declared gone after a period of time had elapsed since the last confirmed case. Far longer than 14 days but not with testing.

Testing has a role.... it's just not in testing an entire city to see if anyone is still sick.

 

[renim]

Fwiw, australia has over 99 negative covid19 test for every 1 positive test.
And these are still targetted tests.

 

[FoverM]

So when I posted the dataset from worldometer, I mentioned that while the rate of daily increase appears to be slowing, that could be an artifact that not enough testing is occurring. And that is, in fact, what appears to be happening. While the daily new cases graph is more or less exponential, the number people being tested isn't:

View attachment 523876

So, as many people have suspected, looking at "# of cases" really doesn't tell you much since it is warped by the number of tests we are doing.

No, that's not the right conclusion from the testing numbers. If I do a constant number of random daily tests on a population growing exponentially, I'll get an exponentially increasing number of positives. If you increase the number of daily tests, you're going to get an artificially increased number of daily positives.

However, I have to assume that testing is a one-time event for a patient. If they test positive then why test them again since you know they already have/had it. A negative person could technically go back into the "untested" pile but I doubt it because they wouldn't want to waste tests on negative people (at least in these early stages). I'm too tired to do the math right now but I believe that this sliding-in-time testing of the population would correlate with the true statistics over time.

Do we even know who's being tested? I have to believe that they're testing symptomatic patients since they're the ones seeing doctors. If so, that means you're not randomly sampling the population and that you're more likely to get positive results.

Anyway, that's my two cents.

 

[Bet TSLA]

Starbucks remains open. FCA, General Motors, and Ford close down. Crazy world.

Is overpriced coffee actually a critical industry?

Starbucks also sells breakfast and lunch items, as well as bakery things. So, food, which has generally been considered essential.

I don’t get it why people go to Starbucks

Frappuccinos.

 

[Bet TSLA]

Elon Musk: Should Have 1000 Ventilators Next Week, + 250,000 N95 Masks For Hospitals Tomorrow — CleanTechnica Exclusive | CleanTechnica

A thousand ventilators next week? I think Elon's forgotten the underpromise, overdeliver thing again.

That's a lot of masks to just have lying around, isn't it?

 

[KarenRei]

Progress in antibody testing:

New blood tests for antibodies could show true scale of coronavirus pandemic

Although I kind of worry about this. If you're in an area that managed to avoid a hospital overload (either through better control in the hospitals against nosocomial transmission, or through general restrictions on public activities, or even just population cooperation in regards to social distancing), and then people start finding out that they - and many of their friends and family members - already got the disease but didn't notice (Iceland/deCODE and Vò data shows that the vast majority of cases are asymptomatic or mild (50-75% no symptoms whatsoever), and would never get caught without random sampling or whole-population testing)... how are they going to react? How are they going to interpret all of this interruption to their lives and fear?

 

[SMAlset]

Elon Musk: Should Have 1000 Ventilators Next Week, + 250,000 N95 Masks For Hospitals Tomorrow — CleanTechnica Exclusive | CleanTechnica

A thousand ventilators next week? I think Elon's forgotten the underpromise, overdeliver thing again.

That's a lot of masks to just have lying around, isn't it?

maybe the masks are from the GigaChina plant?

 

[KarenRei]

maybe the masks are from the GigaChina plant?

I fully expect that he's just buying and importing them from China.

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

I don’t think the rest of the country will ever get to Italy level fatalities.

It depends on when they act. There are still a lot of states with large cities, that are not taking this nearly seriously enough. New Orleans is a big concern now, as are the large cities in Florida.

BTW, looks like WA is not growing exponentially and may come out of the crisis relatively better because of - Seattle Flu study.

Definitely. Having that early warning that the virus had been circulating for a month (which was knowable without the data, but the phylogenetic analysis made it incontrovertible), made the state & cities involved take action immediately. My brothers have been socially isolating for nearly three weeks now. It's too bad New York was so slow to act.

Note that they had a drop in number of tests on the 20th. However, they have seen reductions in % positive, which is good. However, I don't feel they are out of the woods yet - they really have to get as many carriers out of the general population as possible.

Except what happens after 30 days? We just start the dance over again, that's what.

In the absence of good therapeutics or a vaccine, we absolutely have to have MASSIVE testing capacity (would be good to have about 1 billion tests per year of capacity - we need on demand testing so everyone can KNOW THEIR STATUS), continuous GPS tracking of all people who are allowed to move, so we can figure out who was a contact, body temperature scanners in many locations, massive supply of masks and encourage their use by everyone in high risk situations, improved sanitation, massive increases in PPE production, a massive workforce of people to conduct contact tracing, test family members, enforce quarantines, etc.

Again, this is knowable NOW and has to be worked on NOW. That's why it is so important that the Trump administration and Congress take ACTION now to start putting this stuff in place. Otherwise we will be sitting idle for a long time...we can start working on all of this now.

60-80k deaths, peaking at 4-9k deaths PER WEEK.

Distributed across the country. That's a lot of death, but it's spread out all across the country. We're not there yet with coronavirus, and with the lockdown, hopefully we never get there. It's easy to get to that level because it takes relatively few infections.

I'd be shocked and legit panicked if 12k Americans dropped dead of coronavirus next week.

It's not going to be quite that much next week. But I would expect about 500-1000 Americans to be fatally infected (not die) next week - 40-50k additional people will likely be infected nationwide next week, unless something is done immediately to enforce a nationwide lockdown.

I've said previously I think we'll top out at 250k cases. But I'm getting pessimistic - when I made this prediction a few days ago I anticipated a full lockdown in all states. The federal gov't is being very, very slow, and they have not called for a nationwide lockdown. The message has to come from the top, and the talk of hoaxes and saying it is not that bad, has to stop. It is bad; we've shut down our economy for it! If we want to start up the economy again, everyone is going to need to get with the program ASAP.

In addition, the White House does not appear to understand the gravity of the situation and how much worse it is going to get - Trump is still talking about how he's "hoping we don't need a lockdown" (why at this point is it a big deal???), and fiddling in various other ways. The messaging is so poor and that is going to result in more transmissions.

So I think we'll probably get to 350k cases, with 3500-10k deaths (depending on how crunched individual cities get). This is also extending the timeline, and rather exiting mid-May, due to inaction, we'll be likely exiting end of May - assuming a full lockdown nationwide goes into effect this coming week.

New York City by itself, as others have mentioned, is scary. It is looking like it is going to get really bad there. At least they are shut down now, but I think they may need to take more steps if they cannot get enough testing capacity rapidly enough to identify all the carriers (basically test everyone) - obviously that is not going to happen in two weeks. I expect 2000 deaths in NYC - I hope I am wrong.

 

[EV Promoter]

I believe in Italy it's more common for the elderly to live with younger family members while in Germany it is much less common. At least that was one speculation I read.

Somebody mentioned something with the Ace2 gene expression and my SO got interested when I read her the post and did a deep dive into the medical literature. In her reading she was reading about the Ace2 link with east Asian men and came across some information that the part of Northern Italy that has the worst outbreak there are a number of Asian immigrants who moved there to operate Asian owned companies with presences in the region (such as manufacturing).

I haven't seen any data on the hospitalized and deaths in the affected part of Italy. I don't know if those immigrants have been hit harder than the native Italian population the same age or not.

About the Asian immigrant i can report something interesting. As it happens in many parts of the world, chinese in particular tends to create closed and tight community. In the north of Italy in particular an entire manufacturing industry has been setup by chinese with exclusively chinese emploiees. A massive industrial departement for cloths and various fabric in the city and outskirt of PRATO, near Florence, north of Italy. Well, the chinese community put theirselves in self-quarantine and with their typical discipline got Zero positives!

Coronavirus, a Prato la comunità cinese è in autoquarantena e registra zero contagi - Open

Just to say how racism it's a silly thing. And in the first days of the story, any asian were treated very badly in public. Then people realized how was silly and stopped. I'm sure you'll see some similiar pattern.

And let me say one thing: China as a case of study is for me extremely unreliable for the censorship. Italy will be the first country with a western transparency for the matter. Don't make your evalutions and computations on China numbers. Take Italy for this.... and things are grim...