Coronavirus

[TheTalkingMule]

Latest CDC estimates from experts are about 25% asymptomatic (and I think that is throughout the course of the infection).

Based on what? Cases we've identified through testing.

 

[Daniel in SD]

Trivia question for the antibody test enthralled:

Let's say I tested Covid-19 antigen positive 10 days ago and I feel better now but I still have a sore throat and I am still coughing
What is the likelihood of a positive antibody test ? Why ?

The test I referenced above says 100%.
For the home test Cellex just got approved here are the results of their very small study:

 

[Daniel in SD]

Based on what? Cases we've identified through testing.

Yes, say someone in a family gets sick with COVID-19. You then test the entire family. You use that data to determine the number of asymptomatic cases.
Or another example, Korea tested an entire 200,000 person church so they probably have a pretty good idea of the number of true asymptomatic cases are and they say it's about 30%.
South Korea is testing 200,000 members of a doomsday church linked to more than 60% of its coronavirus cases

 

[Papafox]

That's flat out false and an invalid argument.

The US FDA approved HCQ on scant scientific evidence. They literally did it on purely political reasons. I've read the French studies, to be blunt, they are *sugar*. If we were not in the middle of a pandemic the journal editors would have NEVER accepted them and sent them back to the researchers for "lack of significant evidence."

I've done journal article reviews, I've had articles published. But I'm sure you will tell me that I don't know what I'm talking about, again.

Let me repost this link:

Debate Ends Over Chloroquine as France Officially Sanctions Usage
Note: link has been corrected now

Allow me to quote the first paragraph:
"Days after beginning a large scale double blinded trial, the so called gold standard, France has now reached the conclusion chloroquine is recommended to treat corona."

The point I have been making is that after days of running a large, double-blind study of the effects of chloroquine in treating Covid-19, France decided to open the floodgates and allow the use of this treatment for Covid-19. You may argue that the timing is simply coincidence, I would argue that preliminary results in the large, double-blind study suggested that the treatment showed sufficient promise to pursue. We are allowed to disagree on this point.

@bkp_duke , I have never dismissed your viewpoints. They are indeed representative of medical professionals who insist on very solid, completed studies without issues before accepting the treatment. Your views are important and I hope you keep making them.

What I'm asking is that you don't dismiss data that I post as being nothing more than "hopeful". I think the data so far suggests more promise than simply being well-wishing. All that I am asking is that you don't try to silence my views, you just need to continue speaking your own views so that this forum can see a balance of the views and members can decide for themselves what to believe.

 

[bkp_duke]

Let me repost this link:

Debate Ends Over Chloroquine as France Officially Sanctions Usage

Allow me to quote the first paragraph:
"Days after beginning a large scale double blinded trial, the so called gold standard, France has now reached the conclusion chloroquine is recommended to treat corona."

The point I have been making is that after days of running a large, double-blind study of the effects of chloroquine in treating Covid-19, France decided to open the floodgates and allow the use of this treatment for Covid-19. You may argue that the timing is simply coincidence, I would argue that preliminary results in the large, double-blind study suggested that the treatment showed sufficient promise to pursue. We are allowed to disagree on this point.

@bkp_duke , I have never dismissed your viewpoints. They are indeed representative of medical professionals who insist on very solid, completed studies without issues before accepting the treatment. Your views are important and I hope you keep making them.

What I'm asking is that you don't dismiss data that I post as being nothing more than "hopeful". I think the data so far suggests more promise than simply being well-wishing. All that I am asking is that you don't try to silence my views, you just need to continue speaking your own views so that this forum can see a balance of the views and members can decide for themselves what to believe.

Your link goes nowhere.

EDIT - googled, and found the article. As stated previously, NO DATA. I don't trust anyone, I want to see the data for myself.

If France is that confident, they should release the data, even if preliminary.

 

[Daniel in SD]

Let me repost this link:

Debate Ends Over Chloroquine as France Officially Sanctions Usage

Allow me to quote the first paragraph:
"Days after beginning a large scale double blinded trial, the so called gold standard, France has now reached the conclusion chloroquine is recommended to treat corona."

The point I have been making is that after days of running a large, double-blind study of the effects of chloroquine in treating Covid-19, France decided to open the floodgates and allow the use of this treatment for Covid-19. You may argue that the timing is simply coincidence, I would argue that preliminary results in the large, double-blind study suggested that the treatment showed sufficient promise to pursue. We are allowed to disagree on this point.

@bkp_duke , I have never dismissed your viewpoints. They are indeed representative of medical professionals who insist on very solid, completed studies without issues before accepting the treatment. Your views are important and I hope you keep making them.

What I'm asking is that you don't dismiss data that I post as being nothing more than "hopeful". I think the data so far suggests more promise than simply being well-wishing. All that I am asking is that you don't try to silence my views, you just need to continue speaking your own views so that this forum can see a balance of the views and members can decide for themselves what to believe.

You are completely misrepresenting what's going on. Why not quote what the French government is actually saying?

 

[Daniel in SD]

Your link goes nowhere.

Debate Ends Over Chloroquine as France Officially Sanctions Usage
How could it not be trustworthy with a domain name like that?

 

[dfwatt]

Even if in the passage of time, demographic statisticians establish the mortality rate of CV-19 substantially below the circa 1% talked of by most, you need to explain how you think a V-Shaped recovery will materialise given the hydrogen bombs that have already been detonated in the world‘s labour markets and to corporate cashflow.

Yes in so many ways modeling economic activity is really like modeling biology. There are so many interacting cells each promoting the health and well-being of another. I know this is probably not any brilliant macroeconomic insight because I'm way outside my areas of expertise but it's always struck me that a healthy economy is in a sense a lot of money recycling. A lot of loops. Just like in biology you have a lot of deep interdependence and recursion. And once you disturb those relationships in a deep way it's not easy to reinstantiate them all.

Once the system goes far enough out of whack homeostatically in biology the organism dies.

Wait... Does that mean if we resuscitate the economy from the dead it's a zombie economy? Ha!

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

Based on what? Cases we've identified through testing.

Presymptomatic Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 — Singapore, January 23 ...

Serial Interval of COVID-19 among Publicly Reported Confirmed Cases

https://www.who.int/docs/default-so...na-joint-mission-on-covid-19-final-report.pdf

Asymptomatic and Presymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 Infections in Residents...

It's more than just that. They've done particular case studies as referenced above. And as mentioned, we do have some data from situations like Korea, giving us an reasonably firm upper bound on the number of asymptomatic cases.

Also, based on the fact that Korea has been able to mostly contain their outbreak. They could never do that if there really were a huge number of asymptomatic cases. We've gone through this discussion before with you...right?

Or another example, Korea tested an entire 200,000 person church so they probably have a pretty good idea of the number of true asymptomatic cases are and they say it's about 30%.

It's worth noting that this 30% number includes presymptomatic and asymptomatic carriers. So the actual number of truly asymptomatic carriers is probably a bit lower than 30% - many people eventually develop symptoms. (See this article for that statement.)

Up to 30% of coronavirus cases asymptomatic | DW | 24.03.2020


To be clear, even 10% asymptomatic cases is a huge problem. I hope it's lower than that - sounds like it could be as low as 6% or so just squinting and reading between the lines (30% followed by the reporting that 80% of asymptomatic cases become symptomatic). But that may be optimistic.

 

[jhm]

Here's a graph of the Positives per million versus Days since PPM exceeded 50 for the top 20 states (data up to 04/01):

View attachment 528732

The legend on the right is the order based on the latest PPM. Data is from covidtracking.com's states-daily.csv.

Nice. You might want to try grouping states into regions. See this for idea, List of regions of the United States - Wikipedia. The census regions are quite reasonable hierarchical.

 

[SMAlset]

So a group of doctors have worked out a way to use CPAP machines (like the ones Tesla was told could be donated and did) to use as ventilators in the ICU. Story in TechCrunch (you might have to scroll to see):

Sleep apnea retrofit designed by doctors and engineers could help address ventilator shortage – TechCrunch

Website of company collecting CPAPs for conversion:
VENTILATOR SOS

 

[alloverx]

Domestic Violence cases was very briefly discussed in the (NY) Cuomo video today. Dont recall the details but the video is on C-Span.

 

[dhanson865]

A different view of the data from /r/dataisbeautiful/comments/fu56n3/oc_tracking_covid19_cases_deaths_death_rate_and/

 

[ohmman]

You are completely misrepresenting what's going on. Why not quote what the French government is actually saying?

In addition, the EU hasn't sanctioned its use outside of clinical trials, except for existing approved uses.

Another small study (n=11) just came out of France that finds no evidence for antiviral clearance from HCQ.

 

[kbM3]

With appropriate protective gear, testing and sanitary practices, I don't see why Tesla Fremont couldn't re-open sooner. As you may be hinting at with the reference to nearby apartments, the biggest challenge may be transit since many employees take BART. Having said that, I'd be shocked if they re-open in the next month due to politics. Unfortunately, politics led to delayed action at the beginning and will probably lead to delayed re-opening.

It’s not just Fremont and Nevada. All of the 1000+ suppliers have to be producing. And this piecemeal shutdowns at different times across the U.S. and the rest of the world, means it will be hard to align schedules.

 

[EinSV]

It’s not just Fremont and Nevada. All of the 1000+ suppliers have to be producing. And this piecemeal shutdowns at different times across the U.S. and the rest of the world, means it will be hard to align schedules.

True. Germany was putting together a working group to develop a plan to reopen auto manufacturing across Europe. Perhaps a similar effort is needed in the US.

 

[jhm]

disclaimer: CFR is unreliable during an outbreak

I think they are just hard to interpret. If you look at growth rates for both cases and deaths, you obviously want to see both decline down to zero. But deaths lag cases.

If you are making progress controlling the spread, then the case growth rate will decline faster and become lower than the death growth rate. In this positive situation, the numerator of the nCFR (deaths) is growing faster than the denominator (cases), so nCFR is growing bigger each day. So this is scenario in which you are happy that nCFR is growing larger each day.

Now suppose your medical system has be overwhelmed with so many cases that quality of care is compromised and the death rate is elevated. As case growth slows, the medical system recovers and more cases recover with better care. In this case you could have nCFR can decline. So this is a scenario in which you are happy that nCFR is growing smaller each day.

So the context makes a big difference. I think that for most countries right now the first situation is the more likely condition. For example, consider Italy in chart below. It is definitely a good thing that Italy has be slowing the spread (declining case growth rates), but this is driving up the nCFR. For a more complicated case, look at the US in second chart below. Early on the US had case growth higher than death growth for a few weeks. So the nCFR curve declined for awhile. But in the last couple of weeks the US has started to decrease spread even as death rates were climbing due to case growth weeks ahead. So the nCFR bottomed out and is starting to climb. We actually need it to climb much higher in response to slowing spread.

 

[NicoV]

Heard this just on the local TV news (vtm news of 22h30): In the university hospital of Leuven they started testing the effectiveness of an existing antiviral molecule on 160 patients. It’s is not one of the medicines currently typically used in Corona treatments. In lab tests, the molecule was significantly more effective than the currently used antivirals. The molecule was identified by the Rega-institute.
The Rega institute got funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation a month ago to test 15000 existing molecules for their effectiveness against covid-19, as the Rega institute seemed to be the only institute in the world capable of running such a high amount of tests in a couple of weeks due to their fully automated 24/7 test facility: Bill Gates bestelt grote coronastudie in Leuven

 

[deonb]

Some people on this thread reminds me of this guy from Contagion:

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

If you are making progress controlling the spread, then the case growth rate will decline faster and become lower than the death growth rate.

Or if you aren't testing enough...remember we likely have about 2-3 million infections in the country today (at lot of which are currently presymptomatic). We've been saturating the testing capacity for at least a week now as far as I can tell. It looks like the last two days it has finally begun to scale up again, but likely we're still saturated, as the testing capacity has only been growing by 20% per day.


In other news, keep an eye on the development of contact tracing and focus on this by the "feral" government in the next few days. The sooner this starts to happen, the more likely it is that we'll be able to exit this towards the end of May. So far, no word on this, no clear action in the foreground. It's something you'd think they would be talking about. Instead we're still talking about masks (which are super important, but we're a few weeks behind is my point - gotta catch up!).

Josh Michaud on Twitter

Nice paper on the transmission dynamics, and the development of an app. There are a lot of efforts on this - but they will need to be coordinated by the feral government, and buy-in from the people and the courts to make it legal (it'll presumably be opt-in, but you can't go outside if you're not being tracked).

Quantifying SARS-CoV-2 transmission suggests epidemic control with digital contact tracing