Coronavirus

[AlanSubie4Life]

For me it was more the way she compared coming up with an AIDS test to coronavirus

For me it was the scarves.

In other news:

San Diego County down to 3% positive. (Down from around 5% positive a week ago with a similar number of tests.) They must be doing targeted testing to achieve these results. Not sure how we’re going to handle new introductions though, on an ongoing basis. They get so much momentum before they are found, potentially.

Need so much testing. On one hand, I feel good about the San Diego trajectory. On the other hand, I am concerned about the longer term plan. How can we control the federally controlled areas like the borders, the filthy filthy Navy ( ), and the airports? They’ve got to have those areas blocked off. Normally I am not for onerous border restrictions, but I do feel like in this case we need some sort of testing requirement.

Even after all of that we have to worry about a new dose of the scourge being imported from LA every weekend.

At least masks are required.

https://www.sandiegocounty.gov/content/dam/sdc/hhsa/programs/phs/Epidemiology/COVID-19 Percentage Positive.pdf

 

[Daniel in SD]

San Diego County down to 3% positive. (Down from around 5% positive a week ago with a similar number of tests.) They must be doing targeted testing to achieve these results.

What do you mean by this? Completely untargeted (i.e. random) testing would get an even lower positive rate.
Hopefully this means that we’re testing a lot of contacts and not that people are just becoming hypochondriacs.
I agree that the peeing section in the swimming pool could be a problem.

 

[Papafox]

Here's a more in depth summary of how COVID19 is transmitted that goes beyond the simple 6 ft. social distancing rule. I see it as a practical guide.
The risks - know them - avoid them
It's a very readable 12 minute article. I found it helpful for explaining why a meat-packing plant is such an infectious place whereas the beach on a hot day is not so much.

 

[Daniel in SD]

Here's a more in depth summary of how COVID19 is transmitted that goes beyond the simple 6 ft. social distancing rule. I see it as a practical guide.
The risks - know them - avoid them
It's a very readable 12 minute article. I found it helpful for explaining why a meat-packing plant is such an infectious place whereas the beach on a hot day is not so much.

I’m confused by the concept of infectious dose. Is there a minimum infectious dose or is it simply a matter of probability? Does ten times the dose just mean there is ten times the probability of infection? Or is there actually some mechanism by which there is a minimum dose?

 

[Papafox]

I’m confused by the concept of infectious dose. Is there a minimum infectious dose or is it simply a matter of probability? Does ten times the dose just mean there is ten times the probability of infection? Or is there actually some mechanism by which there is a minimum dose?

There are quite a few articles on minimum infectious dose if you Google that phrase.
Here's one from a researcher who suggests for COVID19 it might be around 100 virus particles, but he says we don't know yet.

Fortunately, some infections require a rather high infectious dose, which is why no one gets HIV from a door handle.

The concept of minimum infectious dose, even if we don't know what that dose is, helps to explain transmission methods and which environments are most likely to produce transmission.

 

[Norbert]

I think we may be starting to see some meaningful decline in cased growth and death. According to my smart-ass models, ultimate projections have been dropping to 1,925k cases and 119k deaths. I watched this drop over the weekend, but did not post here as I thought it was just the weekly dip. Tuesdays and Wednesdays tend to be strong number days, but the ultimate projections have not gone back up.

It depends on what you mean by "we". New York and New Jersey, yes. But if you imagine those two death numbers back at their high level, then we have a high number altogether, today. I don't know if a more general decline is immanent, but it hasn't happened yet, as far as I can tell. Sorry to say.

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

What do you mean by this? Completely untargeted (i.e. random) testing would get an even lower positive rate.
Hopefully this means that we’re testing a lot of contacts and not that people are just becoming hypochondriacs.
I agree that the peeing section in the swimming pool could be a problem.

Yeah that is true. I guess what I was saying was, with aggressive targeted tracing, there would be fewer and fewer people to do targeted tracing on, as time passes. There wouldn’t be as much transmission so you’d be looking for the residual background activity for the remainder of the tests, which would be very low, and bring down the average over time.

I guess I was stating the obvious that they were doing targeted testing. If you did limited random testing, you’d expect really low positivity at first, but you’d see it rise over time, since you wouldn’t have enough testing to cover the outbreak properly. But the starting point for the positive results would have been a lot lower than 7% or whatever...

I think for sure we are testing a lot of high risk contacts (though in many cases, according to the county, they simply assume close contacts are positive and do not test them - they just quarantine them - probably more for younger folks since for older folks there is some benefit to being identified as positive early). I hope at this point we are trying to cut down asymptomatic/pre-symptomatic transmission,

Would be interesting to know their exact testing strategy.

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

Bill Hanage on Twitter

Twitter thread referencing the French estimates/model and the Spanish serology study which were linked to here yesterday.

One conclusion he makes is that it is not really safe to open schools as long as the virus is circulating, It is possible that children are less contagious, but they still have a lot of contacts:

I’m surprised @EinSV didn’t give us his expert summary of the Spanish study yet. Maybe he was busy and tomorrow he’ll update us on what to conclude?

 

[PeterJA]

You’re honestly claiming the four letter word CURE doesn’t appear in your dictionary? Just let that sink in for a moment. Like if The Cure comes up on the radio do you instead hear The Who? Ridiculous.

You're honestly claiming I said that? Better read my post again.

 

[FreshPrince]

For anyone who likes to advocate Hubei/Wuhan style shelter-in-place:

 

[bkp_duke]

It is interesting reading and mostly above my pay grade. The D614 mutation is not in the binding domain however, so the conjecture about positive steric changes will require more evidence.

Actually, that interpretation is not correct.

The mutation causes a substantial change in intra-protein binding, which appears to "pull" part of the protein. This would result in a relatively large conformational shift in the surface of the Spike protein (far larger than could be done with a point mutation on the surface).

It's like . . . tightening a bolt on a long steel rod. While the changes on the bolt end could be just a few mm, on the other end you could see movement of inches due to an amplified effect.

 

[dfwatt]

For anyone who likes to advocate Hubei/Wuhan style shelter-in-place:

I must have missed something. I'm not sure anyone on this forum has advocated for a Chinese style dictatorship. Your posting suggests that there are two choices - an incompetent klusterfuk free-for-all (like we have now) or Wuhan style totalitarianism. There is something in the middle - competent epidemiology informing public health planning and action.

I guess you must have missed the bulletin where fifteen countries with fewer resources than ours have already basically beaten the Coronavirus. But this required 1) testing at scale from the get-go; 2) contract tracing and isolation for positives away from home so that they don't infect others in family; 3) masks and social distancing compliance; 4) strong initial lockdowns and travel restrictions. And without #1 (testing at scale from the first penetration by COVID-19), the rest doesn't and can't happen.

So your complaint about Chinese dictatorship, while valid, is also misdirected. We had two months to prepare, plan, and organize. We frittered that away with Trumpian denial, incompetence about testing at many scales and places, and refusal to see the reality in front of us. We are bearing the costs of that collection of mistakes now, and will be for a while. Unless we get testing at scale (and then contact tracing and isolation of new cases to prevent transmission chains from going exponential again), reopening can't really happen, as the spike in infections will quickly crash the reopening efforts. These are the simple, biologically determined, facts on the ground.

 

[cusetownusa]

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Brazil is going to pass France on this chart in what, 2 weeks or so?

doesn’t Brazil have a much larger population than France? Not surprised that they will pass them with total deaths.

What is an easy way to look at the numbers on a per capita basis?

 

[dhanson865]

doesn’t Brazil have a much larger population than France? Not surprised that they will pass them with total deaths.

What is an easy way to look at the numbers on a per capita basis?

COVID-19 #CoronaVirus Infographic Datapack — Information is Beautiful has per capita numbers in the second graph (when it loads) if you like the visual or worldmeter has it in numbers, I just didn't include that portion

https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/attachments/upload_2020-5-13_0-19-19-png.541218/ has per capita from the other day. Brazil doesn't even make the chart yet.

But if you look at the daily numbers they are rising so fast they will be on there in a few weeks.

 

[GFernandes]

So the excess mortality in Euromomo zone is back to the base.

From their bulletin:
"For the EuroMOMO network as a whole, from week 10, 2020 and as of week 19, there were over 152,000 excess deaths estimated in total, including 14000,00 in the age group ≥65 years and 12,000 in the 15-64 years age group. This time period includes part of the influenza season as well as the start of the COVID-19 pandemic."

Now lets compare to 2014/2015 bulletin, that season where we lockdown the entire world:
"In 15 European countries that report mortality data to the EuroMOMO project, an excess winter mortality rate of 231.3 per 100 000 above the seasonal baseline was observed. This excess was noted for more than 11 consecutive weeks and was the highest of the last five winter seasons. The observed excess coincided with influenza activity as determined by the weekly proportion of influenza-positive sentinel specimens reported to ECDC [4, 5]. This excess roughly corresponds to 217 000 deaths among the 94 million elderly citizens (65 years of age or older) of the 28 EU Member States. "

Before the "disagree" posts, bear in mind this is not my opinion, its just facts presented by Euromomo.

y t

 

[Daniel in SD]

Before the "disagree" posts, bear in mind this is not my opinion, its just facts presented by Euromomo.

Why would anyone disagree? Doesn't this line up pretty well with reported COVID-19 deaths in Europe?

 

[Doggydogworld]

If you did limited random testing, you’d expect really low positivity at first, but you’d see it rise over time, since you wouldn’t have enough testing to cover the outbreak properly.

If lockdown brought Rt below 1 random testing would show a decline over time with no contact tracing whatsoever.

San Antonio (Bexar county) in TX does contact tracing. They break cases down into travel-related, close contact and community spread. Positivity is down to 4%. nCFR is a bit under 3%, hospitalizations are 15% of confirmed cases and deaths are 5% of resolved cases. These all indicate they caught about 1/3rd of total cases since start of outbreak, implying ~6k or 0.3% of the population has been infected. COVID Projections estimates TX overall is at 0.7%, so maybe San Antonio's contact tracing helped. It hasn't brought Rt down well below 1.0, though. After a spate of early cases and deaths in a single nursing home the numbers have been pretty steady.

Bexar county is opening up somewhat but so far requires masks. Drive-through testing is available without symptoms. IMHO they have enough test and trace in place to detect outbreaks, but not enough to control them without social distancing measures.

 

[gene]

I hope you guys are listening to the hearings live on c-Span with Dr. Bright.

 

[FreshPrince]

I must have missed something. I'm not sure anyone on this forum has advocated for a Chinese style dictatorship. Your posting suggests that there are two choices - an incompetent klusterfuk free-for-all (like we have now) or Wuhan style totalitarianism. There is something in the middle - competent epidemiology informing public health planning and action.

I guess you must have missed the bulletin where fifteen countries with fewer resources than ours have already basically beaten the Coronavirus. But this required 1) testing at scale from the get-go; 2) contract tracing and isolation for positives away from home so that they don't infect others in family; 3) masks and social distancing compliance; 4) strong initial lockdowns and travel restrictions. And without #1 (testing at scale from the first penetration by COVID-19), the rest doesn't and can't happen.

So your complaint about Chinese dictatorship, while valid, is also misdirected. We had two months to prepare, plan, and organize. We frittered that away with Trumpian denial, incompetence about testing at many scales and places, and refusal to see the reality in front of us. We are bearing the costs of that collection of mistakes now, and will be for a while. Unless we get testing at scale (and then contact tracing and isolation of new cases to prevent transmission chains from going exponential again), reopening can't really happen, as the spike in infections will quickly crash the reopening efforts. These are the simple, biologically determined, facts on the ground.

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I agree for the most part. I take exception to any data that is coming from China and any conclusions that are based on that. In similar fashion cases/million is a bad stat to go by as data is heavily influenced on policies on who qualifies to be tested and test availability.

Death rate or trend of negative to positive ratio are much more accurate metrics.

We have flattened the curve. Current measures, work from home if possible, cloth mask wearing, distancing and PPE requirements at public facing businesses should keep the reproduction number at manageable levels.

I no longer believe that contact tracing and large scale testing is a necessity as, from what I read, asymptomatic spread is rare. Singapore had estimated asymptomatic spread to be low.and one study out of Germany that claimed it had retracted it's findings.

The biggest problem, that quarantine does not solve, will be managing COVID-19 in September when kids go back to school. It'll be basically be reverse of whooping cough where snoty kids will be infecting their parents and grandparents.

 

[dhanson865]

I don't normally post politics themed content but this one is congress and coronavirus related.

Buying and selling of stock by U.S. senators alongside the S&P 500. Analysis of individual senators’ trading in comments. [OC] : dataisbeautiful

The FBI seized Sen. Richard Burr’s cellphone yesterday in investigation of his stock sales linked to coronavirus. According to the financial disclosures I’ve scraped, Burr sold 29 publicly traded assets on February 13th in amounts that varied between $1,000-$250,000. This was his most active day of trading in our dataset, and it came approximately a week before the market began its 30% slide.

Since 2019, Burr has the 2nd highest % return on his trades out of all current U.S. senators.

Lastly, Burr is one of 3 senators who regularly files disclosures by hand instead of electronically. There isn’t anything illegal about this, but hand-filed documents are much harder to scrape data from as they’re essentially just a picture of a handwritten filing. I’m still working on entering data from hand-filed reports, but hope to have them up to date on the site by the end of the week.

Aside from the selloff before the coronavirus (largely led by Burr, Loeffler, Feinstein, and Inhofe), the selloff right before the drop of January 2018 also stood out to me.

This selloff was carried by David Perdue (R), Pat Toomey (R), and Shelley Moore Capito (R) all shedding large amounts of stock.