Coronavirus

[KarenRei]

The Korean CDC reports covid-19 here
KCDC

From the last two batches, The 9am report found 595 cases and the 4pm reported additional 210 cases.

The latest confirmed cases are ~ 800 daily but the new suspected cases are 4x higher. I don't know if suspected means awaiting testing or awaiting confirmatory testing after a positive screening test. The historical results are that ~ 1/2 of the suspected cases are confirmed.

Well, there certainly was a spike on what I have listed as 28 February (but they seem to have credited to slightly later, 29 February), to 910 (315+595). But before that I see 427 (and the day before that, 449), and the day after that, 595. So I'm not sure that "800 daily" is a good description at this point.

 

[EVNow]

Iran's daily toll today is already up to 385. But they need to be finding thousands per day. :Þ

It's unfortunate, but people tend to misinterpret the high numbers out of Italy and South Korea as being bad signs and the low numbers out of Iran as good signs. Just the opposite is the case.

Trade sanction kills people.

 

[lascavarian]

Here is an important tweet-storm from a scientist FredHutch looking into the community outbreak in WA.

Trevor Bedford on Twitter

The team at the @seattleflustudy have sequenced the genome the #COVID19 community case reported yesterday from Snohomish County, WA, and have posted the sequence publicly to http://gisaid.org. There are some enormous implications here.

This strongly suggests that there has been cryptic transmission in Washington State for the past 6 weeks.

I believe we're facing an already substantial outbreak in Washington State that was not detected until now due to narrow case definition requiring direct travel to China.​

I think it is wrong to assume this has happenned only in Snohomish. We probably have such cases in most US cities by now. The reason Korea has 1,000 cases and US only a handful is the # of tests done. Korea did 10k tests in a week. US has done 500 or less.

CDC has completely bungled the response. They should have closed the travel / quarnatined everyone coming from affected countries in Jan.

ps : Market is going to find out what happens when you have a conspiracy minded, ineffective president and equally bad administration who are more worried about controlling information than controlling the outbreak.

Point of clarification. The FredHutch referred to is really a respected Cancer Research Center in Seattle. I used to visit there years ago in support of research my employer was conducting.

Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center - Wikipedia

 

[SageBrush]

Well, there certainly was a spike on what I have listed as 28 February (but they seem to have credited to slightly later, 29 February), to 910 (315+595). But before that I see 427 (and the day before that, 449), and the day after that, 595. So I'm not sure that "800 daily" is a good description at this point.

I summed the 9am and 4pm (local times) reports from March 1

 

[SarahsDad]

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner, said on "Face the Nation" this morning that he suspects "hundreds, if not thousands" of undiagnosed Coronavirus cases in the US already, due to inadequate availability of testing. He said private industry by next week will be able to provide 10,000 testing kits per day, up to 20,000 kits a day within the next 2 weeks. I'm afraid US numbers will shoot up once testing is more widely available. More stock market pain, I suspect.

Transcript: Scott Gottlieb on "Face the Nation," March 1, 2020 - CBS News

 

[mrdoubleb]

Did they really start "testing masses"? AFAIK they only test people who have been to risk areas or had contact to infected people. Therefor IF (just a possibility) a much larger amount of people than we see now are infected and only have mild symptoms, they would still not be included in the statistics we are looking at.

I did't mean the US, was thinking if China, Korea.

 

[SageBrush]

@KarenRei ,

I looked at the KCDC website again.
They are making reports 3 times a day and seem to have testing results from twice a day, ~ 9am and ~ 4pm
The second AM report consolidates a 24 hour interval that spans two dates.

So the March 1 report of the most recent two batches is 376+210. I wonder how the weekend affects sample delivery and testing

 

[SageBrush]

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner, said on "Face the Nation" this morning that he suspects "hundreds, if not thousands" of undiagnosed Coronavirus cases in the US already, due to inadequate availability of testing. He said private industry by next week will be able to provide 10,000 testing kits per day, up to 20,000 kits a day within the next 2 weeks. I'm afraid US numbers will shoot up once testing is more widely available. More stock market pain, I suspect.

Transcript: Scott Gottlieb on "Face the Nation," March 1, 2020 - CBS News

China is able to test 2M a week

 

[bkp_duke]

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner, said on "Face the Nation" this morning that he suspects "hundreds, if not thousands" of undiagnosed Coronavirus cases in the US already, due to inadequate availability of testing. He said private industry by next week will be able to provide 10,000 testing kits per day, up to 20,000 kits a day within the next 2 weeks. I'm afraid US numbers will shoot up once testing is more widely available. More stock market pain, I suspect.

Transcript: Scott Gottlieb on "Face the Nation," March 1, 2020 - CBS News

And, correspondingly, we will have a more accurate read of the mortality rate. They physician in me just doesn't believe the 2% number, and even is suspicious that the 0.7% is higher than reality.

 

[defc0n]

To a second degree approximation the people dying are in hospitals, and those people are tested.

yup.

 

[defc0n]

Why is it obvious that less people are dying from it? If people are not tested, the resulting deaths will also not be reported. So we´d have both a underreporting of cases and deaths, leaving the lethality ratio unchanged in first approximation.

not to be mean but if you don’t understand why then there is not much hope in me discussing this with you

 

[KarenRei]

And, correspondingly, we will have a more accurate read of the mortality rate. They physician in me just doesn't believe the 2% number, and even is suspicious that the 0.7% is higher than reality.

The long-term trend of most zoonotic disease mortality rates is downward regardless.

Cases of H1N1 "bird flu" tend to have extremely high mortality rates when they first jump to humans. But you don't spread if you kill most of your hosts. The markets stopped caring about the 2009 pandemic when it became clear that it had become no deadlier than a typical seasonal flu.

 

[EVNow]

And, correspondingly, we will have a more accurate read of the mortality rate. They physician in me just doesn't believe the 2% number, and even is suspicious that the 0.7% is higher than reality.

I think mortality rate is probably not easily established.

What we should be worried about is # of hospitalizations needed. I wonder whether we have enough beds to handle the cases - China put up new hospitals almost over-night.

In terms of economy - higher the # of cases, # of fatalities, the higher the possibility of shutdowns and likely recession.

I mean - one AP fatality and people call for shutting down AP. We'll probably see thousands, if not 100s of thousands of fatalities.

 

[Right_Said_Fred]

The virus today showed up in my own town (a woman who was in the IC of our local hospital for a week before being tested). The hospital is now closed off for new patients as they think doctors, nurses and patients may have been infected. Schools are staying closed for this reason. We now have 10 confirmed cases in The Netherlands.

In Italy the number of confirmed cases has grown to almost 1700. Today 5 people died, bringing the total number of casualties to 34.

In Germany the number of confirmed cases went up to 129, which is almost a doubling of the 66 that were known yesterday.

In the UK there were 12 new cases, bringing the total to 35.

 

[hobbes]

To a second degree approximation the people dying are in hospitals, and those people are tested.

Wouldn´t think that everybody in a hospital dying of pneumonia will be tested for all virus types. But this will be different in different countries and I don´t have any source to cite.

 

[SageBrush]

My personal opinion is that mRNA vaccination runs counter to the evolution of the immune system designed to identify and process foreign protein. I presume that mRNA is taken up to some degrees by mammalian cells and some of it is transcribed, but those proteins do not get the post-transcription processing that would occur in a virus infected cell and the natural history of immunization to newly produced virus does not take place.

To continue this somewhat-tangent a little bit more ...

The human immune system has two highly evolved systems: one is to reject/kill foreign cells and viruses; the other is to tightly regulate the first to prevent self-destruction. My suspicion is that mRNA vaccination does not sidestep the self-tolerance mechanisms -- or enough of them -- to end up with a potent immune response. This is particularly true when it comes to viral illness since the cytotoxic arm of the immune response are at least as important as the humoral (antibody) arm.

 

[SageBrush]

Wouldn´t think that everybody in a hospital dying of pneumonia will be tested for all virus types.

Right you are, but they will be tested for covid-19 if the test is available.

Your reasoning is going downhill fast.
Imagine if a 20 year old, IV drug abusing homosexual male shows up at a hospital with Kaposi Sarcoma and Pneumonia clinically consistent with PCP. Would you say 'I doubt every virus is going to be tested' or would you say 'any half competent physician will test for HIV" ?

 

[avoigt]

Germany is not declining, there is something wrong with your data. This is data from WHO (via COVID-19-Fälle in Deutschland – Wikipedia):

IMHO it would make sense to only call a decline if that happens for a moving average over a few days or even a week.

Also, do you have source for cases in Germany being an "offshoot of Italy"? AFAIK the first cases in Bavaria were traced back to a Chinese business person visiting. Most of the new cases can be traced back to an event in the state of Northrhine-Westfalia where one person infected quite a few others. However, for him it is still unclear where he got infected in first place. Only a few have been linked to being infected during a vacation in Italy.

To put this into context:

129 cases have been recorded over time but only 113 are active cases in Germany with 70 of those alone in Nordrhine-Westfalia and all 80 could be tracked back to 1 person as the original host.

A few Hundred Germans in Nordrhine Westfalia that have been isolated before because on case was on a carnival party has been released with no symptoms this weekend.

From all active 113 cases only two are more severe ill and we have still 0 deaths in Germany. All the rest have mild symptoms and are isolated at home.

Given a well build healthcare system and an attitude to follow the instructions of the Government I don't expect Germany to be a country where numbers increase strongly. The will likely increase for a while but they close schools for instance now pretty quickly if a case has been found and that the right thing to do to avoid it spreading further.

Time will tell

 

[SageBrush]

all 80 could be tracked back to 1 person as the original host.

Does that mean all 80 came into contact with a super-source, or does it mean that a string of contacts can be traced back to one person ?

I suspect it is the latter, so I don't think it matters much.

 

[aubreymcfato]

Italy cases are spiking: ~1700 as of now,mainly in Lombardia, ~250 in Emilia-Romagna (where I live).
This will be the second week schools are closed.
My personal life (and the one of my friends and family) is more or less the same, but let's see how it plays out.

Frustrated tongue Emoticons and Smileys , =P, , , ,

Normally in English people use : P, but I use :Þ because IMHO it looks more natural (human tongues don't come out of the side of the mouth).

FWIW, I've read and used for years those tongue emoticons as expression of joke or jest, not frustration. Go figure.