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I'm out for the night. Wish everyone the best and happy health. Will be a while before I am on tomorrow. Going to take the P3D through the nice twisty canyon roads in the early AM and enjoy some of this beautiful country and world we live in.

Old Julian Highway from Ramona to Witch Creek? Highland Valley Road? What are your favorites? Mine is Santa Ysabel to Lake Henshaw through Mesa Grande, then the East Grade to Mt. Palomar.
 
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I posted this earlier, but clearly folks missed it.
Coronavirus

In any case, I see you calling it a PCR test. But they say they use enzymes, rather than thermal cycling to let the rna stands multiply. Is it still considered a RT PCR? I do see they try to distinguish themselves from PCR. So questioning your assertion.

PCR is a type of Nucleic Acid Amplification test. There are others such as LCR (Ligase Chain Reaction developed by Abbott), TMA (Transcription Mediated Amplification - one of, if not the first commercially available Isothermal nucleic acid amplification methods), etc.

PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) gets its name because it uses the enzyme DNA Polymerase to start the process of amplification (adding free nucleotides to the 3' end of a target specific primer). The three main steps were denaturation to split the strands apart (DNA or complimentary DNA) by heat, annealing of target specific primers, extension by adding free nucleotides to the 3' end of the primer.

Thermal Cycling was used to repeat the denaturation, annealing and extension process. When I first started molecular testing in the early 90s, the typical tests had something like 30-32 thermal cycles to get enough copies to detect. Isothermal amplification doesn't have to use the conventional heat up and cool down for the amplification process to occur.

RT-PCR used to mean Reverse Transcription PCR because it makes a complimentary DNA (cDNA) copy from single stranded RNA. It is the cDNA that is amplified in RT-PCR.

I now see the term RT PCR being used to describe Real Time PCR. This allows the monitoring of the amplification process in real time as opposed to the end product. In this case, a negative sample would have to wait until the end of the amplification process to determine the result.
 
I found this webpage today, seems pretty interesting. I guess we'll see how well the model holds up. I haven't read through all of their assumptions. Obviously, depending on what is done to restrict travel between states, it will dramatically impact the results even at this point. (I don't know whether their upper and lower bounds account for some of this uncertainty - which is huge.)

Looks like peak deaths on ~April 14th, with integrated deaths around ~81k. Lots of nice plots you can scroll around, etc. Also has state by state breakdown so you can see the delays on peaks in different states. I should note that I've seen models showing a much more optimistic model for Oregon, for example - so I hope that this is all way too pessimistic.

IHME | COVID-19 Projections

All pretty horrifying. I hope they are wrong, though these numbers were within my expectations. Aligns fairly well with my wild guess of a few days ago of ~10,000 deaths by the end of next week. I'd say peak fear will probably show up next week!

Seems very unlikely that the lockdown will be able to stop until the end of May - and then only in some states. Note that practically, the upper and lower bounds don't make much difference (maybe 1-2 weeks) to when we can "stop." (Whatever "stop" means.) I guess the good news is we should have plenty of time to plan the exit strategy! "Plenty" when it comes to this administration may not be enough time though.

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A thread I found dismantling this model:

Carl T. Bergstrom on Twitter
 
A primer on CFR covering/summarizing what has been discussed here:

Dr Emma Hodcroft on Twitter

In the extreme, you could have a CFR of 100%: If you have no testing except to determine the cause of death.

Or even more than 100%, if for some administrative reason you don't count a post-mortem diagnosis as a test case.

Or 0.0% (zero), if you start testing before anyone has died.
 
Here is a very useful table from the Florida DOH taken from my above link
CFR is evolving but I think the relative CFR per age group can be calculated with some confidence.

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I would hate to have to rely on a GM built ventilator. Especially one that was being ordered to be produced regardless. Remember all the nonfunctional torpedoes during WWII? I'd guess there would be lots of nonfunctional ventilators from GM.

Ventec has the design and is lead on the project. GM is working in a support roll.
The President is once again yelling at the wrong people.

It was the Navy shipyard that wrecked the torpedo program during WWII. That's what happens when there is no oversight. The Navy was too proud to admit they were in over their heads.
 
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I plotted the daily and 7-day average growth rates based on Coronavirus Update (Live): 622,157 Cases and 28,799 Deaths from COVID-19 Virus Outbreak - Worldometer figures.
My initial idea is to exclude China and South Korea from the total as they only have a few cases each day, but a high total number of cases.
Furthermore, I added an individual US graph.

My interpretation: We are slowly reducing the growth in Europe (peak of absolut new daily infections hopefully soon in a few countries) and the US seems to be on the right track as well (hard to interpret the timeline here, as testing only started in the last week on a larger scale).

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NIce work. I'd be inclined to try rolling averages of say ... 4 days

Thanks for your suggestion. My 7-day averages were motivated based on the idea, that testing capacity during the weekend might be negatively impacted (especially in Europe) and I wanted to get rid of such noise in the data.
Please find attached rolling 4-day average graphs.

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