Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19) (SARS-CoV-2) [2020]

So at least be consistent and delete all posts starting from post #1334 in this thread (from post #1334 to this one).
 
2019 Novel Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19) for Dallas County Texas
https://www.dallascounty.org/departments/dchhs/2019-novel-coronavirus.php

April 10, 2020 - 1537 confirmed cases - 25 deaths

1537 confirmed cases up 105 over yesterday and three new deaths
Those 105 new cases represent a 7.3% increase over the last day

Increases (by percent) over the last 15 days:
21.0%, 19.6%, 11.1%, 12.5%, 14.9%, 15.8%, 13.7%, 10.8%, 10.2%, 9.6%, 3.9%, 9.2%, 5.0%, 8.2% and now 7.3%

Increases (by count) over the last 15 days:
+64, +72, +49, +61, +82, +100, +100, +90, +94, +97, +43, +106, +63, +108 and now +105

Dallas County Health and Human Services is reporting 105 additional positive cases of COVID-19 today, bringing the total case count in Dallas County to 1,537. The 23rd, 24th, and 25th deaths were reported, including a woman in her 90's who was a resident of a long-term care facility in the City of Dallas, and 2 men in their 80's who were residents of the City of Dallas. All had been hospitalized and had additional underlying health conditions. Of cases requiring hospitalization, most (69%) have been either over 60 years of age or have had at least one known high-risk chronic health condition. Diabetes has been an underlying high-risk health condition reported in over a quarter (30%) of all hospitalized patients with COVID-19.
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Our imbecile of a Governor here in Texas (a Trump lackey) is going to reopen businesses even though there is still a massive shortage of testing done which means more people with the virus (but not showing symptoms) will be spreading it without knowing so I fully expect many more cases and deaths going forward.

Coronavirus in Texas: Abbott ready to work toward economic revitalization
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/coronavirus-in-texas-abbott-ready-to-work-toward-economic-revitalization/ar-BB12s6UR

"Next week, I will be providing an executive order talking about what will be done in Texas about reopening businesses," he said in a news conference at the Texas Capitol, adding that he expects the order to use guidance from the federal government. "We can do both: Expand and restore the livelihoods that Texans want to have by helping them return to work."

Abbott's remarks come as the Trump Administration has pushed to reopen much of the country next month. A Washington Post report Thursday found that behind closed doors, President Donald Trump has floated trying to reopen much of the country before the end of April, while health experts have stressed that it's too soon to back away from social distancing efforts.

Meanwhile, hours before Abbott's press conference, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick he foresees some businesses being able to reopen by the first week of May

...

While some lawmakers and health care workers have expressed concerns about a limited access to test kits, Abbott and Hellerstedt said private companies are stepping up to meet hospital needs.

But state Democrats say it's not enough. The Travis County delegation, made up of six state House Democrats, expressed their concerns in a Wednesday letter about the distribution of test kits and personal protective equipment for health care workers.

The letter asked for clarification from the governor's office about which hospitals would receive immediate distributions of the test kits.

After sending the letter, the delegation spoke to a representative from the governor's office and the Department of State Health Services. However, state Rep. Vikki Goodwin, D-Austin, said the call offered few details on how Abbott Laboratories tests would be distributed to each county.

"Every time we tried to get firm grasp of numbers there was less clarity," she said. "The governor is trying to paint a good picture ... But at the same time, I don't feel like those numbers are good and that's concerning."
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A1xLLcqAgt0qc2RyMz0y said:
Our imbecile of a Governor here in Texas (a Trump lackey) is going to reopen businesses even though there is still a massive shortage of testing done which means more people with the virus (but not showing symptoms) will be spreading it without knowing so I fully expect many more cases and deaths going forward.

Coronavirus in Texas: Abbott ready to work toward economic revitalization
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/c...rk-toward-economic-revitalization/ar-BB12s6UR
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BRiT said:
Hopefully they're not aiming for anything before May 1st. Preferably it would be until new cases drop to nearly 0, but I doubt that preservation of life will win out.
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sure you can recover from an economic downfall but you can't recover from a very tough illness.
 
Kaotik said:
Was this posted already? New reports of people once cleared of COVID-19 testing positive from South Korea. Currently not known whether they've been reinfected or if the virus they've had has reactivated

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/south-korea-coronavirus-covid19-reactivated-positive-1.5529066
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However, that may also be how viruses work normally anyway. No disease has ever been scrutinised like this. eg. Once someone recovers from the flu, they aren't tested for the presence of the influenza virus again.

I would expect, given the infinite variety of life, that with any pathogenic infection:
  • You'll have a major group of people who are susceptible, possibly everyone
  • Some people will various degrees of natural immunity, from some resistance to no disease visibility at all.
  • Some people will have really bad, unexpected reactions.
  • Some people may get the disease multiple times
  • Some people will become perpetual carriers, some with symptoms and some without
  • Any other variation you can think of!
People talk about the virus mutating, but ignore the humans 'mutating' as if we're all identical, but that's very far from the truth. So when a 15 year old goes down with Covid19, people immediately wonder if the virus is mutating to affect younger people, but don't consider the high probability that this girl has a specific gene variance that makes her vulnerable to that specific strain of SARS-Cov-2.

My main point being, as ever, no-one should be jumping to conclusions or fearing the worst! ;) The worst may still happen but it isn't proven yet. We may just be getting incredible insight into how Nature operates with diseases and how many preconceptions we hold are naive.
 
Entropy said:
The consequences of a dip in the economy depends a lot on where you live. If you live in a society where the agreement is that you care for the basic needs of all people, regardless of why they are in a situation that requires this, anyone who looses their job will be looking for a new one. And maybe remember how employers treated their staff this time around.
If you live in a country that cares less for those lacking money, the situation will be harsher obviously. We might even see some social change in such countries as a result. But this discussion starts to strongly stray into politics.
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The problem with this overly simplistic view of things is that the government in those countries that provided a social blanket rely on money that comes in from businesses in that country.

If businesses can't operate, the government gets no money. If the government gets no money it can't run those social services. There is no free lunch here. Businesses are important to the health and welfare of a country regardless of whether the country acts as a nanny state to provide for the general population or if the country presents less of a financial burden to it's constituents but in turn the general public has to take responsibility for itself.

Sure the country could just start printing money if there are no businesses to generate tax income for the state, but then you have situations like Venezuela where the money eventually becomes worthless and quality of life quickly escalates downwards.

Regards,
SB
 
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I hope this thing will go away soon for multiple reasons, but I'm not really worried about these "numbers" we are seeing. We just passed 100k deaths since the beginning of this worldwide.
Currently the population growth on planet earth is about 200k people each day and that includes births and deaths from all causes. The growth rate has been slowing down a bit for quite some time now and that is a good thing, but the corona barely registers in that.
 
DuckThor Evil said:
Currently the population growth on planet earth is about 200k people each day and that includes births and deaths from all causes. The growth rate has been slowing down a bit for quite some time now and that is a good thing, but the corona barely registers in that.
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Only because the world is in lockdown. If lockdown hadn't happened, we'd be at many thousands of deaths a day and climbing exponentially. In fact, we'd probably be at some millions, probably tens of millions, dead from China alone. Over 3 months of uncontrolled spread, the vast majority would have been infected by now with several percent of the billion+ population dying.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
Only because the world is in lockdown. If lockdown hadn't happened, we'd be at many thousands of deaths a day and climbing exponentially. In fact, we'd probably be at some millions, probably tens of millions, dead from China alone. Over 3 months of uncontrolled spread, the vast majority would have been infected by now with several percent of the billion+ population dying.
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I have to say that it does not look quite that contagious to me. The lockdowns western nations are having aren't at the same level as the lockdown in China. Some countries have it pretty tight and some much less. The death rate is pretty hard to pin point with so many variables, but for total populations I've seen 1% being tossed around as an estimate. Personally I would consider the absolute worst case scenario to be half the world population being infected with corona and with the mortality rate being 2%, at that point we'd almost be where the Earth's population didn't grow during that one year. Almost.

I'm not suggesting drastic course changes, I'm just trying to put things in perspective. We are still not in endangered species list with this one.
 
South Korea Says Recovered Coronavirus Patients Test Positive Again
Health officials say the virus may have ‘reactivated’ in patients.

https://www.usnews.com/news/world-r...ered-coronavirus-patients-test-positive-again
SOUTH KOREAN OFFICIALS reported that nearly 100 people thought to be cured of the novel coronavirus have tested positive again.

Jeong Eun-kyeong, director of the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said during a briefing that the virus may have "reactivated" in the patients rather than them becoming reinfected, Reuters reported.

....

Whether a person can become infected with COVID-19 twice has been unknown since the start of the pandemic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that the body's immune response, including how long someone is immune to the virus, "is not yet understood."

The agency said patients who had been diagnosed with a virus similar to COVID-19 "are unlikely to be reinfected shortly after they recover, but it is not yet known whether similar immune protection will be observed for patients with COVID-19.


Health officials in the country said it is unclear how or why this has happened in the 91 patients, but an epidemiological investigation is underway.
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DuckThor Evil said:
I have to say that it does not look quite that contagious to me.
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I point to the numbers. We had exponential growth in every nation without lockdowns of a good 15% a day. once those lockdowns were put in place, we started to cap growth.

We are still not in endangered species list with this one.
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Indeed. But your extrapolated death rates are picking numbers that suit it out of many different numbers available. Why do you choose 2% death rate when the UK, Italy, France and Spain have well over 10% deaths from positive cases? If allowed to proceed without restrictions, there'd be effectively no medical for the people who need it - there'd be hundreds of thousands of people needing ventilators who won't get them and will die as a result. By keeping growth limited, the umber of people needing ventilators is kept lower such that some of them have it and may recover. If you look at somewhere with 1% or 2% mortality, that'll be somewhere that the spread was contained and health-care provisioned to keep it that low.

The facts are over 12% per day exponential growth typically without restrictions in place, 15% serious and critical cases in those testing positive, and over 10% mortality in nations with good health-care but too many people to look after. If you crunch the numbers, that's millions dead. The only reason it's not looking so bad at the moment is because countries are taking extreme measures to change their population behaviour and keep it semi-contained, but the potential for death is definitely there and not, as you suggest, barely a blip on the normal annual lifecycle; the contagiousness absolutely is there.
 
Just compare WA and NY in the US.

Quickly contained in WA, medical facilities never overwhelmed at any point and death rate here is low despite this being where it first "exploded" in the US.

NY, cases came later than WA but exploded far faster such that it overwhelmed the medical resources of NYC due to them not seriously attempting to contain it. End result, high death rate and high incidence of spread of the infection.

And that was despite the Governor of NY urging social distancing. The mayor of NYC basically told the people of the city to ignore social distancing until the city started to have an exponential growth in death rates. Had the mayor followed the advice of the Governor, it likely wouldn't have exploded as much as it did in NYC.

And before someone comes in and starts saying that he was only doing this because Trump was doing it. The mayor of NYC is a Democrat that really REALLY does not like Trump. The Trump meme (as much as he deserves it) gets tiring.

Regards,
SB
 
Shifty Geezer said:
Indeed. But your extrapolated death rates are picking numbers that suit it out of many different numbers available. Why do you choose 2% death rate when the UK, Italy, France and Spain have well over 10% deaths from positive cases?
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Because pretty much every death gets registered in the system, but not even close to every positive person does due to limited tests. I've seen estimates that the true number of positives is much higher, perhaps as high as an order of magnitude higher. Regardless how much that is, testing is done more on those that are more sick and thus more likely to die. Death rate is much higher than 2% on old people and these heavily tested old people are "skewing" the statistics.

If allowed to proceed without restrictions, there'd be effectively no medical for the people who need it - there'd be hundreds of thousands of people needing ventilators who won't get them and will die as a result. By keeping growth limited, the umber of people needing ventilators is kept lower such that some of them have it and may recover. If you look at somewhere with 1% or 2% mortality, that'll be somewhere that the spread was contained and health-care provisioned to keep it that low.

The facts are over 12% per day exponential growth typically without restrictions in place, 15% serious and critical cases in those testing positive, and over 10% mortality in nations with good health-care but too many people to look after. If you crunch the numbers, that's millions dead. The only reason it's not looking so bad at the moment is because countries are taking extreme measures to change their population behaviour and keep it semi-contained, but the potential for death is definitely there and not, as you suggest, barely a blip on the normal annual lifecycle; the contagiousness absolutely is there.
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Like I said I don't recommend drastic course changes at least for now... However. this decease clearly kills those that are already either old or sick, the ones with the least life force left in them. I know there are exceptions, but there always are. The data that has the least moving variables like the data from Diamond Princes cruise ship has the death rate between 1-2% with all the deaths coming from over 70 year old people(not 100% sure if still accurate today, because there are 4 more deaths, since the data I saw). The data that came from Italy a while back also stated that the average age of death was 79.5 and 99% of the victims had other illnesses.

In most of these critical cases and saving lives, you actually just give them a bit more time. People needing ventilators are really sick and their outcome is quite bad regardless, it looks like half of them or even more die anyway and many of those that make it, carry a heavy toll.
 
DuckThor Evil said:
Because pretty much every death gets registered in the system, but not even close to every positive person does due to limited tests. I've seen estimates that the true number of positives is much higher, perhaps as high as an order of magnitude higher.
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In environments where the testing is far greater than the symptomatic cases, it looks like 50% of infected are asymptomatic. So best case, those 10% death rates in some EU countries would represent 5% overall. But even if your 1% is correct, across the whole world population, that'll still be some 70 million people. But your 1% is predicated on health care that just wouldn't exist.

Regardless how much that is, testing is done more on those that are more sick and thus more likely to die. Death rate is much higher than 2% on old people and these heavily tested old people are "skewing" the statistics.
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It's not skewing anything when you're just talking total deaths per year. You said death rate is no biggie, but if left uncontested, the death rate, whether old, young, sick, or healthy, will be many millions. The qualitative consideration is then 'does it really matter if these people die'. In the UK there's a large proportion of middle-aged overweight men. Covid19 deaths from these would be expected to live multiple years otherwise and possibly exercise themselves fit.

The data that has the least moving variables like the data from Diamond Princes cruise ship has the death rate between 1-2%
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That was a best-case situation where they all got adequate health care. The worst case scenario is when virtually no-one gets health care (n thousand ventilators for x million patients) which is where we start to get the very high death rates evidenced in countries where this is happening.

In most of these critical cases and saving lives, you actually just give them a bit more time. People needing ventilators are really sick and their outcome is quite bad regardless, it looks like half of them or even more die anyway and many of those that make it, carry a heavy toll.
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Everything your raising about age and health is different from your original point. Like rcf, you need to question your beliefs and resolve them before then going onto other arguments about how to respond. Specifically you've said:

"It doesn't look that contagious" - 12% exponential growth per day means the vast majority of the world will be infected within a couple of months.
"The death rate is a blip in relation to the world's typical annual population increase" - that's only true while the virus is contained and if not contained, it'll result in millions of deaths.

Past that, you have the argument of social impact, were all these people going to die anyway, etc. But these points you've raised, and now you either have to argue evidence in support of your points that Covid19 isn't very contagious and the death rate would barely register, or accept that you're wrong and then raise other arguments factoring in a new understanding of potential risk.
 
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