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

[A1xLLcqAgt0qc2RyMz0y]

State of Texas complete COVID-19 data breakdown

https://txdshs.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/ed483ecd702b4298ab01e8b9cafc8b83

Data as of 5/21/2020 @ 4:55 PM:

Total Tests: 793,246 (Up +23,005) : 6,995 lower than the 30,000 Daily Tests that the Governor of Texas Abbott promised. Not Good.
Cases Reported: 52,268 (Up +945) : 466 less cases today over yesterday.
In Hospitals: 1,680 (Down -111)
Patients Recovered (Estimated*) : 30,341 (No Change)
Fatalities: 1,440 (Up +21)

Texas tests per 1M population are 27,435 (Up +234) which places Texas as the 8th worst State. Down one place from yesterday.

Click this link: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us
and on the page click the Tests / 1M pop column to sort from worst to first

They're using roughly 27.996 million as the population of Texas.

 

[wco81]

Yep. However, the complications come when you start rating those unwanted deaths in terms of quality. What if every single person who dies from Covid19 is going to die within 24 months anyway from other conditions? In that case, it's likely not worth the damage to society to save them.

It's not as simple as a numbers game. Lots of scientists and data crunchers are pulling apart the numbers because there's nothing else to work with, but the reality probably exists beyond our ability to model and calculate. Ultimately on a species level, we'll have different clusters taking different approaches and one or other will prevail. On a conscious level, about the most realistic, best solution is try to keep infection low and get a vaccine out ASAP.

I recall reading a headline that many of those dying probably had at least 10 years of life left, despite the fact that C19 fatalities skewed old and towards those with co-morbidities. Now maybe the elderly fatalities were just living in rest homes anyways so no big loss because they weren't contributing economically and quality of life might not have been the best?

However, there are studies on animals where it showed that the dosage of infection made a difference between mild or asymptomatic disease and more moderate or symptomatic disease. The difference was 4x the dosage for latter.

 

[wco81]

Speaking of possible preventions and treatments...

Scientists believe cannabis could help prevent and treat coronavirus

They have high hopes for a coronavirus breakthrough.

A team of Canadian scientists believes it has found strong strains of cannabis that could help prevent and then treat coronavirus infections, according to interviews and a study.

Researchers from the University of Lethbridge said that a study in April showed at least 13 cannabis plants high in CBD that appeared to affect the ACE2 pathways that the bug uses to access the body.

The results, printed in online journal Preprints, indicated hemp extracts high in CBD may help block proteins that provide a “gateway” for COVID-19 to enter host cells.

Kovalchuk’s husband, Igor, suggested cannabis could reduce the virus’ entry points by up to 70 percent. “Therefore, you have more chance to fight it,” he told CTV.

“Our work could have a huge influence — there aren’t many drugs that have the potential of reducing infection by 70 to 80 percent,” he told the Calgary Herald.

Stressing that more research was needed, the study gave hope that if proven to modulate the enzyme it “may prove a plausible strategy for decreasing disease susceptibility” as well as “become a useful and safe addition to the treatment of COVID-19 as an adjunct therapy.”​

https://nypost.com/2020/05/21/scientists-believe-cannabis-could-help-prevent-treat-coronavirus/

There was also a preprint that nicotine may also prevent the virus attaching to ACE2 receptors.

But they're studying hundreds of existing drugs right now because they scan the molecular characteristics of the virus vs. matching drug molecules, so things like famotidine for instance, certain types of interferon, even something used to treat head lice.

In addition to developing vaccines and monoclonal antibodies specifically targeting this virus.

 

[dobwal]

Well, we are about to see how the Southern Hemisphere really handles COVID19 as it moves into winter.

South America, Australia, Indonesia and the southern part of Africa should see an uptick in infections and deaths. How those parts of the world handles COVID-19 over the next few months will probably determine how strong the second wave of COVID-19 will be for the Northern Hemisphere when Fall arrives.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

That is a totally idiotic thing to suggest at this point when e.g. papers on fatal pulmonary embolisms induced by Covid-19 are published daily. You can't hide behind ignorance unless you have never heard of Pubmed. Or actually ignorance is precisely the right word in that case.

You're aware that was a hypothetical example and not a suggestion of what's actually happening, right? Obviously, not everyone who dies from covid19 was 24 months away from dying anyway.

Moving away from the hypotheticals, some proportion of them are though, and if it's large, you than have a cost/benefit consideration of whether the lives worth saving are worth the cost to everyone in saving them, which is a discussion in the RSPC thread.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

However, there are studies on animals where it showed that the dosage of infection made a difference between mild or asymptomatic disease and more moderate or symptomatic disease. The difference was 4x the dosage for latter.

If so, perhaps the quickest, bestest 'vaccine' is tiny doses of SARS-Cov2?

 

[WhiningKhan]

You're aware that was a hypothetical example and not a suggestion of what's actually happening, right? Obviously, not everyone who dies from covid19 was 24 months away from dying anyway.

Moving away from the hypotheticals, some proportion of them are though, and if it's large, you than have a cost/benefit consideration of whether the lives worth saving are worth the cost to everyone in saving them, which is a discussion in the RSPC thread.

What is the point in littering the discussion with speculative assertions which are not connected to reality?

As in, what if covid-19 isn't dangerous at all? There would be no need to do anything.

This will not lead to any fruitful discussion. Facts that everybody know quite well just get repeated over and over.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

What is the point in littering the discussion with speculative assertions which are not connected to reality?

To show that raw facts aren't the be all and end all, because we'll never have enough to really know what's going on. That introductory line you responded to was half of my post, the other half presenting the argument of being unable to understand the disease based on numbers that the first part attempted to illustrate.

It's not the case that everyone who dies of Covid19 was going to die in 24 months, but it is the case that some of them were going to die anyway in 24 months, and others are on the spectrum of going to die in a number of years. Simply counting how many has died isn't enough. 30,000 deaths among 5-16 year olds is a completely different social impact to 30,000 deaths among 80+. 2,000 deaths from terminally ill cancer patients is a completely different impact to 2,000 deaths among healthy 25-35 year old dads. 5,000 deaths from life-sentence prisoners is less impactful than 5,000 deaths from care workers. There's a qualitative difference in deaths that our mathematical models and data gathering is probably never going to be able to capture, and there's only so far following the numbers can take us. Which is where diversity in solutions, including potentially dumb ones, can be better for the species overall as you never know when a group will just get lucky, doing what everyone else thought daft and yet that ending up being the best possible option. Taking Sweden as an example, perhaps there's so much low-level Covid19 going around that despite the high death rate, the proportional damage is far less, but low exposure means lots of infected are very mild? That's a possibility. At some point we'll get info from serological test that'll see if that's the case or not. Until then, choices like that, to let people catch the disease, can't be modelled effectively. There's not enough science of data to predict the future. We can only make best guesses.

 

[milk]

That is a totally idiotic thing to suggest at this point when e.g. papers on fatal pulmonary embolisms induced by Covid-19 are published daily. You can't hide behind ignorance unless you have never heard of Pubmed. Or actually ignorance is precisely the right word in that case.

Slow down with the insults. They make it seem like the discussion touched on a personal sore spot of yours. Nothing is more "idiotic" than reacting emotionally to facts that make you unconfortable instead of confronting them with courage and a level head.

 

[wco81]

If so, perhaps the quickest, bestest 'vaccine' is tiny doses of SARS-Cov2?

Well that's what studies with animals showed, though it sounds like the studies were mainly to establish that different doses makes a difference, not to establish what those dosage levels would be for humans.

Of course out in the world, there's no way to control how you get infected like they would in a lab.

But I believe there are studies also to see if there are genetic reasons why some people are hit more severely than others. For instance one study found that a very high percentage of ICU patients had low levels of interferon in their lungs so either the virus managed to suppress the immune response in some way or some people had low levels already because they were immune-compromised.

Point is there are still too many unknowns. Many researchers will be studying this virus probably for many years, probably devoting their careers to it.

 

[wco81]

Just saw an alert which quotes Fauci as saying "now is the time" to reopen the economy.

Other expert ideas I've encountered in the past day or two. One guy said in podcast interview that 50% of the fatalities in the Northeast were in rest homes. So they should have mainly quarantined rest homes, aggressively test there. Though I think in March and April, there was still insufficient testing capacity in NY and other NE states.

Another article I just briefly scanned proposed just banning "super spreader events" such as sporting events, large gatherings such as at churches. But open up most of everything else.

Some things, like packed subway trains in NYC, may be a difficult problem to work around, because so many people depend on public transit in that city and in some other places. Also would probably make long flights still a problem.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Of course out in the world, there's no way to control how you get infected like they would in a lab.

But you could. Send everyone a sugar cube with a measured dose of SARS-Cov-2 on it.

 

[A1xLLcqAgt0qc2RyMz0y]

2019 Novel Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19) for Dallas County Texas
https://www.dallascounty.org/departments/dchhs/2019-novel-coronavirus.php

May 22, 2020 - 8,477 confirmed cases - 207 deaths

8,477 confirmed cases up 204 over yesterday and four new deaths
those 204 new cases represent a 2.5% increase over the last day

Increases (by percent) over the last 57 days:
21.0%, 19.6%, 11.1%, 12.5%, 14.9%
-- Month of April 2020 --
15.8%, 13.7%, 10.8%, 10.2%, 9.6%, 3.9%, 9.2%, 5.0%, 8.2%, 7.3%, 7.0%, 4.8%, 3.8%, 5.0%, 5.8%,
4.0%, 6.0%, 6.1%, 4.5%, 3.5%, 3.6%, 3.1%, 3.0%, 2.6%, 2.6%, 3.6%, 3.0%, 4.3%, 3.5%, 5.3%
-- Month of May 2020 --
5.3%, 4.9%, 6.0%, 5.7%, 5.9%, 5.3%, 5.2%, 4.9%, 4.7%, 4.5%, 4.3%, 3.9%, 3.8%, 3.6%, 2.9%, 3.0%,
2.8%, 3.0%, 2.9%, 2.4%, 2.3% and now 2.5%

Increases (by count) over the last 57 days:
+64, +72, +49, +61, +82
-- Month of April 2020 --
+100, +100, +90, +94, +97. +43, +106, +63, +108, +105, +107, +79, +65, +89, +109,
+80, +124, +134, +104, +84, +90, +81, +80, +71, +75, +105, +91, +135, +112, +179
-- Month of May 2020 --
+187, +181, +234, +237, +253, +246, +251, +249, +250, +251, +253, +236, +243, +235, +199, +214,
+205, +224, +225, +186, +183 and now +204

As of 10:00 am May 22, 2020, DCHHS is reporting 204 additional positive cases of 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19), bringing the total case count in Dallas County to 8,477, including 207 deaths.

The additional 4 deaths are being reported today include:

• A man in his 50’s who was a resident of the City of Dallas and had been critically ill in an area hospital.
• A woman in her 70’s who was a resident of the City of Dallas and had been critically ill in an area hospital.
• A man in his 70’s who was a resident of the City of Dallas and had been critically ill in an area hospital.
• A man in his 80’s who was a resident of a long-term care facility in the City of Irving and had been hospitalized.

Of cases requiring hospitalization who reported employment, over 80% have been critical infrastructure workers, with a broad range of affected occupational sectors, including: healthcare, transportation, food and agriculture, public works, finance, communications, clergy, first responders and other essential functions.

Of cases requiring hospitalization, two-thirds have been under 65 years of age, and about half do not have high-risk chronic health conditions. Diabetes has been an underlying high-risk health condition reported in about a third of all hospitalized patients with COVID-19.

Of the 207 total deaths reported to date, over a third have been associated with long-term care facilities.

 

[A1xLLcqAgt0qc2RyMz0y]

State of Texas complete COVID-19 data breakdown

https://txdshs.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/ed483ecd702b4298ab01e8b9cafc8b83
https://txdshs.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/0d8bdf9be927459d9cb11b9eaef6101f

Data as of 5/22/2020 @ 4:00 PM:

Total Tests: 834,437 (Up +41,191) : 11,191 above the 30,000 Daily Tests that the Governor of Texas Abbott promised.
Total Viral Tests: 740,181
Total Antibody Tests: 60,252 - Positive Antibody Tests: 2,463
Positivity Rate (Previous 3 Days): 4.7%, 5.43%, 5.51% - Rising Not Good

Cases Reported: 53,449 (Up +1,181) : 236 more cases today over yesterday.

Fatalities: 1,480 (Up +40)

Texas tests per 1M population are 28,778 (Up +1,343) which places Texas as the 7th worst State. Down one place from yesterday.

Click this link: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us

and on the page click the Tests / 1M pop column to sort from worst to first

They are using roughly 27.996 million as the population of Texas.

 

[BRiT]

Positive cases to tests is around 7.2% and along with increase in CDC Expanded Cases numbers indicates the testing is too limited by still requiring a doctor's recommendation to get tested. There should be no CDC Expanded Cases if you're able to test.

With the positive test percentages being as high as they are it's possible Ohio is not conflating their Currently Infected testing numbers with the AntiBody Tests, but then again their testing effort could be as pathetic as it was weeks ago and the higher numbers we're seeing are from the AntiBody Test.

Ohio's Trends is just as ugly as the past 21 days. No such thing as dropping and with the premature reopening the trend will begin to spike over the next few weeks.

Ohio did 8.6K tests for today's numbers which is under 40% of the over 22K a day target, with previous days at 3.3K, 3.6K, 5.5K, 4.9K, 6.5K, 5.2K, 4.3K, 4.9K, 5.5K, 8.1K, 7.0K, 8.2K, 12.2K, 8.1K, 5.4K, 7.1K, 8K, 7.4K, 12.7K, 10.3K, 7.8K, 7.2K, 7.5K, 10K, 9.4K.

Ohio's numbers today, Confirmed: 30,794 (up from 30,167 ), Hospitalized: 5,379 (up from 5,295 ), and Deaths: 1,872 (up from 1,836 ).
CDC Expanded Cases and Deaths: 2036, 181
Confirmed Cuyahoga County: 3762 (up from 3667 ) ~ 2.59% increase.

Percentage increase: 2.07%, 1.59%, 1.96%
Raw increase: 627, 84, 36

Ohio has total tests of 305,764 (up from 297,085 ) and tests per 1M population of 26,158 (up from ~ 25,416 ) taken from https://coronavirus.ohio.gov/wps/portal/gov/covid-19/dashboards/key-metrics/cases and https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ [case numbers updated later]

They're now using roughly 11.689 million for population of Ohio.

 

[3dilettante]

The spread of Covid19 has happened much earlier than initially thought even in Ohio, USA. They say the first case in Ohio was March 9th. But that's so far off the mark.

In early February my sister, brother-in-law, niece and nephew were sick for a couple of weeks. Long before this the boys both have asmatic symptoms on and off and high levels of allergies. The family had all the typical symptoms, especially the boys, throwing up, diarrhea, shortness of breath, fever, chills, aches, cough. They were sicker than my niece and sister, who were less sick but still suffered. They didn't even visit my parents for the entire month when normally they would at least once a week and would stay over the weekends a couple times a month.

My niece's Junior High class had over half of the kids out sick, some of them for close to two weeks. From the first group of kids who were sick earlier, the one boy's father had the AntiBody test done last week. It came back that he has the antibodies. Initially in February he was tested for Flu but they said it wasn't the typical flu and thought it was something else because of the lung issues. This was the only time this year the boy's father was sick.

Possible, though the age profile of the severity of the symptoms seems upside down if swaths of junior high students are experiencing weeks-long recovery periods. Schools are a likely vector for transmission, but they're disease factories for many other infections that would need further testing to exclude them.

Humanity has coexisted with even more contagious stuff like measles and smallpox for millenia without everyone getting infected. Everybody would not get infected even in total anarchy. In organized society, it is entirely possible to extinguish local outbreaks.

The world is full of diseases, lethal and not. In the bug picture, humanity will adapt and survive. On individual level, you indeed die or you don't if you catch the disease, but it is not inevitable for you to catch it to see how it goes.

Measles and smallpox had two whole continents of humans that experienced them as novel viruses several centuries ago, with estimated fatality rates having an upper range of 90%. Whole societies were wiped out, even prior to subsequent colonization and subjugation campaigns.
There's archaeological evidence of more intensive farming and more urban concentrations in the North American Mississippi river areas, with populations reaching densities European cities had started achieving somewhat earlier. It would have significantly changed the trajectory of native cultures and modern understanding of that region, if it all hadn't been essentially wiped out before significant direct European contact.

It's true enough that humanity in some form will survive, but that glosses over just how much can be lost--and we're theoretically smarter about this than we were back then, and we have much more to lose.

How does it start though?? There are zero cases of measles in New York. Someone with the measles enters (why aren't they in bed?). They meet someone who hasn't been vaccinated who gets it, who meets a load of other people who aren't vaccinated who get it.

Measles is extremely contagious and those infected have a period where they shed vast amounts of virus prior to showing symptoms. It's at the upper end of contagious diseases with a basic reproduction number of (R0) 12-18, since it is a hardier virus that can carry with the wind and persists on surfaces very well.
The WHO doesn't seem to think asymptomatic individuals are likely to spread the infection, but even a small number of people sickened with the virus can infect an order of magnitude more by the time it's detected.
The R0 factor is also a rough measure of how difficult it is to achieve herd immunity, with the rough formula being 1-1/R0 being how many people need to recovered or vaccinated (94% on the high end). That, coupled with weakening immunity over time, some portion of the population medically unable to mount an immune response, and a vaccine that is 93-97% effective makes it very difficult to reach and sustain the required level of resistance--which makes the severe regression in some areas due to anti-vax efforts profoundly frustrating.
Measles is a virus with no non-human reservoir, which means in theory we could eliminate it like we did smallpox, if we were theoretically better as a species.
To top it off, measles is worrisome in another way in that being infected with it can wipe much of the immune system's memory of other diseases, weakening immunity for everything else.

If so, perhaps the quickest, bestest 'vaccine' is tiny doses of SARS-Cov2?

Attenuated virus vaccines have existed for some diseases, they pose the risk of developing full-blown disease in some of those dosed. Normally, there's some mechanism for weakening the virus' capability to reproduce to make this less likely. Not sure how reliably we can produce viral doses in the micro to nanoliter droplet range with tight enough tolerances to not give a significant portion of people the full-blown infection.

It's not the case that everyone who dies of Covid19 was going to die in 24 months, but it is the case that some of them were going to die anyway in 24 months, and others are on the spectrum of going to die in a number of years. Simply counting how many has died isn't enough. 30,000 deaths among 5-16 year olds is a completely different social impact to 30,000 deaths among 80+.

There's an ongoing ethical debate about how to evaluate death rates, although in many nations there's been a strong aversion to using this utility function. You can argue this, but many societies have refused to weigh life in this manner.
Something of an exception are the panels for organ transplants, and the triage decisions made when hospitals are overrun with COVID-19.
Those can start affecting the survival rate of younger patients suffering from the accidents and misadventures more common with their age bracket, and it doesn't help that experienced-based fields like medicine have a lot of institutional knowledge bottled up in demographics that skew older. Hard to keep up good outcomes if a lot of those who know things are out of commission.

2,000 deaths from terminally ill cancer patients is a completely different impact to 2,000 deaths among healthy 25-35 year old dads. 5,000 deaths from life-sentence prisoners is less impactful than 5,000 deaths from care workers.

Or 500 rich people versus 50,000 poor ones. Your life-sentence prisoner example is ironic for a nation as dependent on prison labor as the United States. Many of those prisoners are officially essential, since they are performing production or service roles for for-profit endeavors or are being used to backfill manpower shortages in areas (road work, construction, sanitation, harvesting) where those free to not work have opted not to work.

There's a qualitative difference in deaths that our mathematical models and data gathering is probably never going to be able to capture, and there's only so far following the numbers can take us.

There's a moral decision made by societies at large to not do this, given the tendency to find some reason why one group's mass casualties are the acceptable cost of doing business of another less-effected one.
With a novel virus, there's also the still unknown long-term effect of a virus that hospitalizes 1/5-1/6 of even those that survive and attacks the lungs so heavily. The clotting disorders may be a long-term threat, and needing months to years to regain lung function can be a drag on economic output as well. Coronavirus immunity tends to fade over time, so repeated lung trauma is a possible scenario if this virus is not tamped down successfully. Pulmonary fibrosis is not a good thing to discover having a raised incidence of.
Endemic malaria in Africa can provide an example of how economies can be dragged down even if fatalities can be prevented.

Just saw an alert which quotes Fauci as saying "now is the time" to reopen the economy.

He said now's the time to take a look at what it would take to open the economy within each state or locality. He's dancing along a line where he's refuting the strawman that scientists want to lock down the economy forever, but cannot flatly state his opinion on whether it's premature due to his employer. He's been consistent about referring to metrics and required testing levels, and was likely part of the effort that drafted the CDC guidelines that the US government suppressed. While he says it's up to the local officials, he has not given many examples of any locales that would meet those conditions right now.

Other expert ideas I've encountered in the past day or two. One guy said in podcast interview that 50% of the fatalities in the Northeast were in rest homes. So they should have mainly quarantined rest homes, aggressively test there.

I know of some regions that did lock down their nursing homes or long-term care facilities. It's significantly harder to do it if the community around them is flooded with the virus.

Another article I just briefly scanned proposed just banning "super spreader events" such as sporting events, large gatherings such as at churches. But open up most of everything else.

Many churches have smaller congregations than a dine-in chain restaurant. What's the threshold for a super-spreader event in terms of people that doesn't overlap with many public activities?

 

[wco81]

Found this site which attempts to calculate the R0 in almost real time.

rt.live

 

[BRiT]

Beyond words...

The Texas GOP just had a rally in Bexar County. The GOP county chair ends the rally by saying coronavirus is a hoax perpetuated by Democrats and tells everyone to take off their masks. Then they shake hands and hug.​

https://twitter.com/x/status/1263957793293336579

 

[Mariner]

You've got to hand it to the Democrats - the must have set up one heck of a hoax. Can't be many hoaxes which have somehow killed hundreds of thousands of people in countries around the world.

Critical thinking is obviously nothing more than two words next to each other for these people.

 

[Davros]

Wow, just wow