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

Netflix is lowering video quality by up to 25 % in Europe because of corona. Why only in Europe? And are we really running out of bandwidth, or is it just greed preventing taking a bit of hit yourself from corona affecting everyone.

 

As I understand it's because Europe asked them to lower their bandwidth consumption. I suspect if the US asked they would do it there also... et al.

 

Yup, some fools in the EU in positions of power thought they were running low on bandwidth and didn't have any more to sprinkle in. So Netflix obliged.

 

Trust me Roger Daltry was pissed....

 

EU Commissioner Thierry Breton asked for Standard Def instead of HD.

 

Does that reduces congestion? Hmm, maybe the backbone is already oversubsribed... In indonesia its quite common for a few blocks of houses to share the same backbone (backhaul?). But they share it to too many subscribers. Dunno how it is in other countries.

 

Read the Twitter replies from the network backbone engineers. They barely saw a 20% increase in usage this week. The one blip was from a COD Bro Shooter.

Most ISPs have Netflix CDN systems inside their own network so there isn't massive traffic on the internet backbones.

 

For those with additional time for reading, here's a Reddit AMA with Bill Gates on the topic of COVID-19. This comment deals with the Imperial College London paper.

Reddit Comment

 

Does anyone know of websites with correct and constantly updated worldwide statistics about the coronavirus pandemic?
I'm asking because there are some significant differences between some of these sites.
Besides the usual updated numbers, I also wonder if there are statistics about people who died of other unrelated causes simply because the health system was overloaded with mild cases of coronavirus and also uninfected paranoid people.

 

BHT works (personal experience)....

http://www.delano.com/blog/?p=190

 

wikipedia is pretty good

also more info on hydroxychoroquine
https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/03/19/mylan-ramping-up-production-of-hydroxychloroquine.aspx
this combined with another drug (sorry paper was on my ipad which I cant find at the moment) was found to be very effective, but even by itself seemed to really help

 

Johns Hopkins
Https://coronavirus.jhu.edu

 

Thanks.
The last two sites that I've checked were the WHO and Financial Times. Johns Hopkins' numbers are closer to FT's numbers, which are higher than those from the WHO.
But tuberculosis alone dwarfs coronavirus by orders of magnitude.

 

I thought Africa and India would fair worse, but so far Africa is largely untouched and India isn't experiencing the rate of growth of Western Europe.

 

My thoughts, more or less, but then I remember that the numbers may be wrong, because the only reliable numbers seem to be:
- The number of dead people.
- The number of people who got tested.

Honestly, I think that the amount of infected may be millions, already. I don't believe that a virus with such an exponential contagion rate has infected only ~250.000 people over the world (even less in those places known for overcrowding and little to none hygiene).

 

The Italian study mentioned the other day seems to show that up to 70% of infections will be either asymptomatic or quasi-symptomatic:

https://www.theguardian.com/comment...ed-coronavirus-mass-testing-covid-19-italy-vo

There cases from that cruise ship in Japan also showed up to 50% of cases were asymptomatic.

With this in mind, it seems it will be incredibly difficult to curtail the spread of the illness. On the plus side, the fatality rate will fall, but the loss of life will still be enormous. Any treatment which can keep severe cases alive without the need for a ventilator would be incredibly valuable. Most of the treatments examined so far seem to reduce recovery time which could be helpful to get people out of hospital quickly and reduce the load on the system, but nothing seems to help the worst cases as yet.

My view is that an antibody test to discover just who has and who hasn't actually had the illness is more important than ever. People confirmed to have recovered from it are unlikely to get it again from what we know and should be safer to work in people facing roles where they are more likely to be exposed again. Several candidates for a cheap antibody test have apparently been developed. How quickly can they ramp these tests up into multi-billion quantities? We need them yesterday.

 

That said, the UK was testing many people in the initial phases, and out of 20,000 tested, only 150 ish were positive. If the virulence was that high, we should have seen lots more of the UK tests positive and then for PHE to track those people and find no symptoms developing.

 

Very out of date map, they seem to lag many hours behind wikipedia

eg spain
18,077 Spain ---------- john hopkins
Spain 19,980 ---------- wikipedia

 

All three maps below can view locations worldwide and zoomed to city level. Not sure about source data though

Johns Hopkins University (JHU) coronavirus map

Harvard - time lapse coronavirus world map

Kitsap Sun coronavirus time lapse by slider