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

For you who are quarantined, I strongly recommend audible. There are a lot of great audio books. It’s subscription based, you earn a set of credits each month and can spend them on any title. Currently listening to the audio version of the Foundation and it is very good.

 

it's quite surprising that the green side of the graph show that in places like Germany where people are usually very responsible and well-adjusted, the activity didn't decrease as much as I expected --they have like 90000 cases. The updated graph of the US is going to be quite quite different in the next few days. I know someone in Seattle who told me that they are being very very careful there and taking measures.

 

Germany tested extremely well. You should look at hospitalizations and deaths instead. And translate them to per capita. Then you have comparable figures.

 

Ohio's numbers today, confirmed: 4782 (up from 4450 ), Hospitalized: 1354 (up from 1214 ), and 167 Deaths (up from 142 ).
Confirmed Cuyahoga County: 911 (Up from 871 ).

Percentage Growth numbers close to yesterdays (8%, 12%, 18%), still increasing but nowhere near the 25%-35% early numbers. However now even 10% represents larger raw numbers of nearly 480/136/17.

Source is still Ohio Department of Health: https://coronavirus.ohio.gov/wps/portal/gov/covid-19/home

 

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

April 7, 2020 - 1261 confirmed cases - 19 deaths

1261 confirmed cases up 106 over yesterday and one new death
Those 106 new cases represent a 9.2% increase over the last day

Increases (by percent) over the last 12 days: 21%, 19.6%, 11.1%, 12.5%, 14.9%, 15.8%, 13.7%, 10.8%, 10.2%, 9.6%, 3.9% and now 9.2%
Increases (by count) over the last 12 days: +64, +72, +49, +61, +82, +100, +100, +90, +94, +97, +43 and now +106

 

Indeed, this is the number we should keep an eye on. Increase by % can be heavily skewed. 1% of million is a lot

 

That graphic is a (rather dubious) condensation of the Google Community Mobility reports. Click the PDFs to get a deeper look into the data.

 

I don't know, considering that the news and the public is freaking out over the raw numbers, meanwhile the % numbers better indicate how long it takes to double, and that's the real thing we're looking at in determining if it's exponential or geometric or flattening.

 

Yea ti's good to always present both in that case. I agree.

 

Which is why I post both.

These are numbers from Dallas County Texas USA which I have broken out to show both percent and count increases.

Increases (by percent) over the last 7 days: 15.8%, 13.7%, 10.8%, 10.2%, 9.6%, 3.9%, 9.2%
Increases (by count) over the last 7 days: +100, +100, +90, +94, +97, +43, +106

Note the second from the last numbers are an outlier because the day before (Sunday) the private testers were closed and the numbers are low because of that.

What is interesting is that over the last 7 days (excluding the outlier) the Increases (by count) have been right around the +100 mark whereas the Increases (by percent) have been steadily declining from 15.8% down to 9.2%.

 

he is going to recover. Take a good look at his face. He always survived with it, then he will do fine.

 

I want Johnson to be around so he can give evidence in a Public Inquiry to be held in future years. It will be interesting to discover just what was going on during the planning process for this pandemic. It looks like not nearly enough at present.

 

https://www.icnarc.org/DataServices/Attachments/Download/76a7364b-4b76-ea11-9124-00505601089b

Data from first 2600 cases of Covid19 admitted to UK ICU...






Clear trends, but it's hard to separate correlation and causation. Is being larger the cause of ending up in ICU, or is it being older, and it's just that older people also tend to be larger? Or vice versa? Are men genetically more likely, or of the phenotype that makes them more susceptible?

This data shows mechanical support is associated with weakened recovery, as per the early info from Germany.

 

That might be obvious now, but that's with hindsight into what the disease is and how unusual it is. the H1N1 fear prompted up-front preparations that were a complete waste, costing £1.2 billion for a risk that wasn't justified.

If the government had prepared big-time while it was a Wuhan localised problem, and the virus ended up being contained, people would criticise them for wasting money, affecting the economy, etc. Instead they chose to wait and use containment which should have worked if the disease didn't have asymptomatic spreaders. This time around, that was the wrong call, but no-one could have known. The whole world has responded in the same generally clueless way. You see different results in Asia only because of previous experience with SARS. The West didn't prepare for SARS to come here, and was right not to. It didn't prepare for MERS to come here, and was right not to.

Diseases are fundamentally difficult to work with. Things that may seem obvious now are only obvious once the situation has played had and you have enough info. Back in January and February, there just wasn't enough info to make informed choices and the only option then is best guesses, which can be wrong. As can informed choices for that matter, which are dependent on science and data gathering which are incomplete and imperfect. Science may point to one clear course of action which can end up being completely wrong. eg. Putting people onto mechanical breathing may have seemed the best choice to help their recovery based on scientific thinking, yet it has the adverse effect explained by further, deeper scientific investigation to get more info,

 

Invasive ventilation has pretty high complication rates at the best of times. Could easily be that with corona there is some special aspect which makes the lungs even more prone to injury and secondary infection.

Maybe they should be experimenting with alternatives, prone non invasive high frequency ventilation for instance like they use on premature infants (of course those have far less volume between lung and mask, so you can't expect the same level of efficiency). Experimenting on people is always a bit iffy ethically of course.

 

Shifty, I was thinking in particular of the "herd immunity" policy which meant that we didn't lockdown earlier in the pandemic. Whichever way you slice it, this will have led to tens of thousands of additional infections in the UK and many more deaths - probably thousands. It was an incredible risk for a new virus which we knew so little about - we still don't even know if herd immunity will work as there is no evidence yet that those who have recovered have immunity!

It seems obvious that we didn't put the resources into contact tracing - the government didn't even get thousands of local environmental health officers to contact trace, even though this is something they are trained to do!

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news...virus-contact-tracing-opportunity-experts-say

With the WHO pleading for every country to contact trace and test out in the community as much as possible, it's likely to prove a severe failing from the UK.

I only hope that the IHME projections for the UK prove to be badly inaccurate.

 

The plan was to flatten the curve and deal with the disease at a rate the medical services could cope with.

But that wasn't known, and a really early lockdown would have to have been with a view to eradicating the disease, meaning an absolute lock-down. As it is, there's no plan to eradicate the disease but to do like Asia and reduce it to small numbers than can be contained through testing and localised isolation.

Very debatable. We have loads of info on viruses and it makes sense to assume this isn't some alien disease that'll behave differently. That may make sense now, but at the beginning of this year, any rational person would look at the outbreak of a new virus and expect it to operate exactly the same as every other virus, that has been successfully contained. If the UK have gone full lock-down earlier and it turned out this was another SARS, it'd have been the wrong choice.

We can't make policy based on worst-case hypotheticals. There's plenty of evidence that 'herd immunity' works - several hundred thousand years of humanity evolving to live alongside countless viruses. All common sense tells us the same will happen again. Even if not, lockdown for a month every time there's a case of Covid19 in the world is totally unsustainable.

Again, that's in hindsight. At the time, the 300 people used were adequate for 'containing' the disease. They contact traced all those that the handful of +ve infections were in contact with. there was lots of testing and it found all those in contact testing negative. That is, one guy tests positive, they tested a hundred people and none showed infection, suggesting limited spread. That's the real data they had. Unbeknownst to them (and everyone else) there were people without symptoms who no-one anywhere in the world would have been contact tracing, because they were Covid19 invisible. That led to the first unexplained case, the guy in Haslemere, who obviously got it from an asymptomatic spreader. No amount of contract tracking could have stopped this.

At this point it makes little difference because everyone's in lockdown. Any new cases are likely to be from incubation before lockdown. The only people who need to be traced are those still in motion such as the politicians. When people leave lockdown, then testing and contact tracing become essential in allowing the population to live normally while containing the virus, but it only works because of the new insight into how this disease is different from the usual.

Putting it another way, the moment any new disease is recovered, a country could engage a Fear First response - boarder lockdowns, everything shut down, until the problem is passed. That'd be very damaging to the nation and completely unnecessary 9 times out of 10. That such a policy may have been beneficial with this disease doesn't make it the right policy to adhere to, and no-one could have known the right policy in this case.

There's still the debate about the actual impact - yes, people will die, but people die all the time. On the other hand, we also have the fallout from the economic collapse to deal with and possible other effects including escalated political tensions. So even if closing everything sooner would have saved lives, in five years time when people are looking back on this, the discussion may even have turned to 'we should have let the old and sick people die as we'd be better off than we are now.' Especially for the UK that still has Brexit to worry about. Perhaps doing nothing and having all the fat, middle-aged businessmen and crusty old people die off would have 'cleaned house' while the economy remained the only active one in the world and resulted in a healthier, leaner society and a new period of decades-long prosperity? No-one can possibly know, only theorise, and then make best-guess choices, and then live with the consequences. As long as one doesn't pick Dumb, like burning 5G towers, then one can't be held accountable for things not turning out for the best.

 

COVID-19 in Canada
April 8, 2020, 11:00 a.m. EDT

Number of people tested
359,269

Confirmed cases
18,433

Probable cases
14

Deaths
401

 

It might not be much in the greater scheme of things, but John Prine passed away last night due to covid-19.

I'm literally still numb from it, it's like I lost a member of my family.

 

Ohio's numbers today, confirmed: 5148 (up from 4782 ), Hospitalized: 1495 (up from 1354 ), and 193 Deaths (up from 167 ).
Confirmed Cuyahoga County: 960 (Up from 911 ).

Percentage increase: 8%, 11%, 15%
Raw increase: 366, 141, 26

I wouldn't say the cases and hospitalized are flattening out as they're still increasing in large numbers but at least it's not exponential growth like the early days. Maybe another couple weeks for true flattening of confirmed and hospitalized?