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

I don't know that it's specifically the ventilator causing that, but rather the medically induced coma that people are often put into so that they can tolerate the ventilator.

It doesn't make the news much in relation to coronavirus but being attached to a ventilator almost always comes with copious amounts of morphine.
 
Cyan said:
The medicine has some side effects. Just like 4 or 5. Risk of organ failure, risk of death, risk or cardio respiratory arrest, and a couple more.
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The question is at what amount / chance?

eg take this substance
side effects
  • Headache.
  • Nausea.
  • Vomiting.
  • Increased blood pressure.
  • Confusion.
  • Double vision.
  • Drowsiness.
  • Difficulty breathing.
  • Muscle weakness and cramping.
  • Inability to identify sensory information.
  • Death
The substance of course is water, what matters is the dosage
 
I recall there was also a report from Hong Kong (I think?) showing that patients who survived the serious Covid-19 pneumonia had a 20 to 30% reduction in lung capacity. Whether or not this will improve in time remains to be seen.
 
Cyan said:
he would do better taking care of his people instead of worrying about the economy. The message was like: "If people has to die, let them die". The economy will improve, always does. In fact financial crisis clean up everything, and start anew.
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That's a naive view and potentially more destructive (it might not be in this case, but if Covid19 was a little worse, the economic and social impact would be far bigger). Like it or not, the people's lives are tied to the economy, the movement of money from one bank account to another to another. An economic collapse leads to all sorts of long-term fallout. You'll have people unable to afford medical care for ongoing problems. You have increased suicide rates. So it's not about protecting 'the economy' but the people that that economy affects.

What if coronavirus was in the water? Let's say the only way to stop the disease was to stop all fresh water in the taps for two months. The impact of that on people, the fallout of people struggling to find water, fighting over water, drinking dirty water, would be massive. So then, would you turn off the taps to save lives, or would let the virus run its course to save lives?

Now I agree that riding it out is probably the best move in this case, although that's from a sheltered view of the disease and viewed with a month's hindsight - I don't know how other people with mega economic impact fair. But I also don't know what state the Country's finances are going to be in having paid everyone to sit around not working, and whether the next five years of NHS health will be even worse than before because of cut-backs to pay off the huge cost of Furlough. In fact, no-one knows what the long term recovery impacts are going to be.

It's never as simple as 'just do the right thing' TV style. It's always a complicated choice between increase the pain and suffering of one group of people or another. It's often a choice between saving a 6 year old or a mini-bus of thirty-somethings. On TV, everyone gets saved by ignoring the rules of physics, but in real life, it's about doctors refusing one person a respirator to give someone else a chance. In dealing with this disease, it's either stop a number of people dying (some of whom were going to die anyway, and some others who have put themselves into harms way by lifestyle choices, and some blameless victims) or stop a number of people having their lives ruined for several years. It's unquantifiable. I think some people make those decisions by developing a mindset that can't process the whole argument and just always sides with either saving lives as a mantra or protecting the economy as a mantra. When you have a faith like that, "leave no man behind," then you can feel good about your actions even if in the end, they end up resulting in the less preferred outcome.

Edit: It's already a numbers game. Every year, thousands of people die from flu. Those deaths could be averted if everyone went into lockdown. The reason we don't is the costs are deemed too high, so those thousands of additional dead are 'acceptable losses' even if no-one consciously thinks that way. Now we have a similar thing but with millions of lives on the line, so lockdown makes sense. But where do you draw the line? What number of people means damage the economy to save lives, and what number of people means keep the economy (daily life) going and just accept those deaths?
 
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On the same theme, it used to be that every fourth to every sixth death was caused by tuberculosis. And this was when we went through the industrial and scientific revolutions that eventually (largely) solved that disease.

People fear change. Death from something new is scary, death from something old is business as usual. Risk assessment is not rational.

That said, most of the businesses that are directly affected are those that are the most transient anyway - restaurants, various consumer retail, tourism. And out of these of course the businesses that never made profit anyway, or where the owners took the profits and left no buffer - and has no intention of supplying one if the revenue drops (i.e. they have no particular faith in it returning to profitability.)

Then of course there are the larger, often publicly traded companies. They are more resilient, but some of them also suffer from owners attitudes regarding their investments not being particularly long term. At the end of the day, just as you can say that a culling of the herd may not be entirely bad when we talk about people, that rings even truer for businesses. If this bump in the road favours the more robust and long term businesses and owners, that may not be such a terrible thing a couple of years from now.

And businesses don’t have children, friends or families.
 
Although there's also the analogy what if a small startup now, like a little child, could grow on to become something special but dies because of lack of support early on? We never know. With so many sci-fi's covering alternate realities now, it should be easy for people to imagine branching realities from any choice, all the different outcomes, and see that you can't pick a perfect future. how about someone goes back in time and kills Hitler...and then someone even worse takes his place, and doesn't make the same dumb mistakes in his campaign, and conquers the world? You never know.

There'll be winners and losers. Decision makers can't save everyone, so they have to try and figure out who's at risk and who they can save, which sadly isn't as simple as just saving lives.
 
Massachusetts to launch first US trial of Japanese coronavirus drug
April 7, 2020
Three Massachusetts hospitals have received approval to launch the first US clinical trial of a Japanese flu drug that could be used to treat COVID-19, according to a doctor involved in the effort.

The trial — which will take place at Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester — was approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration Tuesday. The small, randomized trial of the antiviral drug favipiravir will look to study its effectiveness as a treatment for patients infected with the coronavirus, according to doctors involved in the study.

The Japanese government has touted the drug, known by the brand name Avigan, as a possible treatment for COVID-19 Medical authorities in China have called the drug “clearly effective” in treating coronavirus patients after conducting two clinical trials.

The drug was produced by a pharmaceutical subsidiary of Japan-based Fujifilm more than a decade ago as a treatment for new and reemerging strains of influenza. The company has not yet confirmed the details of the US trial.

Some virologists and regulators have raised concerns about using it as a coronavirus treatment without further testing, though the Trump administration is reportedly pushing the FDA to approve it as an emergency treatment for the virus, according to Politico.

Doctors involved in the planned Massachusetts trial note that the drug has been used widely in humans, so the side effects are relatively well known. The potential benefits for a COVID-19 patient ill enough to be admitted to the hospital far outweigh the potential risks of side effects, the doctors said.

The drug works by causing the virus to misread its genetic instructions and not reproduce correctly, “so that the virus eventually melts down in the test tube,” Finberg said, describing his previous research on it. Researchers believe it will work the same way with the coronavirus, he said.

“It’s actually a very safe drug," Finberg said.

Chinese researchers carried out two clinical trials of favipiravir, reporting positive results, though Fujifilm Toyoma Chemical, the drug’s developer, has declined to comment on the Chinese claims. Some of the data out of China showed that patients who were given the medicine were virus-free more quickly than those who did not receive the drug, and X-rays showed lung improvement among more of those who took the drug, according to news reports.
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https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/04/07/metro/massachusetts-launch-first-trial-japanese-covid-drug/
 
Seeing the relative worldwide impact of the first SARS outbreak kind of puts into perspective why most world governments were slow to respond to Covid-19.

It's easy to look back with 20/20 hindsight and attempt to place blame on this government or that government mishandling things or not acting on the voice of the few scientists that suspected it would blow up (like that article on UK's initial response). But respective governments and most scientists were attempting to not act rashly to something that was unknown and that previously (for a related strain) hadn't resulted in a worldwide pandemic on anything remotely approaching the scale of Covid-19.

Regards,
SB
 
BRiT said:
Interesting graphic about the current pandemic compared to other epidemics, be sure to watch the video graphic.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/fxoxti
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Those reddit fancy graphs are useless FUD thought

Example.. Swine FLU 2009: Their are only 18 500 laboratory confirmed deaths reported between April 2009 & August 2010 while the real estimated number of deaths of the pandemic is between 151,700 – 575,400 deaths ( 284 400 being the closest estimate) that's on top of seasonal flu deaths which range each year between 290,000 – 650,000 worldwide.
 
Ike Turner said:
Those reddit fancy graphs are useless FUD thought

Example.. Swine FLU 2009: Their are only 18 500 laboratory confirmed deaths reported between April 2009 & August 2010 while the real estimated number of deaths of the pandemic is between 151,700 – 575,400 deaths ( 284 400 being the closest estimate) that's on top of seasonal flu deaths which range each year between 290,000 – 650,000 worldwide.
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It's not useless FUD. It's clearly is focusing on the first 100 days and pointing out just how fast it is spreading (and killing people) compared to other recent pandemics. It's not about total deaths overall from pandemics.
 
Malo said:
It's not useless FUD. It's clearly is focusing on the first 100 days and pointing out just how fast it is spreading (and killing people) compared to other recent pandemics. It's not about total deaths overall from pandemics.
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It's useless because we don't have reliable (compared to what we have today with COVID-19) numbers of the first 100 days of any off the other pandemics in the chart as noted from the the facts that I posted above (only 18 500 "official" H1N1 deaths reported in 17 months!).
 
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Recently released data from judicial authorities in Madrid suggest that 6,600 more people than usual died in the last two weeks of March, compared with the official tally of 3,500 Covid-19 deaths in the region.
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So if this is happening elsewhere then the true death toll from covid is nearly double the official numbers, btw fresh food has been running out in supermarkets here in spain the last couple of days. Issues with supplies perhaps?
 
Ike Turner said:
It's useless because we don't have reliable (compared to what we have today with COVID-19) numbers of the first 100 days of any off the other pandemics in the chart as noted from the the facts that I posted above (only 18 500 "official" H1N1 deaths reported in 17 months!).
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we don't have reliable covid data either. even on deaths.

When the post-covid is done and the audits are conducted, you're going to see a much larger number for covid (on the estimated world wide deaths).

Just pointing out the difference between an audit and on-going. With an audit, we fully understand a lot about the disease, we understand better to track it through it's symptoms etc. A lot more information is known. Then we can go back and use that data to see all the cases that weren't classified, use stats and determine the likelihood someone died of it. Extrapolate it over a given population etc.

We don't do any of that with live reporting, and we certainly can't do that with the information we have today. We only report on confirmed cases, and we don't get nearly all of them right now as much as we have better processes today compared to the past.
 
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zed said:
So if this is happening elsewhere then the true death toll from covid is nearly double the official numbers, btw fresh food has been running out in supermarkets here in spain the last couple of days. Issues with supplies perhaps?
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Part of the food shortages are likely down to distribution issues. Restaurants are using much less, people in home isolation are using more (many even buying more than they need because they fear shortages).
 
zed said:
So if this is happening elsewhere then the true death toll from covid is nearly double the official numbers, btw fresh food has been running out in supermarkets here in spain the last couple of days. Issues with supplies perhaps?
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What food shortages? That´s not what is going on
Where you live? Here near Valencia, everything is fully stocked in supermarkets.
People last couple of days have been stocking goods for the easter because in many places food stores will be closed tomorrow until Monday (depending on the region)

About deaths, until next year when we can compare data from the same months, and even months after the virus is controlled, we won´t be able to have an idea of the impact. Not every death is going to be from COVID, some of them, sadly are from people that was going to die soonish, and got in the middle of the hospital craze.
 
Ohio's numbers today, confirmed: 5512 (up from 5148 ), Hospitalized: 1612 (up from 1495 ), and 213 Deaths (up from 193 ).
Confirmed Cuyahoga County: 1014 (Up from 960 ).

Percentage increase: 7.1%, 7.8%, 10.4%
Raw increase: 364, 117, 20
 
2019 Novel Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19) for Dallas County Texas
https://www.dallascounty.org/departments/dchhs/2019-novel-coronavirus.php

April 9, 2020 - 1432 confirmed cases - 22 deaths

1432 confirmed cases up 108 over yesterday and two new deaths
Those 108 new cases represent a 8.2% increase over the last day

Increases (by percent) over the last 14 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% and now 8.2%

Increases (by count) over the last 14 days:
+64, +72, +49, +61, +82, +100, +100, +90, +94, +97, +43, +106, +63 and now +108

Dallas County Health and Human Services is reporting 108 additional positive cases of COVID-19 today, bringing the total case count in Dallas County to 1,432. The 21st and 22nd deaths were reported, including a man in his 80's who was a resident of a long-term care facility who had been in hospice care, and a man in his 70's who was a resident of theCity of Desoto who had been hospitalized. Of cases requiring hospitalization, about three-quarters (70%) 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 (29%) of all hospitalized patients with COVID-19.
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99% of Those Who Died From Virus Had Other Illness, Italy Says

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...FDUO8kV8OrFbBem2J-H_fw0Yhj8s-oYC2ou2AQdAVwe-k

The average age of those who’ve died from the virus in Italy is 79.5. As of March 17, 17 people under 50 had died from the disease. All of Italy’s victims under 40 have been males with serious existing medical conditions.

While data released Tuesday point to a slowdown in the increase of cases, with a 12.6% rise, a separate study shows Italy could be underestimating the real number of cases by testing only patients presenting symptoms.

According to the GIMBE Foundation, about 100,000 Italians have contracted the virus, daily Il Sole 24 Ore reported. That would bring back the country’s death rate closer to the global average of about 2%.
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upload_2020-4-9_22-4-39.png

And thats from a country with the second oldest population that didnt take proper tracing measures and over populated its health care system due to panic.
 
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