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

hopefully they are going to do that very slowly and in a very staggered manner. There are a bit more than 100000 infected people there.

 

That is the problem. This lockdown is going where? Lockdown until the disease is extinguished? Not going to happen - too many people are moving around, so the virus will keep spreading. Lockdown until there's a vaccine/cure? Seems unrealistic. Lockdown until people get bored? We're back to square one. I guess the only option is where China and Taiwan appear to be at which needs methods in place, like constant people-tracking.

Because as I list above, what are the options? We need a get-out plan. We need an idea what to do when lockdown is lifted. This is like a scene from a movie where the heroes take cover as they're being sprayed at by bullets. What's the get out plan? The enemy runs out of bullets? Someone else comes along and saves them? Neither is likely to happen in this analogy. So you have to discuss options, which includes breaking cover and running for it, knowing some people won't make it, but the rest at least get out.

In what way? They have 1/10th the recorded infections as Germany but 1/3 the death count (using Patented 2020 Coronavirus Bunko-stats). Infection rate is still climbing at a slow exponential rate, so eventually everyone will be infected, just over a longer period.

We need a solution where the new serious infection rate is low enough that the medical services can cope with it on top of their usual health-care provisioning. If that was 10 new serious cases a day (which sounds far more than the medical services are used to factoring in the long terms in hospital), that'd need to be all of 100 new infections a day. That means staying in lockdown until the infection rate is that low, and then using containment tracking to keep it that low. Alternatively, more and more respiratory support could be added to a nations capabilities over time, to support a larger infection number. But regardless, exponential growth needs to be capped. Without that, sooner or later all countries will be in the same position. The only model that seems viable is the Asian tracking and containment. Alternatively, there's the 'sod it' manoeuvre where we let Nature run its course. Or the hopeful wait for a Hail Mary play, some miracle cure/vaccine coming out in 'just a few more days now' and keeping everyone inside for 6 months awaiting the end of just a few more days.

Point being, lockdown wasn't a solution and isn't a solution. It only buys time to come up with a solution. It can't be relied upon forever so people need to come up ways to get out of it rather than calls to stay under it.

 

It will have to be the Asian model with in-depth tracking and enforced isolation together with intermittent social distancing plus the tech tracking aspect. Nothing else much seems to be an option and certain Asian countries are at least getting on with life with some degree of normality. Civil liberties will have to take a back seat for a she, unfortunately.

One of the UK vaccine candidates might be ready by September (the lead scientist developing it said she thought it 80% likely to work!) so the pipeline may be shorter than the 12 to 18 months we've heard. Worst case scenario is that none of them work and then we'll have to decide what can be done after that. Ramping up PCR and antibody tests alongside each other so we've got great capacity available to see who has it and who has had it would seem to be an extraordinarily obvious plan.

 

they need a simple reliable and fast test to see if you have got it, have had it. find the real numbers of infected
I think me and the gf had it about 2 weeks ago for a few days, symptoms a little bit of a cough, no fever ( my temp always between 34.8 -> 36.4 ) sense of smell decreased a bit, nothing else though.
I was taking hydroxychloriquine as I had volunteered to work in the hospital (no medical knowledge, just make coffee, move patients/bodies, clean whatever) but stopped taking the pills as I can feel my arthritis coming back a bit Things arent so desperate as for them to accept me yet to help out.
Not sure we had it, but I wouldnt be surprised, I can hear a lot of ppl around me in the apartments with it.
I'm sure the actual number of ppl with it/had it is at least 10x higher maybe even as much as 50-100x so all these measures they are doing now perhaps are not as necessary, here in spain perhaps 20% of the workers have returned to work, shops arent yet open though

 

Is the tech infrastructure in place for this though? We also don't know how well contained the disease is yet, and we're only a week or so into Wuhan's reversal of lockdown. Fingers crossed

Knowing who has it only provides intelligence and doesn't in itself stop the spread. At the moment, the only clear option to minimise fatalities is containment, needing tests (possibly that many if only a few active cases are out there) and then reaching the potential infected to get them to test and act. The Taiwan app-based tech is basically necessary. I'm not that confident of the UK's capacity to use tech that way. But before that can be considered, active cases needs to drop down to something where the growth is negligible. 1000 new cases a day is too many. I don't know what the minimum is to ensure containment can work. Lockdowns anywhere will need to be until new cases drops down to whatever that number is, maybe single digits?

There'll also need to be testing at all international transport centres to ensure local containment isn't messed up by visitors.

I guess another area to be hopeful is identifcation of who's at risk and, more importantly, who isn't. If it can be shown persons of a certain genetic makeup are asymptomatic, they could be vaccinated with live virus to become a buffer. Testing would need to happen to find when they are spreaders, to stay home, and when they are past spreading so they can go back to normal life. At the moment, we can't, for example, let all the under 20s have Covid19 because there's the few that react badly. We need to find who they are, shield them while the rest have Covid19, and then their peers will be a natural buffer to them catching it.

 

Folding@Home gains even more computer performance due to coronavirus.

Folding@Home reaches 2.4 ExaFLOPS in compute performance
Folding@home sends word that its computing capacity accumulated by its users exceeded 2.4 EXAFLOPS or 2,400,000,000.00,000,000 floating-point calculations per second. To make that a bit more understandable, you could imagine 178 RTX 2080 Ti cards simultaneously.



To achieve this, in total, there are more than 660 thousand GPUs and more than 1.5 million CPUs, totaling more than 11 million CPU cores. This allows us to achieve the 2.4 Exaflops that we mentioned, adding a totally extreme power to look for solutions against COVID-19 and several other diseases.
https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/foldinghome-reaches-2-4-exaflops-in-compute-performance.html

Edit: Guru3D likely meant 178,000 RTX 2080Ti's as @Malo indicated below, not 178.

 

The NHS has apparently been developing an app to report to people when they have been in close/prolonged contact with those diagnosed with the virus. Anonymised data, all that sort of stuff although it seems a failure waiting to happen as so few have been tested in the community. Bizarrely, it seems as though people will be allowed to self-diagnose to claim they have definitelyhhad the virus. False positives, anybody?

Google and Apple are producing a joint API for the same thing, apparently.

 

You should at least fix this part you quoted since it's obviously incredibly wrong.

 

Link? The NHS doesn't develop anything but tenders contracts with the private sector that rips them off. Many years ago billions were sunk into contracts with BT, Toshiba, etc to create a unified health service database. Bollocks was accomplished. Presently one of the primary pathology system providers was asking £30,000 to create a Coronavirus reporting system. My mate used to work for this company and provides medical software to some NHS trusts. He has created a reporting system off that same system for free, in use in a few trusts at the moment. The NHS is an incoherent mess of independent trusts all doing their own thing with their own software and in-house protocls. Heck, they're supposed to be working on a unified cancer reporting registry and have failed repeatedly to manage that.

Okay, it's from something called NHSX. I have serious doubts as to their competency.

 

Yes the google and Apple Bluetooth based collaboration is promising and seems a good and secure basis ... hopefully this works more than just nationally but it is a start. I am not sure about the number of false positives thoughI started a discussion on stack overflow on if signal strength curves of contact interaction could give better indication of distance etc.

 

Okay, I keep thinking about this and why it doesn't seem right, but we can't trust the testing case numbers, and I think I've hit on how we know it isn't that many despite loads of people, myself including, thinking we may have had it.

We know lots more people are being hospitalised than with flu. Therefore, either Covid19 is no more dangerous but far, far more contagious, killing no more people but reaching them in a matter of weeks instead of months, or it's not particularly contagious but more dangerous.

Now if it was super contagious, that would have been apparent in the early testing. If one person was infecting everyone around them the same as measles, then during the containment phase when the UK tested those who had been in contact with known positives, there'd have been loads of +ve tests. Yet there were very, very few. It seems quite clear that the thing isn't particularly contagious and why it's R0 value is pegged at 2-3, despite people being contagious for days before symptoms manifest.

That therefore points to the other reason there are way more deaths than flu. It's not reaching loads of people but is more potent then flu, and that makes a lot of sense as it's a new disease with no established resistance in the species. We'd expect it to be as impactful as new diseases to isolated populations, such as the ordinary diseases devastating the Americas.

What about all the people suffering similar symptoms? Well, the other diseases haven't gone on holiday. Influenza didn't tag SARS-Cov2 in so it take a season off. We still have other colds and viruses buzzing around, and quite possibly there's another strain of something doing the rounds, which hasn't been identified because it's not killing people so no-one's investigating.

About the only chance that people have had Covid19 en masse is the theory that the disease was already present in humans, developed into something more deadly in China, and spread back as a secondary strain that's killing people alongside the initial strain that's not, which may be reaching lots more people and may, if true and we're lucky, be laying a foundation of resistance against the deadly strain.

 

State of Texas complete COVID-19 data breakdown



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

Data as of 4/15/2020 @ 12:00 PM:

Total Tests: 151,810 (Up +5,343)
Cases Reported: 15,492 (Up +868)
In Hospitals: 1,538 (Up +129)
Patients Recovered (Estimated*) : 3,150 (Up +570)
Fatalities: 364 (Up +46)

 

Ohio's numbers today, Confirmed: 7,791 (up from 7280 ), Hospitalized: 2237 (up from 2156 ), and Deaths: 361 (up from 324 ).
CDC Expanded Cases and Deaths: 163 (up from 127 ), 17 (up from 15 )
Confirmed Cuyahoga County: 1281 (Up from 1239 ).

Percentage increase: 7.02%, 6.05%, 11.42%
Raw increase: 511, 81, 37

Number of tests Ohio has 67,874 tests and 5,830 per 1M population, up from the Sunday numbers of 63,243 tests and 5,432 tests per 1M population, data from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ .

So now Ohio is in the confirmed cases doubling every 10 days territory.

 

Well, I am no expert so I can only guess. The most plausible approach I have read and many scientists from the field are advocating in Germany is the following:

(Overall goal is to have the total number of infected as small as possible).

1. Step: make a super hard lock down. Make it as long as it takes to bring the spread basically to (almost) zero.

2. Step: Once the virus is down (we are far away from it atm, spread rate need to be as small as 1.04 or so iirc) then start to slowly go back to normal in a controlled way.

3. Step: to make Step 2 work, there is an immense machinery necessary: constant and extremely quick testing. Step 1 might be needed as long as quick testing is available, even if the spread rate is under the threshold. As soon as the virus is detected, it has to be back tracked and than all involved put into quarantine. Keeping it as small and as local as possible is the only way to keep the virus down for an extended period of time.

It is somewhat the Korean style.

For me as a non-expert, this seems the only plausible and sustainable approach to the pandemic without risking many lives, while being able to go „back to normal“ as quick as possible.

 

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

April 15, 2020 - 1986 confirmed cases - 43 deaths

1986 confirmed cases up 109 over yesterday and one new death
Those 109 new cases represent a 5.8% increase over the last day

Increases (by percent) over the last 20 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%, 7.3%, 7.0%, 4.8%, 3.8%, 5.0% and now 5.8%

Increases (by count) over the last 20 days:
+64, +72, +49, +61, +82, +100, +100, +90, +94, +97, +43, +106, +63, +108, +105, +107, +79, +65, +89 and now +109

 

So, regarding the large scale contact tracing in China during the initial outbreak. Do we know if they only tested those who showed symptoms or not? The PCR tests were obviously extremely new so you'd imagine they might be circumspect about testing everybody when they were able to just easily shut down a household.

It occurs to me that they might not have bothered to test those who weren't showing symptoms. As far as I'm aware, SARS was considered symptomatic in all (most?) cases, so you could understand if they treated this new SARS-like disease in the same way. This might explain why the information about the potential for large numbers of asymptomatic cases which has been discovered in recent weeks didn't come to light sooner.

The other question is how many of the asymptomatic cases discovered are actually just presymptomatic ones who will develop symptoms, possibly of varying severity. Difficult to say as yet, even with the millions of known cases around the world. Everyone is still chasing their own tails to some degree with this virus:

https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/covid-19-what-proportion-are-asymptomatic/

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsa...tient-who-isnt-showing-symptoms-infect-others

Regarding the NHSX stuff, this article indicates that Palantir and at least one UK company are involved to some degree:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...idential-patient-data-in-coronavirus-response

 

Looks like Ohio numbers were updated later in the day.

Ohio has 71,552 tests and 6,146 tests per 1M population.

 

ugh, my lil bro keeps going to hospital every day as a resident in "anesthesia". Safety equipment are not complete. Whole bunch of docs and residents on "nerve" already got infected.... as compensation, the hospital planning to give ~150 dollars to residents.

this not only an issue for those that work in the field, but also for their family. case in point: my mom getting stressed out, thinking about my lil bro...
and here i am, cant think of anything i could do to help my lil bro or my mom

 

the actual numbers would be scary, who knows. By now thousands of tests were made. By starting the lockdown in mid march, they say the cases were reduced by a 79,5%. Ideally it'd be a week earlier but well...it could be worse.

The cities are the most critical points. A NY Times article mentioned that people in Europe were furious with the rich for abandoning the city for their 2nd home in other areas. They infected a lot of people -i.e. in Asturias- that way.

There was a singer saying that those like him who are rich are guilty of spreading the illness around the world and infect the poor and basically everyone.

 

Data from Sweden is a bit wobbly after Easter (very low during the holiday, registrations catching up after). Sweden records deaths that occur in nursing homes for elderly, (in contrast to for instance the UK and many other countries) and between a third and half of their deaths are such - they have had bad luck with those.
A better measure is probably to look at their intensive care - and it seems to be approaching a steady state, meaning that as many go into ICU as are dismissed from it or dies. In turn, meaning that the measures of Sweden which are less restrictive than other countries in the EU, seem to be sufficient to more or less reach R=1. Currently.

However, I'm not convinced that it is necessarily transferable to other countries. In Sweden it is basically non-existant that generations live together, there is no cheek kissing going on when people meet, and so on. And when the government says that you should practise social distancing and avoid visiting the elderly, people seem to more or less do that, even though public transportation and so on is still in operation. I doubt Spain, the UK or Brazil could just adopt the same policies with the same result. The population density, living condition, culture et cetera, all affect the outcome of policies.