Coronavirus thread

[Thaluikhain]

Out of interest, is the quarantine and isolation expected to make significant effects on other diseases?

[Whatever]

Out of interest, is the quarantine and isolation expected to make significant effects on other diseases?

Fewer people will catch pneumonia or the flu, sure, but those gains are very likely to be outweighed by the people who do catch it not being able to get the medical care they need because hospitals will be well over capacity.

Normally the flue hospitalizes anywhere from 140,000-810,000 americans in a year, per the CDC. And we see anywhere from 12,000-61,000 deaths. But that's with adequate medical care and full hospital access. Even with a significant decline in total cases, we will likely see a spike in deaths.

A lot of other medical conditions that would normally be easy to treat will go untreated instead too, with potentially deadly consequences.

[Username17]

It's more than a little bit unnerving how many of the world's major countries are just fucking lying to everyone at the highest levels of government.

So obviously Trump went on a tweet rampage extolling the virtue of Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin despite those things not actually having had adequate testing to demonstrate that they are genuinely effective against SARS-COV-2. He deliberately sandbagged the testing effort because he wanted to keep the numbers down. He deliberately exposed uninfected people to infected people because he was afraid the stock market would crash if people figured out that something bad was going to happen. WTF?!

And China... there was a period in the middle where they behaved vaguely like adults, but they literally black bagged the first doctors to identify this fucking thing. The WHO was alerted to SARS-COV-2 spreading person to person by fucking Taiwan, because the PRC was being the mayor from Jaws until after the virus had successfully spread to other countries.

My understanding of the Germany situation is that currently if you get COVID-19 and your lungs fill up with fluid and your heart gives out fighting against pulmonary hypertension that they mark your cause of death as "heart failure" and you don't go into the COVID-19 death toll. Which is... an interesting innovation in keeping reportable death numbers down.

As far as I know, the numbers out of Korea, Japan, and Taiwan are still reputable. But the rest of the major powers have not covered themselves with glory.

-Username17

[maglag]

As far as I know, the numbers out of Korea, Japan, and Taiwan are still reputable. But the rest of the major powers have not covered themselves with glory.

-Username17

Italy's reporting bigger dead numbers from the virus than even China and that's after they stopped bothering counting the bodies anymore.

[OgreBattle]

While reading up on covid-19 I learned that flue's carried by water fowl.
So does flu jump from ducks into humans every year?

If we stopped eating ducks, being around ducks, would flu be way down?

[Whatever]

So does flu jump from ducks into humans every year?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avian_influenza

In short: no.

There's lots and lots of versions of the flu. Some of them are only found in birds. Others are found in other animals (such as dogs, pigs, and horses), and some are also, or only, found in humans. It's relatively rare for an entirely new strain to make the jump from animals to humans, and much more common for existing versions to mutate just enough to get past our immune systems (or simply for the ratios of existing strains to shift so that we personally run into ones we haven't seen in a while).

[Maj]

MERS (why did they put a place name in that one?!) is also known as the camel flu because it can be transmitted from camel to human. But it's not an easy transference.

[Username17]

MERS (why did they put a place name in that one?!) is also known as the camel flu because it can be transmitted from camel to human. But it's not an easy transference.

The WHO decision that viruses should not be named after locations was made in 2015. MERS was first reported in 2012, so it got named via the old nomenclature.

But of course, MERS today could appear anywhere on Earth, and there's no particular reason to believe that any outbreak happening now would start in the Middle East. And it is precisely that kind of confusion that led to the change in viral strain naming conventions.

People calling SARS-COV-2 the "Chinese Corona Virus" or whatever aren't just being racist, they are purposefully being factually incorrect in order to be more offensive.

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

I don't know what the death counts are going to be, and this is going to be a travesty any way you look at it. However, there is a chance that despite a spike in Covid deaths, that might be partially offset by a reduction in traffic fatalities, especially with bars closing.

I'm pretty desperate to find silver linings. Knowing that major flaws in our economic system are being revealed gives me some hope that major improvements in the social safety net are coming. You wouldn't have Social Security without the Great Depression. I'm hoping people think it's worth $0.35 every time you buy a sandwich to give the employee behind the counter sick leave so they don't have to choose between starving and infecting everyone they serve.

[DSMatticus]

Germany's current case fatality count is .37%. Attempts to estimate the true CFR rate all seem to land in the .5% to 1% range, meaning Germany's numbers are surprisingly good but not implausibly so. Germany is also doing widespread random testing and last time I checked had found exactly one case they didn't already know about, which was itself connected to a known cluster. Germany does not appear to have a significant number of mild cases getting missed and pushing up the naive "confirmed / dead" count.

... but they also haven't hit capacity yet and their CFR is rising anyway, suggesting that until now they've just been lucky with who gets sick. I cannot comment on any deliberate statisical fudgery, but they're still only at 82 deaths - early enough that the demographics of the communities it randomly hit first matters a great deal. I actually did some rudimentary early pandemic math for the U.S. back when we were at 30 deaths, just so I had some expectations to compare things too. I expected that model to overestimate how bad things were in the U.S., since if you'll recall it was ravaging its way through a Seattle nursing home at the time. We are so far ahead of what I was expecting that it can no longer be explained by the generous, 6-day doubling day period I settled on. We were incredibly fortunate during the early stages of this pandemic and now the law of averages is asserting itself, and I suspect the same thing is about to happen in Germany and get them closer to the .5% mark we're expecting.

And obviously, when the hospitals hit capacity everything changes.

[Maj]

MERS (why did they put a place name in that one?!) is also known as the camel flu because it can be transmitted from camel to human. But it's not an easy transference.

The WHO decision that viruses should not be named after locations was made in 2015. MERS was first reported in 2012, so it got named via the old nomenclature.

Thank you. I didn't know that, and I was wondering why there was a difference. I resented the fact that people were calling it the Chinese coronavirus. When the news came out that Trump changed his speech so that it deliberately said Chinese, I got livid. People are getting hurt because of what the President says, and he is doing it on purpose.

[RobbyPants]

I'm pretty desperate to find silver linings.

For the time being, pollution is dropping.

[Koumei]

Yes, the Venice canal has turned crystal clear and dolphins have been seen swimming in it, which I feel is taking the Michaelangelo a bit. This has possibly been the best thing ever for "the non-human portion of the world" (similar to when the volcano went off in Iceland, halting flights for a long time, and when Genghis Khan killed every third person he met).

Pets seem to be enjoying the situation where their people are spending more time at home.

[Whirlwind]

Yes, the Venice canal has turned crystal clear and dolphins have been seen swimming in it, which I feel is taking the Michaelangelo a bit...

Unhappily this is perhaps not true. At least, National Geographic reckons not: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/anim ... dia-posts/ and The Guardian changed its story about Venice to remove it https://www.nationalgeographic.com/anim ... dia-posts/

[Maj]

I was so bummed the dolphins were fake news. I love them.

[Username17]

The international numbers seem to be about 20%/5%/1%. That is: 20% of infections need hospitalization, 5% need intensive care, 1% die. Countries reporting markedly different numbers than that are generally attributable to fuckery in data accumulation rather than having an especially good or bad medical response.

Of course, as hospital resources get used up, I'm not sure how many of the 5% and 20% die without adequate care. Out of hospital deaths in Italy have been unnervingly large.

-Username17

[maglag]

Italians start to 3D print key medical equipment to fight corona virus, medical companies preparing to sue them because they're skipping the 11k market price.

[Stahlseele]

Germany has mostly shut down by now as well.
They are probably going to institute widespread, maybe even country wide ban on people going outside for any other reason than to get groceries or go to the doctors . .

[Nachtigallerator]

My understanding of the Germany situation is that currently if you get COVID-19 and your lungs fill up with fluid and your heart gives out fighting against pulmonary hypertension that they mark your cause of death as "heart failure" and you don't go into the COVID-19 death toll. Which is... an interesting innovation in keeping reportable death numbers down.

I can attest that german death certificates do have text boxes both for cause and for mechanism of death, and you would be expected to put down the root cause in the former, so I'm not really sure where you're getting this from. You will hear a lot of false death certificate horror stories from forensic pathologists, but I somehow doubt that's a uniquely german problem.
Our official infection statistic is laggy because reports have to be recieved by state local health authority ("Gesundheitsamt") and processed before being turned over to the top state health authority ("Landesgesundheitsamt"), where they are again processed, and then turned over to the responsible federal authority ("Robert-Koch-Institut") where the national statistic is generated.

For now there has been no general curfew in Germany, we've just shut down just about any business where public gatherings take place (now including barbers). But public health and safety are state matters, so naturally, Bavaria is doing it's own thing and did impose a "curfew" - but this one explicitly allows leaving your home to get some fresh air and exercise, you're just forbidden from doing that with groups that you don't live with, so it's more like a ban on public assembly.


If anyone cares to hear from acute psychiatry in northern germany, we haven't really felt an impact so far, just a lot of confusion and a ban on visitors. We've had one admission of acute alcohol withdrawal coming home from Italy who is to be quarantined until tuesday and one nurse waiting for his test result, but that's about it. It's going to be ugly once we get the first agitated delirium or psychosis with a plausible suspicion of infection, because they'll probably have to be locked in even if nonagressive. And we were running at capacity for that kind of measure before the virus came up.

[Korwin]

Did'nt look at all countrys, but Norway and Austria have the best survival rates so far, Germany on the third place.
Italy on the last.

No idea how the believable the numbers are...
I tend to believe the numbers about deaths.
Nubers about confirmed cases are harder, with the different amount of testing happening in different countrys.


https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps ... 7b48e9ecf6
3/22/2020, 7:13:55 pm

China:
81.397 Confirmed cases / 3.265 deaths
1 death for 24,93 cases

Italy:
59.138 Confirmed cases / 5.476 deaths
1 death for 10,8 cases

US:
31.057 Confirmed cases / 390 deaths
1 death for 79,63 cases

Spain:
28.603 Confirmed cases / 1.756 deaths
1 death for 16,29 cases

Germany:
23.974 Confirmed cases / 92 deaths
1 death for 260,58 cases

France:
14.485 Confirmed cases / 562 deaths
1 death for 25,77 cases

South Korea:
8.897 Confirmed cases / 104 deaths
1 death for 85,55 cases

Switzerland:
7.014 Confirmed cases / 85 deaths
1 death for 82,52 cases

UK:
5.071 Confirmed cases / 234 deaths
1 death for 21,67 cases

Netherland:
4.216 Confirmed cases / 180 deaths
1 death for 23,42 cases

Belgium:
3.401 Confirmed cases / 75 deaths
1 death for 45,35 cases

Austria:
3.244 Confirmed cases / 9 deaths
1 death for 360,44 cases

Norway:
2.257 Confirmed cases / 7 deaths
1 death for 322,43 cases

Australia:
1.314 Confirmed cases / 7 deaths
1 death for 187,71 cases

[Iduno]

I'm on day seven thousand and something of isolation. I fear I may have gone mad, but that was 20 years ago, not a result of current events.

Yeah, the problems I've seen are other people not knowing how to handle not seeing people/leaving their homes every week.

Hell, the Minister for Corruption who prides himself on STOPPING THE BOATS RAAAAA has let a cruise ship unload all its passengers into Sydney, with no checks or follow-ups.

At least Sydney is small, so this won't infect a city of millions of people.

[Username17]

I tend to believe the numbers about deaths.

I absolutely don't believe the numbers about deaths. 153 thousand people die every day in this world, and the number of them that are tested for SARS-COV-2 is extremely small.

There are old people dying at home in every country of the world that aren't tested for SARS-COV-2. How many of them are COVID-19 deaths is anyone's guess.

Even without explicit statistics fuckery (I have seen in print that if you die of sequelae of COVID-19 in Germany you are not counted as a COVID-19 death), there are people dying every day outside the auspices of their nation's Coronavirus testing regime. And some of them are dying of COVID-19. Louisiana has reported 20 deaths and 837 cases, but they've also only tested 3500 people. Obviously there are people with COVID that are sick and dying without getting marked as COVID cases, because fucking obviously.

Are the unreported deaths in Louisiana going to be measured in the dozens? Hundreds? Thousands? I don't know. But it's precisely that I do not and can not know that I take the number of deaths from the United States as a bullshit number that I do not trust.

-Username17

[Korwin]

@Frank,
What numbers do you trust? Apparently you don't trust the numbers of Germany and not the ones from the US.
On what basis, do you form your opinions?

I mean, yes the numbers from the above Johns Hopkins University will have mistakes in them, but we should be able to get some basics of information from them.

Like the UK seems to have massive underreported corona infections to get such an high mortality rate (unless the health care system is allready over their limit, and according to your posts, that didnt happen yet).

[Username17]

@Frank,
What numbers do you trust? Apparently you don't trust the numbers of Germany and not the ones from the US.
On what basis, do you form your opinions?

I mean, yes the numbers from the above Johns Hopkins University will have mistakes in them, but we should be able to get some basics of information from them.

Like the UK seems to have massive underreported corona infections to get such an high mortality rate (unless the health care system is allready over their limit, and according to your posts, that didnt happen yet).

The Korean numbers are probably the best. Good testing and good tracing and a pretty open and transparent data collection. Other numbers are between somewhat and massively worse than that.

Total cases and deaths are going to be underreported everywhere, and the question is merely how much. It's over a week since the UK government admitted that poor testing was underreporting the caseload by an order of magnitude or more.

Deaths are also a lagging indicator. You don't draw the red card and die right away, it's a slow horrible process with your lungs filling up with fluid while you cough yourself bloody and your heart goes out from the strain. If you got ten thousand cases tomorrow you'd have zero deaths the day after that. But Italy added 651 COVID deaths to their tally today and that's with less than 60k cases confirmed so far. Clearly cases are being more underreported in Italy due to testing limits than deaths are. But with the early deaths that weren't tested it was obviously the other way around.

-Username17

[Kaelik]

Impossible to be truly sure where things come from in congress but they dont get out of it without the speaker letting them and I do want to praise Pelosi and the democrats response package from the house. I felt they should have done this before letting McConnell dictate the scope of senate negotiation and there are obviously things I think would be better policy than what has been provided but this is the kind of hard reform package demand that controlling the house let's democrats do and that really does address most of the issues of the virus at at least the bare minimum we need to continue without mass die offs and evictions.