Coronavirus / COVID-19

[Viking]

Bruce Aylward of the WHO says he did not see any evidence of a huge body of undiagnosed COVID-19 cases when he visited China, and that the case fatality rate is likely somewhere between 1-2%:

There’s this big panic in the West over asymptomatic cases. Many people are asymptomatic when tested, but develop symptoms within a day or two.

In Guangdong, they went back and retested 320,000 samples originally taken for influenza surveillance and other screening. Less than 0.5 percent came up positive, which is about the same number as the 1,500 known Covid cases in the province. (Covid-19 is the medical name of the illness caused by the coronavirus.)

There is no evidence that we’re seeing only the tip of a grand iceberg, with nine-tenths of it made up of hidden zombies shedding virus. What we’re seeing is a pyramid: most of it is aboveground.

[...]

I’ve heard it said that “the mortality rate is not so bad because there are actually way more mild cases.” Sorry — the same number of people that were dying, still die. The real case fatality rate is probably what it is outside Hubei Province, somewhere between 1 and 2 percent.

Inside China’s All-Out War on the Coronavirus

As one might remember, this should make it an order of magnitude more deadly than the seasonal flu, which I guess squares well with overwhelmed hospitals for such an infectious disease.

[ReluctantSamurai]

I’m Canadian. This is the Wayne Gretzky of viruses — people didn’t think it was big enough or fast enough to have the impact it does

This. Outside of China, efforts to deal with COVID-19 have been mostly reactionary. I would postulate that countries don't want to rock the economic boat, so they take a wait-and-see approach, Italy being the prime example. And now look...an entire province of 16 million on lock-down. Too late.

As soon as you find clusters, you shut schools, theaters, restaurants. Only Wuhan and the cities near it went into total lockdown.

Back of the envelope, it’s hundreds of thousands of people in China that did not get Covid-19 because of this aggressive response.

Seeing what I've been seeing, if other countries, particularly my own US of A, doesn't follow this protocol, it's going to be a very loooong spring and early summer.

75 to 80 percent of all clusters are in families. You get the odd ones in hospitals or restaurants or prisons, but the vast majority are in families.

Be curious to know if this holds true outside of China

The government made it clear: testing is free. And if it was Covid-19, when your insurance ended, the state picked up everything.

In the U.S., that’s a barrier to speed. People think: “If I see my doctor, it’s going to cost me $100. If I end up in the I.C.U., what’s it going to cost me?” That’ll kill you. That’s what could wreak havoc. This is where universal health care coverage and security intersect. The U.S. has to think this through.

Yep, and the US could be in BIG trouble, especially with a president who thought COVID-19 was just another flu, and his crony Pence who's response to an HIV outbreak when he was governor of Indiana, was abysmal:

https://www.politico.com/news/magazi...k-worse-118648

Pence’s handling of the Indiana HIV outbreak is a case study in mismanagement of a public health crisis. His inaction as governor gave Austin, Indiana with a population of around 4,200, a higher HIV incidence than “any country in sub-Saharan Africa"

Yeah, Donny Baby, just the man to put in charge

They’re mobilized, like in a war, and it’s fear of the virus that was driving them.

God help us here, because we can't even provide test kits that actually function

[Montmorency]

Bruce Aylward of the WHO says he did not see any evidence of a huge body of undiagnosed COVID-19 cases when he visited China, and that the case fatality rate is likely somewhere between 1-2%:

Inside China’s All-Out War on the Coronavirus

As one might remember, this should make it an order of magnitude more deadly than the seasonal flu, which I guess squares well with overwhelmed hospitals for such an infectious disease.

Aylward reports remarkable success from China's efforts, hundreds of thousands of infections averted. Hopefully so.

But we don't really have political will or implements to impose such a response, which included concentrating tens of thousands of medical personnel at the epicenter, hundreds of whom were sickened (with some deaths).

Seeing what I've been seeing, if other countries, particularly my own US of A, doesn't follow this protocol, it's going to be a very loooong spring and early summer.

What I've been reading assumes it's too late to contain with sustained community spread, and that we'd be better off shifting resources to mitigating the effects.

[ReluctantSamurai]

But we don't really have political will or implements to impose such a response

What we have here is a major cluster@#$%:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020...y-soon-improve

In principle, many hospital and academic labs around the country have the capability to carry out tests themselves. The PCR reaction uses so-called primers, short stretches of DNA, to find viral sequences. The CDC website posts the primers used in its test, and WHO publicly catalogs other primers and protocols, too. Well-equipped state or local labs can use these—or come up with their own—to produce what are known as a “laboratory-developed tests” for in-house use.

But at the moment, they’re not allowed to do that without FDA approval. When the United States declared the outbreak a public health emergency on 31 January, a bureaucratic process kicked in that requires FDA’s “emergency use approval” for any tests. “The declaration of a public health emergency did exactly what it shouldn’t have. It limited the diagnostic capacity of this country,” Mina says. “It’s insane.”

The World Health Organization (WHO) has shipped testing kits to 57 countries. China had five commercial tests on the market 1 month ago and can now do up to 1.6 million tests a week; South Korea has tested 65,000 people so far. The U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in contrast, has done only 459 tests since the epidemic began.

Like I said earlier, god help us here in the States, because our government and the bureaucracy surrounding the CDC, is going to make things much worse than they need to be...

[Montmorency]

DONALD TRUMP:
So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!

What we have here is a major cluster@#$%:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020...y-soon-improve

Point taken, thought that article was published at the end of February. I'd imagine the situation has somewhat improved since then. On the other hand...

https://twitter.com/freedlander/stat...43875508420614

Email from my doctor’s office this am: “At this time, despite what you hear from the White House, we are not able to test our patients.”

More: “We have to triage you and then get permission from the Department of Health based on an algorithm.”

Our very large local medical group sent this email message on 3/4/20: At this time, no physician offices have the ability to test for #coronavirus. The #COVID19 test can only be done by New York State and @CDCgov

Uhhhh....


And a few days ago the CPAC conservative conference, with POTUS in attendance, was exposed to 2019-nCov. Ted Cruz has self-isolated.


And Darkness and Decay and the Redcap Death held illimitable dominion over all.


Also, these two pieces of media are apparently NOT satire:

Classic leader principle: US Surgeon General: "The president - he sleeps less than I do, and he's healther than what I am"
https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1236669894747398144

Nero fiddling: Trump: "Who knows what this means, but it sounds good to me!"
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/...78368533700609

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Bob Page: Your appointment to FEMA should be finalized within the week. I've already discussed the matter with the Senator.
Walton Simons: I take it he was agreeable?
Page: He didn't really have a choice.
Simons: Has he been infected?
Page: Ah yes, most certainly. When I mentioned we could put him on the priority list for the Ambrosia vaccine, he was so willing it was almost pathetic.
Simons: This plague — the rioting is intensifying to the point where we may not be able to contain it.
Page: Why contain it? Let it spill over into the schools and churches. Let the bodies pile up in the streets. In the end, they'll beg us to save them.
Simons: I've received reports of armed attacks on shipments. There's not enough vaccine to go around, and the underclasses are starting to get desperate.
Page: Of course they're desperate. They can smell their deaths, and the sound they'll make rattling their cages will serve as a warning to the rest.

Three cheers for the saudis dropping oil prices right as the panic hit the markets...

You'd think a price drop in crude would have positive knock on effects rather than bad ones what with its main value being primarily what it can be turned into. The stock market is wierd.

According to the link, the row is such that Saudi-led OPEC wanted to cut production to keep prices stable, but Russia disagreed on grounds that a production cut would advantage the US shale industry. The effect is Saudis nix the deal and move to increase production. Just as overvalued stocks are popping, supply chains are disrupted, and demand/consumer confidence is cratering amidst the coronavirus emergency.

Interesting connections: Apparently the shale fracking industry in the US is like Uber: overleveraged, oversupplied in a market with depressed prices, premised on misleading or deluding investors, near bankruptcy having lost billions nonstop for years. A downturn now probably does a lot of damage to shale gas and oil, right?

Also, for the first time in history the 10-year US Treasury yield has come below 1%. No idea what that means, though I figure it's more free money the federal government is leaving on the table in refusing to commit to deficit spending.

[ReluctantSamurai]

Point taken, thought that article was published at the end of February. I'd imagine the situation has somewhat improved since then.

Say what you will about the Chinese...love 'em, hate 'em, indifferent, but they went from thinking about suppressing the existence of COVID-19 (like they did with SARS), to being all in. And despite the "all in" approach to containing the virus, 80k+ infections/3k+ deaths later, they've seen their first declines in new cases and deaths since the outbreak began in Dec 2019. If that trend continues, then every single governing body in the world needs to wake up from la-la land (or it can't possibly happen here), and adopt the same tactics, or something similar.

If you take the wait-and-see approach, Italy happens. This sucker moves so fast, that if you hesitate....it's too late. Given the inept, and insanely partisan leadership we have here in the US, I don't see the clear and determined effort that the Chinese have put forth. Like I said earlier, it's going to be a long, long descent into hell for US citizens, before we can begin a recovery.

I just saw this:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020...ck-market.html

At the same time, I have to say, people are now staying in the United States, spending their money in the U.S. — and I like that. People are now staying in the United States, spending their money in the U.S., and I like that. I’ve been after that for a long time.

(This as a reaction to the huge downturn in overseas airline flights.)

Probably an overreaction, but I'm selling all my stuff and moving to Tibet, where I will spend the rest of my days meditating on how stupid some world leaders can be

[Montmorency]

Reminder:

[a completely inoffensive name]

Picture is funny, but if they really didn't want oils on the hardware it would have been stored in a cleanroom.