OT: Corona virus

[Canoerebel]

Thanks for posting, Rfalvo.

Every country in Europe and North America is dealing with full-blown outbreaks now. I'm not sure about Africa and South America, but many countries probably have enough to be dealing with early or medium stages too.

Germany and Italy make two very different studies in the spread and mortality of the virus. If those tends continue, why? We discussed it yesterday here, but it'll be interesting to hear more as this comes to an end.

[Canoerebel]

Here's the Johns Hopkins daily mortality rate graph (lower right). You see the earlier spike when China was full blown. The right-most spiking is due to mushrooming totals in Europe and North America.** You can see that it has leveled off, though I don't think we're actually there yet. Right now the number of cases in Europe and N.A. are growing so much, with South America and Africa still early, that more spikes should be coming. But eventually this will level off and drop. As has been noted before, Italy should be the first solid indication of that, whenever it happens.

** The bar at far right is today's in-progress total. So it's incomplete until midnight GMT.

[Timotheus]

I will weigh in with some links and some analysis.


Wuhan Institute of Virulogy, official page in English
http://english.whiov.cas.cn/

Only one BSL4 virus lab in all of China. There are very few BSL4 worldwide
https://www.liquisearch.com/biosafety_l ... facilities

Article about and pictures from the Wuhan facility:

https://www.nature.com/news/inside-the- ... ns-1.21487

The chair of Harvard's Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, american, arrested in USA; specialist in mind control, worked in you guessed it, Wuhan:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ha ... t-n1124646
https://www.zmescience.com/science/nano ... -17062015/

Also arrested in Boston; 2 chinese nationals, one People's Liberation Army operative claiming to be a "student" working in Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biomedical Engineering, the other was arrested for stealing "21 vials of biological research and attempted to smuggle them out of the United States aboard a flight destined for China."

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/harvard- ... na-related

Coronavirus is a man made pathogen in a lab, by Ralph Baric and his team... https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opin ... bate-34502

Here is the team: https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985

Note Zhengli-Li Shi, who headed the all Chinese science team...

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12711

...which isolated and characterized SARS-like virus from bats.

I.e. created the SARS virus from bats in a lab.

tl;dr chinese people are dirty, and it's from bat soup, anybody who thinks this is man made is a conspiracy nutter wearing tin foil.

I will now leave you boomers, especially the ones with suicidal attitudes and behaviours, to comment further.


edit: crap, forgot about Canada
A researcher with ties to China was recently escorted out of the National Microbiology Lab (NML) in Winnipeg amid an RCMP investigation into what's being described as a possible "policy breach."

Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, her husband Keding Cheng and an unknown number of her students from China were removed from Canada's only level-4 lab on July 5, CBC News has learned.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba ... -1.5211567

Coronavirus being studied in Winnipeg, Local lab growing own stocks
https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local ... 00931.html

[Canoerebel]

That data from Italy yesterday was discouraging, at least in isolation, as both Rfavlo and alanschu noted. Alanschu also referred to a few possible positives hidden amidst the stream of data.

Here's one data point that was encouraging. For the first time, the number of recoveries in Italy showed a meaningful increase. When the virus has been present long enough (at least two weeks), the earliest sufferers begin to recover.

[obvert]

ORIGINAL: Lowpe

ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

ORIGINAL: mind_messing
...

I see that you are unable to control yourself.

I wonder what a graph of China would look like? Weren't they originally saying no human transmission, and arresting people talking about the virus? Didn't they deny researchers and doctors from visiting early on (around December)?

Yep. Every country has some of this as well.

it is of course human nature to think this can't happen to me, and of course politicians are trying to both calm and persuade their populace at first, as well as assuage the market so they don't go into freefall.

No one saw this coming, or the extent of it's spread, or the economic impact it would cause. No early reports predicted what is happening right now.

That makes me think no reports will predict what it will be like in one month, two months or three months from now either.

One of my daughters favourite books is the British classic, "Going on a Bear Hunt." One of the lines constantly repeated with each obstacle is:

"Can't go over it, can't go under it, we gotta go through it!"

[Timotheus]

PAGING NEMO


get in here, spookboy

[Canoerebel]

Edited to Minimize Proliferating Proliferation.

[Zorch]

ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

ORIGINAL: Timotheus
....

The silly fringe is in the early stages of exponential increases it seems.

That's what I meant in yesterday's post about a Turing Test. No Artificial Intelligence could ever be as knowledgeable, opinionated, and irrational as the members of this forum. [:D]

[Kull]

ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

That data from Italy yesterday was discouraging, at least in isolation, as both Rfavlo and alanschu noted. Alanschu also referred to a few possible positives hidden amidst the stream of data.

Table updated thru 3/18. Although we did see an uptick in the numbers from the north, the real growth is happening elsewhere. In three days down "south" (think of it more as "not the north"), the daily increase in confirmed cases has jumped from 14.5% to 19.1%, while the northern rate of increase has actually declined (although not by much, and it's still pretty high).

To get a little more granularity, I added the percentages for Lazio (Rome) and Tuscany (Florence) at the bottom of the table. Tuscany in particular is skyrocketing, and frankly you'll see much the same thing in the other provinces which border on Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna.

A note on the percentages at the bottom of the table. All show changes from one day to the next. These are not overall numbers.

Pertinent links:

1) Daily Italian Stats by province here

2) Original post with regional map of Italy here

3) The 3/17 Update Post here

[Canoerebel]

Kull, thanks for digging and reporting.

I wonder if what happened up north is destined to happen in the "non-north"? Earlier emergency measures might dampen things there (just as Hubei province had far more cases than the other China provinces).

[Canoerebel]

A quick glance around the Johns Hopkins map (https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboar ... 7b48e9ecf6) shows that it's not just Germany that has comparatively low mortality in central Europe. Look at Switzerland, Austria, Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, etc.

[mind_messing]

ORIGINAL: Lowpe

ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

ORIGINAL: mind_messing
...

I see that you are unable to control yourself.

I wonder what a graph of China would look like? Weren't they originally saying no human transmission, and arresting people talking about the virus? Didn't they deny researchers and doctors from visiting early on (around December)?

That was exactly my point, Lowpe.

A compare and contrast with the relevant narratives overlapped on the raw numbers would tell an interesting story.

[Erik Rutins]

ORIGINAL: RFalvo69
I'll share a bit more about what is happening here in Lombardy (and in the rest of Italy), on the ground.

Thank you for your excellent updates from Italy. I look forward to reading these and I hope you are your family are able to stay safe and healthy.

We are being as careful as we can be here and hoping the younger people follow suit. We have health aides that come every day to help care for my father. They come from the town near us that has the main regional hospital and confirmed cases. Unfortunately his care is beyond what I can do on my own at this point, so we rely on their help to be able to keep him at home. This arrangement has worked well for the past couple of years, but now it is also a source of concern, given that we cannot fully isolate ourselves and the increasing news about pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic spread means that despite everyone being careful, it may still find it's way to our house.

My son's school is closed, my wife and I are working remotely, so there is definitely an aspect of this where it is nice to have everyone at home too. I think amid the terrible toll this virus is taking, there is also some hope that it may lead to more unity and perhaps some innovations that may save many more lives in the years to come after we get through this.

We are also planning out our garden (here we start planting in May) so that if this goes on for many months we will at least have some easily available fresh produce here at home, though we won't be fully self-sufficient.

Both my son and my father love ham and baked beans, so before this week I stocked up on some and we've been eating ham and baked beans for dinner for about week now. No sign they are tired of it yet, but I expect that will happen eventually, though I think the rest of us may get there first. [:)]

We're trying out a grocery delivery service called Instacart - supposed to deliver our weekly groceries this Saturday. We'll see if that works, otherwise I'll be making another trip down to the store next week to replenish our stocks.

So far testing here is still limited to those with likely symptoms or health care workers, so they are saying assume that for every confirmed case there are at least 16 out there we don't know about. Comforting. Hopefully the massive increase in testing that is being touted at the federal level, including readily available tests in Walmart and Walgreen's parking lots, will show up here soon and allow us to get much better recon on where the virus is or isn't.

For the US, the next two weeks seem critical in determining how tough the next couple of months will be, but I don't see everyone fully united or awake yet, despite recent events.

Good luck to you all and stay well.

Best Regards,

- Erik

[Erik Rutins]

ORIGINAL: mind_messing
That was exactly my point, Lowpe.
A compare and contrast with the relevant narratives overlapped on the raw numbers would tell an interesting story.

The point was definitely political, whatever its other virtues may have been - please do not bring politics into this thread. You can certainly state that realistic communication here in the US and in other countries has lagged behind the virus and that in many areas the communication is still not what it needs to be. There is a way to make this point without being political or divisive.

Regards,

- Erik

[Canoerebel]

This is the message I sent to my designer and my children Tuesday (and all of us are taking serious precautions):

I think things are going to be fine. This is not going to be an apocalyptic event, at least in terms of real numbers in comparison to other outbreaks and issues.

The situation in China and South Korea is very encouraging. There, the period of increasing virus/mortality rates lasted about two to four weeks.

Italy is now 2.5 weeks into that trend. It's key to see when Italy stabilizes and then begins to recover. Spain and other countries are a bit behind Italy and will have scary numbers because those numbers will rise for days or weeks (but in comparison to flu and other serious things we've experienced in the past 20 years, the numbers should still be comparatively modest).

In the USA, we got a halting, slow start on countermeasures. But we've kicked it into a high gear the past five days. In some ways, we've caught or exceeded most of the European countries. Since we're relatively spread out, have high quality healthcare as a rule, and had a head start on imposing those countermeasures, I hope we'll do better. We'll still experience rising numbers for that same period - two weeks, a month, maybe longer - but probably dampened over what might have been.

Right now the news seems to be 100% negative (and panicky). I expect that to begin changing within the week, slowly at first and then more quickly, as good news begins to come in from Italy, etc.

I plan to be on the Appalachian Trail in late April or early May. I'd be shocked if that wasn't the case. I'll be shocked if the outlook hasn't changed dramatically inside two weeks.

But what do I know? I'm no prophet, which is why I avoid games of chance.

[Kull]

ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

So far testing here is still limited to those with likely symptoms or health care workers, so they are saying assume that for every confirmed case there are at least 16 out there we don't know about. Comforting. Hopefully the massive increase in testing that is being touted at the federal level, including readily available tests in Walmart and Walgreen's parking lots, will show up here soon and allow us to get much better recon on where the virus is or isn't.

A week ago (feels like ages....apparently we're living in dog years now) I posted testing stats per country from wikipedia, and here's an update (current table on the left, earlier on the right). A bit of apples to oranges since they've added some columns and there's more provincial/state granularity, plus i didn't capture the bottom dwellers originally (and do now) but there are some interesting things to see (from what I can tell, the province/state numbers are subs-sets of the country numbers, so don't add them to your country's total):

1) UAE and Australia have gone from "not on the chart" to 4th and 6th respectively in total tests. It will be interesting to see if that translates into lower infection and death rates in the weeks to come

2) Germany isn't on either chart, which is very surprising. Obviously they must be testing, and it would be nice to see if there's a correlation to the low death rate. Not sure why it's not here.

3) The Chinese numbers haven't been updated since February (almost a month ago) and there's nothing from Iran.

4) Testing in the US is increasing at roughly the same rate as most countries, but more is obviously needed. We'll see if the new Roche tests and Korea-style drive throughs start to ramp up the numbers.

[Zerberus_MatrixForum]

ORIGINAL: Canoerebel


Germany and Italy make two very different studies in the spread and mortality of the virus. If those tends continue, why? We discussed it yesterday here, but it'll be interesting to hear more as this comes to an end.

Longtime lurker from northern Bavaria here ...

There are different reasons I think. First one is density of testing. It's said, that there were much more tests in Germany than Italy, especially in the early stages (don't know, if this is true) , but in any case much less than Korea. It's obvious, that you lower the percentage of deaths (not the total numbers) by testing more people.

Next point to see is time. One week ago (12.03.) there were only 2.369 known infections in Germany, today there are 10.999. Most victims will die 1-2 weeks after their infection. That means, next week the numbers will increase for sure unfortunately.

And last - until now Germany still has the hospital capacity to handle critical cases, we only can pray, that we will still have it in some weeks...

[Zerberus_MatrixForum]

Its a little bit difficult to count test numbers:

found following numbers for Germany:

Week 03/02 -03/08 ~ 35.000 tests
Week 03/09 -03/15 ~ 100.000 tests

tests in hospitals are not included, numbers are not known in moment...

[witpqs]

Pardon me if this was already posted, but keeping track of everything in this thread is beyond me.

https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/16/lower-coronavirus-death-rate-estimates/

[Canoerebel]

Hey, that is good news.