OT: Corona virus

[RangerJoe]

ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

ORIGINAL: Cap Mandrake

The $1200 "stimulus checks" are right from the US Treasury (we borrowed the money).

Oddly, the IRS has seemed to have forgotten to send me one.

You're probably, like me, one of the 'fortunate' few that are above the income threshhold for consideration. Benefits start getting phased out >$150,000 IIRC. If you make >$175k you get bupkis.

Well, maybe I should file something. It has been so long that I think that I have forgotten how. Where do I get those paper forms?

[Chickenboy]

ORIGINAL: RangerJoe

ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

ORIGINAL: Cap Mandrake

The $1200 "stimulus checks" are right from the US Treasury (we borrowed the money).

Oddly, the IRS has seemed to have forgotten to send me one.

You're probably, like me, one of the 'fortunate' few that are above the income threshhold for consideration. Benefits start getting phased out >$150,000 IIRC. If you make >$175k you get bupkis.

Well, maybe I should file something. It has been so long that I think that I have forgotten how. Where do I get those paper forms?

Start here:

https://www.irs.gov/coronavirus/get-my-payment

[Chickenboy]

The benefits of testing have been vastly overstated on this thread and in society writ large. As I have mentioned before, testing should be a decision making tool. Where it cannot be used as a decision making tool, it is inherently devalued in its utility. One does not stop an outbreak with testing. Understanding? Sure. Altering the IFR/CFR for posterity sake?
OK.

But the rationale for why some countries have fared better than others in this outbreak has no correlation that I can find with how widespread their virus testing regimens have been-it's simply not possible to use this information in real time to affect the epidemic curve with a ubiquitous virus.



Deaths / M population. Excluding San Marino and Andorra, Belgium has the dubious honor of leading the pack. They've tested a larger percentage of their population than the United States, yet their mortality rate / M is roughly 4x ours. Luxembourgh has tested ~5x the percentage of their population we have, yet have a similar mortality rate. Switzerland has tested twice what we have, yet their deaths/M is ~50% greater than ours. France has tested a lower percentage of their population than the US, yet their deaths /M is 2.5x what ours is. And so on.

Virus (e.g., PCR) testing for a ubiquitous virus will not intervene in the epidemic profile. Contact tracing at this stage is a pipe dream and totally unworkable, so the benefit of the test is subsumed. One can't derive much additional benefit for decision making from most nations' testing programs as they are now. If one assumed that the virus is every nation around the globe and that 'lots' of people have it that may not be showing clinical signs, how does testing 10,000/M or 20,000/M or 30,000/M derive benefit in tamping down the infection?

Should we say that we shouldn't 'reopen the economy' until we get to X/M tests? Nope. There's no clear correlation with the number of tests performed with how 'well' countries have fared with this thing.

IMO, the greatest correlation with fewest deaths / M population is how local/regional/national edicts on extreme social distancing have been observed. The greatest likelihood that someone will die from this agent is whether they get it in the first place, not whether the country has more (superfluous?) testing than another.

I think when the dust settles, for those capable of swallowing some unpleasant truths, there will be an opportunity to reevaluate the public health care systems of some of these countries most wracked by the disease. Italy, Spain, Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Luxembourg and, yes, the United States should search their souls and see what they did really really wrong. But for now, that's an open political wound.

[Cap Mandrake]

ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

ORIGINAL: Cap Mandrake

Man there is some good news evolving.

--Remdesivir seems to work for severe cases
--We AREN'T Going to run out of vents
--The number of mild cases means we can achieve some form of herd immunity sooner than expected
--Maybe we can halt the economic damage before we are mud gatherers

[8D]

"Ooh! Denis! There's some lovely filth down here!" [:D]

[:D] I just had a really great idea whilst taking a leak! Suppose we hire out EVERY hotel in Cancun, hire a bunch of charter jets and fly everyone between 18 and 30 down there for 14 nights all inclusive...6 to a room..let them fornicate and drink tainted alcohol to their hearts content. Everyone would get COVID! Now, on the flight back, everyone get Rocephin and Zithromax to treat the GC and Chlamydia. A few thousand cases of Moctezuma's revenge but you could hand out WHO rehydration bottles on the plane.

[Cap Mandrake]

Agreed. It's not everyone on the planet did not do contact tracing. Look where we are.

South Korea had some good success tamping down deaths but they have a Hermit Kingdom on one side with 200,000 land mines and thousands of machine guns protecting the border and then on the other three sides you have 38F water that kills you from hypothermia in about 10 minutes. Also, who goes to Korea on vacation? [:D] There are literally NO roads or rail lines in. It's airline, ferry or parachute in.

They also had a robust public health infrastructure and widespread societal cooperation and respect for elders.

[obvert]

ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

ORIGINAL: obvert
The Chinese really need to get the whole of Wuhan tested serologically, but if the US could do it in NY, or the Italians in Lombardy, or the NHS here in London, it will be a game changer.

Disagree. The 'game' is afoot no matter what we test, whom we test, when we test or how we test them. We need to move forward assuming incomplete information, not wait on some novelty finding or curiosity. We cannot wait for serologic findings on a small town or other artificial 'population' to move on.

So let's say you find a higher % seroconverters than you expect from a small town (e.g., Santa Clara, CA or Chelsea, Mass) sampling? How will that affect your decision to move forward? ~33% seroconversion= ~66% susceptible. So what? That doesn't impact my perceptions of the disease process or the societal impact one iota.

The premiss of your disagreement seems, (and this is me reading just what you wrote so I may have misinterpreted) that these small serological findings wouldn't be useful.

Actually, I'm advocating a much larger study that would get a some of the big cities and reach a good portion of the population. The small ones could be useful to see how it's impacting different areas, demographics and measures differently I would think.

So if the seroconversion in the 20% of NYC that is tested is 33% would that change future measures?

[Cap Mandrake]

There is an interesting point about high seroconversions in the absence of symptoms....it means the lethality of the virus is much lower but the R0 is likely higher than estimated.

[Chickenboy]

ORIGINAL: obvert

ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

ORIGINAL: obvert
The Chinese really need to get the whole of Wuhan tested serologically, but if the US could do it in NY, or the Italians in Lombardy, or the NHS here in London, it will be a game changer.

Disagree. The 'game' is afoot no matter what we test, whom we test, when we test or how we test them. We need to move forward assuming incomplete information, not wait on some novelty finding or curiosity. We cannot wait for serologic findings on a small town or other artificial 'population' to move on.

So let's say you find a higher % seroconverters than you expect from a small town (e.g., Santa Clara, CA or Chelsea, Mass) sampling? How will that affect your decision to move forward? ~33% seroconversion= ~66% susceptible. So what? That doesn't impact my perceptions of the disease process or the societal impact one iota.

The premiss of your disagreement seems, (and this is me reading just what you wrote so I may have misinterpreted) that these small serological findings wouldn't be useful.

Actually, I'm advocating a much larger study that would get a some of the big cities and reach a good portion of the population. The small ones could be useful to see how it's impacting different areas, demographics and measures differently I would think.

So if the seroconversion in the 20% of NYC that is tested is 33% would that change future measures?

No-I think they're very interesting findings, Obvert. From an epidemiological POV, I think everything about this pandemic is absolutely fascinating. I'm saying now-today-that they're not applicable to what we need to do now-today-for society en masse.

I too would like to see everybody serologically tested-today. But that's not going to happen. As discussed yesterday (at least 5 pages back in this thread [8|]), ubiquitous serology testing of the populace isn't going to / won't / can't happen for many months / years from now. It's a numbers game in terms of testing kits approved / available, phlebotomists, laboratory throughput and so on and so on.

And when we *do* a worthwhile study design for serosurveillance, we need to bear in mind what we're trying to measure. Most (all?) of the PCR testing we're doing is biased towards high risk individuals demonstrating clinical signs or inpatient care medical aides or frontline responder types. That's appropriate given that we're trying to see who has the virus in terms of its relationship with sickness and / or death. But if we're trying to measure the populace as a whole and seroconversion of the unwashed masses, we need to do population-wide surveys that rope in larger numbers of low and medium risk individuals to better gauge the real life spread of the agent.

So if a study was initiated-today-looking at seroconversion of 25% of the population of NYC and it showed 33% seroconversion, you'd probably be privy to those results two or three months from now. And those results would be meaningless to what we do today.

[Chickenboy]

ORIGINAL: Cap Mandrake

There is an interesting point about high seroconversions in the absence of symptoms....it means the lethality of the virus is much lower but the R0 is likely higher than estimated.

Aye. Thinking that too. IFR goes way way down. CFR too, as you'll get lots of 'well I didn't feel great for a couple days, but got better' hindsight case profiles. But the R0 in real-world settings probably goes up.

[durnedwolf]

So there's nothing that would come out in the urine like a high white blood cell rate or something that people could just do a pee-test and if the color changes on the strip they come in for a couple of hits of Rocephin?

[witpqs]

ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

ORIGINAL: Alfred

ORIGINAL: Sammy5IsAlive


... I didn't realise that Professor Ferguson had got it so wrong with BSE/CJD - that was definitely a major goof-up on his part.

He has a well established track record of getting it seriously wrong, a fact overlooked by unqualified journalists who just accept any "expert's" mo9delling without looking at the assumptions underpinning any model.

1. 2005, Ferguson claimed bird flu could claim up to 200 million. Result was 282 world wide deaths between 2003 and 2009.

2. 2009, the claim was swine flu had a fatality rate of 0.3 to 1.5%. He/Imperial College settled for a 0.4% rate which fed into a UK government estimate of 65,000 UK deaths. Actual result was 457 UK deaths, a rate of 0.026% 9f those infected.

3. 2001, their modelling of foot and mouth disease led to UK government policy which cost the UK 10 billion pounds. The modelling was strongly criticised as being severely flawed by Michael Thrusfield, professor of veterinary epidemiology at Edinburgh University.

4. 2002, their modelling expected 50 to 50,000 people dying from mad cow disease, increasing to 150,000 if there was also a sheep epidemic. Result is 177 UK deaths.

5. Nor is their current COVID-19 modelling far from being generally accepted as being accurate. Besides the Oxford study which produces quite different results, Professor John Ioamidis of Stanford University has commented that some of the major assumptions and estimated seem to be substantially inflated.

None of this is surprising when it is realised (as disclosed by Ferguson on 22 March 2020) that their model is based on undocumented 13 year old computer code written for an influenza pandemic, not a coronavirus pandemic. IOW the model is not available for peer review nor does it fully incorporate the specific characteristics of the current pandemic.

Alfred

GIGO by any other name?

I think some of what Alfred laid out implies even with good input there might have been garbage out.

[witpqs]

ORIGINAL: Cap Mandrake

[:D] I just had a really great idea whilst taking a leak! Suppose we hire out EVERY hotel in Cancun, hire a bunch of charter jets and fly everyone between 18 and 30 down there for 14 nights all inclusive...6 to a room..let them fornicate and drink tainted alcohol to their hearts content. Everyone would get COVID! Now, on the flight back, everyone get Rocephin and Zithromax to treat the GC and Chlamydia. A few thousand cases of Moctezuma's revenge but you could hand out WHO rehydration bottles on the plane.

Now, on the flight back, everyone get Rocephin and Zithromax to treat the GC and Chlamydia.

Google was no help - what is the "C" in "GC"? (Assuming the "G" is gonorrhea.)

[Chickenboy]

Edit:

Witpqs and / or Cap Mandrake:

Some day, over a couple of beers, I'd like to regale you with my story of Chlamydia testing gone awry. But that'll cost you a couple beers. [8D]

[geofflambert]

The zombie apocalypse has arrived. Protesters protesting stay-at-home orders in Ohio. Picture says it all. Liberate Ohio!

[Chickenboy]

ORIGINAL: geofflambert
The zombie apocalypse has arrived. Protesters protesting stay-at-home orders in Ohio. Picture says it all. Liberate Ohio!

[:-]
Somebody needs to get an RT-PCR swab on those dirty windows-STAT. Eesh...

[witpqs]

ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

Edit:

Witpqs and / or Cap Mandrake:

Some day, over a couple of beers, I'd like to regale you with my story of Chlamydia testing gone awry. But that'll cost you a couple beers. [8D]

"Oh, Lydia, Lydia..."

[RFalvo69]

ORIGINAL: geofflambert

The zombie apocalypse has arrived. Protesters protesting stay-at-home orders in Ohio. Picture says it all. Liberate Ohio!

The oxygen shortage is being felt elsewhere too.

[Chickenboy]

ORIGINAL: RFalvo69

ORIGINAL: geofflambert

The zombie apocalypse has arrived. Protesters protesting stay-at-home orders in Ohio. Picture says it all. Liberate Ohio!

The oxygen shortage is being felt elsewhere too.

What a bunch of dumbasses. At least it's a self-limiting reaction. A shortage of COVID-19 in your area? Go steam up the government windows with you and 2,000 of your closest blowhard friends. That'll show them. [8|]

[RFalvo69]

ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

ORIGINAL: RFalvo69

ORIGINAL: geofflambert

The zombie apocalypse has arrived. Protesters protesting stay-at-home orders in Ohio. Picture says it all. Liberate Ohio!

The oxygen shortage is being felt elsewhere too.

What a bunch of dumbasses. At least it's a self-limiting reaction. A shortage of COVID-19 in your area? Go steam up the government windows with you and 2,000 of your closest blowhard friends. That'll show them. [8|]

As I already said, I would have no problem for this people to catch the virus and just die (a bad death). Sadly, while this happens they will infect other, innocent people.

What I think is that, unlikely Pearl Harbor, or 9/11, or the various terrorist attacks in Europe (these are only examples), there isn't a clear enemy for your rage to vent. People now screaming about their "civil liberties" had no problems in sacrificing the same liberties as part of the fight against (the Japanese, Bin-laden, the Talibans, various...) But... here? The enemy is invisible, intangible and for the most part not understood. OTOH losing your job is a clear and present wound in your daily life, and you have a clear target about who caused it.

"Herd" immunity at his peak. Let's only hope that the herd that will survive all of this is not the stupid one.

BTW, the guns are already out. What they hope to do against the National Guard, if it comes to that, is anyone guess. I fear that the victims will be, as usual, innocent civilians.

[Chickenboy]

ORIGINAL: RFalvo69

BTW, the guns are already out. What they hope to do against the National Guard, if it comes to that, is anyone guess. I fear that the victims will be, as usual, innocent civilians.

It's difficult for most Europeans to understand American 'gun culture' accurately. I sincerely doubt that these people, openly bearing arms, are going to do anything further than brandish them. If they had a more ominous revolutionary mindset, they wouldn't be congregating openly.

As a side note, I've never met a more polite group of people than at shooting ranges. Respectful, patient, polite, matter of fact and non-confrontational. I wonder why? [;)]