OT: Corona virus

[Canoerebel]

My state has had a big jump today, utterly out of step with previous days. Hopefully it's a similar method or timing of accounting spike rather than reflective of what's actually happening.

[RangerJoe]

ORIGINAL: Zorch

ORIGINAL: Cap Mandrake

...
Let's not forget the "quants" told Lehman Bros. that mortgage backed securities were safe. [:D]

That was a case of willful ignorance. The experts said the MBS were relatively safer than other derivative backed securities, given a set of assumptions that didn't hold up. [8|]

Just remember about any investments, if you do not understand it then don't invest in it.

[JohnDillworth]

My state has had a big jump today, utterly out of step with previous days. Hopefully it's a similar method or timing of accounting spike rather than reflective of what's actually happening.

It's not always a strait line day to day. I know Georgia had a couple of hot spots so was this a new outbreak or the exiting ones ramping up?

[Canoerebel]

I haven't heard of any hotspots or flareups yet. I suspect this would either be a method-of-accounting thing or a coincidental perturbation like you're referring to.

[Canoerebel]

It appears that the University of Washington projections website quoted so often in here the past week has just updated to include many other countries: https://covid19.healthdata.org/spain

The confidence level for Spain seems particularly high, with a decided decline ongoing.

[Canoerebel]

Italy projected to drop very fast...but a couple of cautionary notes. First, the mortality reported today was more than projected by a fair amount (further caveat: this could also be a timing of reporting issue or other irregularity). Also, according to this graph, Italy is only expected to incur about 3,000 more deaths. That would be great but seems so contrary to what we've been seeing.

Bottom line: More time needed to get some level of confidence about the reliability of source for jurisdictions outside the US.

[Canoerebel]

Ugg. UK projection bleaker than expected.

[Canoerebel]

France

[Canoerebel]

Germany

[Canoerebel]

It looks like the site is currently limited to the US and Europe. I had hoped to add a few more at random, including Nigeria and Singapore.

[MakeeLearn]

Covid-19 death count in the United States is likely an underestimate. Here's why.
18 hrs ago

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medica ... li=BBnb7Kz

"This could be especially true because the reporting data can lag by an average of one to two weeks, according to the latest guidance from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's.

Also, deaths due to Covid-19 "may be misclassified as pneumonia deaths in the absence of positive test results, and pneumonia may appear on death certificates as a comorbid condition," the CDC noted, adding that "analyses to better understand and quantify reporting delays" for Covid-19 deaths and "related causes" are underway. In March, the CDC introduced a new code to accurately capture mortality due to Covid-19 on death certificates. "

"With that code, the CDC noted that Covid-19 "should be reported on the death certificate for all decedents where the disease caused or is assumed to have caused or contributed to death.""

[MakeeLearn]

What's Causing My Cold?

May 08, 2019

https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/cold ... old_causes

" Cold viruses have a lot in common, but each type has its own style, too.

Rhinovirus. This bunch is most active in early fall, spring, and summer. They cause 10%-40% of colds. You'll feel plenty miserable when you catch one, but the good news is they rarely make you seriously sick.


Coronavirus. These tend to do their dirty work in the winter and early spring. The coronavirus is the cause of about 20% of colds. There are more than 30 kinds, but only three or four affect people.

RSV and parainfluenza. These viruses cause 20% of colds. They sometimes lead to severe infections, like pneumonia, in young children."

[MakeeLearn]

NEWS SCAN: Novel coronavirus meeting, flu reassortment in ferrets, egg producer warnings

Jan 10, 2013


http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspect ... g-producer


"The World Health Organization (WHO) will convene a technical meeting early next week about the novel human coronavirus that has been confirmed in nine cases in recent months, including five fatalities.

"WHO has organized a technical consultative meeting to take place at the WHO Regional Office in Cairo from 14 to 15 January 2013 on the novel human coronavirus.

The meeting will bring together representatives of the three countries already affected, in addition to key partners and WHO collaborating centres involved in managing this public health issue, together with WHO experts," the agency said in a news release yesterday.

Cases so far have been in patients from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Jordan."

[obvert]

ORIGINAL: MakeeLearn

Stanford Professor: Data Indicates We’re Severely Overreacting To Coronavirus
March 30th, 2020
https://www.stress.org/stanford-profess ... oronavirus

"In an analysis published Tuesday, Stanford’s John P.A. Ioannidis — co-director of the university’s Meta-Research Innovation Center and professor of medicine, biomedical data science, statistics, and epidemiology and population health — suggests that the response to the coronavirus pandemic may be “a fiasco in the making” because we are making seismic decisions based on “utterly unreliable” data. The data we do have, Ioannidis explains, indicates that we are likely severely overreacting.

“The current coronavirus disease, Covid-19, has been called a once-in-a-century pandemic. But it may also be a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco,” Ioannidis writes in an opinion piece published by STAT on Tuesday."

ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

This conclusion by the Stanford professor in the link just provided by MakeLearn is significant:

This is from Mid-March. The Stress.org somehow ran it about two weeks after it appeared in Stat, and only about half of his article, leading to misleading assumptions about what he was actually concluding. He does make some very good points about the Diamond Princess that I am very interested in.

He was a bit off in his optimism, unfortunately. A lot of good ideas in here, but like many he didn't see this getting as severe as it is currently. US deaths are already above his estimate below at 12,197 according to the wikipedia chart just now.

The full article is here in Stat.

https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-f ... able-data/

If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths. This sounds like a huge number, but it is buried within the noise of the estimate of deaths from “influenza-like illness.” If we had not known about a new virus out there, and had not checked individuals with PCR tests, the number of total deaths due to “influenza-like illness” would not seem unusual this year. At most, we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average. The media coverage would have been less than for an NBA game between the two most indifferent teams.

[MakeeLearn]

The New Coronavirus: More Cases, More Deaths, Unclear Transmission

12.13.12
08:30 am

https://www.wired.com/2012/12/coronavirus-four/

"A parallel question: Is transmission (and amplification) happening among species we have not recognized? This possibility is raised by findings just published in the journal mBio, written by a multinational group of investigators who include the two authors of that first ProMED post, an Egyptian physician (then working in Saudi Arabia) and a Dutch virologist. The group says that – unusually for coronaviruses – this virus can grow in the cells of more than one species:

[T]he virus is capable of infecting human, pig, and bat cells. This is remarkable, as human CoVs normally cannot replicate in bat cells as a consequence of host adaptation. Our results implicate that the new virus might use a receptor that is conserved between bats, pigs and humans suggesting a low barrier against cross-host transmission."


"In this paper, the authors do not establish which receptor the new coronavirus – formally, hCoV-EMC – uses, but they have established that it does not use ACE2. And they raise the possibility that, whichever receptor is used, it might be higher up in the respiratory tract, and because of that location might allow the new virus to be more infectious."

[obvert]

ORIGINAL: durnedwolf

ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

My email to family last Tuesday included this assessment: "A few days ago, a major university in the UK revised its mortality estimate for that country from 500,000 to 20,000. Similarly, the US projections are currently 100k to 200k mortality (as widely reported in the news). That’s down by 10x what had been projected a few weeks ago. I think US estimate will drop more – probably a lot more. In the end, I expect (as a layman, an optimist without any credentials whatsoever) that the US death toll will be something in line with a seasonal flu outbreak – perhaps 20k to 40k over the next three or four months. Most mortalities will be the elderly and those with exacerbating conditions (obesity) or health issues (diabetes, etc.)."

At the time, the news and information coming at us was almost uniformly negative. Things were bleak and seemed to be spiraling continually bleaker. But it was the first time there seemed to be enough reliable data to hazard a guess.

(My family has strictly adhered to countermeasure requirements in place in our jurisdictions.)

So if we had done nothing at all - no stay-at-home - I think the numbers would've been as predicted. What do you think?

We will never know. They would have been a LOT higher. I shudder to think.

In Japan everything has been open, although people have been aware of distancing and wearing masks, keeping good hygiene, etc, for a long time. It's only now becoming an emergency there. We will have to see how much of one as it develops.

[MakeeLearn]

Feline Coronavirus (FCoV) RT-PCR

11/07

https://www.vet.cornell.edu/animal-heal ... oronavirus

"Feline Coronavirus (FCoV) is a common viral infection in cats. It generally causes asymptomatic infection, but can cause mild diarrhea. As yet poorly understood changes in the virus can give rise to mutants that lead to the development of feline infectious peritonitis (FIP).
Most cats infected with a FCoV eliminate virus following infection, but some cats may develop a persistent infection. These cats are generally asymptomatic, can shed large amounts of virus in feces, and serve as a continual source of infection for other cats in the environment."

[Canoerebel]

[In Reply to Obvert, above:] Thanks for pointing out the date on that info, Erik.

Professor Ionnidis missed on his mortality projection of 10k or 12k but may well be in the same ballpark unlike most others in play at that time. Around March 17, many/most US projections were still well above the 100k to 200k that were so heavily discussed last week (late March).

Around the same time that Ioniddis made his projection of 10k to 12k for the US, the governor of California estimated that more than half the population of his state could be infected (https://www.latimes.com/california/stor ... two-months). That would have resulted in tremendous mortality just in California in the range of 200k or more, even using a 1% mortality rate; back then the consensus was more like 2x or 3x that.

Ioniddis is likely to be much closer to the actual mark than Governor Newsome and most others making projections around that point in March.

[MakeeLearn]

Isolation of a Novel Coronavirus from a Man with Pneumonia in Saudi Arabia

This article was published on October 17, 2012, and updated on July 3, 2013, at NEJM.org.


"A previously unknown coronavirus was isolated from the sputum of a 60-year-old man who presented with acute pneumonia and subsequent renal failure with a fatal outcome in Saudi Arabia. The virus (called HCoV-EMC) replicated readily in cell culture, producing cytopathic effects of rounding, detachment, and syncytium formation. The virus represents a novel betacoronavirus species."

"This case is a reminder that although most infections with human coronaviruses are mild and associated with common colds, certain animal and human coronaviruses may cause severe and sometimes fatal infections in humans. Although HCoV-EMC does not have many of the worrisome characteristics of SARS-CoV, we should take notice of the valuable lessons learned during the 2003 SARS outbreak with respect to outbreak investigations and management."

[Zorch]

ORIGINAL: MakeeLearn

Feline Coronavirus (FCoV) RT-PCR

11/07

https://www.vet.cornell.edu/animal-heal ... oronavirus

"Feline Coronavirus (FCoV) is a common viral infection in cats. It generally causes asymptomatic infection, but can cause mild diarrhea. As yet poorly understood changes in the virus can give rise to mutants that lead to the development of feline infectious peritonitis (FIP).
Most cats infected with a FCoV eliminate virus following infection, but some cats may develop a persistent infection. These cats are generally asymptomatic, can shed large amounts of virus in feces, and serve as a continual source of infection for other cats in the environment."