Deadly Wuhan Coronavirus

AD1184

Celestial
You and many of the models of statistics are in serious error and built up on fear mongering in an attempt to forever change the country...that will be a disaster.

Herd immunity is the best way to go, but not in your mind.
Lets just all stay at home for until a tried and proven vaccine is ready. Which could be when?...18 months 2 years 3 years.
I don't think the way out is to immediately release the lockdown for the sake of acquiring herd immunity or to maintain lockdown until a viable vaccine has been developed.

Instead, the lockdown will be temporary to get the rate of transmission and number of active cases under control. Once this has occurred, there can be a phased relaxing of lockdown measures (allowing more people to go to work and school, but maintaining social distancing, and probably recommending mask usage in public, but maintaining a ban on large gatherings). There is a rapidly growing diagnostic industry devoted to testing for this virus. Eventually there will be a much greater testing capacity which will enable better monitoring of disease progress and prevent small outbreaks from growing into new large-scale epidemics.

Herd immunity should only be contemplated as part of a programme of vaccination later on down the line.
 

nivek

As Above So Below
These two sets of statistics seems to conflict on the surface, those in critical condition at 3 percent and closed case deaths at 20 percent...For one thing this seems to tell me that there is likely a larger percentage of those with mild symptoms who are dying than are presently being considered...

2020_04_24_15.17.16-1.jpg
 

AD1184

Celestial
These two sets of statistics seems to conflict on the surface, those in critical condition at 3 percent and closed case deaths at 20 percent...For one thing this seems to tell me that there is likely a larger percentage of those with mild symptoms who are dying than are presently being considered...

View attachment 9564
I have noticed that about the number of critical cases in Worldometer data, which is typically much less than the daily number of new deaths in many nations. I think that the reason is simply the number of critical cases is being under-reported. Although there are a number of people dying outside of a medical setting, the British cumulative death data on the Worldometer site is for hospital deaths only. Estimates in this country are that there are 30-50% more deaths outside of hospitals.
 
Just a moment, Trump says inhaling Dettol or Lisol can save us.
The scariest part is that some people are actually stupid enough to listen to what that guy says - like that older couple who ingested chloroquine phosphate from their koi pond supplies, killing the man and putting his wife into an ICU.

My stance is simple: if Trump wants to propose lethal new experimental treatments against this virus, then he should lead by example and test it on himself first.
 

nivek

As Above So Below
China could have come out of this smelling like roses and called a hero if they had truly been transparent when this virus situation started and stopped it from spreading across the world...Think of the headlines, "Communist China Saves the World" but noooooo, keeping true to their deceptive practices they did not do the right and moral thing and put humanity at risk...

...
 

nivek

As Above So Below
Beaches across the nation are packed: Thousands ignore social distancing to sunbathe in temperatures of up to 95 degrees and relax on the sand as governors' pleas to stay home fall on deaf ears

From New York to California, people ignored social distancing to hit the beach Saturday as temperatures heated up. Los Angeles braced for a heatwave this weekend which had people keen to get back to the beach as photos show beachgoers sunbathing and relaxing. Meanwhile in New York, a spring day after a week of rain saw people out and about on Coney Island and Long Beach, despite the city being the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak. And in Florida, popular beaches like Daytona and Cocoa Beach, continue to allow people to walk, surf, bike or swim, while promoting staying a safe six-foot distance from others. This comes in direct defiance to governors Andrew Cuomo (New York) and Gavin Newsom's (California) strict orders to stay-at-home as coronavirus infection rates continue to rise nationwide. People were seen relaxing on the sand on Tybee Beach in Georgia Saturday. Photos show bikini-clad beachgoers standing at an open food or beverage window.

27666712-0-image-m-1_1587898169138.jpg
 

nivek

As Above So Below
Could coronavirus topple Vladimir Putin? As oligarchs buy up ventilators for their dachas, businesses go bust, badly-paid doctors quit in droves and oil price collapse has left Russia's coffers running dry

Badly paid doctors have quit in droves, fearing for their lives after being told to treat coronavirus patients without adequate protective equipment in a chronically underfunded health system.

Ambulances crews queue for hours to deliver patients to overloaded hospitals where medical staff have run out of oxygen – yet desperately needed ventilators have been bought by billionaires setting up makeshift clinics in their mansions.

The oil price collapse has turned the country’s main revenue stream into a trickle, while there is mounting fury that its government is favouring its rich cronies over small business owners with bailouts.

These are the perilous effects of the pandemic in Russia. Now analysts and President Vladimir Putin’s political enemies even wonder if his long and brutal reign might fall victim to the crisis.

The former KGB man-turned- president, who prizes stability and promotes himself as a global strongman, suddenly looks weak against an invisible new foe. The latest figures claim 74,588 confirmed cases among Russia’s 145 million population, with 681 fatalities – although earlier figures showed a 37 per cent spike in ‘pneumonia’ deaths, leading to claims the state was manipulating data.

‘The government is openly lying,’ said Anastasia Vasilyeva, an eye doctor, president of a medical trade union and ally of a key opposition leader. She was detained by police a few days later on a trip to investigate hospital supplies and fined for defying lockdown rules.


27654438-0-image-a-24_1587859171450.jpg
 

Dejan Corovic

As above, so bellow
Could coronavirus topple Vladimir Putin? As oligarchs buy up ventilators for their dachas, businesses go bust, badly-paid doctors quit in droves and oil price collapse has left Russia's coffers running dry

Badly paid doctors have quit in droves, fearing for their lives after being told to treat coronavirus patients without adequate protective equipment in a chronically underfunded health system.

Ambulances crews queue for hours to deliver patients to overloaded hospitals where medical staff have run out of oxygen – yet desperately needed ventilators have been bought by billionaires setting up makeshift clinics in their mansions.

The oil price collapse has turned the country’s main revenue stream into a trickle, while there is mounting fury that its government is favouring its rich cronies over small business owners with bailouts.

These are the perilous effects of the pandemic in Russia. Now analysts and President Vladimir Putin’s political enemies even wonder if his long and brutal reign might fall victim to the crisis.

The former KGB man-turned- president, who prizes stability and promotes himself as a global strongman, suddenly looks weak against an invisible new foe. The latest figures claim 74,588 confirmed cases among Russia’s 145 million population, with 681 fatalities – although earlier figures showed a 37 per cent spike in ‘pneumonia’ deaths, leading to claims the state was manipulating data.

‘The government is openly lying,’ said Anastasia Vasilyeva, an eye doctor, president of a medical trade union and ally of a key opposition leader. She was detained by police a few days later on a trip to investigate hospital supplies and fined for defying lockdown rules.


27654438-0-image-a-24_1587859171450.jpg

That's not bad idea at all.
 

AD1184

Celestial
The epidemic progress post-lockdown continues to disappoint. I believe that the lockdown has not been conducted very efficiently in Britain. While many European countries are easing restrictions, it looks like it will be a long time yet before this is contemplated here. The government will not be drawn on communicating details of its plans to ease the lockdown, which I think is to the detriment of public cooperation more than anything, but sources close to the government indicate that the daily infection rate must be down in the hundreds per day before any measures are relaxed.

The key daily statistic in the available data in my current thinking is the 'Pillar 1 - Positive', essentially the daily count of new hospitalized Covid-19 patients.
upload_2020-4-26_20-53-28.png
upload_2020-4-26_20-59-59.png

This is down to 2,685 today, although keep in mind that today is a Sunday, and the effect of the weekend on the reporting is very real, as can be observed in the statistics of many countries, including Britain. Pillar 2 testing is included in the daily announced total which features most prominently in the press, but this has been increasing, which makes the total of this series less consistent than Pillar 1 on its own, and also makes the situation appear even bleaker than it is. Until not so long ago, the announced total of daily new cases was almost entirely 'Pillar 1'.

It is also encouraging that the yield of positive cases per the number of tests carried out seems to be reducing also. The historical average for Pillar 1 is about one-third of all people, now it is less than one-fifth. In Pillar 2, historically it is around one quarter and in the most recent data less than one-sixth.

But here we are, nearly five weeks into full lockdown, and six weeks into the period when the government brought in its strenuous social-distancing guidelines on the 16th of March, and there are still thousands of people newly testing positive for the virus every day. I do hope that there is some investigation undertaken to find out where these infections are coming from. For healthcare workers and care home residents it is fairly obvious, but do these two groups sum to a number close to the whole?

I have always been concerned about the situation in supermarkets, and have wondered if they are responsible for a large fraction of post-lockdown infections. One wonders whether healthcare and care home workers are also transmitting the disease to the community when they leave their workplaces, thus sustaining the epidemic. Estimates for care home deaths now range up to more than the total number who have died in hospital, with more than 40,000 succumbing to the virus in total in Britain.

UK coronavirus deaths more than double official figure, according to FT study | Free to read
 
Last edited:

AD1184

Celestial
Why experts are questioning two hyped antibody studies in coronavirus hotspots

The Stanford antibody study is in more trouble now. Andrew Gelman, a prominent statistician at Columbia University wrote of it on his blog
I think the authors of the [Stanford antibody] paper owe us all an apology. We wasted time and effort discussing this paper whose main selling point was some numbers that were essentially the product of a statistical error.

I’m serious about the apology. Everyone makes mistakes. I don’t think they authors need to apologize just because they screwed up. I think they need to apologize because these were avoidable screw-ups. They’re the kind of screw-ups that happen if you want to leap out with an exciting finding and you don’t look too carefully at what you might have done wrong.

Concerns with that Stanford study of coronavirus prevalence « Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

A letter recruiting people for the study was sent by one Catherine Su to the mailing list of a Santa Clara area high school, promising participants that they would learn if they were immune and be able to get back to work, and know that they could no longer transmit the virus to others. It so happens that Ms. Su is the wife of non other than Jay Bhattacharya, principal author of the study.

Coronavirus: Email From Stanford Professor’s Wife Claimed His Antibody Study Would Prove If You Were Immune

I heard a claim in a podcast that the paper has been retracted by the authors due to statistical errors, but I cannot substantiate that in news stories that I have been able to find.
 

AD1184

Celestial
I got this piece of rubbish in my news feed:

Science says: It’s time to start easing the lockdowns
By Scott Atlas

[...]

Now, we face another, even greater problem: how to sensibly re-enter normal life. This must be based on what we now know, not on worst-case projections, using facts and fundamental medical knowledge, not fear or single-vision policies.

First, we know the risk of dying from COVID-19 is far lower than initially thought, and not significant for the overwhelming majority of those infected.


Multiple recent studies from Iceland, Germany, USC, Stanford and New York City all suggest that the fatality rate if infected is likely far lower than early estimates, perhaps under 0.1 to 0.4 percent, i.e., 10 to 40 times lower than estimates that motivated extreme isolation.

https://nypost.com/2020/04/26/scien...the-coronavirus-lockdowns/?mod=article_inline

The fatality rate in New York State has exceeded 0.1% of the population, never mind of the infected.

The author (a medical doctor and Stanford academic) is mentioning the now-discredited Stanford study and also the USC study which has provided very little backing for its claims, and which drew inferences from a very low rate of prevalence, in a study of fewer people than the Stanford one and which would also likely have been plagued by similar issues with the test used. Not to mention that it is thought possible that there is a less deadly strain on the US West Coast, and also that Californians live in an entirely different climate to New Yorkers. His other links do not even substantiate what he is on about.

The idea that there is a single fatality rate which remains to be conclusively determined is a nonsense. If life-saving intervention makes any difference to the outcome for someone with severe Covid (and there is plenty of evidence that it does), then the access to that treatment has a huge effect on that rate. Access depends on the demand, and if the demand is overwhelming then the fatality rate is going to increase greatly. There are a range of other factors on which the risk depends, besides age.

He says the risk of death for someone 18-45 is 0.01 percent. He also links to an Oxford University webpage (with the display text 'far lower') which completely contradicts this in a range of estimates from different sources, saying it is many multiples of this value.

There are so many things wrong with this I don't have time to go through all of them. It just goes to show that if someone is a medical doctor, they can still be a moron.

What is it with Stanford?
 
Top