New coronavirus in/from China

Little John · Post by **Little John** » 24 Mar 2020, 09:17

UndercoverElephant wrote:
Little John wrote:
UndercoverElephant wrote:I am now strongly veering towards the opinion that the CFR is well below 1%. I think a hell of a lot of people have got this virus already, and that the infection rate has been under-estimated pretty much everywhere.

I hope you are right UE. Can you explain in detail why you think this.
Not easily. It just seems like the number of people being infected - both famous people and just people I happen to know (of) - are much higher than I would expect, given the current official statistic. It also looks like this disease was spreading in Italy undetected for quite a long time, and that it may have been spreading in the UK largely undetected for longer than most people realise.

It isn't any single factor that is leading me to conclude this - rather just a general feeling based on all of the information I'm trying to assimilate. It looks as if the vast majority of reasonably healthy people, at least those who don't start off with a very high initial viral load, just get a cough (or almost no symptoms). If they get a high load then the disease can overwhelm their body before their immune system gets going, and if they have underlying conditions then their immune system never gets going. In both cases, those people end up with pneumonia, from which most people don't recover without ventilation.

It looks like the mild form of the disease is extremely infectious but not dangerous.

Okay, so I understand everything you have just said there. But, what evidence, either circumstantial or material, do you have for any of it? Everything you have just described could just as easy be a description of a standard British winter. I am not trying to have a go. I just don't understand what the basis of your conclusion is.

Mean Mr Mustard II · Post by **Mean Mr Mustard II** » 24 Mar 2020, 09:23

My car is now mainly serving as a non-urgent or neighbour delivery package quarantine zone depository. NEJM (Doc Campbell) said NCov fomites viable for three days. So I'm giving it six. Summer sky-high car cabin temperatures should help too.

While you were out exercising three hours ago, your package arrived Mrs Jones! Oh, chocolates you say?

UndercoverElephant · Post by **UndercoverElephant** » 24 Mar 2020, 09:27

Little John wrote:
UndercoverElephant wrote:
Little John wrote:I hope you are right UE. Can you explain in detail why you think this.
Not easily. It just seems like the number of people being infected - both famous people and just people I happen to know (of) - are much higher than I would expect, given the current official statistic. It also looks like this disease was spreading in Italy undetected for quite a long time, and that it may have been spreading in the UK largely undetected for longer than most people realise.

It isn't any single factor that is leading me to conclude this - rather just a general feeling based on all of the information I'm trying to assimilate. It looks as if the vast majority of reasonably healthy people, at least those who don't start off with a very high initial viral load, just get a cough (or almost no symptoms). If they get a high load then the disease can overwhelm their body before their immune system gets going, and if they have underlying conditions then their immune system never gets going. In both cases, those people end up with pneumonia, from which most people don't recover without ventilation.

It looks like the mild form of the disease is extremely infectious but not dangerous.
Okay, so I understand everything you have just said there. But, what evidence, either circumstantial or material, do you have for any of it? Everything you have just described could just as easy be a description of a standard British winter. I am not trying to have a go. I just don't understand what the basis of your conclusion is.

As I said, it is just a feeling. Sometimes when you are trying to take in a lot of information, patterns seem to emerge, and you can't always give a detailed explanation of why you sense that pattern. I could be completely wrong.

Vortex2 · Post by **Vortex2** » 24 Mar 2020, 09:33

Even if the death rate is much lower then expected, all this fuss will certainly cause a welcome partial reboot of our society & economy.

Mean Mr Mustard II · Post by **Mean Mr Mustard II** » 24 Mar 2020, 09:43

I too was wondering about people in the public eye and how many I knew of, to serve as a random population sample.

Reflecting my personal interests, I could probably list 100 past and present politicians, 50 past and present world leaders, 20 sports stars, 30 film stars and 450 rock musicians. The rock musicians are an especially vulnerable cohort, most with one foot in the grave already, being aged and through past or ongoing excess.

Many of these folks party hard and think they are immortal, whereas we all know only Keef is.

A cracking rock tune for you today!

Little Angels - Splendid Isolation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acIH_cG9XUs

Here in my room, in splendid isolation
Alone in the gloom, in splendid isolation
Sometimes I need to be, left in my own company
So here I am, in splendid isolation

I'm falling away, in splendid isolation
I'm hoping I'll stay, in splendid isolation
If they were right I'd agree, but it's them they know not me
So here I am in splendid isolation

I'm floating in a sea of my subconscious thought
And the skeletons are crawling from the closet walls
No-one ever sees me, I don't make a sound
And I don't know what I'm gonna do now

The motherless itch has got the best of me
Transcending the things that I will never be
But all along hallucinating life somehow
I still don't know what I'm gonna do now

The pressure starts to push me through my loving daze
For a moment there I thought I'd lost me wicked ways
It's not that I'm a leper when my mind allows
I don't know what I'm gonna do now

Lennon is a memory in a student brain
Gripping thought pavilions guilt in freedom's chains
The virginical construction makes the masses 'wow'
And I don't know what I'm gonna do now

Well I see the moon, the stars, the hemisphere
I see the future and it don't look clear
The past is re-appearing on my fevered brow
And I don't know what I'm gonna do now
Yeah, I still don't know what I'm gonna do now...

Little John · Post by **Little John** » 24 Mar 2020, 09:45

UndercoverElephant wrote:As I said, it is just a feeling. Sometimes when you are trying to take in a lot of information, patterns seem to emerge, and you can't always give a detailed explanation of why you sense that pattern. I could be completely wrong.

Parsing what you have written out:

* A majority of people get a mild form of the disease to the extent they experience little or no symptoms

* A minority of people experience significant symptoms

* A small minority of people become critically ill

So good so far....

However, all of the above being the case, there is no reason that I know of to expect the proportion of mild infections to have grown any sooner in the population than the proportion of severe or critical ones. We should have expected all of them to grow, albeit in their different proportions, at the same time.

Vortex2 · Post by **Vortex2** » 24 Mar 2020, 09:49

UndercoverElephant wrote:I am now strongly veering towards the opinion that the CFR is well below 1%. I think a hell of a lot of people have got this virus already, and that the infection rate has been under-estimated pretty much everywhere.

Also my father-in-law is in the firing line. Has to have care all day after a stroke several years ago, and the family of one of the carers has got the virus.

Campbell might not agree - he sees reports of 5.7%

See (from yesterday) :

Death rates

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-60EvBSLulo

Vortex2 · Post by **Vortex2** » 24 Mar 2020, 10:12

Interesting - but worrying - video of ICU usage stats so far in the UK

Younger people can need care - and the ill people can need other services such as pacemakers and kidney dialysis.

Life will get tricky when the numbers of sick get higher.

https://youtu.be/p5b8ptdQwLk

Vortex2 · Post by **Vortex2** » 24 Mar 2020, 10:26

Lockdowns..

Italy seems to be turning the corner ... but that said many 1000s will still die e.g ICUs are still full with long term ill who will probably not make it.

They had to go from our current fluffy lockdown to a strictly enforced lockdown in order to get the limited success that they have had.

Do we have the police, troops and intestinal fortitude to enforce such a lockdown?

Post by **clv101** » 24 Mar 2020, 10:32

Little John wrote:
UndercoverElephant wrote:I am now strongly veering towards the opinion that the CFR is well below 1%. I think a hell of a lot of people have got this virus already, and that the infection rate has been under-estimated pretty much everywhere.

Also my father-in-law is in the firing line. Has to have care all day after a stroke several years ago, and the family of one of the carers has got the virus.
I hope you are right UE. Can you explain in detail why you think this.

China:
"Documents seen by the South China Morning Post reportedly showed more than 43,000 people had tested positive for Covid-19 by the end of February but did not show symptoms. They have not been included in the official number of infections of more than 80,000."

Also, from Iceland:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/albertonardell ... M8wEX5EBLk
"The first results of the 1800 voluntary tests on people with no symptoms, which started last Friday produced 19 positive cases, or about 1% of the sample....about half of those who tested positive are non-symptomatic,â€� said GuÃ°nason. â€œThe other half displays very moderate cold-like symptoms.""

And on the Diamond Princess, where everyone was tested, some 410 out of 696 cases were asymptomatic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coro ... d_Princess

It's looking there is a very large group of asymptomatic or very mild cases, which must significantly improve the worst case scenarios but maybe makes containment harder.

Bedrock Barney · Post by **Bedrock Barney** » 24 Mar 2020, 10:48

Feels like The Twilight Zone here. We are in work as normal, receiving and responding to emails etc. Two project meetings this week are now going ahead as Microsoft team and Zoom events. For the time being at least, our construction projects are all continuing on site although I think progress will be slower.

fuzzy · Post by **fuzzy** » 24 Mar 2020, 10:54

The actual disaster is only caused by the overpaid moronic scum who were paid to organize resources.

If we have any vets who want to swap an unopened box of 50 masks for something interesting - antibiotics [long dated], something lance armstrong , cocaine, codeine [you can but ask..] - PM me

Vortex2 · Post by **Vortex2** » 24 Mar 2020, 11:17

fuzzy wrote:The actual disaster is only caused by the overpaid moronic scum who were paid to organize resources.

We have been ruled by these scum for far too long - and many/most are unelected civil servants and central government workers.

Over the decades they have quietly increased their powers whilst the population has been distracted by minor things such as going to work and raising families.

Time the stables were cleaned out.

Vortex2 · Post by **Vortex2** » 24 Mar 2020, 11:40

China to end coronavirus lockdown three months after outbreak started

https://metro.co.uk/2020/03/24/china-re ... -12446149/

UndercoverElephant · Post by **UndercoverElephant** » 24 Mar 2020, 12:09

clv101 wrote:
Little John wrote:
UndercoverElephant wrote:I am now strongly veering towards the opinion that the CFR is well below 1%. I think a hell of a lot of people have got this virus already, and that the infection rate has been under-estimated pretty much everywhere.

Also my father-in-law is in the firing line. Has to have care all day after a stroke several years ago, and the family of one of the carers has got the virus.
I hope you are right UE. Can you explain in detail why you think this.
China:
"Documents seen by the South China Morning Post reportedly showed more than 43,000 people had tested positive for Covid-19 by the end of February but did not show symptoms. They have not been included in the official number of infections of more than 80,000."

Also, from Iceland:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/albertonardell ... M8wEX5EBLk
"The first results of the 1800 voluntary tests on people with no symptoms, which started last Friday produced 19 positive cases, or about 1% of the sample....about half of those who tested positive are non-symptomatic,â€� said GuÃ°nason. â€œThe other half displays very moderate cold-like symptoms.""

And on the Diamond Princess, where everyone was tested, some 410 out of 696 cases were asymptomatic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coro ... d_Princess

It's looking there is a very large group of asymptomatic or very mild cases, which must significantly improve the worst case scenarios but maybe makes containment harder.

Yes. Thanks for explaining it more clearly than I could. And it makes containment completely impossible, not just harder. If it is true then we really do just need to protect the most vulnerable for 3 months and let everybody else get it.

Also this: https://edition.cnn.com/world/live-news ... 41e4e9bb23

Italy may have 10 times more cases of coronavirus than recorded, says official