New coronavirus in/from China

[kenneal - lagger]

LJ, you are suggesting locking up the elderly and the infirm and then allowing an unattenuated outbreak which would mean that hundreds of thousands of people would end up getting extremely high initial doses of the virus, on commuter trains for example, and getting a lot sicker than they would have done if exposed to the virus in a more gentle manner. You only have to look at the extent of infection in the London area to see how much more severe it has been there.

You are closing your eyes to the uncertainty of what you are proposing. There is absolutely no evidence to show that an unattenuated outbreak amongst younger people would have the same death and hospitalization rate as the currently managed outbreak. In fact the way that the virus has struck down some otherwise fit and healthy people suggests strongly that it wouldn't behave as you so fervently hope.

Getting on to the strong reaction among governments, including the Chinese government, I too thought that there must be something else involved as the way that a whole province of China was closed to suppress the disease suggested to me that it was much more virulent than they let on. We still don't know what the full impact of the disease could be but if it carries on as the Spanish flu epidemic did we will need further and much more stringent measures to be taken later on this year or early next year.

I'm not sure whether it is interesting or pathetic that Trump knows something about this outbreak that his intelligence agencies don't know after they issued a communique sating that the Chinese government didn't release the virus. Trump's increasing efforts to show his voters that he is in command of the situation only go to show just how little command he has of the situation, of science and of the English language. If he wants to "Make America Great Again" he should resign immediately and stop making his country the laughing stock of the world that it is with him in command.

[fuzzy]

I wonder if the Chinese eliminated chronic asymptomatic carriers ie 'superspreaders' with plasma from severe recovered? This may have stopped them shedding endlessly. Or maybe they just shot them, or nailed their doors up.

An excellent predictive presentation:

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/sites/defaul ... art1_0.pdf

[Vortex2]

We have had roughly 40,000 deaths for a 5% exposure rate in the population .. and that's without overloading the NHS.

Say we need to reach 60% exposure to achieve 'herd immunity' ... that means 11 x 40000 = 440k deaths to come .... assuming continuing good health care.

So. unless new meds or vaccines arrive, we face either a very long road with many deaths and broken economy ... or a shorter journey with probably way more deaths, a broken NHS and a distraught society.

The future will be difficult either way.

Can you think of any other way forward - which is workable?

[boisdevie]

We have had roughly 40,000 deaths for a 5% exposure rate in the population .. and that's without overloading the NHS.

Say we need to reach 60% exposure to achieve 'herd immunity' ... that means 11 x 40000 = 440k deaths to come .... assuming continuing good health care.

So. unless new meds or vaccines arrive, we face either a very long road with many deaths and broken economy ... or a shorter journey with probably way more deaths, a broken NHS and a distraught society.

The future will be difficult either way.

Can you think of any other way forward - which is workable?

Show me your evidence for the 5% exposure rate you claim.

[Vortex2]

HMG data as at 1st May

As of 9am on 1 May, there have been 1,023,824 tests, with 122,347 tests on 30 April.

762,279 people have been tested, of whom 177,454 have tested positive.

As of 5pm on 30 April, of those who tested positive for coronavirus in the UK, 27,510 have died. This new figure includes deaths in all settings, not just in hospitals. The equivalent figure under the old measure would have been 23,229.

Hospital deaths drifting down - new cases less clear ... 7-day average rising.

[Vortex2]

We have had roughly 40,000 deaths for a 5% exposure rate in the population .. and that's without overloading the NHS.

Say we need to reach 60% exposure to achieve 'herd immunity' ... that means 11 x 40000 = 440k deaths to come .... assuming continuing good health care.

So. unless new meds or vaccines arrive, we face either a very long road with many deaths and broken economy ... or a shorter journey with probably way more deaths, a broken NHS and a distraught society.

The future will be difficult either way.

Can you think of any other way forward - which is workable?

Show me your evidence for the 5% exposure rate you claim.

HMG statement during briefing.

(Earlier statements included 2.7% and 4%)

This is probably why HMG says we have a very long way to go.

[boisdevie]

We have had roughly 40,000 deaths for a 5% exposure rate in the population .. and that's without overloading the NHS.

Say we need to reach 60% exposure to achieve 'herd immunity' ... that means 11 x 40000 = 440k deaths to come .... assuming continuing good health care.

So. unless new meds or vaccines arrive, we face either a very long road with many deaths and broken economy ... or a shorter journey with probably way more deaths, a broken NHS and a distraught society.

The future will be difficult either way.

Can you think of any other way forward - which is workable?

Show me your evidence for the 5% exposure rate you claim.

HMG statement during briefing.

(Earlier statements included 2.7% and 4%)

This is probably why HMG says we have a very long way to go.

Since we have not tested the entire UK population this claimed exposure rate is pure horseshit.

[Vortex2]

Show me your evidence for the 5% exposure rate you claim.

HMG statement during briefing.

(Earlier statements included 2.7% and 4%)

This is probably why HMG says we have a very long way to go.

Since we have not tested the entire UK population this claimed exposure rate is pure horseshit.

It's not my fault that you don't understand statistics.

[clv101]

In the worldometer list of countries, from India downwards the numbers are TINY.

They are also junk.

I have a friend in Tanzania, says the official data is wrong, been stuck at 16 deaths for days. But lots of credible stories circulating of overwhelmed hospitals and bodies being collected on the street.

As of just last week, the official UK data was missing thousands of deaths, and even today's fairly accurate data is 10 days+ delayed.

There are big data black holes out there.

[clv101]

Could there be something we haven't been told?

The Chinese reaction and the later global reaction to COVID-19 seem very aggressive.

I don't normally wear a tinfoil hat ... but is there something about this virus we don't know?

I was taken aback by the scale of the Chines response in January - but in hindsight they were absolutely right. They did manage to contain significant community spread to just one small region and even accounting to significant under-reporting of deaths they are certainly in the thousands, not hundreds of thousands on even low millions that a minimal approach might have resulted in. Their economic damage will also be a lot less than ours.

[Snail]

In the worldometer list of countries, from India downwards the numbers are TINY.

They are also junk.

I have a friend in Tanzania, says the official data is wrong, been stuck at 16 deaths for days. But lots of credible stories circulating of overwhelmed hospitals and bodies being collected on the street.

As of just last week, the official UK data was missing thousands of deaths, and even today's fairly accurate data is 10 days+ delayed.

There are big data black holes out there.

F--k it, I dont know what to think. I'm keeping shtum anyway, and if asked encouraging people to continue to be careful.

[vtsnowedin]

Since we have not tested the entire UK population this claimed exposure rate is pure horseshit.

Demanding perfect data are we? You will have a long wait for that. A reasonable sample size is usually sufficient to get to the truth. 100 percent is never reasonable. Perhaps given the slant of testing likely patients first gives an inaccurate number but the true answer from that data will be closer then just a number pulled out of an alarmist's behind.

[Little John]

From much the same psychological profile of people who bought into "basket of deplorables" and "Brexshit" we now have "lock-down" cheerleaders only too eager to parrot unsubstantiated bollocks fed to them by an establishment compliant MSM and to snitch on their neighbors. This little adventure, though, cuts across those lines a bit and has picked up sheep from both sides.

A significant portion of humans, it seems, just need to be led and are only too happy to be. All it takes is the right, fear-based buttons to be pressed. Consequently, I don't expect to see any change of heart in the suddenly little goose-stepping lock-down cheerleaders or for any of them to admit they were wrong, or apologize. They're clearly not going to even as this mass corona virus hysteria is slowly and inevitably dialed down in the coming months.

To the above extent, this has been instructional in exposing just who is who.

Just like Brexit did.

[Little John]

Facts matter.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/20 ... n-mistake/

The tragedy of the Covid-19 pandemic appears to be entering the containment phase. Tens of thousands of Americans have died, and Americans are now desperate for sensible policymakers who have the courage to ignore the panic and rely on facts. Leaders must examine accumulated data to see what has actually happened, rather than keep emphasizing hypothetical projections; combine that empirical evidence with fundamental principles of biology established for decades; and then thoughtfully restore the country to function. Five key facts are being ignored by those calling for continuing the near-total lockdown.

Fact 1: The overwhelming majority of people do not have any significant risk of dying from Covid-19. The recent Stanford University antibody study now estimates that the fatality rate if infected is likely 0.1 to 0.2 percent, a risk far lower than previous World Health Organization estimates that were 20 to 30 times higher and that motivated isolation policies.

In New York City, an epicenter of the pandemic with more than one-third of all U.S. deaths, the rate of death for people 18 to 45 years old is 0.01 percent, or 10 per 100,000 in the population. On the other hand, people aged 75 and over have a death rate 80 times that.

For people under 18 years old, the rate of death is zero per 100,000. Of all fatal cases in New York state, two-thirds were in patients over 70 years of age; more than 95 percent were over 50 years of age; and about 90 percent of all fatal cases had an underlying illness. Of 6,570 confirmed Covid-19 deaths fully investigated for underlying conditions to date, 6,520, or 99.2 percent, had an underlying illness. If you do not already have an underlying chronic condition, your chances of dying are small, regardless of age. And young adults and children in normal health have almost no risk of any serious illness from COVID-19.

Fact 2: Protecting older, at-risk people eliminates hospital overcrowding. We can learn about hospital utilization from data from New York City, the hotbed of Covid-19 with more than 34,600 hospitalizations to date. For those under 18 years of age, hospitalization from the virus is 0.01 percent, or 11 per 100,000 people; for those 18 to 44 years old, hospitalization is 0.1 percent. Even for people ages 65 to 74, only 1.7 percent were hospitalized. Of 4,103 confirmed Covid-19 patients with symptoms bad enough to seek medical care, Dr. Leora Horwitz of NYU Medical Center concluded “age is far and away the strongest risk factor for hospitalization.� Even early WHO reports noted that 80 percent of all cases were mild, and more recent studies show a far more widespread rate of infection and lower rate of serious illness.

Half of all people testing positive for infection have no symptoms at all. The vast majority of younger, otherwise healthy people do not need significant medical care if they catch this infection.

Fact 3: Vital population immunity is prevented by total isolation policies, prolonging the problem. We know from decades of medical science that infection itself allows people to generate an immune response – antibodies – so that the infection is controlled throughout the population by “herd immunity.�

Indeed, that is the main purpose of widespread immunization in other viral diseases – to assist with population immunity. In this virus, we know that medical care is not even necessary for the vast majority of people who are infected. It is so mild that half of infected people are asymptomatic, shown in early data from the Diamond Princess ship, and then in Iceland and Italy.
That has been falsely portrayed as a problem requiring mass isolation. In fact, infected people without severe illness are the immediately available vehicle for establishing widespread immunity. By transmitting the virus to others in the low-risk group who then generate antibodies, they block the network of pathways toward the most vulnerable people, ultimately ending the threat. Extending whole-population isolation would directly prevent that widespread immunity from developing.

Fact 4: People are dying because other medical care is not getting done due to hypothetical projections. Critical health care for millions of Americans is being ignored and people are dying to accommodate “potential� Covid-19 patients and for fear of spreading the disease. Most states and many hospitals abruptly stopped “nonessential� procedures and surgery. That prevented diagnoses of life-threatening diseases, like cancer screening, biopsies of tumors now undiscovered and potentially deadly brain aneurysms. Treatments, including emergency care, for the most serious illnesses were also missed. Cancer patients deferred chemotherapy. An estimated 80 per cent of brain surgery cases were skipped. Acute stroke and heart attack patients missed their only chances for treatment, some dying and many now facing permanent disability.

Fact 5: We have a clearly defined population at risk who can be protected with targeted measures. The overwhelming evidence all over the world consistently shows that a clearly defined group – older people and others with underlying conditions – is more likely to have a serious illness requiring hospitalization and more likely to die from Covid-19. Knowing that, it is a commonsense, achievable goal to target isolation policy to that group, including strictly monitoring those who interact with them. Nursing home residents, the highest risk, should be the most straightforward to systematically protect from infected people, given that they already live in confined places with highly restricted entry.

The appropriate policy, based on fundamental biology and the evidence already in hand, is to institute a more focused strategy like some outlined in the first place: Strictly protect the known vulnerable, self-isolate the mildly sick and open most workplaces and small businesses with some prudent large-group precautions. This would allow the essential socializing to generate immunity among those with minimal risk of serious consequence, while saving lives, preventing overcrowding of hospitals and limiting the enormous harms compounded by continued total isolation. Let’s stop underemphasising empirical evidence while instead doubling down on hypothetical models. Facts matter.

[BritDownUnder]

Could there be something we haven't been told?

The Chinese reaction and the later global reaction to COVID-19 seem very aggressive.

I don't normally wear a tinfoil hat ... but is there something about this virus we don't know?

I was taken aback by the scale of the Chines response in January - but in hindsight they were absolutely right. They did manage to contain significant community spread to just one small region and even accounting to significant under-reporting of deaths they are certainly in the thousands, not hundreds of thousands on even low millions that a minimal approach might have resulted in. Their economic damage will also be a lot less than ours.

I think the Chinese are also more well disciplined in personal hygiene. Wearing of face masks was normal before this outbreak. Blowing ones nose with a hankie is frowned upon in China and outright forbidden in Japan. I am not sure about hand hygiene but just the two things above probably helped a lot in preventing spread. With this disease these things matter a lot.