Selective Genius Posted April 3, 2020 Share Posted April 3, 2020 9 hours ago, Cavscout74 said: I was looking at wikipedia's pandemic page yesterday and noticed something strange - which seems to match a few statements in the press recently that China's numbers are seriously wrong A while ago, Xi Jinping was on a state visit to India. One of the reporters of the state-run news channel accidentally called him 'Eleven' Jinping, since he assumed 'Xi' meant 'Eleven' in Roman Numerals. This infuriated the Chinese, and the reporter was fired. I sorta wish he could be hired again, with a promotion from a reporter to a host with a free pass to say 'Eleven' Jinping as many times as he wants to. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kerbiloid Posted April 3, 2020 Share Posted April 3, 2020 9 hours ago, Cavscout74 said: I was looking at wikipedia's pandemic page yesterday and noticed something strange - which seems to match a few statements in the press recently that China's numbers are seriously wrong. Think positive. They are not wrong. they are alternative. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shpaget Posted April 3, 2020 Share Posted April 3, 2020 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-france-toll/frances-coronavirus-death-toll-jumps-to-nearly-5400-as-nursing-homes-included-idUSKBN21K31I Yesterday, France included 884 deaths that were previously not counted as they happened in nursing homes. France counted only deaths that occurred in hospitals, meaning their numbers are under reported. This shows the importance of international standardization of the method of keeping track of the pandemic. Honestly, it baffles me that there are such inconsistencies when we have multiple international organisations that are supposed to make guidelines for this sort of thing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Codraroll Posted April 3, 2020 Share Posted April 3, 2020 9 hours ago, mikegarrison said: To be blunt about it: I would not rely on any statistics being released by China. I'm reminded of a case I read about a few years ago. A big Chinese city had set a lofty goal for crime reduction: that there should be fewer than 30,000 cases of violent crime that year. The goal was met, just barely. At the end of the year, the tally stood at 29,998. The last of those had occurred on September 26. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fulgur Posted April 3, 2020 Share Posted April 3, 2020 (edited) Passed the 1-million mark! Hooray! I ironically groaned. And a nice graph of exponential growth! Showing how in any one country, cases grow very very quickly. And this is substantial under-reporting, because in the UK, we are only testing NHS workers and hospital patients. And celebrities, of course. You can also see the deaths are beginning to increase exponentially, as a fraction of the cases become deaths (with a significant time lag of a couple of weeks, as the virus incubates). This will show a greater mortality rate than reality, as we in the UK are only testing healthcare workers and anyone ill enough to be in hospital already, and those people are a subset of the population who have more severe symptoms anyway, otherwise they wouldn't be in hospital. Personally, I would not rely on the Chinese statistics completely. However, it is very clear that they have successfully suppressed the outbreak by now, and while the actual number of cases and deaths may have been concealed, they did act with speed and resolve and authoritarian - but effective - measures which kept virus cases and deaths down compared to smaller countries such as the US, Spain, Italy, the UK etc. This is because we didn't act as quickly, decisively and unilaterally, as (a) our leaders didn't want to crash the economy (a self defeating goal, as this lead to the outbreaks spreading across the entire country instead of just single urban centres, like Wuhan itself) and (b) we have a democracy which is run by people who aren't epidemiologists and may have under-estimated the effects of the virus. Edited April 3, 2020 by fulgur Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DDE Posted April 3, 2020 Share Posted April 3, 2020 13 hours ago, Cavscout74 said: It goes moves upwards over time from a tens a day up to almost 4000 new cases/day from 31 Jan to 5 Feb, started to slowly decrease then suddenly spikes to 15000 new cases on 12 Feb, then 5000 the next day, then rapidly drops to hundreds, then tens of new cases per day over the next two weeks. Am I the only one that finds that strange? Nope. That's a known change in methodology and criteria, with the resulting effect attributed to one day. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AHHans Posted April 3, 2020 Share Posted April 3, 2020 14 hours ago, Pds314 said: Germany and the UK seem to have not yet decided if they will slow down the outbreak. I believe that the deaths/day in Germany is still on the exponential growth. We only started to change the number of infected people from exponential growth to linear growth (aka about constant number of infected/day) two weeks ago. Also in the last few day we've had news reports of COVID-19 now spreading in nursing homes - which apparently were mostly spared up to now - so we can expect the death toll to keep rising even if the number of infections in the general populace gets under control. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
James Kerman Posted April 3, 2020 Share Posted April 3, 2020 Just a little moderator reminder: Please keep in mind that it is okay to mention actions performed by governments, but please don't allow the discussion to veer off into the merits or deficiencies of any particular government system. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shpaget Posted April 3, 2020 Share Posted April 3, 2020 Elon dipping his toes into xkcd territory. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DDE Posted April 3, 2020 Share Posted April 3, 2020 His take is insufficiently hot. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Superfluous J Posted April 3, 2020 Share Posted April 3, 2020 "Outbreak in hot sauna bath!" Who knew that conditions similar to the inside of the Human Body would be good for a virus that attacks humans! Oh, right. Everybody. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AHHans Posted April 3, 2020 Share Posted April 3, 2020 (edited) Some background on how the official German numbers come to be, which may help you decide on how hard or squishy these numbers are. Most of this is what I learned from reading the daily situation reports(archive) of the RKI. Some of it is "educated guesswork", reading in between the lines of the official reports and filling the void with what I believe how German administration works. In Germany the Robert Koch Institute (the RKI) is essentially the federal CDC. So they are the ones that collect the data from all over Germany and publish them. Their values are also the ones used on the Wikipedia page about the COVID-19 outbreak in Germany. I don't know where the Johns Hopkins University get their data from. So what does it take get counted as an infected person in the RKI reports: First the local doctor needs to take a sample and send it off to a testing lab. This is the step of which I think it introduces the biggest uncertainty: not everyone gets tested. For a long time the RKI recommended to only test patients with symptoms who also had been to one of the "RKI acknowledged" COVID-19 risk areas or had contact to a known case and symptoms.(*) On the other hand the RKI cannot stop doctors from testing their patients, the worst that can happen to them is that they won't get reimbursed by the health insurance and the doctor or the patient have to pay for the rest themselves. So I believe that the decision on who got tested is fairly inconsistent, with some doctors testing everyone and others only those with an active pneumonia. After the sample is taken it needs to be sent to the lab. That can be carrying it across the hallway in a big hospital, or it can wait to be picked up by a courier the next day at a country doctor's. If a lab is overloaded it may also take some time (up to several days?) before it gets processed. Once a lab gets a positive result it is required by law to report the case to the local health authority at the place where the patient is treated. The date when the health authority gets notice of a case is then the reporting date (German: "Meldedatum").(**) How this reporting is done is unknown to me, probably everything from e-mails, faxes, phone calls, express mail, to courier mail is used somewhere. Then the local health authorities report the cases up the chain of German bureaucracy to the regional health authority, the state health authority, and finally to the RKI. This apparently can take up to several days, German bureaucracy is not famous for embracing modern computer technology. It seems that there used to be several ways that the data could be reported to the RKI but since 17. March the RKI only reports the numbers that were sent to them electronically. And since the 18. March the daily situation reports report the status of midnight the night before. So I believe that once a sample is taken and sent to a lab, a positive result will show up in the numbers of the RKI at some time. But it may take a couple of days for that to happen. In the COVID-19 dashborad of the RKI (sorry, only in German) in the lower right corner the "Fälle/Tag" (cases/day) shows the reported cases with their reporting date: in blue the values known to the RKI the day before and in orange the new cases which it learned about in the last day. Most cases get reported to the RKI within a few days, but today (3. April) there is one "new" case from the 10. March... I don't know how deaths are reported to the RKI, but I believe it works in a fairly similar fashion. I.e. that the local health authority will get notice of all relevant deaths that happen, but it may take some time for the death certificate to reach the health authority and even more time for that to reach the RKI. The biggest uncertainty here are the false positives and negatives: everyone who was tested positive for COVID-19 and dies will be counted as having died of COVID-19, even if they died of a heart attack while already being on the mend.(***) And people who haven't been tested will not be counted, even if they died of COVID-19. But I believe that at least for the last four weeks or more everyone who gets admitted to a hospital with pneumonia gets tested for COVID-19. Even if it is just so that the hospital staff knows how they need to protect themselves. It is not mandatory to report recoveries to the health authorities. So recoveries are estimated by the RKI. To quote their status report: Quote Cases were considered to have recovered if they had a known symptom onset on or before [14 days earlier], were not reported to have pneumonia or dyspnea, did not require hospitalisation or had already been discharged and did not die. Cases were included in the algorithm only if information on date of symptom onset, symptoms, hospitalisation status and vital status were available. About the numbers published by the Johns Hopkins University: they may work together with one of several German newspaper publishers that collect the numbers from all the local health authorities in Germany directly. (Probably by phoning them.(****)) So they eliminate some of the lag of reporting the numbers "up the chain". Notes: (*) Testing capacity is limited, so it makes sense limit the tests to ensure that the serious cases actually get their sample processed soon after it was taken and not to overload the labs with lots of redundant test. (**) I believe it shouldn't be too hard to also record the date of when each sample was taken, but as far as I can tell only the date when the case record was started at the health authority is used by the RKI for publication. Probably not all local health authorities record that sampling date, and the RKI prefers to use consistent data. (***) I don't know how people are counted if they die in a traffic accident while recovering from COVID-19. But I wouldn't be too surprised if they also get counted as having died of COVID-19. (****) Now that I've looked into it and have seen that different newspapers seem to report different numbers I got the impression that there are several groups that phone all the local health authorities (or at least claim to do so). Which makes me wonder if I approve of calling the health authorities when they are already more busy than they are in non-pandemic times, just to have some more up-to-date numbers to publish. Edited April 3, 2020 by AHHans fixed typo Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mikegarrison Posted April 3, 2020 Share Posted April 3, 2020 9 hours ago, Codraroll said: I'm reminded of a case I read about a few years ago. A big Chinese city had set a lofty goal for crime reduction: that there should be fewer than 30,000 cases of violent crime that year. The goal was met, just barely. At the end of the year, the tally stood at 29,998. The last of those had occurred on September 26. Yes, this sort of thing happens. In China and out of it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tater Posted April 3, 2020 Share Posted April 3, 2020 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0843-2 Look at the second 2 charts. It mitigates it, but this is likely the sort of data that was well known a few months ago. The usual suspects are sometimes blocked, sometimes not. Note this is simply breathing, not coughing. So as they have said, it protects others, and at some non-zero level. SARS-CoV2 looks like it is caught by the mask far more readily. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tater Posted April 3, 2020 Share Posted April 3, 2020 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30243-7/fulltext Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tater Posted April 3, 2020 Share Posted April 3, 2020 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tater Posted April 4, 2020 Share Posted April 4, 2020 https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-factories-7-different-vaccines-to-fight-coronavirus-2020-4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tater Posted April 4, 2020 Share Posted April 4, 2020 (edited) Nearly 15% of cats tested in Wuhan had antibodies for SARS-CoV2. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.01.021196v1 No evidence cats were sick, and though they think cat—>cat transmission occurs, they think most were infected by humans (higher response in pet cats of COVID-19 patients). No evidence of transmission from cats to humans, but still. What are the chances 15% of cats in Wuhan are infected, but somehow Wuhan only managed to have ~50k human cases in a pop of 11 million (~0.5% of the population)? If 15% of the humans in Wuhan caught it, that's 1.65M cases. If the fatality rate was 0.66%, that's almost 11k deaths. Edited April 4, 2020 by tater Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tater Posted April 4, 2020 Share Posted April 4, 2020 If the deaths the Chinese report are accurate, and human exposure is identical to cats (15%), then the true fatality rate is... ~0.18%. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StrandedonEarth Posted April 4, 2020 Share Posted April 4, 2020 I had hoped that Canada would have been able to ramp up testing, but the authorities here don't seem to want widespread testing. More testing is more data, and more data is always good for science, but not so much for politicians... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tater Posted April 4, 2020 Share Posted April 4, 2020 https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1375 4/5 cases asymptomatic Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mikegarrison Posted April 4, 2020 Share Posted April 4, 2020 16 minutes ago, tater said: https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1375 4/5 cases asymptomatic More stats from China. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tater Posted April 4, 2020 Share Posted April 4, 2020 2 minutes ago, mikegarrison said: More stats from China. Agreed. Very suspect, but worthy of assessment in the free world using better, trusted data. That's why we need random serological testing ASAP. Look at the cat study, amazing it was published, frankly. Why? Because they have serological testing that they use on cats, but haven't published the same paper for random humans. The PRC has every reason to not show that the numbers they released before are the BS they are. If they tested humans (I'm certain they have, it's just not published), they would have to tell us that the % of people in Wuhan/Hubei that have antibodies might be a large % of the pop, and the number that therefore escaped to infect the world was much, much higher than even current estimates suggest. Still worth considering. Look at the new concensus emerging that this could have in fact come from that lab in Wuhan. Not as a engineered thing, just that the lab was researching bat coronaviruses (known from stuff that lab had put on the web last year, publicizing it), and papers they submitted before this... public stuff that at the time they had no reason to hide—some of which has apparently been disappeared to gaslight people. (note it's not a conspiracy, the likely route out was something like the guy who fed the bats doffed his gear wrong, then got asymptomatically sick. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HansonKerman Posted April 4, 2020 Share Posted April 4, 2020 (edited) On 4/3/2020 at 8:19 AM, DDE said: His take is insufficiently hot I wonder why. Like... jeez. Who comes up with this stuff??? “Wash your hands with vodka... etc” Edited April 4, 2020 by HansonKerman JEEZ. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StrandedonEarth Posted April 4, 2020 Share Posted April 4, 2020 (edited) 20 minutes ago, tater said: (note it's not a conspiracy, the likely route out was something like the guy who fed the bats doffed his gear wrong, then got asymptomatically sick. Which sounds similar to how the superflu in The Stand started, aside from the bats and the asymptomatic part... E: Speaking of which, wonder if the new tv-miniseries will be cancelled now... Edited April 4, 2020 by StrandedonEarth Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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