totm april 2020 Coronavirus

[VoidSquid]

Been at my MD today, fetched my meds against reflux (too much stomach acid, pretty ordinary stuff, one pill a day does the job), they said it's all highly exaggerated, it's just like the normal flu.

Then: with all the things going on, suspension of factories, curfews etc., I prefer to have a stash of my meds. How can I know if I can get it in four, six, eight weeks?

[DDE]

1 hour ago, VoidSquid said:

Then: with all the things going on, suspension of factories, curfews etc., I prefer to have a stash of my meds.

As opposed to 'the norm'?

Times like these is when it pays to be a prepper.

...so all I have is three years' worth of hemorrhoid creams.

[kerbiloid]

55 minutes ago, DDE said:

Times like these is when it pays to be a prepper.

Spoiler

That's how the humanity has switched to the Teleoperated Mode and never returned back...

When the panic wave had gone away, nobody wanted to return back to the office, nobody wanted to rent an office.
After watching Olympics by web everybody had seen that there is no need to buy tickets after standing in a long queue.

People just have realized how comfortable and cheap can be a life in remote mode especially spiced with augmented reality.

***

After finishing their food cans, three years later, the preppers have gotten out of their dark and wet shelters to the sky and met nobody on the streets.
"Wow!", exclaimed they. "They didn't believe us, they were laughing at us, and now we can see who was smarter!"

The preppers went to the food shops to replenish their reserves.
But all food shops were empty and obviously abandoned long ago. No food was inside.

They went to the hunter shops, then to the tourists' warehouse, but everywhere the picture was the same.

Suddenly they heard a loud sound of police siren behind.
The preppers turned around but saw nothing...

... But the sound was still there, right below their noses... 
...Below. They looked down and saw a shoebox-sized police toy car standing on the road in front of them.

"Who are you? And why are you walking along the street instead of sitting at home? Immediately return to your homes connect to the free social network and wait for the medical control and disinfection squad after visiting the open space."
"But we need food!"
"Then why are you looking for it in the shops? Everybody just calls a pizza delivery drone to home. Are you ok?.."

Preppers returned to their lairs and instead of survived heroes of apocalypse again felt like office monkeys, who have spent all their money to eat from food cans for three years and wash hands twice per week.

 

Edited March 6, 2020 by kerbiloid

[DDE]

[numerous tasteless quips rejected]

[tater]

The math of this (and the panic) has been bugging me.

That one paper suggests that the ascertainment rate in January, in China was 5%. This means that they tested 5% of the people who had a nCov-2019 infection. Let's assume that the ascertainment rate has improved to 10%.

This would mean that 10% of the people infected would seek testing.

Assume in a country like the US, we get flu-like numbers of cases. 50 million.

90% have such mild disease they never seek testing. That's 45M mild cases.

Of the remaining 5 million what's the result? ~80% have mild disease by Chinese stats. That's another 4M who are just fine.

We now have 1M left with moderate to severe disease. This is non-trivial, and strains healthcare. Typical seasonal flu hits below 1M hospitalizations in the US. None the less, it's not grossly out of whack with norms. The CFR applies only to those 5M who have sought testing.

Assume it's the 3%. That's 0.03*5M, which is 150,000 dead. That's bad, but it's 3X a typical seasonal flu. The rates differ, and it looks like 2% is a better number. That's 100,000 deaths. 2X flu season.

In both cases, the bulk of mortality is in the elderly, and people with preexisting health problems. For people under 50 it's not really substantially worse than flu.

 

[tater]

 

[ProtoJeb21]

With only one native case and two from people who came over from New York, Connecticut has officially entered panic mode. My school district has cancelled conferences and the play (which isn’t until the first days of April), and has banned us on the VEX robotics team from going up to the Regionals competition in Worcester, Massachusetts (which doesn’t have any cases). If any of us go up, we will be punished by the district. Other towns have wimped out and followed suit. 
 

I can’t wait for the state-wide shutdown and getting banned from doing anything outside of school. At this rate, they’re going to cancel everything. 

Edited March 10, 2020 by ProtoJeb21

[Codraroll]

21 minutes ago, ProtoJeb21 said:

I can’t wait for the state-wide shutdown and getting banned from doing anything outside of school. At this rate, they’re going to cancel everything. 

That's where Italy is now. And honestly, I think it's smarter to take measures to reduce infections right now, than to wait for hospital beds to be filled up and then doing it out of necessity.

This excellent graph has been making the rounds on social media over the past day, and I believe it warrants a repost here as it illustrates the issue very effectively:

(source)

[Dirkidirk]

3 hours ago, ProtoJeb21 said:

With only one native case and two from people who came over from New York, Connecticut has officially entered panic mode. My school district has cancelled conferences and the play (which isn’t until the first days of April), and has banned us on the VEX robotics team from going up to the Regionals competition in Worcester, Massachusetts (which doesn’t have any cases). If any of us go up, we will be punished by the district. Other towns have wimped out and followed suit. 
 

I can’t wait for the state-wide shutdown and getting banned from doing anything outside of school. At this rate, they’re going to cancel everything. 

two cases in fort myers, an hour from where I live, 18 over the state of florida. yet school still exists. In fact, I don't think florida is doing anything about the disease, probably because it's florida. Not sure if that's a bad thing yet. 

of course it is

Edited March 10, 2020 by Dirkidirk

[ProtoJeb21]

12 minutes ago, Codraroll said:

That's where Italy is now. And honestly, I think it's smarter to take measures to reduce infections right now, than to wait for hospital beds to be filled up and then doing it out of necessity.

This excellent graph has been making the rounds on social media over the past day, and I believe it warrants a repost here as it illustrates the issue very effectively:

(source)

Unfortunately, right now people are only in “EVERYONE PANIC” mode, and the methods they school system is going to try and combat the virus will only make things worse. Thousands of dollars have now been wasted by hundreds of students and parents with everything being cancelled, and none of that is going to do any good, because my high school is probably the most likely place we’ll get the virus, because it’s so compact. 
 

It’s important to keep something like this from being a widespread, deadly infection. However, it’s just as important to not jump the shark and panic so much over a few cases that it completely disrupts so much stuff people spent months and hundreds of dollars working for. There’s a difference between containment and spreading fear. 

[Flavio hc16]

17 minutes ago, ProtoJeb21 said:

Unfortunately, right now people are only in “EVERYONE PANIC” mode, and the methods they school system is going to try and combat the virus will only make things worse. Thousands of dollars have now been wasted by hundreds of students and parents with everything being cancelled, and none of that is going to do any good, because my high school is probably the most likely place we’ll get the virus, because it’s so compact. 
 

It’s important to keep something like this from being a widespread, deadly infection. However, it’s just as important to not jump the shark and panic so much over a few cases that it completely disrupts so much stuff people spent months and hundreds of dollars working for. There’s a difference between containment and spreading fear. 

no, you better go into lockdown early than later, it is better to stop now that you ahve only few cases for 2 weeks  than for 2 monts like we are doing here in italy: from yesterday(i live in Rome) the nation is basically in lockdown and everything is closed at least up until the 4th of april but there are already talkings about to stop everything up until the 10th of may or thereabouts. The italian healt organizations are sending emails to the hospitals and healtcare centers that sound like war bulletin, and i know that becuase my mother is a dentist and my close relatives are all medics of some sorts ( surgeon, professors of medicine etc..).

 

Trust me, our family and our relatives were the first to downplay the virus. In 1 week we went form " this is way too much worry" to:"oh crap it's a gigantic problem, hospitals here are full and we risk the collapse of our medical system.

The problem with this virus is not the death rate, but the hospitalization rate, especially the ones who need intensive care ( 10-15% of the infected)

 

In the U.S. if it become widespread it will be way worse than here in Italy, because we have a way stronger healtcare system here ( considered the 2nd in the world after Spain) and the other fact is that our is public, your is not

Edited March 10, 2020 by Flavio hc16

[kerbiloid]

Without a kick, the humanity will never get ready for the virtualization.

[VoidSquid]

Well, question is what does virtualization change? This is our company's main business, virtual servers for our customers. Before, they had their IT on premises, now they're working on the virtual servers in our Datacenters. The users still go everyday in their office, virtualization doesn't change a bit here. And a lot of things are just physical, food for starters.

[Guest]

What @Flavio hc16 said.

Thing with this is, if you're not elderly or have serious underlying conditions and don't count on getting injured or ill while the epidemic is ongoing, your personal risk of getting anything worse than a nasty cold is probably pretty low.

But lots of people are elderly or have serious underlying conditions, and are going to get injured or ill while the epidemic is ongoing, and it's going to suck to be one of them if the healthcare system is overloaded. It'll have to go into triage mode which means that some people will be refused care – in public healthcare systems, the ones assessed to be least likely to survive even with care; in the US, it'll most likely be the ones who aren't able to pay for it. That means that people are going to suffer and die. 

So even if you're young and healthy, wash those hands. Not for yourself, but your parents, grandparents, and all the frail people you don't know but who are at a real risk of getting it badly. And of course the people working their butts off to keep this thing under control – the doctors, nurses, and other healthcare personnel.

Finally: yeah, don't panic. This too shall pass. A colleague of mine has been in quarantine in Wuhan since January, where she went to visit family. She tells me that there is a feel that the worst is over there and life is starting to return to normal. It'll be a long couple of months but this time next year this will be a fading memory. I just hope we'll have learned something so we're better prepared for the next one – SARS and H1N1 didn't do it, maybe this will. 

[sevenperforce]

On 3/7/2020 at 12:08 PM, tater said:

In both cases, the bulk of mortality is in the elderly, and people with preexisting health problems. For people under 50 it's not really substantially worse than flu.

Given that I grew up in a conspiracy theory, I am always very skeptical of conspiracy theories. But I can see why people would believe that COVID-19 is some sort of nefarious plot. A virus that causes only moderate symptoms in most so that it is transmitted freely, infects 70% of the U.S. population, and then kills off only the old and the already-ill. Reduces the cost of socialized healthcare (because you just killed off all the expensive ones) while increasing demand for new healthcare solutions. Embarrasses the current regime, etc. etc.

[DDE]

21 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

Given that I grew up in a conspiracy theory, I am always very skeptical of conspiracy theories. But I can see why people would believe that COVID-19 is some sort of nefarious plot. A virus that causes only moderate symptoms in most so that it is transmitted freely, infects 70% of the U.S. population, and then kills off only the old and the already-ill. Reduces the cost of socialized healthcare (because you just killed off all the expensive ones) while increasing demand for new healthcare solutions. Embarrasses the current regime, etc. etc.

Oh, you don't know the fun part yet...

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.12.20022418v1
 

Quote

ACE2 (Angiotensin Converting Enzyme 2) has been shown to be one of the major receptors that mediate the entry of 2019-nCoV into human cells, which also happens in severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS). Several researches have indicated that some patients have abnormal renal function or even kidney damage in addition to injury in respiratory system, and the related mechanism is unknown. This arouses our interest in whether coronavirus infection will affect the urinary and male reproductive systems. Here in this study, we used the online datasets to analyze ACE2 expression in different human organs. The results indicate that ACE2 highly expresses in renal tubular cells, Leydig cells and cells in seminiferous ducts in testis. Therefore, virus might directly bind to such ACE2 positive cells and damage the kidney and testicular tissue of patients. Our results indicate that renal function evaluation and special care should be performed in 2019-nCoV patients during clinical work, because of the kidney damage caused by virus and antiviral drugs with certain renal toxicity. In addition, due to the potential pathogenicity of the virus to testicular tissues, clinicians should pay attention to the risk of testicular lesions in patients during hospitalization and later clinical follow-up, especially the assessment and appropriate intervention in young patients' fertility.

 

Remember one of the beloved subjects of conspirologists, forced population control?

[ProtoJeb21]

Some clarifications on what’s happening in CT: 

It’s not just my school district banning all field trips. It’s actually issued by the governor; all out-of-state school trips are banned in fear of bringing the Coronavirus back, so going would be illegal. All of New England also appears to be out of the Worlds competition, no matter who wins Regionals (it’s just gonna be Massachusetts teams though). Also, the play and other activities (probably including prom and graduation) are actually being postponed into various parts of June, not outright cancelled (yet).

[tater]

This is an interesting page to noodle with (of course you'd need to know what reasonable values are for some of the fields):

http://scratch.neherlab.org/

 

[tater]

The thing that bugs me most however is the coverage. If we covered seasonal flu with the same intensity, people would be terrified of flu. Yes, COVID19 is certainly worse than flu by some multiple, but right now in the US alone, 100 people die every 8 hours from flu.

It seems to be a thing on social media that comparing this to flu = "denier." It's not denial, it's just a constant benchmark we have, and it spreads in a similar way. So if COVID19 runs rampant, we'd expect to see some multiple of the number of flu deaths, and to the extent the deaths are less than or even equal to flu, mitigation has succeeded.

If it's 2X as infectious, and 10X deadlier, if we don't see multiples of flu deaths, either the numbers for R0/mortality are wrong, or mitigation has worked. By a few months into a flu season, we have 10s of millions of cases, and 10s of thousands dead.

The major plus I see to this is awareness of simple hygiene. My kids grew up coughing into their elbows, and washing hands (wife's a surgeon, grandpa's a retired surgeon). They have made fun of people in public bathrooms (to us, not to the faces of the yucky people) not washing hands since they were tiny (as the filthy animals such people are). There's a paper I read a few days ago that suggested that increasing hand washing substantially just in the 20 most busy airports could reduce a pandemic by 66%, no other interventions.

[StrandedonEarth]

Well, it does make sense that it would be easier to try to contain it earlier than later. If it was up to me I’d ban all non-essential travel, with precautions taken by those who must (I’m thinking mostly logistic drivers). It would be a costly measure, to be sure, but the delaying would likely make it worse. 

[Flavio hc16]

40 minutes ago, tater said:

The thing that bugs me most however is the coverage. If we covered seasonal flu with the same intensity, people would be terrified of flu. Yes, COVID19 is certainly worse than flu by some multiple, but right now in the US alone, 100 people die every 8 hours from flu.

It seems to be a thing on social media that comparing this to flu = "denier." It's not denial, it's just a constant benchmark we have, and it spreads in a similar way. So if COVID19 runs rampant, we'd expect to see some multiple of the number of flu deaths, and to the extent the deaths are less than or even equal to flu, mitigation has succeeded.

If it's 2X as infectious, and 10X deadlier, if we don't see multiples of flu deaths, either the numbers for R0/mortality are wrong, or mitigation has worked. By a few months into a flu season, we have 10s of millions of cases, and 10s of thousands dead.

The major plus I see to this is awareness of simple hygiene. My kids grew up coughing into their elbows, and washing hands (wife's a surgeon, grandpa's a retired surgeon). They have made fun of people in public bathrooms (to us, not to the faces of the yucky people) not washing hands since they were tiny (as the filthy animals such people are). There's a paper I read a few days ago that suggested that increasing hand washing substantially just in the 20 most busy airports could reduce a pandemic by 66%, no other interventions.

you are missing the problem tater, the problem are not the death that the coronavirus does, it's the fact that 30% of the infected need hospitalization and half/a tird of them ( so 10-15% of the total) need intensive care, when places for intensive care ends, then it's start to get really ugly really quickly, especially when medics have to decide who will live or who will die

[tater]

6 minutes ago, Flavio hc16 said:

you are missing the problem tater, the problem are not the death that the coronavirus does, it's the fact that 30% of the infected need hospitalization and half/a tird of them ( so 10-15% of the total) need intensive care, when places for intensive care ends, then it's start to get really ugly really quickly, especially when medics have to decide who will live or who will die

30% of all infected don't need care. Maybe 30% of those tested positive because they showed up at the hospital do. The current ascertainment rate (the % of people with (mostly mild) COVID19 who actually get tested) is what, 10%? Lower? (estimates in China suggest that only 5% of those infected were ever tested).

So 30% of that 10% need hospitalization?

This is the problem, the number of people with COVID19 is certainly far, far higher than the number of people confirmed to have it. People who are really sick go to the doc, get tested. People who feel like they have a cold (by far most cases) don't go to the doctor and never get tested.

(the fact that many more have it than are tested is why social distancing, hygiene, etc are so important)

[Kerbart]

3 hours ago, Flavio hc16 said:

In the U.S. if it become widespread it will be way worse than here in Italy, because we have a way stronger healtcare system here ( considered the 2nd in the world after Spain) and the other fact is that our is public, your is not

On the other hand there are a couple of factors that will help reducing the impact:

• The US is not as densily populated as (northern) Italy. There are some metropolitan areas but half the population lives outside them.
• Public transportation is a main infection vector. It’s also nearly non-existent in the US.
• Those areas that do have dense population and heavily utilized public transportation tend to have much better coverage for health care and a lot of employers that will encourage working from home

Of course there are also some factors that will make things worse, one of them is doing nothing, so it doesn’t hurt to take preventive measures.

[DDE]

2 hours ago, tater said:

It seems to be a thing on social media that comparing this to flu = "denier." It's not denial

IF YOU DO NOT PARTAKE IN TODAY'S MEDIA-DRIVEN CONTROVERSY HYSTERIA YOU ARE A DENIER FENCESITTER

[Flavio hc16]

1 hour ago, tater said:

30% of all infected don't need care. Maybe 30% of those tested positive because they showed up at the hospital do. The current ascertainment rate (the % of people with (mostly mild) COVID19 who actually get tested) is what, 10%? Lower? (estimates in China suggest that only 5% of those infected were ever tested).

So 30% of that 10% need hospitalization?

This is the problem, the number of people with COVID19 is certainly far, far higher than the number of people confirmed to have it. People who are really sick go to the doc, get tested. People who feel like they have a cold (by far most cases) don't go to the doctor and never get tested.

(the fact that many more have it than are tested is why social distancing, hygiene, etc are so important)

In other places? Maybe, but in Italy is completely different: we did alone more than double the tests of the rest of Europe combined ( 1 week ago we were at 40k and the rest at 20k now the rest of Europe is at 40k, we are at 90k right now, and I'm counting The UK who did alone 20k tests). Other nations dont release real data ( France and Germany). I wouldn't  believe too much in Chinese numbers either. What I'm  saying is that in Italy  we are at almost 9k infected and 3k of assisted pulmonary  ventilators are already being used ( we have like 6-7k in the entire nation)

 

Edit: data of 40 mins ago have 10.149 infected finded with 630 death ( so 6% mortality rate, probably because Italy is one of the nation with the oldest population), we have a day-to-day exponential growth of 40-50% . There is for example no way that Germany  has only 1k cases, considering that the 1st infected in Europe was a german businessman. And to give you another example of difference between europen nations: on the 3rd of March we had done 37k test, France was just surpassing 1I and germany was at 4-5k.

Edited March 10, 2020 by Flavio hc16