totm april 2020 Coronavirus

[kerbiloid]

8 minutes ago, Codraroll said:

Well, I would say that if a patient were to breathe an inert gas at close to boiling temperatures for a quarter of an hour, the chance that they will die of the coronavirus becomes extremely slim. 

As this is the leading institute of emergency medicine, I'm sure they know what they do.

As you can read on/in/at/... the link, the patient feels like in sauna, just it.

Spoiler

Sauna thermometer

 

Edited April 23, 2020 by kerbiloid

[tater]

https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/22/gov-newsom-coroners-to-examine-deaths-dating-back-to-december-for-covid-19-death-toll-tops-1350/?utm_content=tw-mercnews&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=socialflow

CA looking back to deaths as far back as Dec to check for COVID.

Interesting.

Just looking at simple models (network transmission models clearly make more sense, but as an upper bound the simple mass models are maybe instructive), it seems like if there are cases in the US in Dec, the prevalence by the time of any interventions is either really high, or it's not as transmissible as imagined. You can't have something super easy to catch doubling every few days unchecked and still have a tiny number of cases 80-100 days later. Low R₀, but a network topology that results in superspreaders?

[Superfluous J]

11 minutes ago, Codraroll said:

Well, I would say that if a patient were to breathe an inert gas at close to boiling temperatures for a quarter of an hour, the chance that they will die of the coronavirus becomes extremely slim. 

Boiling? That's not even body temperature.

In B4 Kelvin joke.

[sevenperforce]

8 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

14 minutes ago, Codraroll said:

Quote

In Sklifosofsky Institute they are trying the 92° hot helium to weaken the virus illness.
The patient inhales it for 15 minutes to restore the blood acidic balance.

Well, I would say that if a patient were to breathe an inert gas at close to boiling temperatures for a quarter of an hour, the chance that they will die of the coronavirus becomes extremely slim. 

As this is the leading institute of emergency medicine, I'm sure they know what they do.

It's 92° Fahrenheit, not 92° Centigrade. It's also a mixture of oxygen and helium; I would assume at higher than ambient GOX ratios.

Nitrogen reacts with certain amino acids and changes the blood pH while helium does not. Presumably the virus has a narrower allowable pH range than humans. It is a very good idea.

[tater]

I know they are using nitric oxide in the ICU for some patients (it's apparently common in the NICU) to increase their O₂ sat.

[kerbiloid]

12 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

It's 92° Fahrenheit, not 92° Centigrade.

Have a look at the thermometer, it's exactly Celsius. Also, nobody in Russia uses F and unlikely even knows how much is 92°F.
In sauna they breath with up to 100°C air, the humidity matters.

At zero humidity +200°C start causing unrecoverable damages after 5 minutes of exposition. This is less than +100 for 15 minutes.

As the link describes, the helium in blood makes easier the oxygen exchange and allows the acid balance get back to give the body some rest in its struggle. It's not a remedy, but presumably a support.

Edited April 23, 2020 by kerbiloid

[sevenperforce]

13 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

At zero humidity +200°C start causing unrecoverable damages after 5 minutes of exposition.

I can't imagine anyone surviving 200 C for ten seconds.

[kerbiloid]

18 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

I can't imagine anyone surviving 200 C for ten seconds.

It's old studies, i read about it in a book about ship fires. There was a table for different temperatures, but from memory I can recall only this.
Humidity makes things worse.

Upd.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-10912578

Sauna champions start dying after ~15min at 110°C.

Somebody likes 3..4 min at +130..140°C. Somebody up to +160°C.

Do not try this at home.

***

So, helium at +92°C is like this but with funny voices.

Edited April 23, 2020 by kerbiloid

[tater]

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/new-york-virus-deaths-top-15k-cuomo-expected-to-detail-plan-to-fight-nursing-home-outbreaks/2386556/

Found a pic of the slide from the presser, finally:

IFR about 0.5% (like that Berkeley paper suggests it should be.

My guess is that R₀ is actually on the lower end of the proposed ranges. It's been in the US since probably late December. Given doubling times, if it was higher (2.5, or even super high like 5.7), then this peak would have happened long before it did. So much more flu-like rate of infection, but deadlier than flu. I bet it's 1.5 - 1.7.

 

A lower R₀ not only means lower herd immunity threshold, it makes more sense given efforts to contain spread. If R₀ was really high, mitigation should have meant little—and it should have been too late by March to do it. Moderate efforts might well be all it takes to slow the spread if you only need to get R_e from ~1.6 to 0.3 (nearly impossible to get to 0.3 from 2.5+).

[tater]

 

[mikegarrison]

I sure wish that the numbers were showing that 85% of us had already had the virus. Then we could say that as soon as the active cases dropped low enough, it was all over.

If only 15% of us have had the virus, that means 85% are still susceptible. This thing is going to be around for a while, even if we are careful. If we aren't careful, it's going to be really bad again.

[sevenperforce]

33 minutes ago, tater said:

 

Just came to post that.

[tater]

I posted a paper from these guys up the thread, this is pretty interesting.

 

[Cavscout74]

Had my own little scare yesterday - woke up coughing non-stop, wheezing, etc.  This was after a few days of minor coughing that I figured was allergies - North Carolina this time of year is awful for that, but I've never experienced much more than minor coughing & sneezing.  I called out of work & managed to get in to see my doctor.   My temp was normal, o2 levels were normal, BP normal and she saw no evidence of CoVid or any other infection, just a severe allergy attack.

I did have some extra time to read news articles, and found an interesting one - the parent company of the cargo airline I work for got in excess of $8 million from a small business loan fund from the government, despite the fact that they aren't a small business.  Today, I came in to work and the parent company side of the headquarters had a full parking lot.  I guess they called everyone in to figure out how to spend the money before the government tries to take it back.  Pretty disgusting, really.

Edited April 23, 2020 by Cavscout74

[tater]

19 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

I sure wish that the numbers were showing that 85% of us had already had the virus. Then we could say that as soon as the active cases dropped low enough, it was all over.

If only 15% of us have had the virus, that means 85% are still susceptible. This thing is going to be around for a while, even if we are careful. If we aren't careful, it's going to be really bad again.

Yeah, the numbers clearly vary by hotspot. Chelsea, MA is north of 30%, and NYC is close to that.

The trick with herd immunity is what R₀ is (and that seems like a moving target). The vid I posted suggests that R0 is not a lone number, but more realistically has variability due to the networked nature of actual human interactions. A ways in, he has a graph with R0 vs the dispersion parameter, k, such that you can have low R0, and still get wide spread via k. What I don't get is if this formulation has an effect on herd immunity levels.

If R₀ is in fact in the mid 1.X range, there is a decent chance that herd immunity is very nearly reached already. There can still be breakouts given the large number of susceptible people, but those will be less widespread and easier to deal with.

 

This was referenced, and is fairly interesting:

https://covid19.gleamproject.org/

2 minutes ago, Cavscout74 said:

Today, I came in to work and the parent company side of the headquarters had a full parking lot.  I guess they called everyone in to figure out how to spend the money before the government tries to take it back.  Pretty disgusting, really.

There is something I heard regarding getting the small business loans related to keeping people employed, so they have to demonstrate people are working at some level. It has been an issue in some businesses, because the bail out packages to individuals through early summer has actually created a disincentive for some lower paid people to go back to work early. Unsure on the specifics.

[Cavscout74]

5 minutes ago, tater said:

There is something I heard regarding getting the small business loans related to keeping people employed, so they have to demonstrate people are working at some level. It has been an issue in some businesses, because the bail out packages to individuals through early summer has actually created a disincentive for some lower paid people to go back to work early. Unsure on the specifics.

They haven't been out of work though - they've been working from home, same as the office workers on the airline side of the building.  For the last month, I'll see one or two people in any given day - I'm assuming they have paperwork to file or whatever, but today looks like 3/4 of them are in at work.  I don't know for sure - we aren't allowed access to that side of the building - just judging by the parking lot and the increased traffic to/from the restrooms

[KerikBalm]

5 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

I guess you can get true known positive and known negative by individual microscopic exam? 

Microscope? no

In acute cases (infection still active), you can try to cultivate "live virus". You can cross check with RT-PCR to show that its not some other virus, and you cant do antibody studies.

After the infection is over, you can test for IgG, but is that really IgG against SARS-CoV2, or some other hCoV? For that you can do virus neutralization assays. I know of a certain study using virus neutralization assays to test an IgG and IgA ELISA that will go on pre-print servers "soon".

[DDE]

1 hour ago, Cavscout74 said:

Had my own little scare yesterday - woke up coughing non-stop, wheezing, etc.

In a darkly amusing way, this is a consequence of early morning supermarket runs for me. Looks like they use really irritating crap for disinfection.

1 hour ago, Cavscout74 said:

I did have some extra time to read news articles, and found an interesting one - the parent company of the cargo airline I work for got in excess of $8 million from a small business loan fund from the government, despite the fact that they aren't a small business.

My employer is at least five entities, including a registered small enterprise and a registered microenterprise.

Which is how we fit into government quotas for procurement from SMEs.

On 3/27/2020 at 7:42 PM, mikegarrison said:

If those are the senior governmental officials in Slovakia ... well, they all seem to be younger and hotter than those in many other countries.

Ladies and gentlemen, I think we need to seriously consider the possibility that this will become the face of everyone's geopolitical annoyance.

Spoiler

North Korea's border with China is rather porous, and while there's evidence they were able to enforce mask-wearing, miracles rarely happen.

And Kim is (a) rather obese and (b) is in the 'shakes hands with everyone' risk category.

So all those rumours about his ill health could point to a very unfortunate outcome.

Edited April 23, 2020 by DDE

[Vanamonde]

Folks, history has proven that we can't stay on-topic and polite to each other when the subject of politics comes up, so we've removed some content from this thread and will once more ask people to leave that aspect out of the discussions. We're not saying that it isn't relevant. We know people want to talk about it. But we do have to ask you all to take that aspect of the discussion to other forums. 

[sevenperforce]

1 hour ago, tater said:

There is something I heard regarding getting the small business loans related to keeping people employed, so they have to demonstrate people are working at some level. It has been an issue in some businesses, because the bail out packages to individuals through early summer has actually created a disincentive for some lower paid people to go back to work early. Unsure on the specifics.

Reminds me of this: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/22/she-got-a-paycheck-protection-loan-her-employees-hate-her-for-it.html

For certain narrow income ranges, you can temporarily make more money off unemployment than via PPL.

[tater]

Live someplace hot?

 

[StrandedonEarth]

I'm surprised this example of "speaking moistly" hasn't surfaced yet. This is the sort of thing that masks would prevent....

Spoiler

 

 

[tater]

T-shirt of a woodcut of a plague doctor my wife did, proceeds to go entirely to COVID-19 support for the Navajo Nation—they're getting hammered compared to here in NM (URL is long, I linked it to the pic, so it's clickable (heck, I'll link this, too)):

 

(yes, the border is toilet paper)

Edited April 24, 2020 by tater

[kerbiloid]

Spoiler

  

  

 

  

11 hours ago, Cavscout74 said:

the parent company side of the headquarters had a full parking lot.  I guess they called everyone

It's brilliant!

Like some people (at least in Hollywood movies) live in trailer parks to avoid the real estate payments, this is a solution of both open office space and office renting problems!

A trailer office park.

The boss is sitting in a parked trailer.
Everybody gets to the work by his car and parks it around. And works in it like in the office cubicle.

So, no renting, no  real estate taxes.
The firm can easily relocate close to the customer's place. JUst tomorrow gather there instead of here.
You can rearrange the cars according to your current unit structure to optimize the logistics.

Everyone is at hand.
Everyone has his own microclimate inside. Hot, cold, windy, stinky, smoked. Nobody cares.
Printers and other noisy things can be put at some distance, in a trailer.
No need in office design. No need in chairs, couches, and other furniture, as everyone has a backseat to relax.
A rented food vendor parked aside as a doner diner.

This company is just prophetic.

Now some car manufacturer should offer an "office car":
Left seat is driver's, right seat is clerk's (or mirrored). Backseat - a couch.
So, the owner moves from seat to seat accroding to his current needs.

May the office slaves become office nomads!

 

Edited April 24, 2020 by kerbiloid

[AHHans]

Interesting article in The Economist: Tracking covid-19 excess deaths across countries

They looked at the total number of reported deaths, calculated the excess over the average of the last 10 years and compared that to the reported number of COVID-19 deaths. There seem to be a lot more COVID-19 related deaths than reported. With New York being the exception from that rule.

Quote Excess mortality since region/country’s first 50 covid deaths Updated on April 21st 13:47 UTC Region/country           Time period               Covid-19 deaths   Total excess deaths     Covid-19 as % of total Spain                                Mar 11th-Apr 7th     13,763                        21,119                                  65% England and Wales   Mar 14th-Apr 10th    10,330                        15,175                                 68% France                            Mar 10th-Apr 6th       8,886                          11,417                                 78% Lombardy                     Mar 1st-Apr 4th          6,132                          12,802                                 48% New York City             Mar 15th-Apr 4th        4,981                            5,099                                  98% Netherlands               Mar 16th-Apr 12th      2,717                             6,169                                  44% Belgium                       Mar 16th-Apr 5th         1,443                             2,888                                  50% Istanbul                       Mar 23rd-Apr 19th         994                              2,511                                  40% Sweden                       Mar 25th-Apr 7th            555                                  780                                   71% Austria                        Mar 23rd-Apr 5th             188                                 330                                   57% Jakarta                      Mar 1st-Mar 31st                84                              1,543                                    5%   P.S. Germany only has - even preliminary - mortality statistics up to mid-March. *grrr*

Edited April 24, 2020 by AHHans
Added P.S.