SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)

Trump's bound to have it. He's been around at least 2 people who have tested positive and Ivanka has been around at least one person who has tested positive.
 
Spain seems destined to surpass Italy next week or so. They have only 5k cases compared to Italy's 17k, but they had 2k new cases today (Italy had 2.5k). With Italy going in full lockdown for a few days now (and partial lockdown for a week), while Spain still to do that (except Catalonia who did it today), you can expect there to get extremely ugly soon.

Germany is hardly better. They are gonna reach 10k on Tuesday or so.
 
christy87 said:
This thing about herd immunity, what if this virus doesn’t work that way and it is a constant danger for vulnerable people.
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Almost surely some immunity will be created either way. Even if it is not lifelong immunity (and probably it won't), it would be much better than the first time.

Vulnerable people will be vulnerable. Heck, many vaccines don't work as good to old people as to the young ones. If this lasts for a year or two (like I think it will), maybe we will have a new permanent set of norms (more hygiene, no handshakes, try to have less personal contacts and so on).

It can easily be the most important event of the first half of this century.
 
Revan said:
You forgot China. They are having less than 50 new cases per day this week (only 11 today). Probably going to reach 0 in the next 2 weeks.
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I excluded them because of the explosive growth initially but if they have been anywhere nearly as succesful as the official figures suggest since I should have included them.

And why are we all ignoring what the succesful countries have done?
 
Ian Reus said:
But they would only have a very small chance of getting it as most of population would have some immunity.
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We all have some immunity to other coronaviruses, rhinoviruses, influenza.

We don't have a very small chance of getting them.
 
Revan said:
Very good point, and why the 'let's get herd immunity' is a disatrous strategy.
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Yup - it's a nice, fancy graphic which has no basis in reality.

Here's a Fields medalist who agrees:


The math for this is pretty simple, but if there are unknown unknowns, even this guy is not able to think of them. So what are we missing that the UK government knows?
 
zing said:
Yup - it's a nice, fancy graphic which has no basis in reality.

Here's a Fields medalist who agrees:


The math for this is pretty simple, but if there are unknown unknowns, even this guy is not able to think of them. So what are we missing that the UK government knows?
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I read both of the threads he made. Yep, the math doesn't add up to creating the herd immunity, without killing 3% of the population or so.

I don't know much, but I think that the best strategy has to be to delay it as much as possible and get a vaccine in the meantime.
 
Tarrou said:
what does this mean exactly?
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That in order for the hospitals to not get overwhelmed, we need to spread the disease (modelled by normal distribution) within 10 years. Essentially, we cannot both create a herd immunity, and allow hospitals to function properly. Which essentially leaves two options:

1) Try to stop the spreading, by doing a total lockout.
2) Pay the price of 3-5% of your population dying and finish the pandemic. *

* This assumes that we create the immunity if we get it, which at this stage, is not a safe assumption.
 
Revan said:
Just when I thought it couldn't get worse: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-rate/

The mortality rate might be significantly higher than the current estimate.
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The mortality rate is almost certainly significantly lower than the current estimate. Numbers of around 0.5% are being mooted elsewhere but obviously difficult to say for now, but no one is working with the estimate that 3.4% is anything like the real number.

The WHO number has been widely criticised as its just based on a reported cases, but obviously this misses a tremendous amount of people. If you look in the UK for example, they estimate the number of actual cases exceeds reported cases by a factor of 10 - 20. And that's in the UK who have tested a lot more than many countries.
 
JulesWinnfield said:
The mortality rate is almost certainly significantly lower than the current estimate. Numbers of around 0.5% are being mooted elsewhere but obviously difficult to say for now, but no one is working with the estimate that 3.4% is anything like the real number.

The WHO number has been widely criticised as its just based on a reported cases, but obviously this misses a tremendous amount of people. If you look in the UK for example, they estimate the number of actual cases exceeds reported cases by a factor of 10 - 20. And that's in the UK who have tested a lot more than many countries.
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Probably not. Some models are putting it significantly higher.

In any case, it is not important the fatality rate in ideal scenario (an oxygen ventilator next to you, and a doctor and nurse taking care to you). Becuse if most people get infected within the year, then that won't be the case. And in that case, the mortality rate will converge to the number of people who need intensive care and oxygen ventilators (which seems to be 5-10%). Multiply it by 0.6 (the number of infected), and you get 3-6% of the population dying.

Which is why it makes the plan nuts! You cannot model this with South Korea's fatality rates while at the same time having millions of sick people. You either model it with Italy's (in fact higher cause the medical system is still working there) rate of 7% or so and millions of people being sick at the same time, or with Korea's/China's (no Wuhan) low mortality rate but with a functioning medical system (aka, only a few thousands of people, at most a few tens of thousands of people being sick at the same time).

The only non-tragic solution is the containment at all costs, and rapidly developing vaccines and anti-virals.
 
Revan said:
Probably not. Some models are putting it significantly higher.

In any case, it is not important the fatality rate in ideal scenario (an oxygen ventilator next to you, and a doctor and nurse taking care to you). Becuse if most people get infected within the year, then that won't be the case. And in that case, the mortality rate will converge to the number of people who need intensive care and oxygen ventilators (which seems to be 5-10%). Multiply it by 0.6 (the number of infected), and you get 3-6% of the population dying.

Which is why it makes the plan nuts! You cannot model this with South Korea's fatality rates while at the same time having millions of sick people. You either model it with Italy's (in fact higher cause the medical system is still working there) rate of 7% or so and millions of people being sick at the same time, or with Korea's/China's (no Wuhan) low mortality rate but with a functioning medical system (aka, only a few thousands of people, at most a few tens of thousands of people being sick at the same time).

The only non-tragic solution is the containment at all costs, and rapidly developing vaccines and anti-virals.
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Where?

No countries are modelling this with anything like the WHO death rate. The numbers you are using are based on reported cases, they are almost certainly highly inaccurate. As I say, it is estimated in the UK that actual cases exceed reported cases by 10 - 20.
 
I'm drunk and happy, hope not precipitously.
 
JulesWinnfield said:
Where?

No countries are modelling this with anything like the WHO death rate. The numbers you are using are based on reported cases, they are almost certainly highly inaccurate. As I say, it is estimated in the UK that actual cases exceed reported cases by 10 - 20.
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The link I posted before (actual number of deaths per case). And this being very similar to SARS, who was modelled to have a 3-4% fatality rate, but ended with 10%.

In any case, as I said it does not matter what is the mortality rate in a perfect scenario. Even if it is 0.5% but 5% of people need intensive care, then the true mortality rate will be 5% when more than 99% of those people won't be able to get that treatment. And they won't if we get millions of sick people at the same time.

And while the UK surely has 10 times more infected people, it will also have 10 times more dead people in a week or two, when the recently infected ones start dying.
 
I've been thinking too about how intensive care units are being forced to pick between who gets treated and who doesn't, with the main factors being age and chance of survival. That's only going to skew the demographics of the fatality figures further isn't it? Making it look even deadlier to older people and less deadly to young people. Where actually, how treatment is allocated may also play a role in that.
 
Tarrou said:
what does this mean exactly?
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At current rates if the trend holds, it is estimated that hospital systems will be completely overwhelmed. To not overwhelm the system, you need to ensure that # of people needing hospitalization == # of people hospitals can support. We know the right hand side(because we know how many beds we have). At that level, you can estimate that the COVID fatality rate is exactly as you would expect it to be. Beyond that point, folks needing critical care get locked out of the right amount of medical treatment and the fatality rate starts rising.

Boris Johnson's plan is to allow 60% of the population to get infected in a phased manner. The reason is if 60% get it, and 40% don't, at most, the average transmission should be (40/60) which is no longer exponential and controllable.

The article calculates that if 60% get it over the next 1 year, then as per the above, # of people needing hospitalization >>>>>> # of people hospitals can support. So, while Boris promises fatality rate to be controlled, in reality you will still see a higher fatality rate. To ensure that the left hand side equals right hand side(and for Boris' plan to work), we can only allow 60% of the people to develop the infection over 10 years and not 1 year. That will support hospital capacity. Which is infeasible.

The solution should therefore be to squash the virus and wait for a vaccine.

(Note that none of this is my inference, I am merely interpreting the guy's article for you)
 
JulesWinnfield said:
The mortality rate is almost certainly significantly lower than the current estimate. Numbers of around 0.5% are being mooted elsewhere but obviously difficult to say for now, but no one is working with the estimate that 3.4% is anything like the real number.

The WHO number has been widely criticised as its just based on a reported cases, but obviously this misses a tremendous amount of people. If you look in the UK for example, they estimate the number of actual cases exceeds reported cases by a factor of 10 - 20. And that's in the UK who have tested a lot more than many countries.
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Hard to comment without knowing the nuance behind the numbers, but I'd argue if there are many other cases, and true mortality rate is lower.. that means our estimate of transmission rate has to be revised up. Absolute deaths is the only real data we have right now.
 
DiseaseOfTheAge said:
Glad you're managing to unwind a little. Not easy but important right now.
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Thanks

I've been seeing so many great things here, I really hope they will work out.

Suddenly there's no idiots on my social media, they have been drowned.

And I went out tonight, everyone was so damn careful, and so acceptant that tonight was going to be the last for a while. It's great to see.
 
The Firestarter said:
The Asian countries people's mentality is much more in line with following rules that benefit their society as a whole. I remember the orderly fashion in which Japan thandled the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown. And it was much more immediate and devastating .
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Where and why did this whole thing start again?
 
DiseaseOfTheAge said:
We all have some immunity to other coronaviruses, rhinoviruses, influenza.

We don't have a very small chance of getting them.
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Because viruses aren't dealt with by the immune response as well as are bacteria because they try to hide, with varying degrees of success, inside cells. They also evolve fast especially when some degree of immunity occurs.
 
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