Corona status (1 Viewer)

[AccessBlaster]

It doesn’t include all cases
Confirmed cases aren’t all cases. They only include people who tested positive. Testing rules and availability vary by country.

Whats the odds were being told the truth.

Edit:

 

[Minty]

Whats the odds were being to the truth.

I think that depends on who you are listening to.
Most western governments are, I'd like to think, being pretty honest about the numbers where they know them.
I also think that some are quoting (or even hyping) the numbers being tested daily to appear to be "better" than other countries, which seems a pretty pointless bit of oneupmanship.

 

[namliam]

mortality is nasty and stuff, but the real problem will still come with the aftermath. Those that ended up on ICU with a serious infection(s) are at heavy risk of beeing patients for the rest of their lives with more or less serious effects

 

[Pat Hartman]

Based on the last numbers I saw, our mortality rate was 1.8% which is worse than the seasonal flu where we average over 30,000 deaths every year with millions infected. We don't shut down the country for the seasonal flu. This flu appears more deadly at this time because we have not done widespread testing (the CDC really messed this up). Trump says we now have the ability to test 100,000 per day but the numbers are not reflecting that yet. Once we see how many people are actually infected and where they are, the mortality rate will decrease and we can use common sense to choose what areas of the country need quarantine and what areas don't.

Did anyone see the videos of NYC yesterday as the hospital ship docked? Yes, it was a great thing to see. Very impressive. However, Manhattan hospitals say they are overflowing with flu suffers. The governor is begging for ventilators. Hospitals are using masks and paper clothing way longer than they should. NYC is a hot bed of infection. Why would people risk their lives to go out into the crowd watching the ship dock? Really??? Too many people don't have any common sense or self control at all which is why they think we need government to be our baby sitters.

People who are sick or been in contact with someone who is sick MUST isolate themselves. People who have risk factors MUST isolate themselves. The operative word is "themselves". What happened to personal responsibility??? My grandchildren's children are not going to be able to pay off this debt we are incurring by trying to make "everyone" whole again after shutting down most sources of income in way too many places. 8T = ~ $23,000 per person. Why not divvy up the pot and give half to each person under the age of 21 or older than 62 or who earns <$150,000 per year and then split the other half among businesses that were forced to shut down based on their pro-rata share of the other half based on profits. Look at that. I just spent 8 trillion dollars in two sentences. I didn't need thousands of pages for a bill that no one ever reads or thousands of people to administer. The average family of 4 ends up with $44,000 which is more than most of them make in take home pay in an entire year!!!!!!! Or, give kids half of what adults would get and then the average family of 4 ends up with $30,000 plus. Surely that makes more sense than giving the Kennedy center $25,000,000 outright and having them lay off their performing staff the next day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WTF? If I lived in DC, I would never, ever pay money to go to another performance at that piece of s*** theater. How DARE they take MY money and not use it for the intended purpose. How DARE the Congress (Nancy Pelosi) insist on including such a boondoggle in a bill that is supposed to help displaced citizens. And this isn't the only boondoggle in the bill that Trump had to sign because if he didn't sign it, HE would have been the bad guy rather than the members of Congress who insisted on these clauses as a condition of getting their vote.

 

[Jon]

Pat, the coronavirus has about 10-20x the risk of dying that typical flu. In addition, you are 1,000 times more likely to be hospitalised from coronavirus. The infection rate coefficient is about 2.5, meaning an infected person will spread it to 2.5 other people on average. For typical flu, it is 1.5. Therefore, it spreads way way faster as the exponentials kick into gear. This cocktail is what makes it so deadly and why the world has come to a grinding halt.

All countries, with perhaps the exception of say South Korea (for example), are guilty of not preparing adequately for a potential pandemic. It seems that we need a catastrophe to happen to get political will for resource allocation towards this sort of thing. Yet, ironically, we spend a ton on nukes.

 

[AccessBlaster]

All countries, with perhaps the exception of say South Korea (for example), are guilty of not preparing adequately for a potential pandemic. It seems that we need a catastrophe to happen to get political will for resource allocation towards this sort of thing. Yet, ironically, we spend a ton on nukes.

Also every country affected by covid-19 are clamoring for ventilators, not just where you happen to be. CNN acts as if we should have one for every person in the US ahead of the outbreak.

There is no way to know everything that might happen in the next month.

 

[namliam]

Yet, ironically, we spend a ton on nukes.

And more on stuff like "is there other life out there" or what does the other side of the moon look like. And even "simple" stuff like the JSF ....

Could make a list as long as my arm, but yeah... loads of moneys beeing spend on ambitious projects... though partly offcourse those projects do benefit our economies.

 

[Pat Hartman]

Jon,
Given the current reporting, yes, this virus is much more scary than the seasonal Flu. However, given the lack of testing, we have no accurate number of people infected so we don't have a valid denominator we can use to compute the mortality rate. Remember, up to now, flu tests have been guarded like Fort Knox (where the US keeps some of its gold bullion) so only people with severe symptoms or in hospital are actually getting tested. This flu is much more contagious than the seasonal flu's but when accurate statistics are available, it will likely have a similar or slightly higher mortality rate. We do know that certain age groups are more seriously affected. The Spanish Flu seems to have been more deadly to younger people and its mortality rate was very high. Given the Korean model, we have found that social distancing and some isolation of the sick and susceptible work well to impede the spread. Early on, the UK wanted to acquire a "herd" immunity. That might have worked if the ill and the elderly took more personal responsibility to isolate themselves. I think we should have done that here also. If the CDC hadn't been so reluctant to expand our testing capacity, we would have known much earlier where the hot spots were and could have taken community based shutdowns rather than having them be state or country-wide. Metro NY is a huge hot spot but upstate New York (north and west of Albany) not so much.

Here is one article that compares this corona virus with the Spanish Flu (Why we can't call this flu the Wuhan flu is beyond me. Apparently Spanish flu, German measles, Lime disease, etc are NOT racist but Wuhan flu is. That is the politically correct for you.).

Why we should be careful comparing the Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak to the 1918 Spanish flu

The Spanish flu killed tens of millions of people. Here’s what it can and can’t tell us about Covid-19.

www.vox.com

Here's an excerpt:

One way we can compare the two outbreaks is by looking at case fatality rates: the share of infections that lead to death. This is always difficult to estimate because there are likely more infections than have been identified by medical authorities. According to Johns Hopkins researchers, as of this writing there have been 111,363 cases of Covid-19 and 3,892 deaths, for a case fatality rate of about 3.5 percent.


But you should take that number with a grain of salt. Countries’ testing protocols vary widely and many, including the US, have only tested a few thousand people while others, like South Korea, have tested hundreds of thousands. That means the denominator for the case fatality rate — the total number of infections — is uncertain, and might be undercounted due to lack of testing. In South Korea, the case fatality rate is currently 0.7 percent, suggesting that better testing might yield more accurate, lower rates. At the same time, as Julia Belluz explains, accurately measured fatality rates are also going to vary significantly from country to country due to differences in health system capacity, low- and middle-income people’s access to health care, etc.

The case fatality rate of the Spanish flu is often cited as 2.5 percent, but this is likely a dramatic underestimate, as science writer Ferris Jabr has written.

The most frequently cited death statistics for the Spanish flu come from Niall Johnson and Juergen Mueller’s 2002 study, which estimated the death toll at 50 million and warned that this might be as much as a 100 percent underestimate, implying a total toll of 100 million. A more recent 2018 paper by Pete Spreeuwenberg, Madelon Kroneman, and John Paget gets a much lower estimate of 17.4 million. If the frequently cited estimate of 500 million infections globally is correct, then the latter death toll implies a case fatality rate of 3.5 percent, but using a higher death toll of 50 million, the fatality rate rises to 10 percent.

Most people don't actually die of the flu. They die of pneumonia or some other illness that the flu weakened immune system became susceptible to. So, that impacts the counting also. Should people who die of pneumonia brought on by flu be counted as flu deaths? Probably.

Statistics are completely controlled by the person presenting them. So, if you want to make this flu look really terrible, you use only the hospital admissions as the denominator rather than including all the infected based on widespread testing. Or if you want it to just look bad, you also include people who are not hospitalized but reported flu symptoms to their doctors. But, if you want an accurate mortality rate, you have to count a much larger sample of tested people so you can pick up people who are infected (and therefore carriers) but suffered few or no symptoms.

Here in the US, we are pretty far from an accurate mortality rate. In the early days, the CDC (Center for Disease Control) really messed up and so this illness was spreading across the country for over two months before we had ANY viable test and the CDC was only testing a few people a day. We now have certified private testing and so have the ability to test hundreds of thousands each day and get reports in hours rather than days so in the coming weeks, we will see a dramatic improvement in the mortality rate. Doesn't mean that people aren't dead. They are and that is always sad but it means that we grossly overreacted and wrecked the stock market and the economy for nothing.

The question now is, do we shut down the country again next fall when flu season starts again? If we don't, we'll loose an average of 30,000 people to the seasonal flu, more if the scientists are not accurate in their prediction of which flu strains to include in the annual flu shot. We never seemed to care about these people before. Perhaps now we will and people who are symptomatic will actually stay home and stop infecting the rest of us. If social pressure on the symptomatic to stay home is raised, that is a good thing.

 

[Deleted member 147267]

Lime disease,

I had to look that one up because I thought you meant Lyme. Turns out they are both diseases, one typically associated with limes but also can result in interaction with other food types. It' scientific name being phytophotodermatitis. How is Lime disease racist? Even if you meant Lyme, it is so known because of the location of its original detection, is it not? That is quite common in practice. Is Legionnaires Disease racist because it became associated with a convention?

 

[Pat Hartman]

Opps. I did mean Lyme and I know better because I only live about 25 miles from the epicenter of that outbreak. Thanks.

I'm not saying that calling this virus the Wuhan virus is racist but maybe Legionnaires Disease is I was just pointing out what the Democrats and ergo the mainstream media is saying.

 

[Pat Hartman]

"Reporters" are saying there is a huge jump in infections and making it out to be the end of the world. Shades of the black plague where people were having to collect bodies from the streets. Yo dumbos!!! When you test significantly more people, you get significantly more positives!! We've always known the number of infected was much higher than what the CDC testing and hospital reports showed. After a couple weeks of increased testing, we'll get to a real denominator and have a better sense of the actual mortality rate of COVID-19. This is a very infectious disease and lots of people will catch it with varying levels of symptoms, but it is fatal to far lower percentage than originally reported. Social distancing is necessary for the infected and the infirm and the elderly.

 

[Minty]

I think the problem is the highly infectious nature of it, it seems to infect more people more easily than the normal type of flu we see year on year. Instead of passing it to roughly 1.5 people on average, an infected person infects 2.5 people. It doesn't sound a lot, but when you extrapolate it it means the spread is logarithmically bigger.

This page from a (hopefully) unbiased source is the most informed I have read https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/q-a-similarities-and-differences-covid-19-and-influenza

 

[AccessBlaster]

This page from a (hopefully) unbiased source is the most informed I have read https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/q-a-similarities-and-differences-covid-19-and-influenza

Director-General Tedros Adhanom is a puppet of the Chinese government.
Goggle: Director-General Tedros Adhanom >> corruption

 

[Minty]

Whist I agree he personally has been compromised, the information on that page has probably never passed near his scrutiny.
I can't find any evidence that the specific information is inaccurate.

 

[MajP]

(Why we can't call this flu the Wuhan flu is beyond me. Apparently Spanish flu, German measles, Lime disease, etc are NOT racist but Wuhan flu is. That is the politically correct for you.

The great irony is that in all of those other cases, those nations and locations are not at fault. In this case the Chinese Dictatorship and corrupt regime has unleashed this on the world through lying, cover ups, and complete misinformation campaigns. They caused it and they own it in this case. Wuhan Flu or CPC Flu or Jingping Flu, whatever you want..

 

[Deleted member 147267]

They caused it and they own it in this case.

Where do I go to vote for calling it the Wuhan Virus or Wuhan anything?

 

[AccessBlaster]

Where do I go to vote for calling it the Wuhan Virus

Try it anywhere facebook, yahoo. BTW big thanks to Jon for not caving in to the political correctness

 

[Jon]

Also every country affected by covid-19 are clamoring for ventilators, not just where you happen to be. CNN acts as if we should have one for every person in the US ahead of the outbreak.

There is no way to know everything that might happen in the next month.

Think of insurance. We have nukes as insurance. A pandemic by airborne virus is one of the biggest risks out there. But we have little insurance for that. Short term immediate needs are being overvalued relative to longer-term protection from such events. The consequence? A global meltdown. The WHO warned back in 2005 about the need for far greater protection from pandemics.

 

[Jon]

And more on stuff like "is there other life out there" or what does the other side of the moon look like. And even "simple" stuff like the JSF ....

Could make a list as long as my arm, but yeah... loads of moneys beeing spend on ambitious projects... though partly offcourse those projects do benefit our economies.

I don't mind the ambitious projects. But at least put a little more into protection from the most likely risks. Just listen to Bill Gates TED talk, talking about a pandemic being the greatest risk we face.

 

[Jon]

Pat...so many things to reply to!!

This flu is much more contagious than the seasonal flu

Lets not conflate the two diseases. Coronavirus is not flu. To call them by the same name is inaccurate and misleads into thinking their deadliness is similar.

However, given the lack of testing, we have no accurate number of people infected so we don't have a valid denominator we can use to compute the mortality rate.

I agree, we don't have an accurate figure. However, there are plenty of models that suggest this is far more serious than flu. The 1% typical estimate of the mortality rate isn't based on the number of deaths divided by the number of confirmed cases. They have factored in previous disease models, big data, and so on. The observed mortality rates are like 10% in Italy and the UK, and that is without even letting the "active" cases coming through with the data to see if they will die or not.

Let's take the UK. 38K cases in total with 3,600 deaths. That is roughly a 10% mortality rate so far. Yet they still have 34K cases active. How many of those will die also, leading to a much higher than 10% observed mortality rate? So, when they say 1%, it is their best estimate based on the real number of people they believe are infected. An anti-body test will give a much clearer picture. I am not saying you are wrong. Rather, I am saying that the experts are more believable to me because they have more data and expertise on the topic.

Most people don't actually die of the flu. They die of pneumonia or some other illness that the flu weakened immune system became susceptible to. So, that impacts the counting also. Should people who die of pneumonia brought on by flu be counted as flu deaths? Probably.

I would be very surprised if they are not counted as deaths in the flu count. You have to die of something. Flu is the cause of death. It brought on the pneumonia. Otherwise, wouldn't the death rate from flu be zero? How can you otherwise die? Heart attack? Wait, that was a cardiovascular event, not flu! An so on.

Statistics are completely controlled by the person presenting them. So, if you want to make this flu look really terrible, you use only the hospital admissions as the denominator rather than including all the infected based on widespread testing.

As mentioned above, no government is saying the observed rate of mortality is what they consider the actual mortality rate of the disease.

The question now is, do we shut down the country again next fall when flu season starts again? If we don't, we'll loose an average of 30,000 people to the seasonal flu, more if the scientists are not accurate in their prediction of which flu strains to include in the annual flu shot.

It's a good question. My question is where on the continuum of mortality rate do you consider a lockdown to be reasonable? What if the mortality rate is 99%? Same principle, you could argue that we don't lock down for the flu so....? Current estimates are that the coronavirus has a 10x mortality rate compared to flu and will infect far more people at a much faster rate, putting even more pressure on the health systems of countries. Add in the fact you are 1000 times more likely to be hospitalised, and there is your answer for why the world has shut up shop. Anything else is a danger to mankind.

The models in the UK predict that we can hopefully keep the death toll to 20,000. Without the lockdown and other measures, the estimates are 500,000 dead, a similar figure to WW2 in the UK.

I say, stay at home!

On a lighter note, apparently, there was a preacher in the US who was selling a gel you rub over your body and it cures you of coronavirus in 12 hours. The FDA shut him down. Shame, because I wanted some.