2019 Novel Coronavirus Covid-19 Discussion

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#2416442 11-Feb-2020 21:10

aspett:

It's clearly just as misguided to report a mortality rate based on unresolved (death or recovery) confirmed diagnosis. There's simply no way it's 2% or 4% as reported. The argument over what the mortality rate is, is probably as good as bike shedding at this point. Inevitably I will be wrong, you will be wrong, and the experts will be wrong until it's over, or measured over some temporal range.

It's fine to report it. It's maybe not a great idea to publish it to an audience who don't understand what they're looking at.

Actually, I do believe you and I are in the clear - I don't think either of us has stated an estimate of what the mortality rate is. Given that the "experts" being cited in the media are offering such widely different estimates, then presented by the media as "facts", it's a horrific situation.

As for measuring enough cohorts infected - or at least diagnosed - at about the same time, then monitoring their progress over a reasonable time frame (maybe a couple of months), the first and best chance of getting that data is from Wuhan. So far, I'm not confident that they're going to deliver.

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#2416481 11-Feb-2020 22:59

a Chinese lawyer has gone missing after reporting that the hospitals are not (able to be) looking after the sick people, and disappeared after criticizing the communist party. as reported by Hong Kong below:

comments from youtube:

People : Where is Chen?

CCP : Don"t worry he"s fine in new hospital

People : No one saw him

CCP : We mean underneath as foundation

Batman

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#2416503 12-Feb-2020 07:15

interesting article/opinion piece about xenophobia here https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/somethings-right-here-folks-look-usa-2009-h1n1-virus-compared-cavolo

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#2416671 12-Feb-2020 12:05

Cruise ships giving a big jump today in the WHO sitrep, 395 confirmed cases outside China with 76 new today with 65 of them being on ships

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#2416678 12-Feb-2020 12:40

I see from this article BBC article on Covid-19 that the virus now has an official name to avoid confusion with other viruses...

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#2416683 12-Feb-2020 12:58

Batman:

interesting article/opinion piece about xenophobia here https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/somethings-right-here-folks-look-usa-2009-h1n1-virus-compared-cavolo

Nothing new... the Black Death was blamed, amongst others, on Jews. And therefore it was OK to throw them out of your city, and, incidentally, make their property available for someone to grab.

If you try hard enough, anything bad can be blamed on whatever group you choose to dislike.

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#2416716 12-Feb-2020 14:16

frankv:

Batman:

interesting article/opinion piece about xenophobia here https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/somethings-right-here-folks-look-usa-2009-h1n1-virus-compared-cavolo

Nothing new... the Black Death was blamed, amongst others, on Jews. And therefore it was OK to throw them out of your city, and, incidentally, make their property available for someone to grab.

If you try hard enough, anything bad can be blamed on whatever group you choose to dislike.

I very much dislike people with a different opinion to my own. I would therefore like to blame them, if I may.

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#2416730 12-Feb-2020 14:36

Beccara:

Cruise ships giving a big jump today in the WHO sitrep, 395 confirmed cases outside China with 76 new today with 65 of them being on ships

Another 40 cases related to the Diamond Princess today, 39 from the boat, and one poor quarantine official......

The case of the quarantine officer will be very interesting to hear about, with regard to what PPE they had, and how much interaction there was with passengers and crew

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#2416734 12-Feb-2020 14:48

Story from South China Morning Post:

At least 500 hospital staff in Wuhan had been infected with the deadly new strain of coronavirus by mid January, multiple medical sources have confirmed, leaving hospitals short-staffed and causing deep concern among health care workers.

There's an alleged serious inconsistency there. The official figure for total confirmed infected was only 45 on 17 January.

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#2416738 12-Feb-2020 15:04

Yet another expert estimate of r0:

pdf

The Novel Coronavirus, 2019-nCoV, is Highly Contagious and More Infectious Than Initially Estimated

Abstract
The novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) is a recently emerged human pathogen that has spread widely since January 2020. Initially, the basic reproductive number, R0, was estimated to be 2.2 to 2.7. Here we provide a new estimate of this quantity. We collected extensive individual case reports and estimated key epidemiology parameters, including the incubation period. Integrating these estimates and high-resolution real-time human travel and infection data with mathematical models, we estimated that the number of infected individuals during early epidemic double every 2.4 days, and the R0 value is likely to be between 4.7 and 6.6. We further show that quarantine and contact tracing of symptomatic individuals alone may not be effective and early, strong control measures are needed to stop transmission of the virus.

(just a note that this paper hasn't yet been peer reviewed - that takes time)

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#2416748 12-Feb-2020 15:41

Harvard Gazette:

Coronavirus likely now ‘gathering steam’

Is it significant that there are so few cases internationally compared with the number in China? Is that an indication that control measures are working or is it just gathering steam internationally?

LIPSITCH: Unfortunately, I think it’s more likely to be that it’s gathering steam. We’ve released a preprint that we’ve been discussing publicly — and trying to get peer reviewed in the meantime — that looks at the numbers internationally, based on how many cases you would expect from normal travel volumes. And a couple of things are striking. One is that there are countries that really should be finding cases and haven’t yet, like Indonesia and maybe Cambodia. They are outside the range of uncertainty you would expect even given variability between countries. So our best guess is that there are undetected cases in those countries. Indonesia said a couple of days ago that it had done 50 tests, but it has a lot of air travel with Wuhan, let alone the rest of China. So 50 tests is not enough to be confident you’re catching all the cases. That’s one bit of evidence that to me was really striking. Second, I was reading The Wall Street Journal that Singapore had three cases so far that were not traced to any other case. Singapore is the opposite of Indonesia, in that they have more cases than you would expect based on their travel volume, probably because they’re better at detection. And even they are finding cases that they don’t have a source for. That makes me think that many other places do as well. Of course, we’re making guesses from limited information, but I think they’re pretty likely to be correct guesses, given the totality of information.

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#2416754 12-Feb-2020 15:53

Sorry to bump my response

At 5pm NZ time: "Experts talk | The Emerging Coronavirus Epidemic: Protecting our communities and ourselves "

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#2416757 12-Feb-2020 16:24

Batman:

interesting article/opinion piece about xenophobia here https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/somethings-right-here-folks-look-usa-2009-h1n1-virus-compared-cavolo

Thanks for posting, was an interesting read.

Note that this opinion piece was also published in the china daily, a state run newspaper, described as a "Questionable Source" due to state propaganda. Also note the author is a Communications & PR coach for in china corporate clients.

Firstly, racism and xenophobia suck, In many circumstances this has got out of hand, and I agree it should stop. But I do not feel travel warning and restrictions are one of those areas.

I find the comparison between the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, and the 2019 noval coronavirus outbreak interesting, but some what of a red hearing.

H1N1 has an R0 of 1.2 to 1.6 (Fraser,2009 - as quoted by the WHO), and a mortality of 0.03%. 18,500 cases were confirmed, but a retroactive assessment indicated 10's of millions were infected (some estimates are high as 22% of the global population), and more that 284,000 people died.

The numbers for 2019 noval coronavirus outbreak are likely to be revised, but scientists have calculated the R0 to be between 2 and 4.l The WHO is quoting 2.0 - 2.5. The WHO's eairly estimate of Mortality is 2%.. Some sources are quoting 5% mortality in Wuhan, and much lower percentages elsewhere to a china wide mortality of around 2%. It is a fair assumption that the overloaded hospital system in Wuhan is increasing mortality relative to area's with appropriate care available.

If the above numbers are accurate the current virus is far more contagious, and roughly 65 times as deadly. As such a much higher level of concern is justified. If the virus is not contained, global harm could be on the scale of the Spanish flu (1/3 of the world infected), deaths estimated in the range of 20-100 million.

While I feel it is fair to accuse various bodies of under-reacting in 2009, It is not a reasonable to use that as a basis to accuse countries of over-reacting now. Firstly we have the benefit of hindsight from 2009, and secondly the risk far exceeds that of 2009. I would fully expect travel warning & restrictions if the USA had an outbreak of something at the level of the spanish flu.

With regards to under-reporting in both 2009 and 2019. One does not make the other acceptable. If I recall rightly more transparency on such issues was promised by china after SAR's. I'm not seeing it.

"China is not trying to hide these hardships" - The arrest of doctors & journalists who have been whistle-blowers implies strongly otherwise.

The criticisms of people avoiding ethnic restaurants is fair, especially in countries with no cases like ours. I think it is fear driven, where people see a slightly heightened risk that one of the staff or customer's may have recently returned from a risk area, so they make a very low effort decision to simply stay home or go to another restaurant. Hard to say how people would act unless an equivalent situation happens.

With regards to containing the virus, I don't think there are arguments that china is putting massive effort into this. Quarantining 50m+ people, extending holidays, building new hospitals in days, scrambling thousands of medical staff and equipment epicenter, welding people into apartment buildings, dragging infected people out of houses and to quarantine camps via boxed in utes. I don't think our government would have the means or the guts to do this even if it was the best way to reduce overall harm.

"Whether two weeks or two months from now, this flu season type virus will have passed and the joy of Spring will have arrived. Just like every flu season." - I truly hope the writer is correct, however 2009 H1N1 pandemic so heavily quoted lasted from early 2019 to late 2010, the Spanish flu timeline stretched from Jan 1918 to Dec 1920.

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#2416763 12-Feb-2020 16:56

Scott3:

With regards to under-reporting in both 2009 and 2019. One does not make the other acceptable. If I recall rightly more transparency on such issues was promised by china after SAR's. I'm not seeing it.

"China is not trying to hide these hardships" - The arrest of doctors & journalists who have been whistle-blowers implies strongly otherwise.

The US CDC was supposed to / announced that they'd readied a team to travel to China a few days ago, that of course would be subject to the approval of the Chinese government, since then I've heard nothing - there's nothing I could find on the CDC website.

I'm not comfortable with the WHO response, but they are between a rock and a hard place. If they were to be publicly critical of China's response, then they'd lose cooperation which would be bad, if they aren't critical, then they're probably not fulfilling their global governance role which would be bad. I'm not sure how you're supposed to come to a conclusion that it's "not so bad" given China's history (and as it's appearing to be at the moment - their present handling of this).

An article in The NY Times also suggests that China have ignored offers from CDC and also WHO. It includes the following gem:

Experts raised a related concern: China’s scientists are given large rewards for publishing in prestigious journals. That creates an incentive to hold back samples and data until publication. Although the American C.D.C. has in the past sometimes had fraught relations with other countries because it used their samples and published analyses of them without giving credit they felt was due, its first priority was still to issue epidemic warnings if they were needed and then to publish later.

“In an epidemic, you don’t want information held back,” one expert said. “You want transparency.”

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#2416776 12-Feb-2020 17:14

tdgeek:

arcon:

Wow that's great they can build a hospital in 10 days. If only they didn't need it in the first place by not contributing to the outbreak with a massive cover up of arresting doctors and promoting public gatherings when they knew about the virus. Pretty sure we wouldn't do that in New Zealand either.

Does the same apply to the Middle East and Australia who also had outbreaks? I guess not?

Did you read the article on Stuff about a traveller arriving in NZ? Sobering reading. China for all its faults has massed quarantined what it can, yet it seems its a free for all arriving here, free and easy entry it seems. We can do better. Even when that traveller went through the US it was just "have you been to China?"

Ummm... it most certainly didn't apply to other countries. Swing and a miss bro.

We can do better? What are you talking about? China literally doesn't want to block travel, other countries including NZ have. If your post was any more misleading TBH I think a Mod might remove it.

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