2019 Novel Coronavirus Covid-19 Discussion

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Mad Scientist
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#2451847 31-Mar-2020 21:08

DarthKermit:

On the subject of masks, where can we buy them? Practically the only businesses still open are petrol stations, supermarkets and dairys. I got some sanding masks around here somewhere. Maybe I'll chuck one of those goddamned things on.

dicksmith but not sure if they have run out or how shipping works in the current climate

dejadeadnz

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#2451849 31-Mar-2020 21:16

My wife just told me that some major dropkick of a patient this morning refused to be treated by a Chinese doctor and another ethnic minority nurse "because they might have COVID-19". She promptly told him that he was free to refuse treatment but cannot dictate the ethnicity of staff providing treatment.

What a dick. We don't need people like this and those who are abusing and spitting on supermarket workers.

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#2451850 31-Mar-2020 21:16

Regarding masks, the continued recommendations by the WHO, US CDC, & NZ Ministry of health, against the general wearing of masks seems to fly in the face of scientific evidence. In short, even

I feel that there is likely to me a massive scandal around both the WHO & CDC's handling of covid-19 in 6 months or so.

The NZ approach with heavy physical distancing seems likely to be sufficient even without wide spread mask usage.

I quite like this wired piece:

https://www.wired.com/story/its-time-to-face-facts-america-masks-work/

"US surgeon general Jerome Adams, and the World Health Organization have urged people not to buy masks, paradoxically claiming that masks are both essential for the safety of health care workers and incapable of protecting the public from Covid-19."

neb

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#2451851 31-Mar-2020 21:17

mattwnz:
My understanding is that everyone entering Oz country is now being quarantined https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/30/treated-worse-than-criminals-australian-arrivals-put-into-quarantine-lament-conditions , so not just those who don't have self isolation plans, or are showing symptoms.

That sounds even worse than a prison, they get better meals there and are allowed out to exercise. The bottom half of the "meal" shown in that photo looks like something our cat horked up.

"Paula’s dietary requirements" are also concerning, if she has an autoimmune disorder like coeliac or a serious allergy then a lot of the stuff they'd send up could help kill her, or will at least make her seriously ill.

Hopefully this is just a glitch due to overstretched resources and it'll get better over time. Sounds like other hotels are handling it much, much better.

Edited to add: One way to pass the time if you're imprisoned in the Sydney Intercontinental Supermax would be to start posting reviews and photos to travel web sites :-).

Edited a second time: Looks like it's already started.

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#2451855 31-Mar-2020 21:23

I've been at work over the last few days, so it's been hard to keep up with this fast moving thread. Work's been a bit interesting to put it very mildly. Because of work I'm going back a little bit in time here, but felt the need to address a few things.

freitasm: What's wrong with people? "Three police officers in self-isolation after being spat on"

This type of behaviour is actually quite a regular occurrence. A lot more than you would believe. You just don't usually hear about it. Offenders more often than not get a discharge without conviction as it's been quite easy for them to argue that the effects of a conviction far outweigh the gravity of the offence. Courts, generally speaking, are quite sympathetic to the view that Police should expect to be assaulted as part of their job.

tdgeek: and the new risk of supermarkets open on Easter Sunday, dumbest idea ever.

What difference does this actually make, with supermarkets being open the day before and the day after..? A few pages later you go on to say 'give the employees a break' - how about you giving us a break? You do realise it's not the same people working day-after-day don't you? They work shift patterns on set rosters just like many other industries. They ARE getting a break - in fact with reduced hours and restricted entry (which is exactly why supermarkets should be open every day) many of them are probably getting more of a break than they would like.

* * * * *

Harking back to the constant questions which were previously cropping up "can I do this?", "can I do that?", "what about..?" and so forth - well done Mauricio for putting a stop to this. Today I helped out an ambulance crew with one such person who wasn't interested in the 'stay the f*** at home' concept. He was a reasonable distance into his bike ride (with a still very long way to go) and suddenly had to stop because he was having a heart attack. How long he'd been lying down before he was discovered in a lay-by on a coastal road is a complete unknown. Took the ambo a while to get there too, and as you all should know, time is critical for heart attack patients.

No one expects such things to happen to them, but they do. Some people need to grow a few brain cells, and start trying to utilise the rare phenomena known as common sense. Let's try and bring it back from the edge of extinction!

* * * * *

Herd immunity - I thought this was nonsense? We haven't developed such a thing to other corona viruses, such as the ones which give you the common cold. Perfectly happy to be wrong on this, but if not can we put it to bed once and for all? Even if elected officials still keep talking about it. They should be pulled up on it but not here, they don't read these forums.

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#2451863 31-Mar-2020 21:52

neb:
MileHighKiwi: Re the death rate, worldometer.com shows, as of right now, a stat of 203,731 'closed' cases. That number is comprised of 165,892 recoveries (81%) and 37,839 deaths (19%).

Is 19% the death rate, or do you count deaths by total cases, which sits at 4.8% or thereabouts.

What is the correct way to measure it?

Interpreting that is very complex because we don't have anywhere near 100% test coverage and even for the tests we have they're not 100% accurate. So the best you can do, and this is huge simplification, is to think of the deaths as approximately accurate but the recovered figure as a (very) lower bound. This makes the actual death rate a lot lower.

As for "what is the correct way to measure", that's such a complex topic that it's probably not worth thinking about, just go with the official rates which have (usually) been created by expert statisticians using decent-enough models.

Further most countries just aren't testing comprehensively enough. They miss most of the asymtomatic/mild cases. Which is a bulk of the cases.

The diamond princess (which is still ongoing) has 11 deaths of 712 patients. This is a 1.5% death rate. However what needs to be taken into consideration here is the age demographics of the ship. It is much older than society as a whole therefore this death rate is high.

Germany which has comprehensive contact tracing/testing is at a death rate about 1%. This will probably drift higher, but they even admit they are probably missing a lot of cases. It is hard to know how many.

Iceland has undergone the highest per capita testing of any country. They literally started randomly testing a percent of their population They have found that 50% of cases are asymtomatic. They have a death rate of .2%. This will tend higher as more cases are resolved probably the death rate will be .5%-1%.

All In all. The 19% death rate is incorrect. The death rate for countries that don't have their health system flooded is probably about .8%.

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#2451864 31-Mar-2020 21:55

neb:

Edited to add: One way to pass the time if you're imprisoned in the Sydney Intercontinental Supermax would be to start posting reviews and photos to travel web sites :-). Edited a second time: Looks like it's already started.

That is unfortunate for them

It actually doesn't look that bad compared to boarding school decades ago.

Batman

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#2451867 31-Mar-2020 22:04

Dratsab:

Herd immunity - I thought this was nonsense? We haven't developed such a thing to other corona viruses, such as the ones which give you the common cold. Perfectly happy to be wrong on this, but if not can we put it to bed once and for all? Even if elected officials still keep talking about it. They should be pulled up on it but not here, they don't read these forums.

People have a very simplistic view of the world. It's either a yes or a no. But in life there is rarely black and white. Especially something as complex as the human body. You can have partial immunity. What it does to Covid outbreak mechanics is probably very complex.

"This means that any partial, pre-existing immunity to the infecting agent can reduce the number of expected secondary cases arising."

Somewhere in the 5th line after "table 1". You can also google partial immunity to find out more.

https://www.journalofinfection.com/article/S0163-4453(20)30154-7/fulltext

dejadeadnz

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#2451879 31-Mar-2020 22:35

One new infection cluster linked to an Air Force rugby team's visit to the US

9 people apparently infected as a result of a seeming recent visit by the team to the US. This is just unbelievably stupid and people in the armed forces, who often have roles to play in emergency management, ought to know better. If there had been taxpayers' money expended on this very ill advised trip, that's even worse. The role of senior management/command in sanctioning this trip (or not) should be investigated.

itxtme

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#2451882 31-Mar-2020 23:21

Scott3:

Regarding masks, the continued recommendations by the WHO, US CDC, & NZ Ministry of health, against the general wearing of masks seems to fly in the face of scientific evidence. In short, even

I feel that there is likely to me a massive scandal around both the WHO & CDC's handling of covid-19 in 6 months or so.

The NZ approach with heavy physical distancing seems likely to be sufficient even without wide spread mask usage.

I quite like this wired piece:

https://www.wired.com/story/its-time-to-face-facts-america-masks-work/

"US surgeon general Jerome Adams, and the World Health Organization have urged people not to buy masks, paradoxically claiming that masks are both essential for the safety of health care workers and incapable of protecting the public from Covid-19."

Masks are essential for health working in close quarters. What makes masks useless to average Joe is that they touch their face. As soon as you touch your face you have potentially put virus on it. In the medical arena that mask gets thrown away. Average Joe takes it off, puts it in their pocket and then pulls it out and uses it again and then uses it a second, third, fourth time. There is training involved in donning and removing PPE, average Joe missed out on that.

Where that is of less concern is when infected people use them. Yes the outside of the mask is infectious, but it is keeping the infectious portion close to that person as opposed to droplets being sprayed around

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#2451884 31-Mar-2020 23:22

Residents in Wuhan are claiming a Death toll of 47,000 for the city. (official number 2,535).

Basis appears to be the number of urns that have been distributed to family members.

http://shanghaiist.com/2020/03/27/urns-in-wuhan-far-exceed-death-toll-raising-more-questions-about-chinas-tally/

https://www.inquisitr.com/5970405/wuhan-death-toll-47000/

Also, the lighting on the Empire State Building in New York is comically dystopian.

https://www.today.com/news/striking-video-shows-empire-state-building-spinning-siren-red-light-t177156

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neb

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#2451890 31-Mar-2020 23:57

Scott3:
Residents in Wuhan are claiming a Death toll of 47,000 for the city. (official number 2,535).

Basis appears to be the number of urns that have been distributed to family members.

And you know it's true because of all the pollution that's started to reappear over Chinese cities, coming from the secret crematoria the government is running.

This is really just wild speculation, there could be any number of reasons for distributing large numbers of urns. One that comes immediately to mind is that the government were preparing for many more deaths than they actually got and now need to clear excess inventory. Or the minimum order at the factory was 50K units and the same thing with inventory.

I realise the Chinese figures are probably cooked, but using this as the basis for deaths is about as useful as reading tea leaves for it. In particular, given that this is China, someone got paid, possibly very well, to produce 50K urns, and what people could be seeing now is an attempt to show that the money wasn't wasted.

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#2451891 31-Mar-2020 23:58

dogstar001: ... Germany which has comprehensive contact tracing/testing is at a death rate about 1%. This will probably drift higher, but they even admit they are probably missing a lot of cases. It is hard to know how many.

Iceland has undergone the highest per capita testing of any country. They literally started randomly testing a percent of their population They have found that 50% of cases are asymtomatic. They have a death rate of .2%. This will tend higher as more cases are resolved probably the death rate will be .5%-1%. ...

CFR (deaths/cases 7 days prior) has already increased to 2% in Germany. If confirmed cases are only 50% of total cases per the Iceland data, that would make the IFR (infection fatality rate) around 1%. Other data points to ~30% asymptomatic (eg. https://www.dw.com/en/up-to-30-of-coronavirus-cases-asymptomatic/a-52900988), giving an IFR of ~1.4%. But Germany is still in near exponential growth phase so it is still early days. A week ago their CFR was 1.6% and the number of cases has more than doubled in the week since. I posted stats in another thread (#2451889) showing a large disparity between the age distribution of cases in Germany and Italy back on the 24th of March. Possibly proportionately more older people have been affected in the last week.

CFR for South Korea has now risen to 1.8% and since they are now well beyond the initial high exponential growth phase (comparatively small numbers of new cases), it may rise a bit more (some current critical patients). Not that different from Germany and at least a week or so ago, Germany had carried out fewer tests per capita than SK?

Because of age dependence and other factors, crude CFR (or IFR) per country is not particularly useful though, other than in a general sense. In South Korea an atypically high proportion of cases were younger females (presumably demographics of the religious sect cluster), so their IFR would be expected to be lower than in many other countries. IFR will also depend very much on whether the health system is overwhelmed as in Italy and Spain, and early days in Wuhan (& probably soon some parts of the US?).

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#2451892 1-Apr-2020 00:01

DS248:
CFR (deaths/cases 7 days prior) has already increased to 2% in Germany.

Any chance of posting your incredibly useful graph again? That was really good for seeing trends, I haven't seen anything similar elsewhere.

DS248

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#2451893 1-Apr-2020 00:34

I started a new thread for data, analysis, etc and have posted updates there. https://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=161&topicid=268639

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