Covid-19 discussion and humor thread [Was: CDC says don't touch your face to avoid Covid19...Vets to the rescue!

[OldTimeAFLGuy]

2 hours ago, K-9 said:

So, today the WHO officially declared the CoVID-19 spread as “pandemic.” Is that an “overblown” reaction? Is the media creating fear by reporting that? Is that their goal? Really? Nonsense. 
 

Our biggest vulnerability to this outbreak is the shear amount of cynicism towards those in charge of mitigating its damage and the media responsible for informing us of those efforts. 

 

 

...just speculation, but I think the difference is that even though according to CDC, 641,000 died worldwide last year from the flu with known, yet totally NOT preventative with  vaccines versus no known vaccine on the horizon......yet similar to SARS and MERS as starting points with corona............

Edited March 11, 2020 by OldTimeAFLGuy

[Jauronimo]

5 minutes ago, aristocrat said:

china had over 80k cases and are down to 16k active cases.  we currently have about 1063 active cases with 10 being serious. 

We probably have 5x-20x the number of announced cases as confirmations lag actual contractions and we simply don't have the testing. 

 

One new case in the Houston area today.  The guy went to the Rodeo over the weekend where average attendance per day is 50,000 to 70,000.  Read the article Hapless posted and look at announced cases vs actual cases.

[DrDawkinstein]

8 minutes ago, Jauronimo said:

We probably have 5x-20x the number of announced cases as confirmations lag actual contractions and we simply don't have the testing. 

 

One new case in the Houston area today.  The guy went to the Rodeo over the weekend where average attendance per day is 50,000 to 70,000.  Read the article Hapless posted and look at announced cases vs actual cases.

 

Yep, when they announced "5 cases in Georgia" my first thought was "That means more like 5000" and maybe even a higher multiple of that.

 

I'm fairly certain it has already spread through Atlanta, but there arent any tests available. So hey, the numbers look good!

[Seasons1992]

We're quickly approaching a 2-week period where y'all will be my only physical contact!!! I'm lucky to work from home.

 

I look forward to the thoughtful posts from @Royale with Cheese.

[Hapless Bills Fan]

22 minutes ago, DrDawkinstein said:

 

How many people have been tested tho?

 

Testing is a problem.   S. Korea can now do 15,000 tests/day and has drive-through testing stations.  Here's a couple articles on US testing capacity and numbers:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/were-behind-curve-us-hospitals-confront-challenges-large-scale-coronavirus-testing
https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-cdc-us-facilities-lack-testing-capacity-to-id-cases-2020-3?op=1

 

We have tested <5000 people currently.  We are not currently testing and contact tracing people who show up in hospital with atypical pneumonia but have not traveled or had known contact with someone who has covid19. 

There's an Atlantic article that gives actual testing capacity numbers state by state but I don't care for the overall tone (kinda alarmist) - it's linked in the Sciencemag article.

[aristocrat]

9 minutes ago, Jauronimo said:

We probably have 5x-20x the number of announced cases as confirmations lag actual contractions and we simply don't have the testing. 

 

One new case in the Houston area today.  The guy went to the Rodeo over the weekend where average attendance per day is 50,000 to 70,000.  Read the article Hapless posted and look at announced cases vs actual cases.

 

98 percent of stats are made up by the person bringing them up. 

 

but seriously this is what's being reported. it's very difficult to talk to someone when they just kind of make up numbers and somehow declare victory. what if there are only 2,000 cases?  

[Augie]

7 hours ago, Halloween Land said:

It seems that this virus isn't affecting really young kids ages 0-9? Why is that? 

 

The flip side is the people in the 80+ category where the death rate is very high. I called my 92 year old mother and explained why I wouldn’t be visiting for a while. Best to not take that chance right now, just hang low and see how this goes. 

[DrDawkinstein]

36 minutes ago, Hapless Bills Fan said:

Article about this from WaPo:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/03/10/coronavirus-is-mysteriously-sparing-kids-killing-elderly-understanding-why-may-help-defeat-virus/

 

 

I bet the old folks are missing the days when being told "OK Boomer" was their biggest problem! 

1 minute ago, Hapless Bills Fan said:

 

Testing is a problem.   S. Korea can now do 15,000 tests/day and has drive-through testing stations.  Here's a couple articles on US testing capacity and numbers:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/were-behind-curve-us-hospitals-confront-challenges-large-scale-coronavirus-testing
https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-cdc-us-facilities-lack-testing-capacity-to-id-cases-2020-3?op=1

There's an Atlantic article that gives actual testing capacity numbers state by state but I don't care for the overall tone (kinda alarmist) - it's linked in the Sciencemag article.

 

Yep, that was the point I wanted to raise by asking that question.

 

We have a low number of "confirmed cases", but that's mostly due to the low number of actual tests.

[Jauronimo]

5 minutes ago, aristocrat said:

 

98 percent of stats are made up by the person bringing them up. 

 

but seriously this is what's being reported. it's very difficult to talk to someone when they just kind of make up numbers and somehow declare victory. what if there are only 2,000 cases?  

Its very hard to talk to someone who dismisses the only thing resembling real analysis on the topic as "made up" and suggests a hypothetical based on a number they just pulled out of their own ass. 

 

What if there are only double the number of cases?  Do you feel better about our government only being off by a factor of 100%?   China had 1,000 cases in the early days before they shut down a province until that number turned out to be 70,000.

Edited March 11, 2020 by Jauronimo

[Bubba Gump]

All the SUNY schools are now closed for the rest of the semester, U of R also going to online classes only.

[K-9]

1 hour ago, Jauronimo said:

Blessed are the hand washers for they shall inherit the post-Covid19 earth.

I could have sworn it had something to do with handling dates and unleavened bread. 

[teef]

Just now, Bubba Gump said:

All the SUNY schools are now closed for the rest of the semester, U of R also going to online classes only.

syracuse too.

[Sherlock Holmes]

On 3/8/2020 at 11:02 AM, Hapless Bills Fan said:

This may not be the place to put this, but after the humor above: there is so much bull#### about Covid19 going around that I feel the need to share some actual straight info with my homies here especially since I'm getting requests in PM.  Questions will be answered with references or to the best of my ability***.  Bullcrap Youtube videos starting out "Cathedral of Misogyny" will be shot into space.  Political conspiracy theories, whinging about how "media panic" is the problem and it's really just flu will follow out the airlock.  There's a thread in PPP for that.  Further humor in decent taste is welcome.

 

Its. An. Illness.  It doesn't care about your politics or your religious beliefs.  It will follow well-understood patterns of spread, and can be contained by well-known strategies.

 

There is substantive evidence that "community transmission" of Covid19 is taking place in Washington State, with an initial case of someone who flew back from Wuhan in mid-January before the shutdown of the city. (Trevor Bedford is professor at Fred Hutch virology institute and knows his *****).  Anyone want to bet the rent that if there's community spread in Snohomish, Washington originating from travel mid-December to mid-January, there is not already community spread elsewhere in the country?  I don't.  (Yes, there are caveats here, but do we really want to bet the low probabilities vs an emerging epidemic, or do we want to test and find out?)

 

Why don't we know that there's community transmission underway all over the country?  Until this week, testing was 100% focused on returning travel from known infected places because the "case definition" included these.  Seriously.  If you hadn't traveled but had symptoms, you couldn't be tested (except apparently by a bunch of rogue Fred Hutch researchers who had already collected flu samples, apparently).  Meanwhile, places we once scorned as 2nd rate like Taiwan "get it": "Furthermore, they proactively sought out patients with severe respiratory symptoms based on records in the national health insurance (something which all developed countries can deploy with relative ease, with the notable exception of the US [my note: but we could still do it, just harder])."  Meanwhile, In US, people in hospital with severe respiratory symptoms who tested negative for flu were NOT being tested for Covid19.  Even a nurse who became ill with respiratory symptoms AFTER CARING FOR A KNOWN COVID19 PATIENT in CA struggled to get tested - and this is a critical test, because if a HCP falls ill caring for a patient, it's a Red Alert that the infection control protocol needs revision.  That nurse shoulda been first in line for a test.

The second reason is maths - if one is dealing with a disease where the vast majority of those infected have a mild form easily mistaken for seasonal flu, community spread will easily pass unnoticed until enough people get sick that a cluster of cases with severe illness show up at the hospital in need of treatment AND ARE TESTED.  That can take ~a month and has an element of chance (one of the sick people has a relative in a nursing home and visits regularly vs. the sick person lives in a town of 30,000 college students who might all get sick, but are at low risk to become severely ill). 

Why do we care about containing this disease if 80% of those who contract it have only mild symptoms, another 15% have a severe flu-like illness requiring treatment for weeks, and only 5% become severely ill and require artificial ventilation?  Again, maths: If too many people fall ill at once, it pushes the healthcare system to failure point.  Covid19 infected people who need the highest level of care won't be able to get it because equipment, beds, and skilled HCP will simply not be available.  (This is one reason why the initial fatality rate in Wuhan was so high, 5.8% - they ran out of equipment and beds to care for the most seriously ill).  People who need care for other reasons will not be able to get high-quality care: be sure to schedule your heart attack or your child's meningitis accordingly.

 

Why should we worry about the disease - it seems it's already declining in China and never took off in Taiwan as predicted?  It's declining in China because they got to grips with the problem.  China instituted a very aggressive and effective set of disease control strategies.  From this reddit which is an accurate bullet-point summary of an international WHO team that visited China:

"One of the important reasons for containing the outbreak is that China is interviewing all infected people nationwide about their contact persons and then tests those. There are 1,800 teams in Wuhan to do this, each with at least 5 people. But the effort outside of Wuhan is also big. In Shenzhen, for example, the infected named 2,842 contact persons, all of whom were found, testing is now completed for 2,240, and 2.8% of those had contracted the virus. In Sichuan province, 25,493 contact persons were named, 25,347 (99%) were found, 23,178 have already been examined and 0.9% of them were infected. In the province of Guangdong, 9,939 contacts were named, all found, 7,765 are already examined and 4.8% of them were infected."    Likewise, Taiwan was very proactive in implementing effective disease control strategies in a matter-of-fact way that did not cause public panic.

Bottom line: the disease is genuinely declining in China, but it's not because it's a "paper tiger" just seasonally going away as a threat, it's because China is taking proactive and effective disease control strategies and has tested and implemented the most effective disease treatments nationwide.  The overall death rate in China is now <1%, but that's not because the disease isn't significantly more serious than flu - by reliable accounts, it is - it's because China is now pursuing aggressive disease testing to keep outbreaks within the limits the health care system can treat, and has done a lot of work testing and developing more effective disease treatment protocols that are now implemented nationwide.  China can now produce 1.6 million test kits for the novel coronavirus per week that delivers a result on the same day.  Across the country, anyone who goes to the doctor with a fever is screened for the virus.

 

We can do this.  But we aren't.  You want to keep your Grandma or Gramps or heart disease suffering, immunocompromised friend or loved one alive, call your Congresscritters and Senators and ask why China can produce 1.6 million test kits a day and proactively test everyone with fever to determine the scope of the disease, while we're still worrying about where ya traveled recently and we aren't testing.  Demand that we drive response to this disease with science and proven epidemiology not political appointees. 

 

***ability and disclaimer.  I have a doctorate in biochemistry and spent a decade doing research at a major med school and a decade in pharma R&D including work on vaccines.  I am neither a virologist nor an epidemiologist by training, I believe my training and background enable me to "get" both.  Substantive correction and contribution by trained virologists and infectious disease specialists welcome.

 

So in your opinion bioengineered or mutation? Just curious...

[Hapless Bills Fan]

6 minutes ago, aristocrat said:

98 percent of stats are made up by the person bringing them up. 

 

but seriously this is what's being reported. it's very difficult to talk to someone when they just kind of make up numbers and somehow declare victory. what if there are only 2,000 cases?  

 

If there are only 2000 cases, then We Win the Lottery!!!!!! WHOOO HOO!!!!!

 

I understand the perception of "make up numbers", but seriously, the thing is that disease spread follows pretty well-understood mathematical principles.  If an epidemiologist has some basic information about a disease - for example, a parameter called a "basic reproduction number", which is the number of cases directly generated from a single case when the population is susceptible, mortality and morbidity rates, he or she can do a pretty good job of estimating what's really going on.

 

This is the kind of thing epidemiologists have used to help countries with pretty minimal health infrastructure contain and control Ebola, for example.  In the case of Covid19, we have some pretty good data from China, S. Korea, Italy etc. so we have an R0 and a decent morality rate.    It's not hard data, but it's not "making up numbers and declaring victory" either - it's using known mathematical equations and disease-specific parameters to make very educated predictions.

 

A second line of evidence comes from the intersection of computational biology and virology.  Covid19 is an RNA virus - the genetic material is RNA, not DNA, and it's copied by an enzyme called RNA polymerase.  RNA polymerase is a slob.  It makes mistakes pretty frequently by polymerase standards, "mutations".  So if you find a virus with a mutation, and then another virus with that mutation plus a few more, you can actually track how related they're likely to be and how many passages (patients) they've gone through. 

 

So in the case of Washington, this group of researchers at Fred Hutch in Seattle were collecting samples as part of a flu research project and they said "hey!  let's cook up a Covid test and test all the same samples, just to see what we find!" because us researchers are a blast to have at a party and that's the kind of thing we get up to for shucks and jollies.   And lo, they found positives in folks who had no known contact with a case, or no recent travel, and traced the mutations back to an initial case and said "OK, looks like we've gone through 5 generations here so that would mean using the known Covid19 basic reproduction number we really must have this many cases in the community"

 

Again, it's not hard data, but it's pretty different from just making up *****.

[OldTimeAFLGuy]

...I'm still going to Aruba and using Bourbon as my mother protectorate.......

[Hapless Bills Fan]

16 minutes ago, Sherlock Holmes said:

So in your opinion bioengineered or mutation? Just curious...

 

Natural mutation.  Very good evidence.  You can get all kinds of goops on twitter but Trevor Bedford is a computational virologist at Fred Hutchinson Institute in Seattle and he knows his *****.

 

 

[K-9]

22 minutes ago, Hapless Bills Fan said:

 

Testing is a problem.   S. Korea can now do 15,000 tests/day and has drive-through testing stations.  Here's a couple articles on US testing capacity and numbers:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/were-behind-curve-us-hospitals-confront-challenges-large-scale-coronavirus-testing
https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-cdc-us-facilities-lack-testing-capacity-to-id-cases-2020-3?op=1

 

We have tested <5000 people currently.  We are not currently testing and contact tracing people who show up in hospital with atypical pneumonia but have not traveled or had known contact with someone who has covid19. 

There's an Atlantic article that gives actual testing capacity numbers state by state but I don't care for the overall tone (kinda alarmist) - it's linked in the Sciencemag article.

This is shameful. Also read an article that test kits received are missing components needed for comprehensive testing which is skewing results. 
 

Time for me to check my own cynicism. 

[Hapless Bills Fan]

29 minutes ago, DrDawkinstein said:

I bet the old folks are missing the days when being told "OK Boomer" was their biggest problem! 

 

Indeed

 

Quote

We have a low number of "confirmed cases", but that's mostly due to the low number of actual tests.

 

Correct.  And we are only actively pursuing and testing one arm of possible cases (recent travel or contact with someone known to have the disease).

The other arm would be hospitalized bilateral interstitial pneumonias that test negative for flu and contact tracing those cases as is being done in Taiwan, Singapore, and S. Korea.

 

 

[Hapless Bills Fan]

6 minutes ago, K-9 said:

This is shameful. Also read an article that test kits received are missing components needed for comprehensive testing which is skewing results. 
Time for me to check my own cynicism. 

 

I don't know about kits missing components for comprehensive testing, but there was an error in the first set of kits distributed which caused a delay.

 

What is puzzling to me is why we don't adopt the technology already developed and use-vetted in some other countries - China, Taiwan, S. Korea.

[Jauronimo]

3 minutes ago, Hapless Bills Fan said:

 

I don't know about kits missing components for comprehensive testing, but there was an error in the first set of kits distributed which caused a delay.

 

What is puzzling to me is why we don't adopt the technology already developed and use-vetted in some other countries - China, Taiwan, S. Korea.

Buy American!!