Re: Coronavirus data and events as they come in

[chaotic neutral observer]

Looking at a particular outlier is all well and good, but the bigger picture would seem to be the best indicator of overall effect to me. I see little point in assigning an arbitrary "lapsed" time period on open cases and I'm not sure that it would significantly change anything. The fucker can go on for weeks going sometimes suddenly from mild to deadly symptoms in EXTREMELY unpredictable progression.

Three weeks was pretty arbitrary; it would be better to review cases with positive outcomes, and determine the time interval from when they were diagnosed, to the point when 90% of them had recovered.  (The 90% is arbitrary, too).  (Also, since we're only considering positive outcomes that were reported, we've introduced selection bias.  Oops).

We don't have all the pieces of the big picture.

The USA currently has 1.2M reported active cases.  Let's say that half of those were reported more than two months ago.  How many of them have probably recovered by now?  How would that affect the estimate of the death rate?  What if the number of active cases is significantly underreported?  What about the people who caught the plague and got over it, without being tracked?  You need to count them too.   But you can't.

The numbers you don't know are just as important as the ones you do know.  I'm not being optimistic about the death rate, I'm just being pessimistic about the available information.

[The Johnny]

Today in Mexico:

-165k REPORTED cases
-19.7k deaths

Question: Do we really have 12% mortality case? Cause were not doing in no way at all massive testing.

There has been speculation that we have between 5x up 10x real cases.

5x real cases scenario: 825k cases, 20k deaths = 2% mortality
10x real cases scenario: 1,650k cases, 20k deahts = 1% mortality

Now if you add that Covid deaths sometimes get reported as atypical pneuomonia or whatever, we dont really know what is actually happening.

What's sad is that this is literally the first news of this out of Mexico that I have heard since you had two cases.

Don't worry, we're doing better than most countries... i really don't think one can hide that many Covid deaths in the stats, and im 100% certain that at the least theres 2x as many cases as reported... which means were at 6% mortality or lower, pretty good for the third world 

[Doktor Howl]

Today in Mexico:

-165k REPORTED cases
-19.7k deaths

Question: Do we really have 12% mortality case? Cause were not doing in no way at all massive testing.

There has been speculation that we have between 5x up 10x real cases.

5x real cases scenario: 825k cases, 20k deaths = 2% mortality
10x real cases scenario: 1,650k cases, 20k deahts = 1% mortality

Now if you add that Covid deaths sometimes get reported as atypical pneuomonia or whatever, we dont really know what is actually happening.

What's sad is that this is literally the first news of this out of Mexico that I have heard since you had two cases.

Don't worry, we're doing better than most countries... i really don't think one can hide that many Covid deaths in the stats, and im 100% certain that at the least theres 2x as many cases as reported... which means were at 6% mortality or lower, pretty good for the third world 

We're proper fucked.

[Cain]

As are we.

[Doktor Howl]

As are we.

2 days straight of 35,000+ new cases per day.  Deaths are down, but this bloom of new cases will fix that in a week.

Added onto the fact that Trump has publicly decided that none of this is a thing, and we're not going to react to it anymore.

[Cain]

We've had 159 in total over the last 24 hours, but that's a 200% increase on the death rate from the start of this month.

[The Wizard Joseph]

I literally just went back and forth across Wisconsin. I was the only person wearing a mask that I saw except store employees. Wisconsin is doomed.

[Doktor Howl]

I literally just went back and forth across Wisconsin. I was the only person wearing a mask that I saw except store employees. Wisconsin is doomed.

I was just at the grocery store, there was maybe 200 people there, only two idiots not wearing masks.

In Pima County, that's a $360 fine.

[Cramulus]

as the country slides back into total horseshit, I'm gonna take a mini-vacation next weekend, to what may be the safest part of the entire US: Western New York.

I'm visiting Ithica, which is on Stage IV of reopening. With a relatively low population, and good public adherence to masking and social distancing, the region has now basically reopened without a spike... indoor dining is allowed at 50% capacity. Events with up to 50 people are happening.

[Cain]

I think that's the most galling thing. If people had adhered correctly to the procedures most of the country could be opening up by now. New Zealand and Germany are, for example, with relatively little deaths on their part. Instead the UK and USA have gone at half-measures all the way along, rendering what shutdown we did have effectively worthless because we're going to have to do it again.

[Cramulus]

This vacation is really borne out of my fiance wisely cancelling her trip to see her family in South Carolina.

South Carolina is fucked central. They didn't take it seriously, and now they're getting the spike. They've broken their record for new cases reported something like four times in seven days.

New York announced that travelers coming in to NY from the 13 "hot-spot" states ( Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah and Texas) will need to quarantine themselves for 14 days. While Cuomo has not announced how exactly this will work, he's saying there will be a $2000 fine for breaking quarantine, then a $5000 if you're caught a second time, and up to $10,000 fine if you've "caused harm" (guessing this means if you are deemed responsible for an outbreak).

I think that's great. Over here in NY, we've been in hard lockdown for months. Now it's paying off. I do not want to see that ruined by tourists.

[Cain]

It's going to be, though. I guarantee it. Just like all the idiots here, going to the beaches. I can tell you right now, most of the people on the beaches in the news over here don't come from Bournemouth, for example (because they know the beaches there are crap and would rather go to Weymouth).

[Cain]

So, this is weird:

Spanish virologists have found traces of the novel coronavirus in a sample of Barcelona waste water collected in March 2019, nine months before the COVID-19 disease was identified in China, the University of Barcelona said on Friday.

The discovery of virus genome presence so early in Spain, if confirmed, would imply the disease may have appeared much earlier than the scientific community thought.

The University of Barcelona team, who had been testing waste water since mid-April this year to identify potential new outbreaks, decided to also run tests on older samples.

Note:

The research has been submitted for a peer review.

Dr Joan Ramon Villalbi of the Spanish Society for Public Health and Sanitary Administration told Reuters it was still early to draw definitive conclusions.

"When it's just one result, you always want more data, more studies, more samples to confirm it and rule out a laboratory error or a methodological problem," he said.

There was the potential for a false positive due to the virus' similarities with other respiratory infections.

"But it's definitely interesting, it's suggestive," Villalbi said.

[Juana]

I've heard that people who are asymptomatic might have partial immunity from a similar but less deadly coronavirus and I wonder if that's what's going on there

[altered]

I've heard that people who are asymptomatic might have partial immunity from a similar but less deadly coronavirus and I wonder if that's what's going on there

The way I've heard it is the initial outbreak was of something you could call "SARS-CoV-2a", the "original"/"classic" strain of SARS-nCoV-2, the cause of COVID. This strain was not particularly dangerous, which led to the initially slow response in China.

Then you have a second strain that popped up at some point before the death-toll skyrocketed. Keep in mind this thing was percolating since at least December in Wuhan, and there isn't a concurrent death toll. In fact new cases barely get reported (not just by the government, but by the populace: there's no spike in hospital visits!) until mid January, which we can presume is the arrival of strain 2, "SARS-CoV-2b" so to speak.

There was a graph showing that the foothold in a country that receives COVID infections starts with this first strain, then the second strain pops up and outcompetes it afterwards.

The above is facts I remember reading. Everything below is speculation.

There's an argument to be made that the first strain potentiates the transmission of the second strain, while also providing limited immunity from it. A model of this looks something like people who get strain 1 get immunity to symptoms of both strains, but become able to transmit strain 2. People who acquire strain 2 but not 1 can't transmit it. Presumably acquiring strain 1 after or concurrently with strain 2 provides limited or no resistance at all.

This isn't unheard of, by the way, I just can't remember other cases off the top of my head. I think they're mostly digestive? Howl might actually know more, given his poop plant years.

Initial thought is strain 2 is blood bound and can only escape with bleeding into the lungs and coughing, which strain 1 provides?

Point is, all the fucked up death and blood disease is arguably a strain 2 thing, and the relative lack of transmission from some people and relatively high transmission of apparently less bad disease in initial outbreaks outside of China tends to point to strain 1 being older, less terrible, and possibly potentiating strain 2. The fecal sample from 2019 might carry strain 1, in which case we might be looking at an outbreak with two sources and two patient zeros: the deadly one and the infectious one. Pure speculation, but not unfounded.