Coronavirus - Health aspects

[NW-Bound]

On Sunday 2/16, China extended the lock down in Hubei province beyond the cities. All rural communities are now under lock down.

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The government issued a notice on Sunday that stated that the provinces rural communities, which number about 200,000, are to be put on lockdown, with only one guarded entrance, according to the South China Morning Post. Once every three days, a person from each household will be permitted to leave their town to buy supplies. "In principle, every villager should stay at home. If he really needs to step outside, he has to wear a mask and keep a minimum 1.5 meters from other people... All leisure and entertainment venues shall be shut down and all group activities shall be suspended. Weddings should be postponed, and funeral processes minimized ..." ... businesses were to cease operations until they were given an official go-ahead from authorities... all cars—excluding police vehicles, ambulances and those carrying important supplies—would be barred from traveling on the province's roads.

The total number of confirmed cases has reached 70,811 world-wide, with 1,775 deaths, and 11,369 recoveries.

[Gumby]

Quote:

Originally Posted by NW-Bound On Sunday 2/16, China extended the lock down in Hubei province beyond the cities. All rural communities are now under lock down. ... The total number of confirmed cases has reached 70,811 world-wide, with 1,775 deaths, and 11,369 recoveries.

71,811 according to this site https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/a...23467b48e9ecf6

The good news is that the number of newly reported cases per day has gone down and that the ratio of recoveries to deaths continues to climb.

[Alan]

Quote:

Originally Posted by NW-Bound On Sunday 2/16, China extended the lock down in Hubei province beyond the cities. All rural communities are now under lock down.

Talking with our daughter in LA yesterday she passed on an interesting story. She works for an e-sports company whose largest customer base is in China. She is working on an app-based game that is set in the same universe as the big e-sport game which is played on a PC. Like the PC version both the app and the playing of the game is free, income comes from all the extras that the gamers purchase. Chinese gamers have to play in-country because of the firewall preventing folks in China accessing the world-wide-web.

The new app-based game is currently being trialed in Romania and Australia only, and the first thing that happens when the app is downloaded and first opened is to choose your language in which you want to play the game.

Chinese is now the largest chosen language in the trial, and DD's company has concluded that since most gamers in China play the PC based game from internet cafes, and many of those folks are now quarantined at home that they have got around the Chinese internet firewall, connected to the Australian servers and downloaded the game app so they are not totally devoid of their favorite game, playing it from home on their phones and tablets.

[EveryLady]

There are both positive and negative implications to findings in a recent Harvard School of Public Health study that estimates undetected international COVID-19 spread. The negative:

"Using the second component of the Global Health Security index to stratify country likely detection capacities, we found that the ability to detect imported cases among high surveillance countries is 40% (95% HPDI 22% - 67%), among intermediate surveillance countries it is 37% (95% HPDI 18% - 68%), and among low surveillance countries it is 11% (95% HPDI 0% - 42%)."

The implication for the actual disease severity:
"We conclude that estimates of case counts in Wuhan based on assumptions of perfect detection in travelers may be underestimated by several fold, and severity correspondingly overestimated by several fold."

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...707v1.full.pdf

[NW-Bound]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Alan ... Chinese is now the largest chosen language in the trial, and DD's company has concluded that since most gamers in China play the PC based game from internet cafes, and many of those folks are now quarantined at home that they have got around the Chinese internet firewall, connected to the Australian servers and downloaded the game app so they are not totally devoid of their favorite game, playing it from home on their phones and tablets.

While China blocks access to Youtube and Facebook and many other sites, it still allows access to foreigners via VPN. It would not make a difference to the Chinese who do not read a foreign language, however there are more and more younger Chinese who are not insular. They seek information from abroad, instead of listening to the narratives from the CCP.

Once they can get around the firewall with VPN, they will see that there are Chinese contents from abroad, and knowing a foreign language is no longer a necessity. The CCP of course knows this. It will be interesting to see how they can maintain a strong grip on the people, when the latter realize they have been kept from the truth.

[Teacher Terry]

This thread is so big that I cannot remember if I mentioned it but the death rate in China is 10x’s what’s being reported. They can tell by all the sulfur dioxide in the air that the reporter that stated there are 50 crematoriums running 24 hours/day is correct. He has disappeared.

[copyright1997reloaded]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Masquernom Sad part is the wacko appears to be one of our senators? I think they've been working on a vaccine for SARS for years and still don't have one that works? I think it's like searching for the cure for the common cold.

Since you are mentioning a US senator and equating him to a wacko, I hope you are aware that infectious disease escape from labs has been an ongoing problem: https://thebulletin.org/2014/03/thre...g-prophecies/#

Time will tell (maybe) whether Senator Cotton is out to lunch on this. (Or maybe we will never know how it really originated.) I'd just be careful calling people wacko who just might have information that you don't have, especially when dealing with a country that has lied been slow in conveying information in the past (e.g. SARS)

p.s. For reference, here is an older (pre Corona) article in Nature magazine about the lab: https://www.nature.com/news/inside-t...hogens-1.21487

[Masquernom]

Quote:

Originally Posted by copyright1997reloaded Since you are mentioning a US senator and equating him to a wacko, I hope you are aware that infectious disease escape from labs has been an ongoing problem: https://thebulletin.org/2014/03/thre...g-prophecies/# Time will tell (maybe) whether Senator Cotton is out to lunch on this. (Or maybe we will never know how it really originated.) I'd just be careful calling people wacko who just might have information that you don't have, especially when dealing with a country that has lied been slow in conveying information in the past (e.g. SARS) p.s. For reference, here is an older (pre Corona) article in Nature magazine about the lab: https://www.nature.com/news/inside-t...hogens-1.21487

If we're going with conspiracy theories, I'm actually going with the meteorite story posted earlier. Could the coronavirus have been sent by an alien intelligence? Ancient alien researchers say yes!

[EveryLady]

Now that testing of all individuals remaining on the Diamond Princess has begun, 70% of those testing positive are asymptomatic.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...ty-locked-down

The Chinese CDC published an epidemiological analysis today with lots of interesting stats. There's a typo in the first paragraph: it's based on 72314 cases of COVID-19 reported in their infectious disease information system as of February 11, 2020, including 44672 confirmed cases.
https://translate.google.com/transla...ml&prev=search

[Gumby]

When considering the numbers reported every day, it might be helpful to keep this piece from the NYT in mind. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/18/o...a-numbers.html

[REWahoo]

From the BBC:

Coronavirus: Largest study suggests elderly and sick are most at risk

Quote:

Health officials in China have published the first details of more than 44,000 cases of Covid-19, in the biggest study since the outbreak began. Data from the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CCDC) finds that more than 80% of the cases have been mild, with the sick and elderly most at risk.

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It finds that 80.9% of infections are classified as mild, 13.8% as severe and only 4.7% as critical. The number of deaths among those infected, known as the fatality rate, remains low but rises among those over 80 years old.

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The study also identifies which existing illnesses put patients at risk. It puts cardiovascular disease at number one, followed by diabetes, chronic respiratory disease and hypertension.

[MichaelB]

In addition to REWahoo’s post, from the same study

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men are more likely to die (2.8%) than women (1.7%).

[rathgar]

I am constantly hearing how we should be more concerned with the flu than this coronavirus.
However, I awoke to this headline:

The new virus is deadlier than the one that causes the flu. NYT Feb 18

Can someone put this in perspective?


An analysis of 44,672 coronavirus patients in China whose diagnoses were confirmed by laboratory testing has found that 1,023 had died by Feb. 11. That’s a fatality rate of 2.3 percent. Figures released on a daily basis suggest the rate has further increased in recent days.

That is far higher than the mortality rate of the seasonal flu, with which the new coronavirus has sometimes been compared. In the United States, flu fatality rates hover around 0.1 percent.

The new analysis was posted online by researchers at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

[brewer12345]

Quote:

Originally Posted by rathgar I am constantly hearing how we should be more concerned with the flu than this coronavirus. However, I awoke to this headline: The new virus is deadlier than the one that causes the flu. NYT Feb 18 Can someone put this in perspective? An analysis of 44,672 coronavirus patients in China whose diagnoses were confirmed by laboratory testing has found that 1,023 had died by Feb. 11. That’s a fatality rate of 2.3 percent. Figures released on a daily basis suggest the rate has further increased in recent days. That is far higher than the mortality rate of the seasonal flu, with which the new coronavirus has sometimes been compared. In the United States, flu fatality rates hover around 0.1 percent. The new analysis was posted online by researchers at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

It means that if this is as highly contagious as it appears and continues to run across the world, we are armpit deep in the septic tank and sinking.

[sengsational]

It looks like this pandemic will be about 10 times as deadly as the typical flu.


If that death rate graph a few posts back holds, the younger people have a lot less to worry about. They always say the very old and very young should get the annual flu shot, as they are the highest risk.



I saw that over the next two years they expect 60% of the world's population to get exposed. If that's true and 4% of the people over age 65 in North America succumb, that's 2 million people, right here on my continent. Wow. I hope I'm not reading this right.

[REWahoo]

Quote:

Originally Posted by sengsational It looks like this pandemic will be about 10 times as deadly as the typical flu. If that death rate graph a few posts back holds, the younger people have a lot less to worry about. They always say the very old and very young should get the annual flu shot, as they are the highest risk. I saw that over the next two years they expect 60% of the world's population to get exposed. If that's true and 4% of the people over age 65 in North America succumb, that's 2 million people, right here on my continent. Wow. I hope I'm not reading this right.

I'm not quite as pessimistic as these numbers indicate.

Remember that it is early days when it comes to understanding, diagnosing, treating and accurately documenting this disease. The actual number of infections is likely to be far higher than has been documented, which could mean the fatality rate is considerably lower. Plus, there are a number of anti-viral drug trials underway and vaccines in development. This could result in much improved ways to treat or prevent the disease.

[Sunset]

While the actual number of infections is likely to be higher, there are also a number of deaths at home that may simply go uncounted as they were never tested since China has a shortage/limit of test kits.

[NW-Bound]

At this point on Feb 18,

Total confirmed cases: 73,337
Deaths: 1,875
Recoveries: 13,140

The death rate outside of China remains low, compared to that inside Hubei province where Wuhan is.

[Tekward]

Quote:

Originally Posted by rathgar An analysis of 44,672 coronavirus patients in China whose diagnoses were confirmed by laboratory testing has found that 1,023 had died by Feb. 11. That’s a fatality rate of 2.3 percent. Figures released on a daily basis suggest the rate has further increased in recent days. That is far higher than the mortality rate of the seasonal flu, with which the new coronavirus has sometimes been compared. In the United States, flu fatality rates hover around 0.1 percent.

Per NYT piece today it is >20x the fatality rate of the seasonal flu. Even more alarming to this group:
"Thirty percent of those who died were in their 60s, 30 percent were in their 70s and 20 percent were age 80 or older."

[rathgar]

That's a very concerning perspective.