Coronavirus Sars-CoV-2/Covid-19 Megathread

[11B4V]

EXTRA EXTRA

White House takes control of covid stats away from the CDC.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2020/07/14/report-white-house-may-ask-states-to-use-national-guard-for-covid-data-collection/#7badc4ff127a

Alternative facts

[mongers]

I'm fighting a losing battle at work. The military just don't give a shit.

Comms Hansie and get him to para-drop in to attack your boss. 

[mongers]

A friend of mine just died.  Haven't seen him in years, and all the obit says is that he died peacefully at home.

That's sad news.

Raz, when you reach my age it begins to happen often.

[crazy canuck]

First serology report estimates less than 1% of British Columbians have been infected and that the actual number of infections was about 8 times the reported number.  Double edge sword.  We have done well so far, but need to avoid having people bringing it into our province.  Strict quarantine measures for people entering the province is likely to be imposed similar to what is happening in the Maritime provinces.

[jimmy olsen]

https://t.co/MDuGmV6UxM

A Second Coronavirus Death Surge Is Coming
There was always a logical explanation for why cases rose through the end of June while deaths did not.

...

Nationwide, the U.S. deaths per million tally—a hair under 400—is in the top ten globally. But look just at the Northeast's 56 million people, and the death rate is more than double the national average: 1,100 deaths per million.


By contrast, the South and West—where SARS-CoV-2 is burning through the population—are much more populous than the Northeast. If those areas continue to see cases grow, they could see as many deaths per million as the Northeast did but multiplied by a larger number of people. At 1,100 deaths per million, the South and West would see 180,000 more deaths. Even at half the Northeast's number, that's another 69,000 Americans.

....


New York City is and probably will remain the worst-case scenario. New York City has lost 23,353 lives. That's 0.28 percent of the city's population. If, as some antibody-prevalence surveys suggest, 20 percent of New Yorkers were infected, that's an infection-fatality rate of more than 1.3 percent, which exceeds what the CDC or anyone else is planning for. To put it in the same terms discussed here, New York City saw 2,780 deaths per million people. A similar scenario across the South and West would kill over 550,000 more Americans in just a few months, moving the country to 680,000 dead. It is unthinkable, and yet, 130,000 deaths—the current national death toll—was once unthinkable, too.

That's still not the worst-case scenario for a truly uncontained outbreak, in which serious measures are not taken. For months, most public-health officials have argued that the infection-fatality rate—the number of people who die from all infections, detected and undetected, symptomatic and asymptomatic—was somewhere between 0.5 and 1 percent. The CDC's latest estimates in its planning scenarios range from 0.5 to 0.8 percent. Take that lower number and imagine that roughly 40 percent of the country becomes infected. That's 800,000 lives lost.

...

[alfred russel]

https://t.co/MDuGmV6UxM
It is unthinkable, and yet, 130,000 deaths—the current national death toll—was once unthinkable, too.

The Atlantic...once respectable, now ridiculous.

Tim--exactly when were 130k deaths unthinkable? On the first page of this thread back in January you referenced the death ratio and how it would be bad if it went on to infect hundreds of millions like the spanish flu. The potential for disaster is why outbreaks like ebola and swine flu have always been big stories.

[Sheilbh]

https://t.co/MDuGmV6UxM
It is unthinkable, and yet, 130,000 deaths—the current national death toll—was once unthinkable, too.

The Atlantic...once respectable, now ridiculous.

Tim--exactly when were 130k deaths unthinkable? On the first page of this thread back in January you referenced the death ratio and how it would be bad if it went on to infect hundreds of millions like the spanish flu. The potential for disaster is why outbreaks like ebola and swine flu have always been big stories.

I mean what's ridiculous? The point is "There was always a logical, simple explanation for why cases and hospitalizations rose through the end of June while deaths did not: It takes a while for people to die of COVID-19 and for those deaths to be reported to authorities." I mean that's right, isn't it? Hasn't it always been likely that the reason deaths weren't trending is because they're a lagging indicator that would follow rather than that there was something unique about these new infections?

It was unthinkable back then though. Yes, there's always the possibility that any infection becomes a new Spanish flu but I think generally we have limited imaginations and even if we've watched contagion we think we'll do better than literal disaster movies.

You know, but if you'd been told that a new illness would emerge in China at the back-end of a year and by the middle of the next year most of the global economy would have been switched off, people would be staying at home and there'd be over 100,000 dead Americans - that is imaginable, I suppose, but I don't think anyone's imagination would have gone there first. We'd expect it was caught, we'd expect it was contained all of that stuff. There was nothing inevitable about this - six months ago we all had zero cases, zero deaths the difference since then reflect some fundamentals (how connected is your region to global travel) and a lot of choices/decisions.

I mean I remember seeing what was happening in China and not being able to imagine that happening here. Not necessarily because the disease wouldn't get here (though I thought it would be contained) but because I just didn't think a non-authoritarian regime could respond like that. I didn't think it would work even if they tried. Similarly I don't think I ever would have expected excess deaths of around 65,000 people in the UK in March or February. To be honest I think it was only when this hit Italy and Iran really badly that I got an actual sense of how bad it could be in real terms. Until then it was kind of theoretical.

[Monoriu]

You know, but if you'd been told that a new illness would emerge in China at the back-end of a year and by the middle of the next year most of the global economy would have been switched off, people would be staying at home and there'd be over 100,000 dead Americans - that is imaginable, I suppose, but I don't think anyone's imagination would have gone there first. We'd expect it was caught, we'd expect it was contained all of that stuff. There was nothing inevitable about this - six months ago we all had zero cases, zero deaths the difference since then reflect some fundamentals (how connected is your region to global travel) and a lot of choices/decisions.

I mean I remember seeing what was happening in China and not being able to imagine that happening here. Not necessarily because the disease wouldn't get here (though I thought it would be contained) but because I just didn't think a non-authoritarian regime could respond like that. I didn't think it would work even if they tried. Similarly I don't think I ever would have expected excess deaths of around 65,000 people in the UK in March or February. To be honest I think it was only when this hit Italy and Iran really badly that I got an actual sense of how bad it could be in real terms. Until then it was kind of theoretical.

I don't know.  Maybe it is because we experienced SARS in 2003, and quite a number of experts had warned since then that this could happen.  I never threw away the boxes of facial masks that I bought back then, and I did use them earlier this year.  In January 2020, when the disease first hit HK, my first instincts were to buy masks and put them on.  I expected that politicians worldwide would stop this from happening, but there was ample warning in the years between 2003 and 2019 that this could happen.  So I was only half surprised. 

[alfred russel]

You know, but if you'd been told that a new illness would emerge in China at the back-end of a year and by the middle of the next year most of the global economy would have been switched off, people would be staying at home and there'd be over 100,000 dead Americans - that is imaginable, I suppose, but I don't think anyone's imagination would have gone there first.

I guess everyone's mind works a bit differently, but it is the first place my imagination goes! A few weeks ago I see a story that there is increased seismic activity in Yellowstone, and my first thought is, "I wonder if this is the end of life as we know it, and the end of most life in North America?" and move on without reading the article.

If the supervolcano erupts, and in the 30 minutes before I'm engulfed in the atmospheric firestorm I see an article in the Atlantic saying, "no one could have seen this coming, it was unthinkable" I'm going to be annoyed..."they made movies about this, geologists have been studying yellowstone to assess the risk, there have been clickbait stories for years...of course people saw it coming!"

[Sheilbh]

I guess everyone's mind works a bit differently, but it is the first place my imagination goes! A few weeks ago I see a story that there is increased seismic activity in Yellowstone, and my first thought is, "I wonder if this is the end of life as we know it, and the end of most life in North America?" and move on without reading the article.

If the supervolcano erupts, and in the 30 minutes before I'm engulfed in the atmospheric firestorm I see an article in the Atlantic saying, "no one could have seen this coming, it was unthinkable" I'm going to be annoyed..."they made movies about this, geologists have been studying yellowstone to assess the risk, there have been clickbait stories for years...of course people saw it coming!"

Yeah - and I suppose a pandemic is inevitable, same with antibiotics resistance (which I find myself panicking about after these last few months). But I suppose my expectation is we will generally be able to contain it because that is the European experience of SARS, MERS, avian flu etc. This isn't quite like antibiotics resistance or a supervolcano because if that happens the impact is inevitable, with this there are lots of things that have to go wrong between new virus emerges in China and 100,000 dead Americans. I didn't imagine all of those things going wrong.

I think the different experience in Asia of those earlier epidemics is part of the reason they responded more effectively. I think this will change us and maybe make us more effective at containing the next epidemic.

[celedhring]

The Aragonese regional government has decided to put down 90,000 minks from a fur farm after samples from 90 animals returned a 90% positive rate of Covid. The farm had been shut down when several workers tested positive back in May. At the time the local authorities already tested a few animals and none tested positive, but kept the farm under watch. The transmission of the virus amongst the minks seems to have been explosive.

There's no evidence of the animals passing the illness to humans.

[merithyn]

There's no evidence of the animals passing the illness to humans.

Then why are they killing the minks???

[celedhring]

They say it's precaution, because there's no evidence on the contrary either. 80,000 infected minks isn't something you can really ignore...

Fur farms are evil.

[The Larch]

They say it's precaution, because there's no evidence on the contrary either. 80,000 infected minks isn't something you can really ignore...

Fur farms are evil.

I believe there have been cases already of minks passing the disease to people. In the Netherlands, where this was first recorded, around one million minks have been put down already, and more than 20 fur farms have been affected.

[Sheilbh]

On economics of lockdown - this is incredible: