Coronavirus Awareness Thread

[dinosauria101]

0.5? I thought it would be like 5-6%

[creature386]

Well, Germany isn't the whole world. Theropod literally had a whole post dedicated to discussing to how sampling bias and other factors can influence fatality rates. The global fatality rate and the German fatality rate come from different samples and from different conditions.

[theropod]

No, Germany very much isn’t the whole world (and I want to stress that the case fatality of COVID is pretty much the only regard in which that isn’t a good thing). The global fatality rate as of now is about 4.5%, 18 575 fatalities in 415 876 recorded cases. But as I outlined in my previous post, the caveat is that the actual number of cases is likely much higher than those 400 000.

Looking at many countries, particularly in Africa, Southeast Asia and South America, the real number of cases is likely far higher than the official figures have recorded. Even in the US, I would assume there are probably twice as many actual cases as there are officially counted ones. Otherwise the fatality count makes fairly little sense. Granted, terrible healthcare system, but not so terrible that we would expect a fatality rate twice higher, considering so far there are no effective causative treatments that would be expected to make massive differences, and considering the incidence for a given population is actually higher in Germany, which should lead to clinical capacities being filled up more quickly.

In Italy, the case-fatality stands at over 10%, but following figures from other countries, not even that many percent of patients should require hospitalization. There are likely other factors, concerning age-structure and social behaviour, that are or were at play there, and of course the overburdened healthcare system does lead to increased fatalities among those who do require hospitalization, but Italy too probably has many unrecorded milder cases beyond those officially recorded 69 000.

[Life]

Since the forum's membership base span multiple countries, following are additional links of value:

www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html

www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/novel-coronavirus-china

coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

www.health.harvard.edu/blog/be-careful-where-you-get-your-news-about-coronavirus-2020020118801

www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/corona-simulator/

[elosha11]

Here's an article and video indicating the coronavirus is disproportionately causing greater fatalities in men in the U.S. and worldwide, likely due, at least in part, to poorer health decisions such as drinking and smoking far more often and in more excess than women. This may lead to poorer overall health and weakened immune systems. Women may also have a biological superior immune system due to giving birth and hormones associated with that.

Emphasis on the early/rather speculative nature of this data. However, yet another reason for all to carefully monitor and curtail drinking and smoking.

www.cnn.com/2020/03/24/health/coronavirus-gender-mortality-intl/index.html

[theropod]

Might also have to do with more risky behaviour causing more men to actually contract the virus.

[Infinity Blade]

My state currently now has 1,127 cases (at least according to FOX). My particular county has unfortunately reported a second death, an 84 year old man (link->).

Luckily, though, my county has also eased restrictions for testing.

6abc.com/6049167/

[Ceratodromeus]

Before this became a massive thing with a name a few months ago, i had a severe respiratory infection with flu like symptoms which included a fever of 104*F, and i was bed ridden for a couple of days;phyiscally could hardly even move. I never got tested for this thing, as it wasn't being widely tested and reported on as it is now, and i'm not saying i had it....but if it's anything like that, **** that.

[Life]

Mar 26, 2020 9:37:57 GMT 5 Ceratodromeus said:

Before this became a massive thing with a name a few months ago, i had a severe respiratory infection with flu like symptoms which included a fever of 104*F, and i was bed ridden for a couple of days;phyiscally could hardly even move. I never got tested for this thing, as it wasn't being widely tested and reported on as it is now, and i'm not saying i had it....but if it's anything like that, F*** that.

How are you doing now? Fully recovered?

[creature386]

Everyone's favorite psychiatrist and all-around geek Scott Alexander has an article on the coronavirus:
slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/19/coronalinks-3-19-20/
The article is basically a huge repository of links on corona-related debates (such as the herd immunity vs quarantine debate). Some links are… interesting to say the least. ISIS for example told its terrorists not to travel to Europe to avoid getting the coronavirus. Um, yay?

[Ceratodromeus]

Mar 26, 2020 10:31:29 GMT 5 Life said:

Mar 26, 2020 9:37:57 GMT 5 Ceratodromeus said:

Before this became a massive thing with a name a few months ago, i had a severe respiratory infection with flu like symptoms which included a fever of 104*F, and i was bed ridden for a couple of days;phyiscally could hardly even move. I never got tested for this thing, as it wasn't being widely tested and reported on as it is now, and i'm not saying i had it....but if it's anything like that, F*** that.

How are you doing now? Fully recovered?

100%, it took about a week to fully get out of my system; by day 5 i was up and moving around normally, but i had a persistent cough that sounded like death for another 2 or so days

[talira]

I'm in southern Australia and my state is now officially in 'Stage 3' lockdown. We're only allowed to leave our homes to get medical care, to go to work (if you can't work from home), for daily exercise and to go shopping for essential items. Also (thanks to all those idiots who thought it was a great idea to spend time at the beach last week), there's now a 2-person limit on public gatherings. Australia now has over 4,000 COVID-19 cases.

[elosha11]

Mar 30, 2020 5:02:03 GMT 5 talira said:

I'm in southern Australia and my state is now officially in 'Stage 3' lockdown. We're only allowed to leave our homes to get medical care, to go to work (if you can't work from home), for daily exercise and to go shopping for essential items. Also (thanks to all those idiots who thought it was a great idea to spend time at the beach last week), there's now a 2-person limit on public gatherings. Australia now has over 4,000 COVID-19 cases.

Best of luck to you. The lockdowns here in the U.S. are much more piecemeal from state to state. One, among many, reasons why we aren't getting it under control.

[creature386]

Mar 26, 2020 14:27:11 GMT 5 creature386 said:

Everyone's favorite psychiatrist and all-around geek Scott Alexander has an article on the coronavirus:
slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/19/coronalinks-3-19-20/
The article is basically a huge repository of links on corona-related debates (such as the herd immunity vs quarantine debate). Some links are… interesting to say the least. ISIS for example told its terrorists not to travel to Europe to avoid getting the coronavirus. Um, yay?

Here is round two:
slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/27/coronalinks-3-27-20/
Below is a summary of quotes and sections I found especially interesting, helpful or hilarious.

The United States now has more coronavirus cases than any other country, including China, marking a new stage in the epidemic. As before, feel free to treat this as an open thread for all coronavirus-related issues. Everything here is speculative and not intended as medical advice.

[…]

Summary: Asian countries have managed to control the pandemic through mass testing, contact tracing, and travel bans, without economic shutdown. The West lost the chance for a clean win when it bungled its first month of response, but it can still recover its footing. We need a medium-term national shutdown to arrest the spread of the virus until authorities can get their act together – manufacture lots of tests and face masks, create a testing infrastructure, come up with policies for how to respond when people test positive, distribute the face masks to everyone, etc. With a lot of work, we can manage that in a month or so. After that, we can relax the national shutdown, start over with a clean slate, and pursue the Asian-style containment strategy we should have been doing since the beginning.

This is the only plan I’ve heard from anybody that doesn’t result in either hundreds of thousands of deaths, or the economy crashing so hard we’re all reduced to eating weeds and rocks.

[…]

There isn’t a lot you can do to improve your chances if you get coronavirus, but one really important intervention you can take right now is to STOP SMOKING.

I try not to lecture my patients on their health failings. I am not a jerk to obese people or people who don’t get enough exercise. But I try to tell every smoker, at least once, to STOP SMOKING. Studies have shown that having a doctor or other authority figure say this actually helps a lot, and every person who STOPS SMOKING gains 5 – 10 years of life expectancy. There is nothing else you can do as a doctor or a human being that gives you a medium chance of saving ten life-years with a ten second speech. Everything that effective altruism has to offer pales in comparison. So even though I hate lecturing people – on this blog as much as in my medical practice – I suck it up and tell everyone STOP SMOKING.

[…]

Japan should be having a terrible time right now. They were one of the first countries to get coronavirus cases, around the same time as South Korea and Italy. And their response has been somewhere between terrible and nonexistent. A friend living in Japan says that “Japan has the worst coronavirus response in the world (the USA is second worst)”, and gets backup from commenters, including a photo of still-packed rush hour trains. Japan is super-dense and full of old people, so at this point the living should envy the dead.

But actually their case number has barely budged over the past month. It was 200 a month ago. Now it’s 1300. This is the most successful coronavirus containment by any major country’s, much better than even South Korea’s, and it was all done with zero effort.

The obvious conclusion is that Japan just isn’t testing anyone. This turns out to be true – they were hoping that if they made themselves look virus-free, the world would still let them hold the Tokyo Olympics this summer.

But at this point, it should be beyond their ability to cover up. We should be getting the same horrifying stories of overflowing hospitals and convoys of coffins that we hear out of Italy. Japanese cities should be defying the national government’s orders and going into total lockdowns. Since none of this is happening, it looks like Japan really is almost virus-free. The Japan Times is as confused about this as I am.

Some people have gestured at the Japanese being an unusually clean and law-abiding people. Maybe the government has just sort of subtly communicated “don’t do anything that will mess up our Olympics chances” and everyone has been really good at not touching their face. Maybe widespread use of face masks is much much more important than anyone has previously believed. I don’t know.

One way this should affect us Westerners is by making us worried that an Asian-style containment strategy wouldn’t work here. The evidence in favor of such a strategy is that it worked in a bunch of Asian countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. But if there’s something about wealthy orderly mask-wearing Asian societies that makes them mysteriously immune to the pandemic, maybe their containment strategies aren’t really that impressive. Maybe they just needed a little bit of containment to tip them over the edge. I don’t know, things sure seemed bad in South Korea a few weeks ago (and in Wuhan). I am so boggled by this that I don’t know what to think.

Also, what about Iran? The reports sounded basically apocalyptic a few weeks ago. They stubbornly refused to institute any lockdowns or stop kissing their sacred shrines. Now they have fewer cases than Spain, Germany, or the US. A quick look at the data confirms that their doubling time is now 11 days, compared to six days in Italy and four in the US. Again, I have no explanation.

[…]

It took the mainstream media a while to realize the seriousness of the coronavirus. The right wing has its own parallel media system, and I’ve heard accusations that it failed even worse, and for longer. I can’t comment on whether this was true at the time, but it seems to have improved; as of me writing this, fox.com, breitbart.com, nationalreview.com, and townhall.com all have front pages full of the same kind of frantic coronavirus news I would expect to see anywhere else. Reddit’s big pro-Trump subreddit r/The_Donald has a sticky thread of “President Trump’s Coronavirus Guidelines For America – 15 Days To Stop The Spread – READ AND FOLLOW”. Even the front page of Infowars urges readers Don’t Be A Covidiot – their term for someone who ignores the danger of coronavirus and doesn’t practice good social distancing.

[…]

Hall of shame: Bangladesh (where 25,000 people have gathered for a mass prayer rally against the coronavirus – if only the New Atheists were still around to offer opinions on this kind of thing). Mississippi, as usual (see this comment by an MS Redditor). Russia, as usual. Donald Trump is a permanent lifetime member at this point. The FDA is also probably a permanent lifetime member.

[…]

Hall of fame: Service Employees International Union (“found” 40 million face masks and is donating them to local hospitals; what does it even mean to “find” this many masks in this context?), and Amazon (now giving workers double pay for overtime). And Brazilian gangs, in the face of government inaction, declared a unilateral quarantine order in Rio de Janeiro, saying “If the government won’t do the right thing, organized crime will”. I deeply appreciate the commentator who described this as “state capacity anarcho-capitalism”.

[theropod]

Bangladesh (where 25,000 people have gathered for a mass prayer rally against the coronavirus

One never ceases to be amazed at how stupid some people can be.