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Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

straitstimes.com

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Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#201

Post by torgian »

chvid wrote: post #173
torgian wrote: post #144

My wife is mainland Chinese, and she has been saying that it a worse than what the government is saying. Also, since Li Wenliang died, well, frankly a lot of people are pissed at the CCP. Anyway, I feel like it’ll be an epidemic ( it already is, I believe ) in China, and be much better controlled outside of China. Unfortunately my wife is also stuck in Chongqing; Taiwan is essentially closing up its borders and we do…

I don’t understand what it is that the Chinese authorities are supposedly misreporting? The mortality rate of 2% is consistent with the number of cases and deaths reported by other countries. Is it that there are a large number of undiagnosed cases? That is kind of a given and is probably also the case in other countries. The timespan between first case and until it gets reported to who and quarantines start is less…

Take this with a grain of salt:

My wife, when she went to the hospital to be diagnosed, said that they had a separate room for those that were diagnosed with having the Wuhan virus, and a separate room for those that did not.

She saw several people in that room, and yet over the next few days, only one new case was reported from that hospital.

I don’t know if this is due to unconfirmed or bad diagnosis, but this is just yet another red flag in a country full of red flags.

As for my wife, she only had a respiratory infection and got medicine for it. She’s better now, but now her mother is sick -.-

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#202

Post by dmos62 »

hkt wrote: post #168
eindiran wrote: post #43

> Doctors there were running "naked" as they knew they were set to be infected given the shortage of protective gear. They still worked there nonetheless. That is so rough, especially since some healthcare workers are now among the dead: specifically, I saw that Li Wenliang had died. https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/chinese-doctor-w...

I'm reminded of the people who went into Chernobyl to begin containment. Hard to call them anything but heroes.

> people who went into Chernobyl to begin containment

I'm not an authority on the subject, but I was under the impression that those were soldiers and conscripts and they were ordered to go.

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#203

Post by dredmorbius »

Jommi wrote: post #199
dredmorbius wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chinese authorities at some level -- it's not clear that this was CCP or local Wuhan decisionmakers -- clearly tried to shut down initial reports of the outbreak, as evidenced by Dr. Li Wenliang's detention and citation. As a new disease, with the first cases possibly being acquired as early as late November 2019, it wasn't until mid to late January 2020 that city and national authorities appeared to start taking the…

Thank you so much for this comment. I feel it quite balanced and Lola at the topic from multiple angles. However I would like to inquire why you see Dr.Li's detention as evidence of "shutting down initial reports of the outbreak"? First of all we do not have any kind of real insight on what Dr.Li was actually saying, and what was the severity of his reprimandation. When something is on the lose that has the potential…

Re Dr. Li:

The letter of admonition he received has been posted, see:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang#/media/File%3A李文...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang

I don't speak or read Chinese but can rely on multiple news reports (e.g., BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51403795, SCMP: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3049561/dr-l...) and Wikipedia's inclusion and characterisation as strongly reliable indicators.

The BBC is the UK's national broadcaster. SCMP is owned by the Alibaba group, a major mainland China corporation. Each clearly labels Dr. Li as a whistleblower. SCMP's story includes a highlighted summary "China’s health authorities and the public have offered their condolences over the death of the doctor, whom police tried to silence in the early days of the outbreak".

Both articles focus on Li's acts in breaking the nCoV story -- without really wanting or intending to -- the initial negative response of Wuhan police, and the narrative now, from authorities such as Zeng Guang, chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (reported in the SCMP story) that "that the eight people punished by the police should be held in 'high regard'", again, quoting the SCMP directly.

As for ongoing suppression of discussion adjacent to the nCoV outbreak, messages of support for Li and criticism of the Chinese government continue to be censored:

The top two trending hashtags on the website were "Wuhan government owes Dr Li Wenliang and apology" and "We want freedom of speech".

Both hashtags were quickly censored. When the BBC searched Weibo on Friday morning, hundreds of thousands of comments had already been wiped.

(From the BBC story.)

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#204

Post by hef19898 »

allovernow wrote: post #68
user5994461 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The WHO also announced 5-6 days average incubation with a mortality rate around 3%.

The WHO has been reporting numbers almost identical to those out of China, which are unquestionably and severely underreported and can only represent a distant lower bound. I don't think anything coming from the WHO can be trusted. I honestly think it hugely irresponsible for the WHO to report these numbers without clear disclaimers. In fact, there are clear politics at play here, as the WHO has only come out with ma…

AFAIK the WHO always acknowledges that there is a large number if unreported cases and truly reliable numbers are only available after the fact. They also state that during the outbreak, the longer it takes and the more cases are reported numbers trend towards the true numbers. It is rather improbable that that the death ratio for the unreported cases should be higher than for the reported ones. Unless you believe in conspiracy theories, which I think the HN crowd should be above believing.

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#206

Post by hef19898 »

tristanj wrote: post #157
allovernow wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The WHO has been reporting numbers almost identical to those out of China, which are unquestionably and severely underreported and can only represent a distant lower bound. I don't think anything coming from the WHO can be trusted. I honestly think it hugely irresponsible for the WHO to report these numbers without clear disclaimers. In fact, there are clear politics at play here, as the WHO has only come out with ma…

I believe it goes further than this. WHO and China are both trying to downplay the severity of the pandemic because they know if they publish more accurate estimates, it will cause mass panic. Panic is not helpful in any situation, and leads to an unstable society, hoarding, and destructive behaviors.

And what makes you believe that to be true? Have any WHO numbers been proven wrong in the past for, say, ebola? SARS? Or any other epidemic or disease? Or is it because it is China that a lots of people prefer to not believe them? Because that is how you spread panic if you ask me.

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#207

Post by dmos62 »

torgian wrote: post #201
chvid wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand what it is that the Chinese authorities are supposedly misreporting? The mortality rate of 2% is consistent with the number of cases and deaths reported by other countries. Is it that there are a large number of undiagnosed cases? That is kind of a given and is probably also the case in other countries. The timespan between first case and until it gets reported to who and quarantines start is less…

Take this with a grain of salt: My wife, when she went to the hospital to be diagnosed, said that they had a separate room for those that were diagnosed with having the Wuhan virus, and a separate room for those that did not. She saw several people in that room, and yet over the next few days, only one new case was reported from that hospital. I don’t know if this is due to unconfirmed or bad diagnosis, but this is j…

Good luck to you and yours. My grandparents are worried and they're on the other side of the planet. I can only imagine what the atmosphere is in your region.

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#208

Post by hef19898 »

yread wrote: post #198
forgingahead wrote: post #119

Great article all around, worth reading as it's one of the only I've seen that are actually talking about disease progression and timeline. Some key info from the article: ---- Caixin: Based on your clinical experience, what's the disease progression of the new coronavirus? Peng: Lately I've been spending the daytime seeing patients in the ICU, then doing some research in the evenings. I just wrote a thesis. I drew o…

I find it so strange that even people who should know better say yeah there is 30k cases and 600 deaths so only 2% die. They should look at the clinical progression of the disease, if it takes 2 weeks from hospitalization to death - how many cases where there 2 weeks ago: those were the people that died.

Yeah, and people who know better say anything different than that? Or what exactly don't you like about official WHO numbers based on global data that pretty much alines with Chinese ones?

EDIT: What makes you think highly educated people just doing epidemics didn't have that ideas alrwady and didn't base their numbers on that?

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#209

Post by tomatocracy »

dmos62 wrote: post #202
hkt wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm reminded of the people who went into Chernobyl to begin containment. Hard to call them anything but heroes.

> people who went into Chernobyl to begin containment I'm not an authority on the subject, but I was under the impression that those were soldiers and conscripts and they were ordered to go.

Many were, and many were volunteers (or at least volunteered for that specific duty). I don't think that makes them any less heroic.

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#210

Post by hef19898 »

eloff wrote: post #41
Alex3917 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I submitted this already, but this is worth reading also: https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/puzmZFQGRTiiquwLa6tT-g/confere...

He's the expert, and I'm not. But I can do math. Influenza this year in the US: 19M infected and 10K fatalities. If you posit 1% mortality rate for coronavirus like he argues, that's 20 times more deadly. And it's twice that in China, it's unclear if that's a statistical anomaly or a structural feature of some difference in how things are tested/reported in China. So I'm not going to just shrug and say it's no big de…

So you are programmer and no epidemiologist. I would believe the true experts get their models and math right. And I believe them to have correct data base, plus the experience to read and interpret the data they get from the ground.

The fact that you are already planning to bug out, despite being on a different continent is also a little bit telling.

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