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Is It a Pandemic Yet?

nytimes.com

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Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#71

Post by svl »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #50
rimliu wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our media is referring to "patient zero" in Italy as a 38 years-old man. So either he is known or our media is full of your-know-that. Which would not be surprising. Edit: a commenter below correctly pointed out that that 38yo man is being referred to as "patient one" not "patient zero". My bad.

Things are developing very fast, expect that distortions from the chinese wispers games that is modern media to be worse than ever. I've seen report that the first case was in contact with a person that had been in China but showed not symptoms and even might have tested negative at some point. If they get re-tested and show positive now, or some of their possessions do, that solves the mystery.

Dutch media reported yesterday that this person (who had been in China and had dinner with the 38 year old "patient 1") still tested negative on a second test, so the search for the real patient zero continued.

Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#72

Post by nicolapede »

wonderwonder wrote: post #39
danmaz74 wrote: post #8

I read a lot about this virus lately, and it looks like the mortality rate depends a lot on the availability of intensive care. If that's the case, slowing down the diffusion of the infection could be really important in keeping down the total number of deaths.

I noticed the same thing. As numbers continue to grow, we run the real risk of even top of the line health care systems being overwhelmed and people passing from lack of access to care. Couple numbers that jump out for me are China with ~3% mortality rate but also rumors of these numbers being vastly unreported. Iran with a 19% mortality rate (on a small scale)! Also the mortality rate appears to be 3.2% where for a…

Given that it can take N weeks to die, wouldn't it make sense to calculate the mortality rate at a given time t as the number of deaths at time t divided by the number of reported infected people at time t-Nweeks ? (I am using N =3 for my back-of-the-envelope calculations).

Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#73

Post by cletus »

So Italy having an arguably uncontained cluster is probably the most troubling part. The EU has extremely porous borders. The chances of this spreading to the other EU members (and the UK) got a lot higher.

At least in the US you largely have to come in by air. Yes of course there are land borders. Canada is one but fits the same description of most cross-border travel (apart from to the US) is by air. The border with Mexico is... probably more of an issue.

Anyway, the benefit of this is that it gives you a central screening point. Given that carriers can be asymptomatic it's not impossible someone will slip through but it's more difficult for someone to convince themselves they just have a cold and they need to go home, to work or otherwise move across a border and spread the infection.

The Northern hemisphere summer really can't come soon enough.

Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#74

Post by Blahah »

ropiwqefjnpoa wrote: post #16
Swizec wrote: post #12

We were looking into Covid-19 at the office and after digging through the scariness we realized mortality rate for healthy 30-somethings is around 0.1%. Then we said screw it and stopped worrying. We’re most likely gonna be fine. Even if it becomes widespread the odds are ever in our favor. Plus there’s already a few confirmed cases in SFBA so ... Edit: for the downvoters, I’m not say spread disease with wonton aband…

Yeah, I stopped worrying a few weeks back after I saw the mortality rate. It's basically a highly virulent flu with the same risk factors. Not on the same level as sars and the like.

That's a pretty cavalier attitude even if we take your assumptions to be true.

If it's a virulent flu, the last time we had a pandemic with comparable stats was 1918, when we had much less global travel but much worse medical infrastructure. The 1918 Spanish flu infected potentially 1/4 of the world (500 million people at the time) and killed around 2% (variable depending on sources) of the global population - ~40 million.

It's on a different level than SARS/MARS, because this seems to incubate without symptoms in the young and healthy (for now) and then kill when it breaks out in populations of the old and sick. It's spreading faster and being reported differently than anything before.

Some basic advice that everyone should apply during every global outbreak they don't really understand:

- don't travel if you don't absolutely have to

- don't go to hospital unless you absolutely have to

- try to stop touching your face

- wash your hands and face frequently

It's a pandemic, definitely (source - me, I'm working on coronavirus). Don't panic but don't be complacent. Just look after yourself and your family and avoid exposure to potentially high risk.

Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#75

Post by yulaow »

nickjj wrote: post #47
James_Henry wrote: post #20

> And what should each of us do, beyond staying informed and washing our hands frequently? Keep calm and rational. It might be worth stocking some reserve of critical medications, for example — but not too much, because hoarding could create shortages. > We, as individuals, can also try to plan for basic contingencies. Companies can cross-train key staff members so that one person’s absence won’t derail the business.…

> if needed, quarantine yourself and take care of yourself and your family/relations well How would that work in practice? The last I heard you can catch this virus pretty easily just by having air touch your eye. A lot of people live in either a city or a suburban area and most apartments and houses aren't air tight. Wouldn't your breath get circulated out of your apartment, mixed in with the outside air and drift o…

The virus is not airborne, it propagates via aerosol so it is very short lived "in the air" and over surfaces.

Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#76

Post by ducttape12 »

Can someone explain to me why coronavirus is getting so much coverage? According to Wikipedia, Coronavirus has killed about 2000 people. Each year smoking kills 480,000 people in the US. In two days smoking will have killed more people in the US than coronavirus has worldwide.

Shouldn't we have headlines about this every day? Or any of the other far more deadly things (traffic accidents, heart disease, suicide, etc.)?

(I'm not trolling, I honestly don't understand why this is different.)

Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#77

Post by pstadler »

A couple of excellent sources for COVID19:

https://bnonews.com/index.php/2020/02/the-latest-coronavirus... (most up-to-date counter and news aggregator which includes a source for each reported number)

https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/ (strictly moderated, lots of links to scientific reports and papers, no hoaxes and fake news)

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Z7VQ5xlf3BaTx_LBBbls... (spreadsheets with interesting charts)

Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#78

Post by ddtaylor »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #45
i_am_nomad wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might be what the other 1.5 million people in my city are counting on. Which means, I’m not going to count on that.

If your city's supermarkets can feed people with in-person shopping, they can feed people with deliveries as easily, it's the same number of people buying food.

With an extra layer of logistics that will have failed because the delivery drivers or pickers are sick.

Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#79

Post by gbrown »

nickjj wrote: post #47
James_Henry wrote: post #20

> And what should each of us do, beyond staying informed and washing our hands frequently? Keep calm and rational. It might be worth stocking some reserve of critical medications, for example — but not too much, because hoarding could create shortages. > We, as individuals, can also try to plan for basic contingencies. Companies can cross-train key staff members so that one person’s absence won’t derail the business.…

> if needed, quarantine yourself and take care of yourself and your family/relations well How would that work in practice? The last I heard you can catch this virus pretty easily just by having air touch your eye. A lot of people live in either a city or a suburban area and most apartments and houses aren't air tight. Wouldn't your breath get circulated out of your apartment, mixed in with the outside air and drift o…

> A lot of people live in either a city or a suburban area and most apartments and houses aren't air tight. Wouldn't your breath get circulated out of your apartment, mixed in with the outside air and drift over to your neighbor -- or is the virus not that susceptible to spreading?

Not an expert, but if I understand correctly the virus would be unlikely to survive that long outside the body. Even in the cruise ship which was docked in Japan, which would be a bit of a "worst-case" scenario for the transmission you describe, most people didn't get sick.

Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#80

Post by daxorid »

asiachick wrote: post #56
danmaz74 wrote: post #8

I read a lot about this virus lately, and it looks like the mortality rate depends a lot on the availability of intensive care. If that's the case, slowing down the diffusion of the infection could be really important in keeping down the total number of deaths.

Dumb question but what intensive care? Do people need to be on respirators? Need access to drugs only available at ICU? Just curious if any of the things done at an ICU to prevent death really need to be only at the ICU.

Yes, mechanical ventilators and in most cases, supplemental oxygen for roughly 18% of patients.

We can expect CFR in the US to be fairly low (approx 2%) as long as the availability of these resources permits treatment for all who need it. After saturation, however, the CFR will move asymptotically toward approx 15%.

Medical system saturation is believed to be the main reason the CFR in Hubei is much worse than other provinces.

The US has about 62k mechanical ventilators, about half of which are already occupied at any given time, and half of the available ones are purpose-built for infants in NICUs. So let's assume we begin to have a real problem above (62k/4)/0.18 == 86k simultaneous US cases.

I'd assume oxygen supplies should be easy to scale up. No idea about scaling up the manufacture of ventilators, or if the (much more numerous, and cheaper) CPAP machines in the US could be used as stand-ins. Perhaps someone more familiar with these devices can chime in.

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