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Coronavirus Disease 2019 Situation Summary

cdc.gov

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Re: Coronavirus Disease 2019 Situation Summary

#121

Post by dennisgorelik »

aazaa wrote: post #56

> An important part of CDC’s role during a public health emergency is to develop a test for the pathogen and equip state and local public health labs with testing capacity. Testing for COVID-19 has been an unmitigated failure in the US. Whatever advantage may have accrued from closing travel routes has been fritted away by preventing local authorities from testing. Without testing, there's no way to say anything abou…

I think CDC "failed" testing for Covid-19 intentionally: in order to avoid panic and please Trump administration.

Re: Coronavirus Disease 2019 Situation Summary

#122

Post by dennisgorelik »

dboreham wrote: post #3

>This virus is NOT currently spreading widely in the United States. Curious how this is known given practically zero tests have been done and numerous cases with no contact external to the US have been discovered.

It is Coronavirus pandemic only if you are testing.

If you are not testing - it is just a regular flu.

Re: Coronavirus Disease 2019 Situation Summary

#123

Post by eqdw »

lurquer wrote: post #117

Serious question... In light of the fact that this virus has never been tested for before, how does one know the virus hasn't been part of the popilation for centuries? How do you know your last flue wasn't in fact Covid-19? With some illnesses -- say smallpox -- you can 'count' the number of cases by symptoms alone. But for this, it seems the symptoms in the majority of cases are inonsequwntial... similar to the flu…

According to this very report, 80% of cases are "mild or moderate". This can mean anything from getting the sniffles for a while, to full on pneumonia (but not enough pneumonia to have to go to the hospital).

Yes it is technically correct that the majority of cases are mild. I wouldn't call that "inconsequential", or "similar to the flu". Maybe "Similar to the worst flu you've ever had", although the important distinction (need hospital vs get better on your own) remains the same. But that statement is true in roughly the same way (and with roughly the same probability(+)) as saying "the majority of people who play Russian Roulette win". Yes, I have an 83% chance of living. I still don't want to play that game

----

(+) According to this very study that we are all commenting on right now, ~20% of cases need hospitalization, and a majority of those cases will be fatal without it

Re: Coronavirus Disease 2019 Situation Summary

#124

Post by eqdw »

peterwoerner wrote: post #22
101404 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go for testing. The virus is still present (but not contagious anymore) some time after you recover.

why would s/he pay $3000 to get tested for something s/he already recovered from? https://twitter.com/NickKristof/status/1234140218023989253

Fun fact: a used PCR machine is only $2500. And if the prices on tests kits out of asia are accurate... You could literally test yourself in your own home for that price. And then you could test a thousand of your friends. If you wanted to

Re: Coronavirus Disease 2019 Situation Summary

#125

Post by dennisgorelik »

hurricanetc wrote: post #58
nickjj wrote: post #33

If anyone is curious, it's now officially in NYC. Someone came off a plane from Iran. She was officially tested but since she wasn't dying the hospital sent her home for self-quarantine. Feel free to Google it to read it on whatever site you prefer, but here's a snippet from the Weather channel's site (I saw it when checking the weather today): > A woman in her late 30s contracted the virus while traveling in Iran, G…

First tested and confirmed case in NYC. There have been numerous reports from NYC residents who returned from areas with community spread, got sick, tested negative for the flu, and the CDC wouldn’t test them. I think in a few weeks we’ll find out that Coronavirus has actually been spreading in NYC for 3+ weeks. The CDC is incompetent.

> The CDC is incompetent.

Incompetent in achieving what goal?

Building an accurate Coronavirus map has a questionable value, considering that Coronavirus is quite similar to a regular influensa.

CDC was successful so far in delaying Coronavirus panic. Now the US public will learn that the scary disaster did happen several weeks ago and nobody even noticed.

That cognitive dissonance will cause brief embarrassment, but then the general public will calm down and move on to other worries.

Re: Coronavirus Disease 2019 Situation Summary

#126

Post by sizzle »

aazaa wrote: post #56

> An important part of CDC’s role during a public health emergency is to develop a test for the pathogen and equip state and local public health labs with testing capacity. Testing for COVID-19 has been an unmitigated failure in the US. Whatever advantage may have accrued from closing travel routes has been fritted away by preventing local authorities from testing. Without testing, there's no way to say anything abou…

This is a failure of our politicians who have been slashing funding of said institution. How do you expect them to do their job properly when underfunded?

Re: Coronavirus Disease 2019 Situation Summary

#127

Post by lurquer »

claudeganon wrote: post #120
lurquer wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before you advocate 'surveillance testing', you should provide a link to hard data showing what the false-positive rate is. Not assurances of how accurate it might be... I want a definitive false-positive rate. Until we have that, surveillance testing may be more harmful than beneficial.

That’s insanity. The WHO themselves insisted that aggressive surveillance testing is necessary to formulate an adequate response and it’s what Korea and Singapore are doing right now. There have been no reports of widespread false positives, only false negatives, and even in that case, testing was ramped up because it’s better to catch some than none.

Sigh...

I wrote: "Not assurances of how accurate it might be..."

Yet, that's exactly what you responded with...

Once again, what is the false positive rate?

If you don't know, so be it. But, if its 5% or so (like many similar viral tests), you may wish to give some thought as to what you are going to do with the tens of thousands of healthy 'false positives' your proposed surveillance testing will uncover.

Re: Coronavirus Disease 2019 Situation Summary

#128

Post by lurquer »

eqdw wrote: post #123
lurquer wrote: post #117

Serious question... In light of the fact that this virus has never been tested for before, how does one know the virus hasn't been part of the popilation for centuries? How do you know your last flue wasn't in fact Covid-19? With some illnesses -- say smallpox -- you can 'count' the number of cases by symptoms alone. But for this, it seems the symptoms in the majority of cases are inonsequwntial... similar to the flu…

According to this very report, 80% of cases are "mild or moderate". This can mean anything from getting the sniffles for a while, to full on pneumonia (but not enough pneumonia to have to go to the hospital). Yes it is technically correct that the majority of cases are mild. I wouldn't call that "inconsequential", or "similar to the flu". Maybe "Similar to the worst flu you've ever had", although the important distin…

Thanks for the response.

But, my question remains... what evidence is there that this virus is new as opposed to something that has been in the milieu -- causing pneumonia and deaths in the elderly -- for decades?

Put aside the 'confirmed cases' and the like, and focus on sheer symptoms: is there any statistically significant uptick in the number of seriously ill people in the non-Wuhan populations? (I exclude Wuhan because, frankly, neither I now anyone else knows what the hell is going on there.) I keep hearing of one or two 70- or 80-year olds dying here and there... In the same time-frame thousands in this same cohort have died from, presumably, influenza and any other number of respiratory illnesses.

How do we know that the elderly haven't been getting Covid-19 and dying of it at these rates for decades?

I'm genuinely curious. At this point, the story is being driven by politicians and bureaucracies with incentives to plan for the worst... I don't expect a logical and rational analysis from them. But, I do from HackerNew posters. Surely I'm not the only one looking at these numbers, the dearth of information about the test's false-positive rates, the utterly inconsistent data coming from Wuhan vs. the rest of the world, and scratching my head? Am I?

Re: Coronavirus Disease 2019 Situation Summary

#129

Post by TMWNN »

sizzle wrote: post #126
aazaa wrote: post #56

> An important part of CDC’s role during a public health emergency is to develop a test for the pathogen and equip state and local public health labs with testing capacity. Testing for COVID-19 has been an unmitigated failure in the US. Whatever advantage may have accrued from closing travel routes has been fritted away by preventing local authorities from testing. Without testing, there's no way to say anything abou…

This is a failure of our politicians who have been slashing funding of said institution. How do you expect them to do their job properly when underfunded?

No. The CDC budget was never slashed.

The president proposes budgets, but that's the starting point of negotiations within Congress. Congress has consistently increased the CDC budget. https://apnews.com/d36d6c4de29f4d04beda3db00cb46104

Re: Coronavirus Disease 2019 Situation Summary

#130

Post by thismachine »

lurquer wrote: post #117

Serious question... In light of the fact that this virus has never been tested for before, how does one know the virus hasn't been part of the popilation for centuries? How do you know your last flue wasn't in fact Covid-19? With some illnesses -- say smallpox -- you can 'count' the number of cases by symptoms alone. But for this, it seems the symptoms in the majority of cases are inonsequwntial... similar to the flu…

The entire COVID-19 genome has been sequenced and compared to known viruses.

"Phylogenetic analysis of the complete viral genome (29,903 nucleotides) revealed that the virus was most closely related (89.1% nucleotide similarity) to a group of SARS-like coronaviruses (genus Betacoronavirus, subgenus Sarbecovirus) that had previously been found in bats in China" [0]

"This phylogeny shows evolutionary relationships of HCoV-19 viruses from the ongoing novel coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic. All [148] samples are still closely related with few mutations relative to a common ancestor, suggesting a shared common ancestor some time in Nov-Dec 2019. This indicates an initial human infection in Nov-Dec 2019 followed by sustained human-to-human transmission leading to sampled infections."[1]

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32015508 [1] https://nextstrain.org/ncov

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