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The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

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Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes - absolute criminal negligence in the US and UK. Possibly Australia too. The problem isn't just that a lot of people will die because the health system is swamped. That's hardly good news, but when you have a high peak you have a lot of people ill at the same time. And that means you run the risk of losing a significant percentage of critical workers in essential services including food, utilities, logistics, and…

Original poster. I'm from the UK. Looking at the curves only and leaving out politics completely, the UK curve is by far the slowest growing of the 3, for whatever reason. It's the US that has the most to fear at this point, of the 3 countries.

The UK stopped testing anyone unless they were admitted to hospital for suspected coronavirus.

Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#42

Corona is killing a negligible % of the population, mostly very old and very sick people (checkout the official data from the Italian health ministary - average age of dead patiences is 79.5 years, all of them with severe background illness, in a part of the country where 29% of the population is at least 60 yeard old. Those are the facts.). If anyting, what we are experiencing is not a corona pandemic but a massive,…

That’s true only when hospitals are functioning. Corona spread saturates hospitals and then mortality goes up to near 10%, from the virus itself as well as other unrelated causes which get no ICU treatment.

>Corona spread saturates hospitals and then mortality goes up to near 10%

Some evidence of this? Hospitals were completely overrun in Wuhan initially, but the mortality rate didn't get anywhere near 10%.

Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#43

Corona is killing a negligible % of the population, mostly very old and very sick people (checkout the official data from the Italian health ministary - average age of dead patiences is 79.5 years, all of them with severe background illness, in a part of the country where 29% of the population is at least 60 yeard old. Those are the facts.). If anyting, what we are experiencing is not a corona pandemic but a massive,…

You can't argue with the fact that hospitals can't take the pressure even at negligible death rate.

Hospitals fucked = lots of other people are screwed as they depend on unrelated treatments.

Heath system going out has huge cascading problems for society.

Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#44

Corona is killing a negligible % of the population, mostly very old and very sick people (checkout the official data from the Italian health ministary - average age of dead patiences is 79.5 years, all of them with severe background illness, in a part of the country where 29% of the population is at least 60 yeard old. Those are the facts.). If anyting, what we are experiencing is not a corona pandemic but a massive,…

It's killing whole percentage points of the identified infections.

If 1 billion people get infected, that's 10 or 20 million people (or more). And so on with larger numbers of infected.

That's not 'negligible'.

Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#45

From what I read in this article and other sources, performing more tests seems to be a very promising approach to get this pandemic under control. The number of positive tests and death rates are published every day on all channels. I wish the number of performed tests would be also published daily. What gets measured gets managed. I wonder what limits the number of tests that can be performed. How much would it cos…

It's not a question of cost at this point. It's a question of availability of reagents and consumables, materials to make those, and time it takes to ramp up. The supply chain is like a supertanker.

At first we didn't have enough test, but that ramped up quickly, then we didn't have enough RNA extraction reagent, now we don't have enough swabs, and soon is the collection media that will be missing.

There has been a call for more protective equipement. But as the situation gets worst, beds space, ventilator, and then staff are going to be the bottleneck.

If you google you'll find stories of people helping their local hospital by 3D printing parts for for respirators, and swabs. There's nothing cost effective about that, it's not fast, but it gets the job done. If you were to scale that, you would be competing for the same materials than manufacturers using injection molding or plastic dipping are.

Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#46

Corona is killing a negligible % of the population, mostly very old and very sick people (checkout the official data from the Italian health ministary - average age of dead patiences is 79.5 years, all of them with severe background illness, in a part of the country where 29% of the population is at least 60 yeard old. Those are the facts.). If anyting, what we are experiencing is not a corona pandemic but a massive,…

> checkout the official data from the Italian health ministary Post link plz

Here is something from somewhere from yesterday https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Infograf...

Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the USA curve is fearsomely steep This analysis is difficult because it is related to testing capacity. We all know testing capacity was limited early on. It remains limited, but is growing. The faster capacity grows, the steeper the curve will be. Want to have a less steep curve? Lower the amount of testing. In another comment, you claim looking at the curves leaves out politics completely, but it doesn't. Any pol…

> Want to have a less steep curve? Lower the amount of testing. That works only at the beginning.

A more interesting view would be the number of positive tests over the number of tests preformed.

Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes - absolute criminal negligence in the US and UK. Possibly Australia too. The problem isn't just that a lot of people will die because the health system is swamped. That's hardly good news, but when you have a high peak you have a lot of people ill at the same time. And that means you run the risk of losing a significant percentage of critical workers in essential services including food, utilities, logistics, and…

Original poster. I'm from the UK. Looking at the curves only and leaving out politics completely, the UK curve is by far the slowest growing of the 3, for whatever reason. It's the US that has the most to fear at this point, of the 3 countries.

UK policy is "testing for coronavirus is not needed if you are staying at home" for symptomatic suspected cases, so it's likely our stats are a bigger underestimate of actual infections than many other countries

Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how much of the US’s growth is due to us finally having some (albeit not enough) testing?

Related, there's also the distinct possibility that many had Covid-19 well before it was in public consciousness. Look for ILI (Influenza-like Illness) stats which were appreciably higher in January. The obvious inference is that many had Covid-19 before it was recognised as such. This might be a good thing.

If that were true, we should see a much higher proportion of tested people showing positive. Also we shouldn't see the proportion of people tested being positive shooting up, but we do. Those ILI stats were probably just Flu.

Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#50
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not an exponential, it's a logistic curve, just approximate with the SIS model, it's easier. Yeah I knew by Sunday that tomorrow we're hitting 30,000 cases in Spain. My assumptions worked. And it's just the tip, because I don't know anything about whether there's been randomized sampling, so who knows about the normalization. I just can't believe this. No one listens and this is in-your-face obvious.

I realise it's actually a sigmoid but an early decent approximation is an exponential, no? (edit: good catch though)

Apparently not with this when you're early. I took it seriously when a third degree polynomial fit worked too well and then suddenly didn't.
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