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1. I would not trust anything coming out of WHO at this point. Even Germany called it a pandemic, yet they are not willing to call it such (perhaps due to political influence/pressure, or just incompetence). This looks more like a 'panic containment' type of statement than the truth. 2. The R0 of seasonal flu, is about 1.5, Covid-19 has a R0 between 2.6 and 3.5*. (yet to be determined), which is much more contagious…
The fatality rate may be 3.4% and the r0 may be 2.6 to 3.4 but it is unlikely that both are true at the same time. It depends on your assumption of undiagnosed cases. We don’t know how many of those there are. But suppose you assume that all the diagnosed cases are all the cases (impossible but for the sake of the statistical argument). That is to say we tested 100% of the sick people. If that were true the fatality…
The fatality rate would obviously decline with a larger denominator which includes total infected. But so would the rate for influenza. It still seems to remain the case that this virus is ~10x deadlier than the flu, unless it has a far greater r0. The possibility of variants (type-S and type-L) mentioned elsethread makes things more complicated, though.
"To summarize, COVID-19 spreads less efficiently than flu, transmission does not appear to be driven by people who are not sick, it causes more severe illness than flu, there are not yet any vaccines or therapeutics, and it can be contained – which is why we must do everything we can to contain it. That’s why WHO recommends a comprehensive approach." Ah, so there aren't hordes of asymptomatic carriers out there, whic…
The confusing thing is that the Diamond Princess data points in the other direction: more asymptomatic cases, and a significantly lower case fatality rate, than the WHO numbers. https://slate.com/technology/2020/03/coronavirus-mortality-r... The WHO says they haven't found many asymptomatic cases (despite looking), but apparently lots of the cruise ship cases were. The WHO estimates a mortality rate over 3%, but much…
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Bypassing airport temperature tests is an incredibly low bar because it rarely catches other diseases. Anecdotally, I've travelled multiple times with people who have had fevers and entered countries with routine temperature screening and haven't been stopped. Human body temperature is also so variable that a small fever is masked by the margin of error.
I've been somewhat shocked at seeing these forehead thermometers being used for screening. Forehead thermometers are not accurate. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24127699 I challenge HN's readers to devise ways to defeat a forehead thermometer. IF we had a hackathon around this idea, how long until somebody devises a method of communication via forehead thermometer reading manipulation?
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Did they really say China would be able to contain it?
Could not find the exact reference, but here are some other bullshit from that time: https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1178015.shtml That "transparency" and "openness" were quoted a lot but it was not the case at all. Many chinese doctors and journalists were shut down.
I still can't say China's data was real without being called a shill, but it's getting increasingly obvious that this was the case. China's numbers line up perfectly with what visiting WHO observers saw (as stated in their latest report), their hospital occupancy, their rate of exported cases, economic activity in the country, and the day to day experience of hundreds of millions of actual human beings. Anybody who still says it's all fake is just jacking off on nationalism.
They're trying to avoid a panic, so I'm just looking at the data from now on.... Numbers from https://bnonews.com/index.php/2020/02/the-latest-coronavirus... As of March 4th. 6:22 pm eastern standard In China: Deaths: 2,981 recoveries : 49,856 Death/recovery : 5.98% Outside of China... Deaths: 272 Recoveries : 1205 Deaths/recoveries : 22.6%
That is, deaths / (total cases); as other comments note, the problem is that computing "total cases" as just deaths+recovered might not be right if one outpaces the other, and if there are a bunch of cases we don't know about because we're not testing. (E.g., are we only seeing severe cases as they send people to the hospital?)
To me it seems WHO was downplaying it the whole time. First lie is China will be able to contain it and now they don't even call it a pandemic. Also R0 is much higher then for flu. I really hope the new idea about transmissability is true but if it is I don't get why China treats it as they do. Wuhan is locked for 40+ days. I can't trust WHO now related to Covid-19, especially after what happened to stock. Of course…
> I can't trust WHO now related to Covid-19, especially after what happened to stock. The stock market is an indicator of investor confidence. How investors feel about a particular event is not necessarily accurate, and has basically no direct relation to the WHO.
I also wouldn’t overplay the market correction. We are back to where stocks were in Oct last year, when there were no concern about the virus.
I've noticed a trend in the discussion of Covid-19 when talking to people. They tend to either under estimate it; "it's just the flu", or they over estimate it; "This is going to be really bad, time to buy all toilet paper". There's a lot of confusing mixed messages, not even from just random people, but from the WHO and different governments. They say they are fully prepared and it can be contained yet doctors and h…
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This virus isn't airborne. It's spread through respiratory droplets.
There have been reports that aerosol spread can occur in limited cases: https://youtu.be/xWj9OUAfTLQ
They're trying to avoid a panic, so I'm just looking at the data from now on.... Numbers from https://bnonews.com/index.php/2020/02/the-latest-coronavirus... As of March 4th. 6:22 pm eastern standard In China: Deaths: 2,981 recoveries : 49,856 Death/recovery : 5.98% Outside of China... Deaths: 272 Recoveries : 1205 Deaths/recoveries : 22.6%
All Countries except for South Korea are NOT counting the mild or asymptomatic cases. When you look at the SK numbers, 5,621 confirmed cases and 35 deaths. That puts the death rate at 0.6% (same as severe influenza season). Everybody just needs to chill.