It means we are only testing really sick people. The death rate in that population is ridiculously high. More access to testing should reveal a very large pool of much less symptomatic patients.
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At this point is it not fairly safe to say that without a vaccine we are looking at everyone eventually becoming infected? The real question being how quickly that will happen?
I’m not saying that to scaremonger, just basing it off the wide spread infection cases that are popping up all around the world. Thanks to vaccines in my lifetime people didn’t get sick like my parents generation. It’s somewhat naive of us to think that we wouldn’t have to deal with a new virus ever…
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Nothing is ever 100%. Current estimates are 40-70% of the general population, but that is very preliminary. We lack a lot of very basic info on this particular bug, and base a lot on other coronavirus, which is dangerous since they run the gamut from about 25% of the common colds every year to monsters like SARS. Basically, stay tuned, information changes rapidly.
Edit for dumb typos
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Cool, let’s start with the military.
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Let’s make Azar pay the price then, if he’s so keen on the free market.
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South Korea seems to have it’s act together - is testing anyone and everyone and providing free care - the death rate for them is .6 % (The annual flu mortality rate averages .1% - to 6x more deadly) - this makes you think … not so bad eh?
Italy shows 148 deaths with just over 3000 cases (that I could find) - if jump in deaths (41 today) wasn’t accompanied by a rise in case #'s that would put the mortality rate at 4.7 % - that’s… real bad.
I won’t claim it’s a fact - but looking at the two sets of numbers above - it seems like there is a direct relationship between how the country is testing and treating people, and how many survive. Given how the healthcare system in this country works - well I feel safe - I have great health coverage. I am scared to death for my friends and relatives though.
(links to where I found this information - most likely out of date even now).
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We know someone who is an admin at the Kaiser in Brea (orange county, CA), and this person reports test confirmed cases being quarantined there. No reports of this locally… No news… So, there’s definitely suppression going on.
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Thanks for that. The only problem with the WHO statement is that they also initially said the incubation time can be 14 days but then upgraded it to possibly 24 days.
That’s because it’s probabilistic. There’s about a 0.1% chance of the incubation time being 24 days or over. About 99% of the time the incubation time is <14 days.
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As I said in an earlier thread, given the patchiness of CDC testing, best estimate of the number of cases in the US is to divide the number of deaths by the coronavirus death rate - probably using the Wuhan one - and this will be most likely a lower bound on the number of cases. So there’s probably about 600-1200 cases in the US currently, over 2/3rds unreported.
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I get the logic of looking at somewhere where medical providers have had longer to confirm and report to epidemiologists the infection rate. And it sounds to my inexpert perception like the best strategy for doing so that I’ve heard.
But what about the people who become infected but never go to medical care providers or if they do don’t get a correct diagnosis? Is there anyway to control for that unkown? Or is the virus so consistent that anyone infected who doesn’t seek care is virtually guaranteed to die and thus be recorded as having had it? That seems counter-intuitive, but then like I said, I’m not an expert. It seems to me like some people will contract the virus, survive and never be recorded during their contagious time period. And are medical examiners and pathologists going to test everyone who dies for the virus? Obviously they can’t now in the US because the fools in charge bungled the response, but would that even be an objective for the medical community? My intuition is that it wouldn’t be a good allocation of limited test kits, but again, not an expert.
My point being, is it not likely that even the covid-19 stats in Wuhan province are missing victims, especially given that the PRC has dis-incentivized people not to seek proper medical care by concentrating anyone suspected to be infected thereby increasing their risk of contracting it if they haven’t already, instead of enforcing self-quarantine at home?
Moreover, can we ever truly get complete and accurate stats even down the line when there are people who may become infected, be contagious, then recover and never even know they had anything beside the bad flu? And again, is that even possible?
Again, not saying your suggestion of going by the Wuhan rates isn’t the least inaccurate. I’m just wondering if even that can really be all that accurate.
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Hopefully they can develop a vaccine that can cope with that. Hm, and hopefully the human immune system can cope with that too. A virus that keeps coming back like the common cold, but hits like the worst flu would be bad.
The basic assumptions here are that:
- The Wuhan dataset is probably the best in terms of uniform testing. Most other locations are testing for people who travel from infected locations, in Wuhan the focus is on infections in the community, so even if they don’t catch every case, they probably catch a more representative sample of symptomatic cases than locations where you have to be very sick to get tested.
- We assume that of the people who get the coronavirus, some proportion will be mild, some proportion will be serious, and some will die. If those rates stay relatively constant from location to location, we can then divide the serious cases (which are more likely to be reported) by the relevant ratio to obtain an estimate.
There are of course sources of error. But generally speaking, these errors are all in one direction - making the ‘divide by death rate’ estimate an underestimate of the true number of cases:
- Some cases in Wuhan are not going to be picked up and these will be disproportionately less severe cases. This makes the denominator too large (i.e. wuhan death rate is too high)
- If the CCP is attempting a cover up, it’s easier to cover up mild cases self-quarantining, than people dying, so again this pushes up the apparent death rate.
- The proportion of Wuhan patients that die is probably higher than in more developed healthcare systems. Ergo the denominator is again probably too large if we use the Wuhan number
- There will be people who die of coronavirus in the US who are not tested. Ergo the numerator is too small
And so on. The point is not that 600-1200 is the right number, but it’s probably a much more accurate number than 200+.
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The virus evolving is, generally speaking, a good thing. As the paper points out, the impact of the quarantine measures are that the less dangerous variant (S) is now increasing in prevalence. The evolutionary pressure for a disease is to evolve to be more infectious but more mild in symptoms.
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Which on the one hand is obviously a good thing that the fatality rate likely in the direction of lower. But the flip side of that seems to be that there’s a lot more contagious and soon to be contagious victims out there than epidemiologist are tracking, which seems to imply the disease is a lot further spread than if the number of actual cases was lower and therefore much harder to contain. That’s what concerns me. If it can’t be contained, then ultimately a whole lot more people will die.
So the US with our hot mess of a health care system is fucked.
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…and then end fossil fuel industry and tobacco company subsidies.
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Putting scare quotes around experts is Trump-voter conspiracy theory bullshit. It degrades science and devalues actually knowing something.
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Most virii evolve towards avirulence. The exceptions - like smallpox and measles - can be terrifying
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A couple things skew the number. The initial deaths were in a nursing home. The worst possible place for an outbreak. The elderly are a high mortality rate group. The other reason is the low number of tests given.
So yes, the low number of test kits skews the number. No, it’s not due to bad quarantine procedures (unless you feel we should have gone on total lockdown before any infections were discovered). And the infection rate and death rate has little to do with American health care and more to do with travel and hand washing.
