Wuhan Coronavirus: Megathread - Got too big

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South korea is our best case example of quarantine, but it isnt perfect. Let's say they have been testing 15,000 a day, every day, for the last 90 days. Everyone was only tested once, and the results were 100% accurate for the foreseeable future, E.G. nobody who tested negative in january would catch it in february/march, ece. That is 1.35 million people tested.

Out of a country of 51.47 million. That is 2.6% of the population tested. That leaves over 50 million people untested, and for all we know, mild cases could be spreading all throughout that 50 million population, and since these people are sick with what they think are mild colds, they dont go out, and therefore dont get tested unless symptoms get worse to the point they think something else is wrong.

The US, during the H1N1 outbreak, confirmed 57 million infections, and tested well north of half of the entire fucking country. S korea is nowhere near that level of testing. So even though South korea is the best in terms of testing per capita, even its testing is far too low to catch all the low level cases.
Interesting. Yes, I realize that the proportion of people tested to the general populace is very small. Still, the very low detection rate, especially compared to places like Italy where a similar number of daily tests can bring up 50 times as many positive results, makes me wonder.

So to offer a few counterpoints, based on what I gather: the Koreans are of course acutely aware of what is going on and still have an oubreak of MERS in memory, plus they have constant access to information about the localization of latest detections, so many people suffering from what appears to be a cold will want to get tested rather than take the risk. Testing facilities are said to be widespread and easily available. Some people are being proactively contacted by Korean epidemiological services (I don't know on what criteria and with what frequency though). Those too old or too ill to go out can be tested at home. And I don't think Korea is on lockdown like many European states, so people remain mobile, driving to work and on errands, so they can easily go to a drive-by station and take a few minutes to get tested.

While I agree with @Otterly that this still presents an unclear and fragmentary image and all we have is guesses, it still seems unlikely that given the above, the Koreans are missing some ongoing massive spread right under their noses. It's conjecture, yes, but then what lets some places keep up while others explode with detections and have their hospitals overloaded?
 
Today marks the most reported coronavirus deaths in the US in a single day


There have been at least 265 reported coronavirus deaths in the US on Friday, according to a count by CNN.
This is the most reported deaths in the United States since the pandemic outbreak.
  • Thursday there were 253 reported deaths in the US.
  • Wednesday there were 233 reported deaths in the US.
  • Tuesday there were 164 reported deaths in the US.
there's going to be a ridiculous amount of money flooding into the economy quickly and folks are gonna get paid to sit on their ass and do nothing...by the gov't.

So this is what welfare feels like.

For corporations maybe. $1200 one time is nothing. And unemployment isn't welfare, it's insurance that the worker and employer pays for.
 
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Another very German story, this time on the ground.
An officer of the Regulatory Office (Ordnungsamt), accompanied by a young apprentice, visited the table tennis site adjacent to a playground. The playground had been cordoned off by red and white tape for days, but not the table tennis table. Which I thought had been a nice move.

Playing sports in pairs is explicitly allowed in Germany these days, if you stay in pairs or are members of one household.
He spontaneously imagined a somehow undefined space upon which he must have felt the urgency to act immediately. The playground is the playground, and even if table tennis is not cordoned off, it is part of it, this can't stay that way, "Ordnung muss sein." He had to do something.

He made a few phonecalls and then proceeded to tell a lenghty story how he liked to watch the game himself but saw a possibility of imitations by others and bla bla and bla. He shut the game down.

And then they wonder why everybody is joking and angry and fearful and subdued at the same time towards the "Corona-police". With what limited freedom of movement we have left, their overprotectiveness is getting on my nerves.
I fear for the day when everybody like in China will be ordered to wear a mask if they want to go outside. Suddenly new rules apply and you don't know which new rights they invent to restrict yours.

We are already very compliant here. Nobody wants to get the virus and nobody wants to be lectured by all these new security guys. Police and some people are having a field day policing for themselves the fuck out of everybody else. These are the most German traits: Policing others, if I can't have joy, nobody else should.

Lolcows may represent all of the worst of humanity but the existence of them and their stupid decisions is a sign of a healthy civilization that values freedom.

Retarded people that don't do what they're told even with good reason are the last bastion of defense of a free society.
 
The youngest UK death was apparently fake news.


tl;dr she had a heart attack "at the weekend" and the hospital couldn't resuscitate her. Her family have deleted posts saying she had no health conditions. Sounds like drugs and the family hoped to cover it up.

Christ, that horrible... fucking horrible family.
 
Boots UK online virtual queue corona covid.png


This doesn't make any fucking sense; why not just limit how much people can buy in a given session, or ID them by logging where they're having stuff delivered and their payment details? Not that you could stop idiots hoarding shit because there's a billion ways around those measures.

God I fucking hate this country. I didn't even want to buy anything I just wanted to check prices for when I go in-store on Monday for fuck's sake.
 
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Nothing new under the sun and no news is good news. The planet will break before the guard does. Morale is high. Resources are low. People keep dying but the situation keeps stabilizing, same old.

On the funny side. I've had time to watch some Poirot rerun. Inbetween episodes they put some adds for stupid shit. "Teletienda" it's called here. I think you call it "infomercials", anyway, I wanted to share a photo for one of them. It's a clock.
20200327_200157.jpg

More concretely it's the single most gaudy fucking clock I've ever had the displeasure to witness. They claim every single one of those rocks is a diamond and, now, I have no idea what the prize of diamonds is right now. But if it is, what a fucking waste. What kind of tasteless bloody bastard would buy such a thing?! That's not a clock, it's a message, it says "please kill me I have money."

there's going to be a ridiculous amount of money flooding into the economy quickly and folks are gonna get paid to sit on their ass and do nothing...by the gov't.

So this is what welfare feels like.

To be fair staying home is the most valuable thing most people can do under the circumstances. Good moment to learn about online business though. Learn to code as the meme goes.

Today marks the most reported coronavirus deaths in the US in a single day


There have been at least 265 reported coronavirus deaths in the US on Friday, according to a count by CNN.
This is the most reported deaths in the United States since the pandemic outbreak.
  • Thursday there were 253 reported deaths in the US.
  • Wednesday there were 233 reported deaths in the US.
  • Tuesday there were 164 reported deaths in the US.


For corporations maybe. $1200 one time is nothing. And unemployment isn't welfare, it's insurance that the worker and employer pays for.

If the bell curve works like it does "the day with most deaths" will be every day from now for a while.
 
Kenyans aren't taking social distancing order well.
Chaos ensues.
Yesterday I posted about the chaos that followed when Kenyan police tried to implement the social distancing order at the Likoni ferry crossing.
Now the paramilitary wing of Kenyan police, General Service Unit (GSU) (archive) officers have taken over the Likoni ferry crossing channel in Mombasa.

Now the police are beating up people while "ushering in the coronavirus curfew".
The Likoni ferry users got their share of the baton. Poor bastards.
Source | Archive
Police brutality ushered in the coronavirus curfew for Coast and Eldoret residents as cops descended on hapless citizens two hours before the deadline.
The Police officers also went on another brutality spree, beating up hundreds of ferry users who were lining up to get into the ferries at the Likoni Channel.
The officers who were armed with batons beat the commuters after they crowded and tried to force themselves towards the Likoni Channel
Police order Mombasa residents on ground on March 27, 2020 just hours before the start of nati...jpg
 
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China opened up to the capitalism and acquired a freakish amount of wealth. With that wealth they have been mastering the art of soft power.

NYT, Washington Post, CBC... all want those sexy Chinese dollars or serve governments that do.

Trump has hammed up distrust of the media and the progressive overreaction has been to blindly believe the media.

Perfect storm.
Tweet direct link
Archive

God that bloke tweets a lot. I mean a lot. Has he got a job? And all of it is exactly what you'd expect.

Also, unrelated, just like to say hi to Godzilla1984 I think it is , the Canadian miner guy. Slogging his way through the thread.
If you're reading this, we're probably all dead by now.
 
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I guess the only thing I'm not prepared for is the lack of distraction, I am seriously have ran out of gunpla model kits to build

No kidding. The first thing I gravitate to is the news feeds, which is fine for a while because at the moment there seems to be lots worth archiving. It very quickly starts making my brain go a little crazy, though. That special 'tismal part of the brain that says "report everything, relay everything, archive everything" starts to get a little manic and cow-ish.

I'm trying to pass the time helping my parents get acquainted with platforms like Zoom and other means of telework, since their normal work (and mine) has basically disappeared over the past month. Unironically learning to code, what a time to be alive.
 
So basically no quarantine h1n1 basically hospitalized and killed people just as much as this virus will come June. like i said its only been sending people to the hospital for one month and we're at 20k, and we're adding thousands more every day. If we didn't shut a goddamn thing down, we probably would already be at 250k US by now
We MAY have been at 250K. Or not. If the infection rate is as high as is claimed, then no, lack of quarantine would not have led to 250K hospitalizations, because even in only 30% of the US is currently infected you would have run out of people before hitting 250K hospitalizations.

It's like a commenter here yesterday tried to extrapolate based on 50K hospitalizations per day in new york, and how if that rate continued for a week new york would have X fatalities, without realizing that at the mathematical rate new york would have a 100% infection rate by the end of day 3 based on current hospitalization rates, which are likely weighed in favor of hospitalized people because...say it with me....there is a shortage of testing all over new york.

We know, based on how other coronaviruses and less infectious flu strains spread, that Coronavirus has managed to infect tens of millions to spread as far as it has to so many parts of the US. A mere 90K infections would not be able to touch 90% of US counties with a small handful of infections per area, ESPECIALLY a virus more infectious then the flu. The most conservative math would still show millions infected. The worst case scenario is that we are only seeing 15% of total cases with testing, the likely percentage is below 5%.
Interesting. Yes, I realize that the proportion of people tested to the general populace is very small. Still, the very low detection rate, especially compared to places like Italy where a similar number of daily tests can bring up 50 times as many positive results, makes me wonder.

So to offer a few counterpoints, based on what I gather: the Koreans are of course acutely aware of what is going on and still have an oubreak of MERS in memory, plus they have constant access to information about the localization of latest detections, so many people suffering from what appears to be a cold will want to get tested rather than take the risk. Testing facilities are said to be widespread and easily available. Some people are being proactively contacted by Korean epidemiological services (I don't know on what criteria and with what frequency though). Those too old or too ill to go out can be tested at home. And I don't think Korea is on lockdown like many European states, so people remain mobile, driving to work and on errands, so they can easily go to a drive-by station and take a few minutes to get tested.
Testing stations are widespread and easily available, and yet they have only managed to test 1.35% of their population assuming all their tests would be accurate into the future (EG a person that tests negative in January would not catch the disease in march), assuming they had been testing since late December, assuming they never tested the same person more then once, and assuming 0 false negatives or positives.

AKA a totally unrealistic scenario. We know they are testing medical personnel frequently, as well as first responders, and its likely that active members of society are getting tested several times. And testing has not been going since late december at the current rate either. The likely result is less then 1% of south korea has been tested. A virus could easily avoid testing numbers like that. The US regularly tests over 10% of its population for flus during outbreaks like 2009, and even then there were infections that were missed.

As you said, the proportion of tested citizens is very low, and their testing rate wasnt always this high. The disease could have spread in january/february, and none of those who recovered would test positive today. Testing 1% of the population over 3 months with a test that will only show positive if the virus is still active will not produce an accurate picture.
While I agree with @Otterly that this still presents an unclear and fragmentary image and all we have is guesses, it still seems unlikely that given the above, the Koreans are missing some ongoing massive spread right under their noses. It's conjecture, yes, but then what lets some places keep up while others explode with detections and have their hospitals overloaded?
If you assume that South korea is an accurate representation of case fatality, then simply increase total cases in places like italy until fatality and hospitalization numbers line up. That would give Italy something along the lines of 900K-1M active current infections just to match Koreas numbers. That would be why they are having a massive death toll, the virus is spreading far beyond testing limits. After all, italy has little public testing and even serious cases are being passed up due to limited testing per capita.

Italy has many vectors that would allow corona to run rampant for weeks before detection. It would not surprise me at all if their actual death rate is way lower then current percentages and the majority of cases are never tested.

Another piece of data to chew. Assuming worst case scenario and that we are detecting 15% of total cases, based on current reported case numbers, that would give coronavirus a 0.8% fatality rate, lower then even south korea has managed. If you go with more realistic 10% numbers, that fatality rate drops even lower. Words can barely describe how absolutely blind the world is to current infection numbers, especially given how infectious corona is, and how long it has been spreading. This is why so many experts are now saying 60-70% of their countries have already been exposed, the infectious rate of corona doesnt line up at all with reported case numbers, which leads to only one conclusion: that case numbers are orders of magnitude higher then reported by testing, and since there are not hundreds of thousands of people in hospitals with mysterious pneumonia coughs in every single country, this leads to the logical conclusion that corona is nowhere nearly as deadly as testing would show due to how poorly balanced testing currently is. It would be like if you only tested patients hospitalized for flu to confirm infection then concluded that the flu had a 30% fatality rate.
 
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What is the percentage of your dead that were tested only after they died? It'd be interesting to see how much this could skewer the death rate. I'm pretty sure our death toll would probably be higher if we took the time and the resources to test the dead, but the RKI stated pretty clearly that they will not waste a single test on a dead person.
I would assume that hospitals are very reliably checking people for Corona, since it is in their own best interest to protect themselves and others, so I somewhat doubt that many people "slip by".

Another very German story, this time on the ground.
An officer of the Regulatory Office (Ordnungsamt), accompanied by a young apprentice, visited the table tennis site adjacent to a playground. The playground had been cordoned off by red and white tape for days, but not the table tennis table. Which I thought had been a nice move.

Playing sports in pairs is explicitly allowed in Germany these days, if you stay in pairs or are members of one household.
He spontaneously imagined a somehow undefined space upon which he must have felt the urgency to act immediately. The playground is the playground, and even if table tennis is not cordoned off, it is part of it, this can't stay that way, "Ordnung muss sein." He had to do something.

He made a few phonecalls and then proceeded to tell a lenghty story how he liked to watch the game himself but saw a possibility of imitations by others and bla bla and bla. He shut the game down.

And then they wonder why everybody is joking and angry and fearful and subdued at the same time towards the "Corona-police". With what limited freedom of movement we have left, their overprotectiveness is getting on my nerves.
I fear for the day when everybody like in China will be ordered to wear a mask if they want to go outside. Suddenly new rules apply and you don't know which new rights they invent to restrict yours.

We are already very compliant here. Nobody wants to get the virus and nobody wants to be lectured by all these new security guys. Police and some people are having a field day policing for themselves the fuck out of everybody else. These are the most German traits: Policing others, if I can't have joy, nobody else should.

As silly as it might seem, I can kind of get behind closing off even something like a tabletennis table.

For instance:
c34b4e4e5154bfa4.jpg

One might think that it's ridiculous to "close off" that single little bouncy thing, but when you think about it, it can transmit the virus very easily to many kids in no time at all.
I mean, just to play devil's advocate, imagine someone with Jinping-Pest sneezes on the table and some time later, someone else touches it and then rubs their eyes sometime later while playing.

All I am saying: I wouldn't chalk this up to some asshole trying to rain on someone else's fun alone.

Still yeah, there's a couple of no-fun-allowed assholes and people who try to police around other people.
 
So here’s a question from an ignoramus to the medically-inclined Kiwis in the thread... And it’s an exceptional question, so please go easy on the neg-ratings, because I know it’s a dumb question but feel compelled to ask anyway.

As I skooshed the first mosquito of 2020 this morning here in southern Burgerland, I got to thinking: the virus is small and lasts for days on certain surfaces. It’s shed into human waste, as well as from coofing/sneezing/existing whilesick with Corona-Chan. Do we have to worry about freaking insect transmission as things warm up just cuz the virus gets everywhere and is fairly durable outside human hosts?
 
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