Jump to content

Coronavirus (COVID-19)


Ser Scot A Ellison

Recommended Posts

6 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Do you think the PRC authorities are deliberately underreporting the disease’s impact?

China is a hierarchical authoritarian society. Officials there shade the truth when reporting upwards in order to look as good as possible. Filter that through several layers and the people at the top have a very distorted view of what is actually going on, Though this is complicated by the fact that they are aware of this and sometimes try to compensate for it. Furthermore they are perfectly happy to falsify the facts to achieve their goals. Recent Chinese history clearly demonstrates all this.

The current situation is even is further complicated by the fact that they are apparently smarting about how they were seen to have handled SARS and want, in the medium to long term, to convince people that they have handled this one better.

So it is certainly wise for the rest of us to cross check on all that has come out of China regarding this epidemic.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Do you think the PRC authorities are deliberately underreporting the disease’s impact?

Unfortunately, I am not aware of what is being stated as the disease's impact.  But, in general, since the desire to save face is still unavoidable, I would say yes.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Has anyone here on this board been affected, or had close personal contact with some one touched by SARS? I suspect I am one of the few. SARS did not just show how an authoritarian badly mishandled it but also how an democratic rather free society also  badly mishandled the epidemic also. Don't be so quick to claim China is badly mishandling this outbreak. People being people, even with the best of intentions, democratic and authoritarian governments will have similar fuckups. 

I worked with, am friends with, and worked in the hospital where SARS came to roost. Luck more than anything else stopped SARS. Bad decisions came close to making it much much worse. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Deaths per day and number of deaths is not relevant epidemiologically or in terms of response planning and organisation, so long as the case fatality rate is about the same. So long as you know the number of new cases per day and you know the case fatality rate you can forward plan for the expected number of deaths. Number of deaths / deaths per day are simply a headline grabber and a way to make people panic, as is talking about death rate acceleration. A couple of weeks ago I calculated the case fatality rate to be about 2.2% (from memory), the other day the calculation was 2.0-something%. That suggests the case fatality rate may actually be decreasing, so long as the data can be regarded as reliable and robust.

Viruses are funny things, especially fast mutating ones like RNA viruses. It's possible that even over this relatively short timescale we could be seeing the pathogenicity of the virus decrease as it cycles through human hosts.

The other thing in the radio interview I noted was that this virus does not seem to cause a cytokine storm, which is often what makes viruses especially deadly, and is what kills a lot of people who were the picture of good health before they get an infection. So that helps to explain why this virus has an historically low case fatality rate (so far) compared to more recent viral epidemics.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

The deaths per day are increasing, but I don't believe there is sufficient data to say its accelerating. The 64 deaths two days ago is a 15% increase from the day before, but the % increase has been higher in the week before (~30% in one day)

If you want to be pedantic, the word "acceleration" applies to an increase in velocity, which does not apply here at all.  I was using it a bit loosely to apply to an increase in  deaths per day, instead of to (say) an increase of miles per hour.

If we accept my intended meaning, then your objection is analogous to arguing that since a car's rate of acceleration did not increase, therefore the car cannot have accelerated, even though its velocity did in fact increase.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, maarsen said:

Don't be so quick to claim China is badly mishandling this outbreak.

We don't know how badly (or well) China is handling this outbreak, because they don't want us to know.  

My main point is that we have no basis for assuming that the death rate from the outbreak is limited to that in the official lab-confirmed cases.

This is relevant to the suffering of the people of Wuhan, if nothing else.  But it is also relevant in assessing the extent and nature of the peril that is coming our way.  How the various international, national, and city governments will handle is, now remains to be seen.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 minutes ago, Platypus Rex said:

If we accept my intended meaning, then your objection is analogous to arguing that since a car's rate of acceleration did not increase, therefore it did not accelerate at all.

Your intended meanings have been quite strange though, wouldn't you agree? I mean while discussing the virus in the international thread you posted this:

22 hours ago, Platypus Rex said:

It did not take long for this outbreak to turn into a negative commentary on Trump.  Nobody has yet said a word about the CCP.  A reminder of where I am, I guess.

Considering that there was discussion only a couple pages back before you typed this about how China is an authoritarian state, I'm not sure what your intended meaning was.

I can only assume either

1) You didn't even bother reading the previous posts before typing a silly comment that insinuated this forum was OK with dictatorships.

or

2) You did read the posts, and hoped no one would notice you posted a blatant lie.

Not sure which is worse, 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 minutes ago, A True Kaniggit said:

Your intended meanings have been quite strange though, wouldn't you agree? I mean while discussing the virus in the international thread you posted this:

Considering that there was discussion only a couple pages back before you typed this about how China is an authoritarian state, I'm not sure what your intended meaning was.

I can only assume either

1) You didn't even bother reading the previous posts before typing a silly comment that insinuated this forum was OK with dictatorships.

or

2) You did read the posts, and hoped no one would notice you posted a blatant lie.

Not sure which is worse, 

If you are going to launch campaign of personal attack and vilification against me, based on something I said in another thread, please do it in that other thread, so everyone can see the context.  Thank you.

Or better yet, stay here and discuss the Wuhan Coronavirus.  Is there is something I said about the Wuhan Coronavirus that you disagree with me about?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, Platypus Rex said:

If you are going to launch campaign of personal attack and vilification against me, based on something I said in another thread, please do it in that other thread, so everyone can see the context.  Thank you.

Or better yet, stay here and discuss the Wuhan Coronavirus.  Is there is something I said about the Wuhan Coronavirus that you disagree with me about?

Sure I’ll post the same thing in the other thread too.

Maybe you’ll explain your meaning of the bolded in that thread

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Platypus Rex said:

If you want to be pedantic, the word "acceleration" applies to an increase in velocity, which does not apply here at all.  I was using it a bit loosely to apply to an increase in  deaths per day, instead of to (say) an increase of miles per hour.

If we accept my intended meaning, then your objection is analogous to arguing that since a car's rate of acceleration did not increase, therefore the car cannot have accelerated, even though its velocity did in fact increase.

Ok.

And I am trying to point out that an increase in the rate of change from day to day would be much much more serious, and seeing this somewhat slower increase in mortality is reassuring.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Deaths per day and number of deaths is not relevant epidemiologically or in terms of response planning and organisation, so long as the case fatality rate is about the same. So long as you know the number of new cases per day and you know the case fatality rate you can forward plan for the expected number of deaths. Number of deaths / deaths per day are simply a headline grabber and a way to make people panic, as is talking about death rate acceleration. A couple of weeks ago I calculated the case fatality rate to be about 2.2% (from memory), the other day the calculation was 2.0-something%. That suggests the case fatality rate may actually be decreasing, so long as the data can be regarded as reliable and robust.

Viruses are funny things, especially fast mutating ones like RNA viruses. It's possible that even over this relatively short timescale we could be seeing the pathogenicity of the virus decrease as it cycles through human hosts.

The other thing in the radio interview I noted was that this virus does not seem to cause a cytokine storm, which is often what makes viruses especially deadly, and is what kills a lot of people who were the picture of good health before they get an infection. So that helps to explain why this virus has an historically low case fatality rate (so far) compared to more recent viral epidemics.

How are you calculating the case fatality rate?  You can't just take today's numbers of 490 dead and 24000 confirmed cases to date and then calculate the case fatality rate by dividing 490 by 24000 (which would result in 2%).  A huge number of the 24000 confirmed cases are new and have not run their course, meaning that many people from this group of 24000 will die.  The case fatality rate is definitely greater than 2%.  It's not clear from the public data what the actual fatality rate is.  China definitely knows, and most likely, they have shared this data with other countries, which is why you are seeing so many other countries enacting strict quarantine rules.  

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 minutes ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

By the way, I find the Johns Hopkins tracker to be very useful (by way of the Guardian, which has a live blog that is also very informative)

Thanks, this is useful.  From the tracker, there are 24,402 confirmed cases, 492 deaths, and 899 recovered.  That means 23,011 of the cases remain unresolved.  I'm hoping that there is a lag in reporting the recovered number, because of the total number of resolved cases (total dead plus total recovered) is just 1,391.  Of the resolved cases, a very high percentage right now are dead.  I think it's likely that the reporting of the resolved case is just lagging, but that's just a guess.  If the number of resolved cases is accurate though, that would be extremely scary.  It's something to watch.

SARS had a mortality rate of around 10% and MERS had a mortality rate of over 30%.  

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Nature paper released on the viral genetics: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2012-7#disqus_thread

Key points:

Almost certainly of bat origin. Not snake origin as some earlier reports suggested.
Extremely high sequence homology with the SARS virus.
Uses same invasion mechanism.

Given this it's likely that antivirals which were effective against SARS would also have some efficacy against nCov.

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

Ok.

And I am trying to point out that an increase in the rate of change from day to day would be much much more serious, and seeing this somewhat slower increase in mortality is reassuring.

I'm not sure you appreciate the mathematical implications of what you are saying.   Continued geometric increase would be bad enough without worrying about the rate of geometric increase itself geometrically increasing.  That neither of these things will happen, over any extended period of time, is not particularly reassuring.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...