2019-nCoV / Corona virus Pt 2

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quadraginta

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quadraginta
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Darat said:
UK Gov:

Department of Health and Social Care
✔
@DHSCgovuk
Replying to @DHSCgovuk

As of today, due to the number of new cases, we will no longer be tweeting information on the location of each new case.

Instead, this information will be released centrally in a consolidated format online, once a week. We are working on this now and plan to share on Friday.
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I guess too much timely information would only scare the unwashed masses needlessly.

Previous thread had grown too large - http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=341650 feel free to quote etc. from that thread if you want to.
Posted By: Darat
 
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In a certain way, specifying the location of a new case could be misleading. It could cause a reader to think that the virus spread is limited to that place. But it isn't. Really it's anywhere at any time.
 
As more cases are discovered, the workload of tweeting each one goes up. At a certain point, it's more efficient to batch the reports. It seems DHSC has reached that point.
 
theprestige said:
As more cases are discovered, the workload of tweeting each one goes up. At a certain point, it's more efficient to batch the reports. It seems DHSC has reached that point.
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Considering the minuscule effort involved in making a tweet, that would suggest that there are an awful lot of cases.

Why weekly instead of one tweet per day? Surely that would not overwhelm their administrative resources.
 
xjx388 said:
I’m basing my reasoning on the facts as we know them currently.
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Read the link I cited FFS. Your entire point is in contradiction to known facts and evidence.
 
Tipping point reached, new cases are outstripping the Chinese recoveries/deaths. Active cases will start to increase.
 
Are they really going to repeat japans mistake and sentence everyone on that boat to infection? I thought california was so much smarter than the rest of us or more moral or something.
 
RecoveringYuppy said:
Read the link I cited FFS. Your entire point is in contradiction to known facts and evidence.
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I did read your wikipedia link. I even used the citiations to go deeper. For example:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/202...-not-be-source-novel-virus-spreading-globally
Lucey says if the new data are accurate, the first human infections must have occurred in November 2019—if not earlier—because there is an incubation time between infection and symptoms surfacing. If so, the virus possibly spread silently between people in Wuhan—and perhaps elsewhere—before the cluster of cases from the city’s now-infamous Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was discovered in late December.

. . .

Andersen posted his analysis of 27 available genomes of 2019-nCoV on 25 January on a virology research website. It suggests they had a “most recent common ancestor”—meaning a common source—as early as 1 October 2019.
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So there is currently no certainty at all regarding exactly when the first infections occurred. It could have been October; it would be impossible to know for sure, especially if for a lot of (most?) people the symptoms are no different to the common cold.

If that's true, then there should be no question about the good possibility that this thing was out in the wild before the "first cases" were reported in China, January 11.

Now, if you have something specific that indicates what I'm saying is way off, I welcome it.
 
RecoveringYuppy said:
Read the link I cited FFS. Your entire point is in contradiction to known facts and evidence.
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You cited a wikipedia article. xjx read that article, read one of its sources, and cited that source. Everything in that article, and in its source, is consistent with the idea that the virus was out and about before the first cases were announce in January. At least as early as November 2019, and possibly as early as 1 October 2019 (or even earlier).

xjx's entire point is supported by known facts and evidence.
 
Here is the original post from xjx388 that I am disputing.
I can see a time, not too long from now, when we realize that this bug had actually been in the population for a good bit of time before it became big news. That people had actually had it, thought it was just a bad cold and moved on with their lives after a few days.

Yesterday was especially busy for us. A lot of upper respiratory stuff came through, coughing, fever, etc. We, obviously, don't test for Covid-19. A lot of those patients did test positive for flu or strep, but a lot did not. I'd wager that if we (and every other doctor's office) sent a swab of every patient with flu-like symptoms to a capable lab, that we would actually catch some people that had Covid-19. IOW, I'd bet it's already long been circulating among us and we thought it was just another bad cold.

We do a respiratory panel for patients with persistent URIs that checks dna/rna for multiple pathogens. There are a few coronaviruses on that list and patients freak out when they see it. One day, this one's going to be on the list too.
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Nothing supports the idea that this virus has been in the population for a long time or that every doctor's office would be detecting this now if they tested for it.
 
"Diamond Princess cruise ship: The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has corrected the number of cases from 706 to 696. After examining the results of the virus test, it was reported that some people were counted twice."

Doesn't build confidence in other statistics if such a well-defined population can have counts be this wrong for this long.
 
sphenisc said:
"Diamond Princess cruise ship: The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has corrected the number of cases from 706 to 696. After examining the results of the virus test, it was reported that some people were counted twice."

Doesn't build confidence in other statistics if such a well-defined population can have counts be this wrong for this long.
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1.4% is not much of an error.
 
RecoveringYuppy said:
Here is the original post from xjx388 that I am disputing.



Nothing supports the idea that this virus has been in the population for a long time or that every doctor's office would be detecting this now if they tested for it.
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He didn't say every doctor's office would detect it. He said if every doctor's office tested every flu-like patient, we'd detect a lot more of it.

The only real variance between you and xjx that I can see is an unstated assumption about what "a long time" means in this context. Certainly the available evidence suggests that was in the population undetected for at least a couple months.

You seem to have a mild hate-on going for xjx's speculation. But at this point it's not really speculation: We know that it was running around for at least a couple months. And given what we know about the virus (highly contagious, presents as a bad flu), I think it's reasonable to speculate that it's actually spread a lot farther than the outbreak we're currently tracking. Because it seems likely to have spread quite a bit in October-November-December, before it got noticed as such in January.
 
sphenisc said:
"Diamond Princess cruise ship: The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has corrected the number of cases from 706 to 696. After examining the results of the virus test, it was reported that some people were counted twice."

Doesn't build confidence in other statistics if such a well-defined population can have counts be this wrong for this long.
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The error amounts to 10 out of almost 700, or a mere 1.4%. I don't think it's that bad of a mistake.

ETA: ninja'd by RecoveringYuppy!
 
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theprestige said:
He didn't say every doctor's office would detect it. He said if every doctor's office tested every flu-like patient, we'd detect a lot more of it.

The only real variance between you and xjx that I can see is an unstated assumption about what "a long time" means in this context. Certainly the available evidence suggests that was in the population undetected for at least a couple months.

You seem to have a mild hate-on going for xjx's speculation. But at this point it's not really speculation: We know that it was running around for at least a couple months. And given what we know about the virus (highly contagious, presents as a bad flu), I think it's reasonable to speculate that it's actually spread a lot farther than the outbreak we're currently tracking. Because it seems likely to have spread quite a bit in October-November-December, before it got noticed as such in January.
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OK. If a "long time" turns out to be a couple weeks or a month I'd agree that's within current evidence.

Bad use of parentheses if he meant what you are claiming. He can clarify how many of those offices he expects to detect the virus. As written he implies he's expecting his clinic/office/whatever would be detecting it.
 
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