Merged 2019-nCoV / Corona virus

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Skeptic Ginger said:
I passed the video on to ProMed Mail, The International Society for Infectious Diseases. I copied some of your comments, Angrysoba, but left them unattributed.

https://promedmail.org/ Not sure how they deal with videos and especially videos taken down after the fact. They have though, published my emails to them before.
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Thanks! He clearly wants this message out there and wants more pressure on Japanese authorities to put in place competent people. Japan has plenty of those but not in the right positions, it seems.
 
Those evil, much hated round these parts, youtube atheists and youtube skeptics are mirroring the video like mad right now
 
Roboramma said:
Hopefully we've been, and will continue to be, lucky with respect to spread to India. Time will tell I guess.
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Another point about India is that it seems Covid-19 is definitely spread via the foecal-oral route, and hygiene is not that flash in many parts of the country.

As you say, time will tell - I'd say 3 more weeks. By then we'll be fairly sure it's either contained or about to become a major global problem.

The Diamond Princess is providing some fairly disturbing facts too - with a 5% serious rate after only two weeks since the first infections.
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Meanwhile, there are more and more voices expressing international concern on the economic front. Here's the IMF:

https://english.kyodonews.net/news/...over-from-virus-urges-global-cooperation.html
 
Dr.Sid said:
South Korea joins the club, with a cultist flavor.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...us-outbreak-cases-soar-at-church-cult-cluster
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That one's interesting, because they're claiming all the infections result came from one person. One person infecting 50+ is a neat trick and certainly looks more like a foecal-oral transmission than airborne droplets.

I can think of dozens of instances where one person with norovirus has infected hundreds, but not any in cases of 'flu. That level of infection for airborne transmission would be more like measles than any other airborne disease, and it's just not that contagious according to what he know so far.

The next few days will be very interesting. Luckily, North Korea won't be infecting many other places, but there's a body of thought saying they're getting hit with it and it will be very, very bad. The perfect storm of terrible health services and an impoverished and under-nourished people.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/02/coronavirus-korea-lethal-china-200219132141267.html
 
The Atheist said:
Another point about India is that it seems Covid-19 is definitely spread via the foecal-oral route, and hygiene is not that flash in many parts of the country.
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Where did you get this from?

SARS was but I've not seen anything saying COVID-19 was. It's also important to note it's believed the SARS virus was aerosolized from the dripping pipes in a large high-rise apartment. That's not exactly fecal oral.

Norovirus has been shown to become aerosolized when you flush an uncovered toilet. So I suppose it's a moot point whether or not it's fecal-oral-respiratory or fecal-airborne-oral.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
Where did you get this from?

SARS was but I've not seen anything saying COVID-19 was. It's also important to note it's believed the SARS virus was aerosolized from the dripping pipes in a large high-rise apartment. That's not exactly fecal oral.

Norovirus has been shown to become aerosolized when you flush an uncovered toilet. So I suppose it's a moot point whether or not it's fecal-oral-respiratory or fecal-airborne-oral.
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Here, "Fecal Transmission May Be Behind Coronavirus’s Rapid Spread" (reported in several papers/reputable sites).
 
JeanTate said:
Yeah, nothing until two deaths; no mild cases, no people from China who tested +ve, etc.

Odd.


Well, by far the greatest numbers of infected people in China, deaths, etc are, and have been, in Hubei province. And from what I’ve read, there are very few “local” clusters outside Hubei (i.e. significant transmission beyond people who have travelled from Hubei, and those living with a locally infected person); more specifically, the numbers of infected people in border provinces (e.g. Yunan, Heilongjiang, Inner Mongolia) is low ... except for Guangdong and Heilongjiang. So the historical relatively low numbers of people who have returned home after New Year, from Hubei, to countries like Nepal or Myanmar, seems consistent with low/zero infections reported there.

Contrast that with the Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea (even the US, and Australia).

Modulo uncertainty over less common transmission routes, e.g. leaky sewage pipes, the continued spread of Covid-19 outside China (or more specifically Hubei province) will depend on infected people from Hubei traveling there, and establishing and expanding local clusters.

So one’s concern should be on such travelers (mostly strongly constrained) and local clusters (which are in Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore).

Gross, aggregate, numbers can be misleading.


Yeah, it’s a big concern, that infections are being missed.
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The current issue of The Economist has a couple of very good articles on this (behind paywall/requires subscription?); in particular, someone has obtained data on the number of (international) flights from Wuhan (within a relavant period) and plotted this against the number of reported cases ... the correlation is good! And it suggests which places may be (or have been, the data is now a tad old) under-reporting. Such as Indonesia.

In my earlier post I missed Thailand: many people flew there from Wuhan (like Singapore, say) and Thailand also has some local clusters (also like Singapore).

Another update: another report (sorry, can't find the source) says "mild" cases are by far the most common (80%?), and that while relatively few, cases of "no apparent symptoms at all" exist (~2%?). The huge unknown is how infectious people with mild, or no, symptoms are, and for how long.
 
JeanTate said:
In my earlier post I missed Thailand: many people flew there from Wuhan (like Singapore, say) and Thailand also has some local clusters (also like Singapore).
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Going by the rigmarole around Foolmewunz before he died, it doesn't look like health systems in Thailand are very capable at dealing with pneumonia at the best of times, so christ knows what they'll end up with.

Back to India - again. It seems that about 500,000 people die every year from pneumonia in India, so I suspect they wouldn't even notice covid deaths among that number until health workers start keeling over with it.

I give it ten days, tops, before we see the outbreak showing up in big numbers.

People keep looking at the falling rates in China and thinking it's under control, but they have ~60,000,000 people under virtual house arrest and it's still spreading, so that idea seems completely illusory to me.
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Going back to the economic front again, I'm recommending anyone with extensive investments to get involved in hedging against a major pandemic. For $40 you can buy a derivative product that pays even money for every one percent the MSCI developed sharemarkets decline. If it does break out, I think 10% reduction is a given and possibly a lot more that that.
 
The Atheist said:
People keep looking at the falling rates in China and thinking it's under control, but they have ~60,000,000 people under virtual house arrest and it's still spreading, so that idea seems completely illusory to me.
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And that's only dropped R0 just below 1. They could continue that for 6 months and still have 10k new infections. The thing would spring right back once things returned to normal. Really need to speed up vaccine work or at least find out exactly how it spreads and target only measures that address that.


As for the financial impact.... Markets are in la-la land. This is beyond central banks to control because they can't do a damned thing about shortages and price increases will play havoc with pricing of everything that's based on minimal inflation.
 
And the falling rates in China seem to me like statistical games a company does to try to make a product look like it is selling better then it is; "We are the best selling (name product here) among left handed redheads between the ages of 20 and 25".
 
JeanTate said:
Here, "Fecal Transmission May Be Behind Coronavirus’s Rapid Spread" (reported in several papers/reputable sites).
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It's not a fact, it's speculation based on the fact it was true for SARS.

They've added finding virus in stools, fine. But saying that might account for the spread on the ship, fecal oral spread does not explain the spread while spreading from the crew to the passengers does.

But this:
it seems Covid-19 is definitely spread via the foecal-oral route
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is not supported by that article or those findings.

It's worth saying "maybe" given the state of sanitation in many parts of India, however.
 
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marting said:
And that's only dropped R0 just below 1. They could continue that for 6 months and still have 10k new infections. The thing would spring right back once things returned to normal. Really need to speed up vaccine work or at least find out exactly how it spreads and target only measures that address that.
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Don't get your hopes up for a vaccine - the WHO says it's 18 months away, which sounds too late to be of much use.

The hope is one of the antivirals works, because nothing else will.

marting said:
As for the financial impact.... Markets are in la-la land. This is beyond central banks to control because they can't do a damned thing about shortages and price increases will play havoc with pricing of everything that's based on minimal inflation.
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I agree with all that. The markets have shown a bit of weakness on 50 new cases in S Korea. Just imagine what they'll do with 5 or 50 thousand.

I'm going very short, very heavily.
 
It cresting as we speak- new cases are out-paced by recoveries.

Too bad it is mostly in China, and we can't beleive their science, but in light of the fact that most deaths are among the feeble, we should be able to see other causes of deaths dropping. Basically, if it wasn't for Coronavirus, they would have died of XYZ in the same time frame.Maybe.
 
WHO 2/20

Since the publication of modeling estimates in yesterday’s ‘Subject in Focus’, one research group (Ref. 12) has provided a correction of their estimate of the Infection-Fatality Ratio (IFR), with the new estimate being 0.94% (95% confidence interval 0.37-2.9)
 
Sadly and to my great disappointment, Promed went with the official reports on the cruise ship, claiming despite obvious evidence to the contrary, that everything was done right and the quarantine was successful.

In the meantime the man behind the video has completely retracted his statement.

Stay tuned. This is not the kind of thing you can cover up. Either the people getting off the cruise ship will develop disease and spread the infection, or it will turn out the video and the crew member reports were incorrect or exaggerated.

:popcorn1
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
Sadly and to my great disappointment, Promed went with the official reports on the cruise ship, claiming despite obvious evidence to the contrary, that everything was done right and the quarantine was successful.

In the meantime the man behind the video has completely retracted his statement.
Stay tuned. This is not the kind of thing you can cover up. Either the people getting off the cruise ship will develop disease and spread the infection, or it will turn out the video and the crew member reports were incorrect or exaggerated.

:popcorn1
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If you mean Kentaro Iwata, he did not completely retract his statement. He pulled the videos, it is true, but as I mentioned he was on Japanese TV yesterday talking about this and essentially said many of the same things.

What may have changed, is that the officials in charge have apparently changed what they were doing (ETA: he says the situation improved on the ship), but there is a report here from a press conference he did with the Foreign Correspondents Club in Japan:

https://english.kyodonews.net/news/...eos-blasting-situation-on-virus-hit-ship.html

And there is a longer excerpt here which I haven't had time to read yet:

https://english.kyodonews.net/news/...navirus-hit-diamond-princess-cruise-ship.html
 
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