COVID-19

[Ego]

The crisis is revealing some new and interesting technological possibilities.

I saw reports that China was using their mass surveillance tech to enforce the Wuhan quarantine by denying hotel rooms and gasoline purchases to those who are residents of Wuhan but have been outside of the region since before the quarantine. Last night Uber suspended a few hundred customer and driver accounts in Mexico after learning that the two drivers transported someone who later tested positive for corona.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51358042

[Sclass]

I’m starting to wonder about @JP’s comments about the real situation on the ground being different from what the Chinese government is reporting. While they’re being praised for their response internationally we are still getting their filtered data.

Eventually if they’re hiding infections and deaths it’ll come to light. Exponential growth is powerful.

I saw some images of the completed hospital. It looks more like a detention center. Lots of bars in the windows. The original press releases had clear windows.

[jacob]

The crisis is revealing some new and interesting technological possibilities.

Ha! Yeah, maybe comprehensive tracking will turn into something that's actually useful for 5G bandwidth Like, did this human touch this particular fridge, door handle, or vehicle, and if so, who else touched it?

Meanwhile, I've noticed that Africa has registered ZERO events. That is interesting.

https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps ... 7b48e9ecf6

[jennypenny]

Taleb's thoughts ... https://www.academia.edu/41743064/Syste ... rus_A_Note


@sclass--If people are told to stay in their homes even if they are sick and should go to the hospital, they won't be counted as official coronavirus victims because they won't be tested. It's a neat trick to keep numbers down. It also makes me question mortality rates. Anecdotal evidence suggests that China is hiding the true number of deaths, lowering the projected mortality rate. OTOH, if milder cases are trapped in their homes never to be counted as one of the infected, that would artificially raise the mortality rate because only the sickest individuals are getting tested/confimed.

If I had to guess, I'd say the latter is probably closer to the truth and mortality rates will turn out to be closer to a typical influenza outbreak. And while that's terrible and could kill a lot of people if widespread, it wouldn't be catastrophic (maybe locally in some areas, but not globally).

[AnalyticalEngine]

The reason Africa has zero events is pretty much a testing limitation. See here from how the WHO is testing cases: https://www.who.int/docs/default-source ... d381fc88_2

Basically the WHO is using a technique called Polymerase Chain Reaction machine (PCR). This is where they take a sample from the patient and copy the genetic material a bunch of times. If they detect coronavirus RNA after doing that, it means the patient has the virus inside of them. However, the limitation here is there are only so many PCR machines in the world. Additionally, many hospitals don't have them onsite because they are specialized and expensive. So they've been having to ship many samples off to places that do have the machines for testing. (This is one reason US samples are going to the CDC for confirmation and not local hospitals.)

Now you take Africa, with its less developed infrastructure, and it's no wonder they can't do this special test. So the lack of cases in Africa might be ENTIRELY a limitation of testing.

The good news is they're making an antibody test (might already be done?) that just tests for antibodies to the virus rather than viral RNA itself. This is a lot easier to administer on-site and way less prone to bottlenecks. So we might see better data soon.

Incidentally, this is one reason everyone is so concerned because even if they can contain it in Wuhan, it could spread to somewhere with a poor medical infrastructure, like Africa, and infect many people there before they can catch it. Then it could respread from there to other countries that dodged the bullet on the Wuhan wave.

[Ego]

What will happen if the virus is not contained? That scenario seems more likely by the day. I snipped out the most interesting points from the article.

https://www.statnews.com/2020/02/04/two ... contained/'

Researchers are therefore asking what seems like a defeatist question but whose answer has huge implications for public policy: What will a world with endemic 2019-nCoV — circulating permanently in the human population — be like?

2019-nCoV joins the four coronaviruses now circulating in people. “I can imagine a scenario where this becomes a fifth endemic human coronavirus,” said Stephen Morse of Columbia University...

...the current four “are already part of the winter-spring seasonal landscape of respiratory disease,”

Together, the four are responsible for an estimated one-quarter of all colds

“I think there is a reasonable probability that this becomes the fifth community-acquired coronavirus,”

Any evolution that does take place in an endemic coronavirus, including one that spikes seasonally, might well be toward less virulence. “It doesn’t want to kill you before you transmit it,”

Exposure to the four endemic coronaviruses produces immunity that lasts longer than that to influenza, Webby said, but not permanent immunity.

Since 2019-nCoV is new, “this first wave will be particularly bad because we have an immunologically naïve population,” Adalja said. Future waves should pass by people who were exposed (but not necessarily sickened) this time around...

Invert.

Would it make sense for healthy people to purposely expose themselves to it now, assuming they have the reserves to fight it and build immunity for a future where they might otherwise be less able to fight off an initial infection? I also wonder how strong the non-specific effects of infection will be.

Time to start licking handrails and door knobs?

[jacob]

@Ego - No!! It would make sense to wait as long as possible until one contracts a milder and more evolved version or a vaccine is developed. I can't think of anything where deliberate infection with the full strength version is ever a good idea. As I said above, what doesn't kill you doesn't make you stronger and it sometimes leaves a permanent mark.

[AnalyticalEngine]

Anyone else find it odd the markets aren't reacting to this, like at all? Shanghai composite was down 8% for one day, now it's already been trading upward again. Even if this doesn't become a pandemic, you'd think having 50+ million people under quarantine and the supply chain disruptions would be enough?

[jacob]

@AE - No, this is what I would expect. A quick panic (I bought about $10k worth last Monday) followed by a recovery. Similar to other events like terrorist attacks. In general, these have a 1-2 day declines followed by a recovery of 2-4 weeks.

Actual economic effects if any would appear much slower (at the quarterly reporting rate). Compare to the trade war or maybe more accurately a government shut down. 50M is still only 3% of China's 1300M population. Yes, this hurts economic transactions of 3% of China, but insofar it's a short event, it just result in pent up demand rather than demand destruction. In terms of supply, a lot of critical people would have to die before labor supply is disrupted.

[Ego]

As I said above, what doesn't kill you doesn't make you stronger and it sometimes leaves a permanent mark.

Hum. While I concede that it has the potential to do permanent lung and kidney damage - typically to the old, ill or those who are immunologically wacky - getting SARS, MERS or other corona viruses and recovering most certainly has the potential to make us stronger.

One strange example from this epidemic is the fact that 2019-nCoV and SARS use the same receptors to enter the cell. I've seen reports that those who had SARS are showing immunity to 2019-nCoV as the SARS antibodies interfere at the same receptor site.

There is also cross-reactive T-cell immunity where the T-cells are practiced at clearing virus-infected cells and do so for a variety of virus infections even though they had not been previously encountered. Also through exposure we can train our innate immunity to respond in the goldilocks zone, enough to keep the virus at bay but not so much that it causes a deadly cytokine overreaction.

It strikes me that nature has been churning out variants on the same coronavirus theme for the past few decades. It will probably continue to do so and it is somewhat likely that the "big one" will be another variant. Those with previous exposure may be happy they endured a milder corona for the benefits it imbued.

Or not.

[ertyu]

Survivors of SARS show documented chronic fatigue, depression and other psychological issues. There was a paper about survivors in Toronto that were tracked showing them going to therapy at much higher rates than the general population.

[tonyedgecombe]

The only way I can see it making you stronger is against another bout of the virus. There is no upside to getting it early other than getting it before your health care system is overwhelmed. Looking at the stats it seems ten times as many people are hospitalised as die so probably about 20%. I think I'll skip it if I can.

[TheWanderingScholar]

I much rather wait for inoculation via tested vaccines versus the raw virus. One can possibly do long-term damage to you (as mentioned above), run extremely high medical bills, and generally be a PITA. The other is not.

[Jason]

I guess it was only a matter of time - Wuhan Coronavirusgate.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/as ... g-news-bar

[ertyu]

I guess it was only a matter of time - Wuhan Coronavirusgate.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/as ... g-news-bar

it's behind a paywall for me could you extract relevant quotes

[Sclass]

I dunno. Is that story about a student from China? Or an Asian American. There is a big difference.

Indeed the red Chinese students form a clique in the universities.

Hey, how come that whistleblower doctor died? He was 34 and healthy. That’s impossible!

[Jason]

it's behind a paywall for me could you extract relevant quotes

Sorry.

The headline changed over time. Originally it was "Doctor who Warned Chinese Authorities of Wuhan CoronaVirus reported dead.' No explanation provided, so it had a cloak and dagger vibe. It was later revised to indicate that he died of the virus. I guess it shows how things are different than in the US. In the US, he would have been publicly discredited and forced to work in The Animal type locale. In China, they inject you with what they said didn't exist. Either way, along with humanity in general, I'm just happy I'm not a doctor.

[Peanut]

I dunno. Is that story about a student from China? Or an Asian American. There is a big difference.

Indeed the red Chinese students form a clique in the universities.

Hey, how come that whistleblower doctor died? He was 34 and healthy. That’s impossible!

It's both groups that are being 'avoided' for lack of a better term. Unless you pay close attention to style of dress, maybe, it can be difficult to discern who is native-born and who is a foreigner.

Any word on the doctor was was 44 and died in the Philippines? Worrying profile.

[Sclass]

44 year old doctor in the Philippines? That’s a different one. I’m talking about this guy. He was 34.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/06/asia/li- ... index.html

I hope this was just an outlier.

Yup, there’s all kinds of Chinese people. I guess picking them off is as hard as distinguishing a Norwegian exchange student from a blond kid from Indiana. Back in the 90s it was easier to tell but I notice the new people coming over from China have a totally different style.

Pretty soon if this thing is exponential (even though the news shows a quadratic) the disease will no longer have a Asian masked face associated with it. I’m so tired of the stock photos.

[AnalyticalEngine]

After listening to Congress asking disease experts on this yesterday, I've come to the conclusion that these quarantine efforts have zero chance of working. The problem is the world is too porous. You can ban flights from China, but we're still accepting Chinese cargo ships. There are 8 billion people in the world, and the virus is already in multiple countries. There's so many known unknowns here that panicking and throwing people with mild symptoms into quarantine camp only has the potential to make things worse.

The problem is most people don't change their behavior in a pandemic and they just keep spreading it around. I was reading one study where they wanted to see if canceling school would stop SARS from spreading. The researchers found it made no difference because the kids just left the house to meet up at the park instead of school.

All it takes is a handful of people to break quarantine, which is impossible to stop, and the spread will continue. I think we have to assume the virus is already many more places and the difference is we don't know about it yet.

The real personal solution is social distancing. You can't control what other people do, but you can control yourself. I notice I've been hyper aware of things like people coming in sick to work, people shaking my hand, company potluck...and there's no way you're gonna be able to stop people from hugging each other. There's no way we're gonna contain this.