COVID-19

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den18
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Re: COVID-19

Post by den18 »

theanimal wrote:
Mon Mar 09, 2020 8:09 pm
@Den18- The authors of the paper concluded that they think it could travel in an enclosed space like a building with air conditioning. So it seems like as long as there is air movement, the virus can travel over a relatively extended (30 min) period of time. They did conclude that it was not only important to wash hands but to have/wear a mask as well.
Thanks. Do you know what the scientists were referring to when they said "face masks"? Did the people just wear normal surgical masks or are people in China actually wearing full N95 masks? It is interesting that the two people wearing masks were not infected.

theanimal
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Re: COVID-19

Post by theanimal »

No, I don't know and I'm having trouble finding the original paper. At least from images I've seen it appears most in Chinese wear the surgical masks but it is my understanding that these aren't sufficient.

den18
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Re: COVID-19

Post by den18 »

theanimal wrote:
Mon Mar 09, 2020 8:32 pm
No, I don't know and I'm having trouble finding the original paper. At least from images I've seen it appears most in Chinese wear the surgical masks but it is my understanding that these aren't sufficient.
Yes, that was my understanding as well. The footage was from before it was declared an emergency, so I also think the masks were just normal surgical masks. It is possible the normal masks offer some, but not full, protection. If nothing else, that would be helpful. Both masked passengers not being infected does seem relevant. If the general public get into the habit of wearing surgical masks, because they offer some protection, I think that would help.

Jin+Guice
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Jin+Guice »

Someone who does something more doctor or nurse like would probably know better than me what is sufficient, but the hospital protocol where I work (which hasn't had any cases yet) is to wear N95 masks for patients with COVID-19.

classical_Liberal
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Re: COVID-19

Post by classical_Liberal »

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-nc ... ntrol.html

N95 plus contact and eye protection.

theanimal
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Re: COVID-19

Post by theanimal »

Numbers in Iran are estimated to possibly be at 2 million infected...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... ms/607663/

From the article
Remember that the official number of cases is 6,566. Yet a variety of other indicators suggest that far more people in Iran have become infected:

-A paper by the University of Toronto’s Ashleigh Tuite and others noted that, by February 23, cases of Iranian origin had surfaced in Canada, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates. Given the volume of air travel between Iran and these countries, Tuite’s team estimated how many native COVID-19 cases must have occurred in Iran to produce one case each in these other countries. Their estimate for February 23: 18,300. Since the epidemic reached 100 cumulative cases, the official numbers have doubled roughly every three days. If that rate held, the estimate as of today would be 586,000.

-On March 3, 23 out of 290 members of parliament—about 7.9 percent—had the disease. (Unlike ordinary people, these MPs probably had reliable access to diagnosis. State media insisted they contracted the disease not from one another, but from their home districts.) The rate of infection of parliamentarians would, if applied to Iran’s total population, come to 6.4 million cases.

-Let’s consider the other politicians. The senior advisory council has experienced two known deaths out of 39 members; the cabinet has two known infections out of 30. Even if no other council or cabinet members had COVID-19, that’s an infection rate of 5.8 percent. That would mean an estimate of 4.7 million.

-A government website invited Iranians to submit details of symptoms they were experiencing. After 2 million responses, about 9 percent reported COVID-19 symptoms. In the United States, among those whose symptoms and history have led them to be tested for COVID-19, about 10 percent have eventually tested positive. If that rate holds, Iran would have 730,000 cases.

-On March 4 and 5, two evacuation flights of Chinese citizens were allowed to leave Tehran for China’s Gansu province. Chinese authorities were of course wary of introducing more coronavirus carriers into the country, so they tested passengers and found 11 COVID-19 cases out of 311 passengers. If Chinese people in Iran got the disease at the same rate as Iranians, that suggests a rate of 3.5 percent, for a total of 5.7 million at the time of the flight. Tuite, the researcher who studied earlier flights, cautions that this number would undercount total cases, because it represents the number of cases on that plane at that time (the “point prevalence”) and not total cumulative cases—which would be higher, about 8 million. “It’s alarming, and I have a hard time wrapping my head around the implications of this,” she told me. “But I think it’s possible.”

-Seven of the 21 COVID-19 patients in British Columbia had traveled recently in Iran. Finding a denominator for this number is difficult, but we can try. British Columbia has about 50,000 Iranian Canadians, and let’s assume they visit Iran, say, once every four years on average and stay for a month. That means in any given month, about 1,000 return from Iran. That suggests a total COVID-19 burden of 590,000 cases.

-On March 8, health authorities in Golestan province declared that hospitals there were full. Golestan has about 2.2 percent of Iran’s population, and if we assume it has the same percentage of its hospital beds, the province should have 2,600 hospital beds. Let’s assume that at least some people with other conditions are already in those beds and that roughly 2,000 beds are now filled with COVID-19 patients. About 15 percent of COVID-19 patients need a hospital stay. That suggests that 13,000 people—or about 0.8 percent of the province’s population—have COVID-19 in Golestan. If that rate applies countrywide, it yields 610,000 infections, which suggests a cumulative total of about 1 million infections—if we include those who have already recovered. Finally, because hospitalizations are a lagging indicator, double that number to account for growth in the past week: 2 million.

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Seppia
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Re: COVID-19

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Will
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Will »

Working from home today. My wife developed a dry cough yesterday, I almost had to force her to stay home until we're sure it's no COVID-19, she wanted to go to work. Most likely it's just a cold, since she has no fever or other symptoms, but I needed to insist we should not take any risks. So I convinced her in the end and we are staying home today with our daughter. We're receiving a surprising amount of (gentle) pushback for this - my boss sent me an email that this isn't the official health policy and her boss only sent her a very short and not very friendly message.
We're not afraid of getting ill, being in our mid thirties and very healthy, but we're afraid of spreading it to other much more fragile people like the caretakers of our daughter, who have severe pre-existing conditions. We're at least doing our part in trying to cooperate in not spreading it, but when I hear stories about other people's behavior in the Netherlands it scares me. For example: A couple of colleagues of my wife came to work while being ill yesterday. Also, even if you test positive for COVID-19 in the Netherlands you are usually allowed to self-quarantine, which means you are allowed to go to the supermarket and buy food yourself. I do not expect the average person to be able to handle this in a sufficiently safe way. Also, I even heard rumors that the wife of the first COVID-19 casualty in the Netherlands wasn't even tested, though they still do not know what the origin of his infection was.
This is going to get much worse here before it gets better.

Riggerjack
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Riggerjack »

Yeah, I sent my gently worded freak out email to my boss, yesterday. I was asking about WFH, since he forwarded an email from the "emergency response council" last week saying it was a possibility.

He was unimpressed. Until forced, he's going to fight WFH for anyone not very high risk, ie, not his responsibility.

Locally, we are about 2 weeks behind Italy. About the same number of confirmed cases, and more deaths than the Italy of 2 weeks ago.

I have a coworker on a cruise ship right now, and one about to fly off to her vacation, on Friday.

It seems I work for a company full of people who can't do math, or read a chart, and desperately don't want to think about this, or plan for a change. :roll:

Lucky C
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Lucky C »

Normalcy bias. There was a meme floating around depicting people's COVID-19 reactions vs. a bell curve of intelligence. High intelligence right tail = people looking at the scientific evidence, R0, CFR etc. and preparing accordingly like most of us, left tail = people running to the most crowded store in town to panic buy toilet paper because other people are panic buying toilet paper, and the middle 1 or 2 standard deviations are the normies who think anyone concerned is just another panicked TP hoarder while saying it's "just a flu" or a "hoax" that the media is over-hyping.

den18
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Re: COVID-19

Post by den18 »

China is conducting trials of high-dose vitamin C to decrease mortality of the severe cases:

https://www.medicinenet.com/script/main ... key=228745

Shangai had had some success. Interested in the results of this. No current treatment, and the vaccine being months away at minimum, would mean this could be an important discovery.

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Ego
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Ego »

Covid data with date offsets. The U.S. is 11.5 days behind Italy. Notice the downward trend of South Korea. Japan is testing on par with some regions of the U.S. so that may explain their numbers.

Image

jacob
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Re: COVID-19

Post by jacob »

Nice graph, but it should be adjusted for population.

CS
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Re: COVID-19

Post by CS »

Why adjust for population? Population density might be a better differentiator, but for the most part, humans mostly live much the same.

chenda
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Re: COVID-19

Post by chenda »

@CS I think the figures are absolute rather than per capita.

jacob
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Re: COVID-19

Post by jacob »

On second thought, if at this point breakouts are still considered "point sources", the numbers should not be adjusted. In that case, "Italy" is just another word for "Lombardy". However, the US has three-ish point sources, namely Washington, New York, and California, and splitting the numbers would give a more accurate county that adding them up and calling them "USA"... because they didn't start at the same time.

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fiby41
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Re: COVID-19

Post by fiby41 »

39 confirmed cases.

Riggerjack
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Riggerjack »

@jacob

Yeah, that's why I was using numbers for Washington. Infection on the diamond princess, an TN are not really relevant. That's how I came up with the idea that Italy is 15 days ahead of us.

There are other confounding factors, housing density, etc. But I am watching Italy's timeline, to see how close we track.

On a personal level, this has forced me to start considering just quitting my job, and going semi ERE. In 3 years of manning my desk, I hit full FI.

But I seem to be losing my patience with the unthinking herd and herdsmen.

George the original one
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Re: COVID-19

Post by George the original one »

den18 wrote:
Tue Mar 10, 2020 9:47 am
China is conducting trials of high-dose vitamin C to decrease mortality of the severe cases:
Oh, man, don't tell me Linus Pauling was right!?!

George the original one
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Re: COVID-19

Post by George the original one »

Oregon could run out of testing kits tomorrow.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medica ... r-BB10ZZ26
The state has tested only 179 people for COVID-19, with 14 of those confirmed or presumed to have the disease. An additional 52 people have submitted specimens to the state lab and are awaiting results.

But what is clear is that Oregon’s strained testing capacity has kept the number of cases artificially low. Health officials have readily conceded that there are an unknown number of people in Oregon who have the disease but their mild symptoms don’t warrant testing from the stockpile of limited supplies.

“In addition to these 14 cases,” Sidelinger said, “there are likely many other cases in the state of Oregon that we haven’t identified.”

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