The Official Coronavirus Discussion

[EBK]

I just drafted up a long rant about other people.  Now that I've written it and read it over, I feel only slightly better, and I've decided to replace the details of it with a single innocuous (and entirely unrelated) word:

CAULIFLOWER

That is all.  Thanks. 

[jimilee]

Zimbabwe


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[Scruffie]

Irradiated!

[Aentons]

Cucumber Wire Boat

[Scruffie]

Cucumber Wire Boat

Hotdog Lozenge.

[EBK]

I remember back in the before time, in the long long ago, when I was worried about when the first positive COVID-19 case would appear in my city.  There have now been 653 cases, with 20 deaths here.

[culturejam]

I remember back in the before time, in the long long ago, when I was worried about when the first positive COVID-19 case would appear in my city.  There have now been 653 cases, with 20 deaths here.

I've been keeping track with this: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

My state is #2, baby! Wooooo!!

Seriously, though, it's pretty crazy.

[matmosphere]

The curve flattening seems to be effective so far.

[m-Kresol]

The curve flattening seems to be effective so far.

it actually is. Austria - after being the major European infection center (tourist + greedy and stupid tourism owners = spread throughout Europe) - has taken steps before others have done and we have been doing quite well with it. Luckily, our health system never was at maximum capacity and numbers are going down. starting may 1st, the lockdown restrictions (you were basically limited to work, shopping, some forms of sport,...) are lifted. You still need to keep distance and wear annoyingly unnecessary facemasks (according to WHO those are not really too helpful; obviously also not bad...) when shopping or using public transport and gatherings are limited to 10 people.
larger stores and restaurants are allowed to reopen in stages and with limitations.

So far, I think, we were lucky in getting this thing "under control" and preventing the worst. As far as I have read, Austria will be a guinea pig to other European stages to observe how things play out after these next steps.

Stay safe everyone and all the best!

[midwayfair]

I remember back in the before time, in the long long ago, when I was worried about when the first positive COVID-19 case would appear in my city.  There have now been 653 cases, with 20 deaths here.

I've been keeping track with this: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

My state is #2, baby! Wooooo!!

Seriously, though, it's pretty crazy.

Utah's and Nebraska's numbers look super sketchy to me. Over 3,000 active cases but only 45/55 deaths would mean their mortality rate from COVID-19 is almost an order of magnitude lower than everyone else's.

[matmosphere]

I remember back in the before time, in the long long ago, when I was worried about when the first positive COVID-19 case would appear in my city.  There have now been 653 cases, with 20 deaths here.

I've been keeping track with this: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

My state is #2, baby! Wooooo!!

Seriously, though, it's pretty crazy.

Utah's and Nebraska's numbers look super sketchy to me. Over 3,000 active cases but only 45/55 deaths would mean their mortality rate from COVID-19 is almost an order of magnitude lower than everyone else's.

That's strange but I suppose it isn't outside the realm of possibility if they have been effective in keeping their older population safe, and for some reason there has been an outbreak among younger people. My suspicion is that either way those numbers will unfortunately normalize to what we've seen everywhere else within the coming weeks or months.

[gordo]

I can see why Georgia is lifting the lockdown. They have some serious catching up to do.

[benny_profane]

I remember back in the before time, in the long long ago, when I was worried about when the first positive COVID-19 case would appear in my city.  There have now been 653 cases, with 20 deaths here.

I've been keeping track with this: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

My state is #2, baby! Wooooo!!

Seriously, though, it's pretty crazy.

Utah's and Nebraska's numbers look super sketchy to me. Over 3,000 active cases but only 45/55 deaths would mean their mortality rate from COVID-19 is almost an order of magnitude lower than everyone else's.

It's really difficult to draw any meaningful conclusions from comparisons like this. Test administration, autopsy reporting, case diagnosis, etc. are not uniform across the board. Consider, for example, that fevers have been used as a qualifying symptom to receive a test in many locations. Many of the ICU hospitalizations and deaths attributed to COVID-19 in NYC have been with patients exhibiting low or no fever.[1] The CDC's revised list just added six symptoms to reflect growing understanding of the disease. Hopefully this, and the increased administration of tests, will help form a better picture. But, if cases in these states are not being tested due to restrictive administration guidelines, there may be uncounted infections/deaths—particularly in patients with underlying risk factors or other co-morbidity—and a seeming over-representation of infections in younger patients or those without complications.

[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2765184

There are also problems with the antibody tests that are being rolled out. They're being introduced with little to no regulatory oversight. To pick a low-hanging fruit: the prevalence study in Santa Clara, California suggested a mortality rate of 0.12-0.20%. This figure, extrapolated using the confirmed case fatality rate in NYC, infers that the population of NYC is 12.5M (instead of 8.3M). Since that seems wrong, let's dive deeper into what's going on with the study. There was little to no attempt to recruit a random sample. Additionally, the test had a false positive (type I error) CI of 0.1% to 1.7%. Antibodies were identified in 50 of the 3,330 participants (1.5%). This figure lies within the confidence interval. By releasing pre-print findings, they were able to spread this information far and wide without having their methods double-checked. I'm not entirely sure why people are so fixated on 'proving' a lower mortality rate by saying the case fatality rate is artificially high, but there are a lot of folks out there trying to do just that.

So, the point is, this is a novel disease that we still have much to learn about. There's very little consistency of test administration, monitoring, and surveillance by different governments and other authorities. This all makes comparative analysis (beyond maybe time series within a particular region) rather fraught. And that's certainly cause for concern when wide-sweeping policy decisions are based on these shaky foundations.

[gordo]

You sort of hit the nail on the head here.  Which is why the media is having such a field day with this.  I'm hardly pro or anti media and realize that you have to keep people engaged but not panicked but there's no real base line to report against.

[alanp]

Interesting wrinkle released lately, the air-pollution figures tend to go with a higher mortality rate. Early days for data, though, as has been said.