COVID-19 thread

[Ryusenshi]

Shit, my grandmother has Covid19...

[Travis B.]

Ugh that really fucking sucks. I hope she comes out okay.

[MacAnDàil]

Yeah, that's a shame. I hope she gets better.

[Raphael]

Best of luck to your grandmother!

[Ares Land]

Oh man, that sucks. I join everyone in hoping she gets better soon.

[quinterbeck]

So sorry to hear that, hope she recovers soon!

[doctor shark]

Shit, my grandmother has Covid19... :(

Fingers crossed she comes out of it fine...


Random observation: It’s a striking contrast to see how different the closures are here in the Netherlands compared to in Luxembourg. Perhaps unsurprisingly, restaurants aren’t open except for take-away and hair salons are closed, just like in the Grand Duchy. On the other hand, most clothing stores, electronics retailers, and the like are open, but with limits as to the number of customers allowed in the store (often it’s like 5-10)… and no mask requirements, which is very odd. (The recommended distance from other people is also lower: 1.5 m compared to 2.0 m.)

[alice]

Shit, my grandmother has Covid19...

I wish her a full and speedy recovery.



In non-Covid news, Boris has had a baby! Is there nothing this man cannot do?

[chris_notts]

In non-Covid news, Boris has had a baby! Is there nothing this man cannot do?

I thought he looked like he'd been gaining weight recently...

[zompist]

Some fun facts, for certain values of fun.

Covid-19 deaths in the US as of today: 63,800

US deaths in Vietnam War: 58,220

All US gun deaths in 2018, including suicides: 39,221

Automobile deaths last year: 38,800

Flu deaths 2018-19 season: 34,200

US deaths due to terrorism since 1995: 3,658

An important caveat: testing and reporting are still inadequate, and the true death toll is likely much higher. Analyses of excess deaths from New York suggest that official reports are only catching half of the real death toll.

Also worth noting: Only about 7000 flu cases, IIRC, were actually marked as such on death certificates. The CDC number is intended to record people who died of the flu, not the vagaries of coroners. The Covid numbers work the same way, but the data is not all in.

Oh, one more interesting number. New domestic cases in South Korea yesterday: 0. Something to think about when people try to say the only alternatives are permanent lockdown and "opening up the economy" without testing so millions of people die.

[Moose-tache]

This Healthline article is a little old, but does a good job of outlining what exactly caused the two countries to differ so wildly. Healthline's bottom line: early testing made all the difference. The US closed travel from China early, and eventually implemented many of the same quarantine measures (except cellphone tracking, which Koreans were more willing to tolerate than Americans), and while the President did lie recently about testing, technically the US has tested a larger fraction of its population. The main difference was that tests were available in RoK from the first week of February, but not in the US until near the end of the month. Mid-February was the beginning of community transmission in both countries, which means only Korea could accurately track and contain infection for the first few weeks of spread and exponential growth. By the end of the month, Korea had tested about thirty times as many people, in absolute numbers. Missing that critical ~three week window, according to Healthline, is the main reason why the US is in such a worse situation than Korea today.

As RoK health officials have pointed out, there is no reason why much of their response couldn't have been replicated. It wouldn't have required socialized medicine. Korea has a national health insurance plan, but most of the companies and hospitals that worked with the government to make that wave of early testing happen were privately owned. Compared to Canada or the UK, two countries who have also struggled to imitate Korea's success, the Korean healthcare system is downright conservative. So we can draw broad, society-level conclusions about "collectivism" or "individuality" or "socialism," but really, all it really comes down to is the fact that the Korean government and health sector reacted in time, and the American one didn't. We could have easily done it, even with the institutions we have in place. We've seen Democratics (H1N1) and Republicans (SARS) get it right before. But the particular people in those institutions this time around failed. This is what you get when the people in charge slash budgets and downplay dangers that might make them look bad. We have marketeers and narcissists running our government, and quelle surprise, it's not working.

[Ryusenshi]

Shit, my grandmother has Covid19...

Thankfully, she has fully recovered now. They detected the virus in her bloodstream, but she wasn't really sick beyond fever and coughing. We think the virus got afraid of her bad temper.

[Pabappa]

Im glad to hear that. Thanks for keeping us in the loop.

[Travis B.]

That's good to hear!

[Linguoboy]

So what's the pool look like now for First US Cabinet Member to Be Diagnosed?

[alynnidalar]

Pence seems like the obvious frontrunner, but if we exclude him then I'm going to go with Mnuchin. Just feels right to me.

[Linguoboy]

Pence seems like the obvious frontrunner, but if we exclude him then I'm going to go with Mnuchin. Just feels right to me.

He does because his refusal to wear those gay-making masks has gotten so much coverage. But I don't know if some other Cabinet member has been just as fragilely asserting his masculinity and it hasn't made the headlines.

[Moose-tache]

Mike Pence is uniquely suited to avoiding Corona virus. He swore off NFL games ages ago, and doesn't go within 6 feet of any woman who is not his wife. Wilbur Ross is probably the oldest person in the cabinet, so that's a decent bet. But he mostly lives on a giant ranch in the middle of nowhere. Ag Secretary and human soft-boiled egg Sonny Perdue would be another good candidate for most vulnerable. Alex Azar, and a handful of other cabinet members who actually leave the house are probably putting themselves at greater risk. But my money is on Mike Pence getting sick last.

[Pabappa]

https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps ... 7b48e9ecf6
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-nc ... in-us.html

The United States might be finally actually really truly genuinely flattening the curve, given that there seems to be a definite weekly pattern where the cases peak around Wednesday and fall on the weekends. There is still a peak today, but it seems remarkably lower than previous ones, so we might be finally turning the corner here.

[chris_notts]

There have been two very different studies in the news recently about what percentage of people have already had corona virus. Preliminary results from testing people in Spain suggested 5% of people there have had it, which would suggest that the true death rate in Spain is about 27k / (47m * 5%) = 1%.

On the other hand, an estimate by the University of Manchester for the UK, which used desktop modelling and did not involve actually testing anyone, suggested 25% of the UK population had already had corona virus. If this were true, then the true UK death rate would be somewhere in the region of 0.2 - 0.3% depending on whether you look at confirmed COVID cases or excess deaths.

Now, I'm much more inclined to trust the Spanish numbers because they were based on actually testing a subset of the population for antibodies, whereas the UK estimate that got the red top papers excited was not. Of course, there might be differences between countries, but given that the UK response has been generally perceived to be bad internationally, can we really be doing 5 times better than Spain when you look at the mortality rate?

Assuming that the Spanish number is broadly correct, we might simplistically expect the death toll if everyone got corona to be:

Spain - 0.46m
UK - 0.66m
USA - 3.3m