General Corona virus updates

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silentsinger

Momofuku
Jun 23, 2015
21,038
14,457
Don't ask me what but there was some rumour going on about the vaccines being more harmful than the effects so I wasn't vaccinated as a child. I had whooping cough, measles and German measles within a few months.

Finding out that Measles is something that is a potential killer disease is really recent news to me.
 

sparkuri

Pulse On The Finger Of The Community
First 100
Jan 16, 2015
36,842
48,624
Northern hemisphere will get a break from this in the summer. If it's endemic it'll come back hard in the winter. Vaccine before then? Doubtful.

Interestingly Spanish flu did the same but mutated by fall making it much more deadly
This is what Mr. Martinson been saying since the beginning.
And like Dengue, it may be one of those, "if you get it once, don't get it again" situations.
The only great news today was reports of after-recovery.
In all samples tested, zero cultures grew from the sputum of previously infected patients after 8 days.
So to be safe, 10-14 days after a patient recovers they're good.

Now, if only we had better incubation period data.
That is where this is still an absolute monster, and can make the above info relatively useless for layman...
 
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madmav

Posting Machine
Jan 29, 2016
1,998
2,208
the responsible thing to do is to shut down the world.. like 3 months ago.. this would have just been a regional virus for most of east asia and south east asia.. 1 or 2 months of a total global shut down would have snuffed this thing .. instead the world's gonna burn in places that think their first world privilege is going to get them a hospital bed at a moments notice.. there was a reason for why china built a "hospital" within 6 or 7 days.. it was a place to put the elderly, sick and soon to be dead while the main hospitals could try to treat those with a chance of survival.. we can still contain this by enacting regional lock downs and doing way more testing
 

sparkuri

Pulse On The Finger Of The Community
First 100
Jan 16, 2015
36,842
48,624
the responsible thing to do is to shut down the world.. like 3 months ago.. this would have just been a regional virus for most of east asia and south east asia.. 1 or 2 months of a total global shut down would have snuffed this thing .. instead the world's gonna burn in places that think their first world privilege is going to get them a hospital bed at a moments notice.. there was a reason for why china built a "hospital" within 6 or 7 days.. it was a place to put the elderly, sick and soon to be dead while the main hospitals could try to treat those with a chance of survival.. we can still contain this by enacting regional lock downs and doing way more testing
They wanted this thing, it's clear.
Everyone who says they don't trust the government, trusts the government.

I should bump my "Saudi Arabia can crash our market in a day".
If you can find it, you have my permission.

We had it good over here in the U.S. for a loooong time.
This was bound to happen.

Still want to believe this ain't happening in the morning, but this will get much worse before it gets better.
I believe the gears of war are moving...best thing a person can do is find out where Bill Gates is at every moment and take the flight right behind his.
I believe Thursday is gonna be a barn burner, but all this week.
They'll probably quarantine the PNW within 2 weeks, this is my gut feeling.
 

sparkuri

Pulse On The Finger Of The Community
First 100
Jan 16, 2015
36,842
48,624
Case, case,case. cluster, cluster, BOOM

Girl, 7, who lives in The Bronx and is linked to Westchester coronavirus cluster is the YOUNGEST person in the US to be diagnosed - as NYC confirms 20 cases and puts 24 people under mandatory quarantine with 2,019 being told to self-isolate



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Four doctors at Wuhan hospital where coronavirus whistle-blower worked have died of the disease in just over a month



    • Dr Zhu Heping, an eye disease specialist, reportedly died of coronavirus today
    • He was the fourth doctor at Wuhan Central Hospital to lose his life to the virus
    • He worked in the same department as Dr Li Wenliang, who died on February 7
    • The other two medics lost their lives to the infection on March 1 and March 3
------------------


Italians extend lockdown across the WHOLE country after death toll leaps by 97 in one day to 463... as travel is restricted, people are told not to go out at night and nation's premier says 'there won't be a red zone... there'll just be Italy'




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sparkuri

Pulse On The Finger Of The Community
First 100
Jan 16, 2015
36,842
48,624
Iran Has Far More Coronavirus Cases Than It Is Letting On
The surprising number of Iranian government officials succumbing to COVID-19 offers a hint that the disease is far more widespread than the official statistics indicate.




You are standing before a huge barrel of apples. You can’t see the apples, but you can reach in and pick them out. Most are delicious, but a very small number of them are rotten—just about one in 12,000, your friend assures you. You reach in blindly and miraculously pick out a rotten apple. You reach in again and withdraw a whole heaping bushel of apples, maybe 50 in all. Most are good, but when you look closely you see them: one, two, three, four more rotten apples. One rotten apple is an amazing coincidence. Five means your barrel has lots of rotting apples in it and your friend was lying to you.



You are standing before a huge barrel of apples. You can’t see the apples, but you can reach in and pick them out. Most are delicious, but a very small number of them are rotten—just about one in 12,000, your friend assures you. You reach in blindly and miraculously pick out a rotten apple. You reach in again and withdraw a whole heaping bushel of apples, maybe 50 in all. Most are good, but when you look closely you see them: one, two, three, four more rotten apples. One rotten apple is an amazing coincidence. Five means your barrel has lots of rotting apples in it and your friend was lying to you.




The first sign of dishonesty came on February 28, when Masoumeh Ebtekar, one of the country’s vice presidents, announced that she had the virus. Ebtekar is one of the most famous politicians in the country, well known even in the West for her role as a particularly sadistic member of the group that held U.S. diplomats hostage in 1979 in Tehran. Of course, being a notorious sociopath confers no immunity against COVID-19. But here is where the rotting apples come in.

If COVID-19 is so rare—fewer than 400 cases had been reported in Iran by the day she announced her diagnosis—what are the chances that one of the afflicted would be a famous politician? Soon we learned of three other senior officials who not only contracted the virus but were killed by it: Mohammad Mirmohammadi, a member of a senior advisory council to Iran's supreme leader, and Hossein Sheikholeslam and Hadi Khosrowshahi, both former high-level diplomats. Mohammad Sadr, another member of the council, announced his infection last week, as did Ebtekar’s fellow cabinet member Reza Rahmani. Recently, the speaker of parliament said 23 of his fellow members of parliament had tested positive. Two of them, Mohammad Ali Ramezani (February 29) and Fatemeh Rehber (March 7), have died.


That’s a lot of tainted apples, statistically speaking. Why would Iran lie? On February 21, Iran conducted the latest in a series of sham elections in which only government-selected candidates could run for office. To show disapproval, many Iranians refuse to vote, and as participation has dropped, the appearance of electoral legitimacy has dropped as well. Iran’s government told its people that the United States had hyped COVID-19 to suppress turnout, and Tehran vowed to punish anyone spreading rumors about a serious epidemic. Forty-three percent of Iranians voted, unaware that the outbreak had already begun. Quick action could have allowed quarantines to be put in place. Instead Iran greased its own path toward the most catastrophic outbreak in modern history.

Ariana A. Berengaut: Democracies Are Better at Fighting Outbreaks

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.

The average of these estimates is about 2 million, which is about 250 times the official number and 15 times the total cases acknowledged worldwide. According to models, Tuite told me, the point-prevalence of COVID-19 in Canada could rise to 5 to 10 percent of the total population when the epidemic reaches its peak. These numbers, which I have shown to experts, suggest that Iran might be at or near that point.

Does Iran really have 2 million citizens with COVID-19? Perhaps politicians spend more time in public, and are therefore more susceptible to infection; if so, some of the estimates above would overstate the number of cases. Then again, it’s also possible that they were aware of the epidemic earlier and took precautions. In that case, those estimates would understate the number of cases. Edward Kaplan, who studies epidemics at Yale, looked at my numbers and noted that many of Iran’s politicians are old men—the average age of senior advisory council members is 70—who are therefore especially likely to show symptoms of COVID-19, leading to a higher share of sufferers in political circles than in the general population. It’s also possible—perhaps likely—that these numbers over-sample for Tehran and Qom, both cities hammered by the epidemic. COVID-19 is in every Iranian province, but some provinces are earlier in their cycle than others.


Many similar unknowns make these estimates difficult to assess—which is why experts have to attack the problem from multiple angles, with the assumption that errors in one approach do not correlate to errors in the others, and get rounded out in the average. Even if the estimates are off by a lot, they still reveal an outbreak completely out of control, beyond the capacity of Iran or perhaps any country to manage.

Juliette Kayyem: The U.S. Isn’t Ready for What’s About to Happen

The messages coming out of Iran on social media, especially from health-care workers, do little to convince me that my doomsday figures are inaccurate. David N. Fisman, a colleague of Tuite’s at the University of Toronto, notes that the virus reportedly spread after panicked residents of Qom and Tehran fled to smaller cities, thereby sowing COVID-19 all over the country. Circulating on social media are reports that some provinces, such as Mazandaran, have set up roadblocks to keep more people with the infection from spilling into their territory.

The situation the doctors describe is desperate, with nurses wrapping themselves in tablecloths because they have long since run through their supply of proper gear. They swear that the official numbers are wrong. “Just stay overnight in the hospital to find out what I'm talking about,” one wrote. Or if you want to live, go home, and don’t come out until the plague passes. “[Our] society now needs fear more than hope.”


 

FINGERS

Banned
Nov 14, 2019
17,004
19,803
Why have people been let off of planes from Italy into the UK and US without being tested?

The test is not really that effective.

It will detect someone already with a fever but not someone carrying the infection and not showing the simpsons

It's mainly a placebo. But it can't hurt I spose.
 

Hauler

Been fallin so long it's like gravitys gone
Feb 3, 2016
46,888
58,909
Apparently Ohio has 2 confirmed cases.
We are now under a STATE OF EMERGENCY!!!!!

It's been nice knowing you all.