outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

Iran now done good:

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/coronavirus-iran-releases-85000-prisoners-effort-combat-virus

Saw somewhere that the number of cases are flatlining in Italy

Poor choice of words!

total cases in italy increased 13% from 24,747 3/15 to 27,980 on 3/16.

the day before that, the increase was 17%. so i guess...that's improvement?

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/

Looks like slowing down/falling on daily new cases and daily deaths.

Yeah the cases are decreasing, I believe..

that's uh...really good news isn't it?

the number of daily _new_ cases in in italy slightly decreased, for one day.

https://i.imgur.com/xPHizeR.png

daily new cases also decreased on march 2, march 10, and march 13, so i think we'd want to wait for a few days to see if there's a downward trend

I didn't realize you could click on certain countries there. Iran shows improvement. Spain and the U.S. are not good. They don't have daily breakdowns for Canada.

Don't know what to do with the info, but Cuomo reported that NY state (for example) has tested 10,000 people, which is reportedly twice what was reported just yesterday. So testing is ramping up, at least in some places, to some degree, which will mean at least a spike in confirmed cases (of course).

one would hope that extreme isolation + quarantine measures would bring down the curve! that's why we're doing it!

the best single graph resource that i've found: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus#trajectories-since-the-100th-confirmed-case

(it's interactive as well, so you can hover over particular countries to the see the growth rates over time)

((clemenza, elsewhere on that same page there's a daily breakdown of Canada's cases)

You’re probably not going to see a big drop until the last lagging incubation period cases show up - you’d expect to see the same drop in China. Then what?

oops, posted all this in the wrong thread.

https://i.imgur.com/HNfXfZp.png

this is why i'm hesitant to think that italy is approaching any sort of peak for new cases. their growth rate is in the same range as many other countries right now.

(a growth rate of 28% per day will double the cases every 3rd day. a growth rate of 42% per day will double the cases every 2nd day)

(((((of course, lack of testing availability damages the integrity of this kind of analysis, but it's the best thing we have at the moment, i think)))))

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/combination-of-two-anti-hiv-drugs-proved-crucial-in-coronavirus-treatment-rajasthan-official/articleshow/74653762.cms

Is this good news? This feels like good news, even if four is a very small sample size.

https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/coronavirus-health-ministry-recommends-anti-hiv-drug-combination-lopinavir-ritonavir-case-to-case-basis-1656488-2020-03-17

Apparently not appropriate for all cases according to this but still.

Deaths seemed to take a big jump today. I check the worldometer way too often--they hit 7,500 around the time I got up at 9:00, now they're almost at 7,900. That's a much faster rate than previous days.

It's going to be positively shocking the first time the US's infection total triples.

Matt that’s touched on in the BBC doc about Wuhan. AIDS patients there are actually donating their retrovirals to coronavirus patients, even though it’s not an approved treatment, and there’s an unofficial network of delivery guys who collect the donations and bring them to the infected. Or at least there was, before everyone was ordered to stay indoors completely.

I post this not because it's Tom Hanks and his wife particularly, but more as someone who wants to hear more about people who test positive and come out of it okay. It just makes everything less frightening. (I know from statistics the truth of that already, but concrete examples help.)

http://www.cnn.com/2020/03/16/entertainment/tom-hanks-rita-wilson-released-hospital-coronavirus/index.html

couple of interviews with people who've had it

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-51876080

https://www.talktomira.com/post/how-does-it-feel-to-have-coronavirus

What can be done with early, widespread testing: Virologist Andrea Crisanti essentially halted transmission in the population 3000 municipality of Vo 'Euganeo, by mass swabbing everyone. Only 10% of positives were symptomatic, and as of the 2nd round of tests, the 7 or 8 positives were quarantined.

Discovered via this tweet:

According to Crisanti, the director of the virology lab of U Padua, as little as 10% of #COVID2019 carriers show any symptoms at all. He sampled repeatedly the entire 3k+ population of Vo ', one of the initial clusters.

— Andrea Matranga (@andreamatranga) March 17, 2020

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2020/mar/17/coronavirus-live-news-updates-uk-us-australia-europe-france-italy-who-self-isolation-travel-bans-borders-latest-update?page=with:block-5e712ae48f085e564ad85fe4#block-5e712ae48f085e564ad85fe4

This says there's a hope of a vaccine by the autumn. Can they really do it that quickly? Or does that mean they could have *a* vaccine, but that mass-production would take longer still? Am pinning my hopes on it now anyway.

Testing alone takes months. There's months of clinical trials ahead that just began for the vaccine that's currently being looked at, in addition to mass production timing

from the US Naval Institute:

The Pentagon is starting the process of activating Navy hospital ships USNS Mercy (T-AH-19) and USNS Comfort (T-AH-20) as part of the Defense Department’s domestic response to the spreading COVID-19 virus, USNI News has learned.

“We’ve already given orders to the Navy… to lean forward in terms of getting them ready to deploy,” Secretary of Defense Mark Esper told reporters on Tuesday.

The ships will now begin the several days-long process of bringing aboard medical staff and equipment ahead of deploying along the East and West coasts, a defense official confirmed to USNI News on Tuesday afternoon.

https://news.usni.org/2020/03/17/pentagon-preparing-navy-hospital-ships-mercy-comfort-for-coronavirus-response

Yes, there's a vaccine entering human trials in Seattle now, but those won't be finished for 12-18 months, then I'm guessing tack manufacturing time on.

If the German vaccine is further along, that's great. Not clear on that.

xp

IMO give us the cocaine from Sorry to Bother You that turns you into horse person. I want to be horse now

xp to my comment above. That 10% figure was Andrea Matranga's interpretation. An immunologist Romagnani in a letter on the same Vo 'Euganeo study writess (Google translate):

the vast majority of people who become infected, between 50 and 75%, are completely asymptomatic, but however, it represents a formidable source of contagion. In Vò, in fact, with the isolation of infected subjects, the total number of patients fell from 88 to 7 (i.e. about 10 times) within 7-10 days

Which is why general isolation works/is necessary, you basically have to assume everyone a symptomatic has it and that every interaction is a chance to pick it up or pass it on.

I would hope we get to a point ( like China) where the initial outbreak has been contained and we can focus on imported infection, but it seems like you have to be in lock down for a while for that to be possible. Also testing like hell but there aren’t going to be enough tests for a while.

I don't understand why my fellow Floridians don't understand that.

"I'm fine! I don't feel sick!"

That Italy study is really promising, if accurate. But that also means the only way to stop it or its spread is to (duh) pretty strictly self isolate, which, if a drive I just took is any indication, is a long way away from happening here.

people are voting in your state right now.

the alternative to social distancing is extensive testing, which, uh, we're also not doing.

Oh, I'm not even talking about people out voting (apparently lots of polls struggled for judges). I'm just talking about all the people I saw out and about. Fewer than usual, sure, but certainly not all taking extra or any precautions. For every group I saw standing conspicuously far apart from one another, there was a group of teens clustered as usual. On the plus side, despite St. Patrick's I didn't really see much action around all the nearby Irish bars.

if I'm understanding this correctly, this virus was probably here a month earlier than previously thought, and there are probably tens of thousands of people who have contracted it and recovered without really knowing anything was up?

Schools, gyms, pubs, workplaces all still open as normal. I won’t be changing my behaviours, with the exception of keeping away from anyone old or vulnerable. How am I going to catch it if I don’t go out? 🤷‍♀️

— Nikki Hesford (@NikkiHesford) March 17, 2020

It's just dawned on me that we're probably only days away from the first TV advert heartwarmingly referencing social distancing.

I'd like to apologise in advance for my murderous rampage.

Please confine you rampage to you own four walls #socialddistancing

my sister had a virus that involved a high fever, trouble breathing, lungs aching from coughing several weeks ago

I’m pretty sure it was influenza b, but she’d been traveling to DC so who knows?

It's just dawned on me that we're probably only days away from the first TV advert heartwarmingly referencing social distancing.

I'd like to apologise in advance for my murderous rampage.

My 5 year old niece lives in NJ and has pneumonia. She's been tested for covid--just as a precaution, they said--and my brother says they'll have results in 3-4 days. I'll post here when I hear back

In other news, I have a friend on Twitter who insists she is going to yoga tonight

there are already quite a few covid podcasts out there. I loved this tweet, though I should say I am also a podcaster, of a sort.

I know this time of self isolation is hard and scary for people but however bad you are feeling- please, please don’t consider starting your own podcast

Straight men under the age of 35 are particularly vulnerable to this and we all need to be vigilant of the dangers x

— Nicola Coughlan (@nicolacoughlan) March 16, 2020

DW: Iran, its dire.

supposedly the US had 1,748 new cases yesterday, as opposed to 983 the day before.

should be thought of exclusively as new proven/reported cases, of course

of course. it's just like when in Jurassic Park when they only found the 'extra' dinosaurs when they started looking for them.

hard to tell how much is true exponential increase vs people who were already infected who just hadn't been tested prior.

one kind of obvious thing i've been thinking about, and was just reminded of in the bold part above - is this the first time that a crisis has hit pretty much the entire world at the same time? speaking of WWII, maybe that was the last global-scale event of this nature?

AIDS

Toba supervolcano at 75 ka. The years 536-542: Icelandic volcano + Illopango volcano + Plague of Justinian. Black death of 1346-1353. Great Influenza of 1918.

WWII was perhaps the last global event of this magnitude, but there were places like Latin America and Subsaharan Africa where it mostly effected trade. Whereas the Great Influenza of 1918 was devastating pretty much everywhere, on all inhabited continents, and from Polynesia to remote Inuit villages.

Wales to shut all schools from Friday