outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

i think you're forgetting that the people who have had it and showed no symptoms can (and are) still passing it on to others

My understanding is that even if you've already had it and have had the antibody test to prove it, you might still be able to transmit the virus via contact with people who haven't, so there are dangers to it. Also if some people start treating it as a reason to break the lockdown then people who haven't had it will just start going out again.

(xpost)

That is partly how recovery from ancient and medieval plagues worked - eventually they burned out because they killed the people they were going to kill, and the people left were the people who were immune to begin with or who had gotten it and recovered.

obv we're not there yet on testing or understanding, and most of us are not comfortable with a pure Darwinian shakeout

i'd like to think that we can pull off a pandemic response in the U.S. that is superior to those of the middle ages, but..."we'll see what happens"

Where have any of you read that even if you've already had it and have had the antibody test to prove it, you are still able to transmit? I assumed, as with any other illness, once you had it and have recovered, you're not contagious. I mean, this isn't something you carry around with you forever, is it? You'd confirm you had it, wait a week or so, then yeah, there'd have to be a follow-up test to see if it's still in your system. But if you know you had it, whether or not it's out of your system, that's a big step forward for control, imo. Because you can start the virtual countdown to safety. As opposed to just waiting around to see if you *might* get sick, whether or not you actually are and don't know it or never get sick at all, which is how we're all treating it (appropriately) right now.

(Any other comparable illness, that is. Not, like, herpes or something.)

From the piece:

Much about the coming years, including the frequency, duration, and timing of social upheavals, depends on two properties of the virus, both of which are currently unknown. First: seasonality. Coronaviruses tend to be winter infections that wane or disappear in the summer. That may also be true for SARS-CoV-2, but seasonal variations might not sufficiently slow the virus when it has so many immunologically naive hosts to infect. “Much of the world is waiting anxiously to see what—if anything—the summer does to transmission in the Northern Hemisphere,” says Maia Majumder of Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital.

Second: duration of immunity. When people are infected by the milder human coronaviruses that cause cold-like symptoms, they remain immune for less than a year. By contrast, the few who were infected by the original SARS virus, which was far more severe, stayed immune for much longer. Assuming that SARS-CoV-2 lies somewhere in the middle, people who recover from their encounters might be protected for a couple of years. To confirm that, scientists will need to develop accurate serological tests, which look for the antibodies that confer immunity. They’ll also need to confirm that such antibodies actually stop people from catching or spreading the virus. If so, immune citizens can return to work, care for the vulnerable, and anchor the economy during bouts of social distancing.

Not sure anyone knows for sure yet but I've seen a few leading epidemiologists say that they assume it will be like other coronaviruses and you won't be able to transmit once you've had it and fully recovered

From that we will need to develop testing for immunity, and a long-term capacity to administer these for people.

alright team, sounds like we have a plan. now let's get out there and Execute!

(^things people in the federal government should never say, because it freaks out conservatives)

Over half a million positives worldwide now. The worldometer site doesn't have a global graph, so I don't know if the curve is getting better, or--because of China's early resolution (now precarious?)--if such a graph would be instructive.

I see a graph here: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ ?

Calculate how much of the stimulus check you'll earn: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/coronavirus-stimulus-check-calculator/

once you had it and have recovered, you're not contagious

I think this is generally true, but "recovered" is a slippery thing. Judging from what I've heard through the coworker pipeline, returning to work the day after your fever breaks is... not sufficient

When people are infected by the milder human coronaviruses that cause cold-like symptoms, they remain immune for less than a year. By contrast, the few who were infected by the original SARS virus, which was far more severe, stayed immune for much longer.

I'm assuming the difference is "common cold" coronaviruses mutate a lot more frequently than SARS. From what I've heard, covid-19 is more like SARS in that regard.

https://nextstrain.org/ncov?c=country&l=radial&m=div

the overall evolutionary divergence in full genome sequences of SARS-CoV-2 is low so far and non-synonymous mutations seem to be rare so far, and (based on just like looking around) non-synonymous mutations to the spike protein are rarer still.

Aside from the kids thing the fact it isn't mutating quickly is pretty much the only good thing about this scenario.

I'm dangerously close to doing an Engineer Guy Medium here but someone explain to me why New York state can't buy the patent for one of the extant antibody tests and start producing them and identifying the immune to let them help

— 'Weird Alex' Pareene (@pareene) March 26, 2020

as i was saying https://t.co/69X0HFssho

— 'Weird Alex' Pareene (@pareene) March 26, 2020

*charges*
*unleashes*

In a time of uncertainty and fear I’m reluctant to pass on startling information based on first pass looks at statistics. But this seems sufficiently compelling and concrete to merit our attention. Here is an article from the Italian daily Corriere Della Sera. It’s written by the mayor of Nembro, a town in the northern hot zone, and health care entrepreneur, both of whom are physicists.

Here are the relevant statistics.

Nembro, in the province of Bergamo, is the town most hard hit in per capita terms by COVID-19. Currently the town has 31 deaths attributed to COVID-19. But when the two authors looked at the total number of deaths registered in the town in January, February and March and compared it to the average for that period in previous years they found the number was dramatically larger. 158 deaths have been registered in the town during that period this year compared to an average of 35 in previous years.

The math is simple: the average of 35 plus the 31 COVID-19 deaths gets you to 66. But the town has recorded almost 100 more deaths on top of that. As the authors say, “The difference is enormous and cannot be a simple statistical deviation.”

The authors applied the same analysis to two other towns and in both came up with anomalous deaths 6.1 times the number officially attributed to COVID-19. The ratio was even higher for Bergamo as a whole.

As I said, these numbers are so stark that I don’t think you need a lot of training in statistics to see that something very big is happening with these numbers and it is almost certainly tied to COVID-19.

This is one company who had a plan and put it into action (they can't figure out the spike in toilet paper lol)

https://www.texasmonthly.com/food/heb-prepared-coronavirus-pandemic/

xp

here's the accompanying chart:

https://i.imgur.com/qf17gBu.jpg

the implications is that covid-19 seems to be directly or indirectly causing 6x the deaths that are officially counted as "deaths". some of those are deaths that were never diagnosed as coronavirus. but some of them are also likely indirectly caused by poorer quality treatment for non-coronavirus patients. damn.

re: mutation, bottom line of a recent thread by one of the leading minds rn:

So, my prediction is that we should see occasional mutations to the spike protein of #SARSCoV2 that allow the virus to partially escape from vaccines or existing "herd" immunity, but that this process will most likely take years rather than months. 12/12

— Trevor Bedford (@trvrb) March 25, 2020

BBC: Mexicans demand crackdown on Americans crossing the border

so I had assumed most people in charge of towns were doing this. Knowing that places like ny and ca have stopped testing severe cases/lack of tests, you can do a lookback to find closer to a real number. xpost

I see a graph here: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

I was thinking of a bar graph, like they have for individual countries, where it's easy to compare daily numbers. The logarithmic graph does seem to be...stable (?), if not flattening.

The second chart here is a bar graph that plots global daily deaths over time (days):

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-toll/

You can hover over the data points for the data.

The past two days are relatively flat but comparing 2 data points this early in the curve opens up a matter of sample size margins... for example, May 21 & 22 were nearly identical before steeply ramping up again on the 23rd.

The bleakness is that as of yesterday we're losing victims at a rate of 100/hour around the globe... here in the US, it's a rate of 10/hour. Completely unnerving and catastrophic to poke your head into the data, which I try not to... especially the projections.

trends are easier to see in a graph with some smoothing, like three-day averaging, but when things are moving this fast it also understates the latest data.

the implications is that covid-19 seems to be directly or indirectly causing 6x the deaths that are officially counted as "deaths".

"Indirectly" does a lot of heavy lifting here, doesn't it?

...i guess? (not sure if you read the rest of the little TPM blurb on it which goes into the indirect stuff.

Are mortality rates over baseline showing up as much higher than is accounted for by reported covid-19 deaths? If so, then it would be reasonable to suspect some of that increase is due to indirect covid-19 involvement.

yep - that seems to be the case in multiple cities in italy.

Nembro, in the province of Bergamo, is the town most hard hit in per capita terms by COVID-19. Currently the town has 31 deaths attributed to COVID-19. But when the two authors looked at the total number of deaths registered in the town in January, February and March and compared it to the average for that period in previous years they found the number was dramatically larger. 158 deaths have been registered in the town during that period this year compared to an average of 35 in previous years.

The math is simple: the average of 35 plus the 31 COVID-19 deaths gets you to 66. But the town has recorded almost 100 more deaths on top of that. As the authors say, “The difference is enormous and cannot be a simple statistical deviation.”

The authors applied the same analysis to two other towns and in both came up with anomalous deaths 6.1 times the number officially attributed to COVID-19. The ratio was even higher for Bergamo as a whole.

it makes sense to me that some of the additional deaths would be from unreported/diagnosed COVID (direct deaths from COVID, in other words) and some would be deaths caused by the downstream ripple effects (indirect causes) from COVID - poorer quality treatment, deaths of despair, an ambulance not showing up as quickly as they normally would, etc.

When you see those numbers for flu, they are always counting indirect deaths.

if anyone has access to weekly death stats for a large municipality in the US, (including weekly stats from the same week last year at this time, in march 2019), please post a link! i didn't find any sort of usable data for Chicago, but maybe other cities keep better death statistics and publish them publicly.

as marshall mentioned in his post, it seems crazy that this analysis hasn't (apparently) been done for U.S. cities yet. i'd like to try to replicate the study from the italian cities, only for Seattle, NYC, Chicago, etc.

basically we'd just need data for a current outbreak city -the current week vs this week in 2019 - see how the total deaths compare, then see how much of that increase can be attributed to official covid19 deaths.

About 8,000 people die in the US every February and every March.

Sorry -- EACH DAY in February and March, of course.

and about 212 people, nationally, died on 3/25.

so basically, if we had data for national Total Daily deaths (deaths from any cause) from 3/25, we could do a rough back of the envelope comparison to italy.

e.g., if there were 9200 deaths, that would be comparable to the situation in those italian cities, because there would be 1200 more deaths than usual (9,200 - the average 8,000), and only 212 would be officially attributed to COVID, while the other ~1000 would be the undiagnosed covid19 deaths + indirect deaths

SEIU finds 39 million N95 masks

https://www.seiu-uhw.org/press/union-locates-massive-supply-of-n95-masks/

musta been a helluva truck

The New York Times worked with a doctor to film 72 hours at Elmhurst, the hospital that's been hardest hit by the coronavirus outbreak in NY. The result is an extraordinary piece of video journalism

Everybody should watch this: https://t.co/AnaBqSwK81 (by @robinnyc7/@rarecanary)

— Brian M. Rosenthal (@brianmrosenthal) March 25, 2020

re above

Queens doctors telling us random people brought into the ER for car accidents incidentally have coronavirus is defiantly the scariest thing I've heard all day

— Adam H. Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) March 26, 2020

jeez
to me this is one of the most unsettling and therefore frightening things: the symptoms and victims hit hardest seem so arbitrary

Not gonna lie, I can imagine what would happen if you go into an ER these days and DON'T have at least suspected coronavirus.

"To the back of the line with you! Oh, what's that, you've been shot in the groin and you're missing an arm? Welp, sucks to be you."

Someone from my choir died yesterday after having been sick for weeks having trouble breathing and having temperature swings. She wasn't tested.

I'm sorry Frederik, that's awful

Sorry to hear that, Fred.

That’s awful, sorry to hear that.

Sorry to hear that.