Not with a Bang, but with a Sneeze?

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LarsMac
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Post by LarsMac »

The news out of China lately is that a new bug is on the horizon.

Yesterday in the news 6 people were reported to have died. Today, it is up to 17.

Yesterday it was pretty much contained, and today it has affected four other countries.

An interesting item, the suspected point of origin is a seafood market where "illegal wild animal" transactions took place. I can't even imagine what that means.

Apparently half of the current confirmed cases are health care workers who came in contact with sick individuals.

References in the news mention the SARS epidemic of a few years back.

While this particular outbreak may not be the end of the world, it occurs to me that eventually, we could very likely see just such an event become the final doom of mankind on the planet.

One other note:

President Donald Trump said the situation was "totally under control"

Now, I'm REALLY worried.

I decided to ad the tracking link here:

Wuhan Coronavirus as of 2020/01/29
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Post by spot »

I'm quite impressed at the response in China, they do seem to be open this time round.

And the British managed to test 14 contenders and signed them all unaffected. I'm not sure we'll get through the weekend that way though.
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Post by Bryn Mawr »

The British government are also saying that the danger is low as we are in a good place to control any outbreak.

If it weren’t so serious it would be laughable.
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Post by Saint_ »

Unfortunately, the serious outbreak seems to be right around the corner if history is correct...

Consider the case of Captain Maclear’s rat. This interesting rodent inhabited Christmas Island, a small bit of tropical verdure some two hundred miles south of Java…

Yet such was the luxuriance of the tropical growth that the rats had not attained such numbers as to provide competition among members of the species. The individual rats were extremely well-nourished, and even unduly fat.

In 1903 some new disease sprang up. Because of their crowding and also probably because of the softened condition of the individuals, the rats proved universally susceptible, and soon were dying by thousands. In spite of great numbers, in spite of an abundant supply of food, in spite of a very rapid breeding rate, the species is extinct.


- George R. Stewart. "Earth Abides"
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Post by LarsMac »

the latest on this is that it seems this new Coronavirus is transmittable before symptoms express.

That means that shortly after exposure, and long before anyone knows they're sick, they are wandering about, passing through checkpoints and preparing to share their good fortune with the world in general.

I don't know that this is going to be a major "plague" event, necessarily, but it will prove to be a major PIA for travelers for months to come.

I share home with several people who have marginal - Compromised Immune systems, so I plan to limit my exposure to other humans for the foreseeable future.
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Post by spot »

LarsMac;1529876 wrote: I don't know that this is going to be a major "plague" event, necessarily, but it will prove to be a major PIA for travelers for months to come.




These last couple of days I've started to think that perhaps it might. That early infectious phase is particularly nasty. I'm not convinced it's stoppable unless a mass precautionary vaccine comes on stream. I'll queue up for that one when summer arrives.

"UK government urged to reassure public that NHS is ready for cases within days" is ominously improbable too.

Prof Neil Ferguson, a public health expert at Imperial College, said his “best guess” was that there were 100,000 affected by the virus even though there are only 2,000 confirmed cases so far, mostly in the city of Wuhan in China where the virus first appeared.

“Sooner or later we will get a case,” he said. “There are very large numbers of Chinese tourists across Europe right now. Unless the Chinese manage to control this, and I’m sceptical about whether that is possible, we will get cases here.”

https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... perts-warn

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Post by LarsMac »

several countries are talking about extracting their citizens from Wuhan.

Not that is such a good idea. They have likely already been exposed, and should probably be treated there, in my opinion.
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Post by Bryn Mawr »

LarsMac;1529894 wrote: several countries are talking about extracting their citizens from Wuhan.

Not that is such a good idea. They have likely already been exposed, and should probably be treated there, in my opinion.


Totally agree, the Brit ex-pats in Wutan are complaining like mad that they’ve not been brought home but in isolation there or here they cannot be allowed out to infect the public and why endanger the medical and air crew to move them from isolation in their homes there to isolation in a hospital here.
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Post by tabby »

I saw on our local news that there are 3 people in Virginia recently returned from Wuhan that have been tested for the virus. Luckily, two tested negative and one doesn't have the results back yet. I'm sure there are more out there that probably should be tested but unless it becomes mandatory a lot of people won't volunteer. And even then some will still lay low.
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Post by LarsMac »

So, about a month on, here is a map of the current locations of this bug. Be sure to look at the numbers though, The graphic could be a little intimidating. As a percentage of population, it is still minimal. OF course, if you look at the rate of spread, it might give reason for concern. .. .. I was planning a trip to Japan and China, but think I might just stay home for a while.

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Post by spot »

LarsMac;1529958 wrote: The graphic could be a little intimidating.


I've simplified it.






The blue is the Rest of the World cases, the red very properly is Mainland China and is in hundreds of cases.

A straight line means the disease is unaffected by measures, the degree to which it levels off is the human response by way of masks and isolation.

Is it bending? Maybe? I'm not going to react to a three-day phase. I think that's a higher rate of people now being ill at home instead of getting medical assessment.

We can look again at the end of February and know whether it's going to win. My guess is that it will. Public deployment of the first vaccine other than for medical and military staff and politicians is six months off, and it's the public that are on the graph.

Those two bumps in the red data show the ability of China's central government to control the news, or in this case force the release of news from smaller fry down the food chain.



NOTE: this post originally miscounted in deaths rather than cases, I have corrected the text and graph but that's why Lars' comments below rightly criticize my wording here.
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Post by LarsMac »

there are, to date, no deaths in "Rest of the world"

So far, 110 confirmed cases in the Rest of the world.

All 171 deaths were in China.

Perhaps that is more attributed to controlling the news than actually controlling the disease. Time will tell.

In barely a week it went from a couple hundred infected to nearly nine thousand.

I guess I will forego my planned trip to Beijing.
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Post by LarsMac »

Another note.

The first reported case tracks back to December, so 2019 may be part of JH indexing methods.
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Post by spot »

LarsMac;1529962 wrote: there are, to date, no deaths in "Rest of the world"

So far, 110 confirmed cases in the Rest of the world.


I was paying attention to the numbers and not the deaths - of course both lines relate to cases and not deaths. That was careless, I'll correct it in any reposts.





eta: The mistake was sufficiently bad that I've corrected the original graph too, I'd not want that lying around to confuse people.
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Post by spot »

We've seen the list of countries with cases?

It includes the UK, for all the good that will do. The UK will do a wonderful job, it's not the UK that bothers me.

It includes:

South Korea

Vietnam

Cambodia

India

Nepal

Philippines

Sri Lanka

I think we're into the territory of exponential growth, looking at those.

So far the average daily growth rate has been over 1.4. That's a ten-fold increase in cases every six days. That's despite all the measures being taken and the fact that resources can still be focused on chasing, finding and isolating contacts.

The most optimistic guess for the roll-out of mass vaccinations among the general public might be six months.

We could get lucky and see the disease attenuate, dilute its effect, lose potency. Alternatively it might retain its 2% lethal outcome and continue to spread.

Perhaps the growth rate might drop to an average of 1.2 instead of the present 1.4, that's a reasonable hope. If it drops to that extent, and the death rate drops to 1% of cases, there would still be over a million dead across the rest of the world by May.

How to put the disease back into the bag now that it's left China, that's the puzzle.
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Post by LarsMac »

Nearly 10k reported cases, and the deaths are all still within the more localized regions, probably the earlier reported case.

Some stats on the fatalities would be useful (date of diagnosis, age, general health prior to infection, that sort of thing.)
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Post by LarsMac »

On the other hand, here in the States, Influenza has killed more people that this new bug has killed globally, and new cases popping up regularly.

I was at the hospital yesterday, and there is one floor locked down because of the Flu.

It houses a number of patients who, for various reasons are isolated to prevent them from being exposed to the Flu or any other random bugs floating around the neighborhood.
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Post by spot »

I've not looked at mortality, I don't think there's enough data to get a meaningful projection.

On the other hand, as far as cases go for the Rest of the World and for Mainland China, there's a simple rule at the moment. Every eight days, add a zero after the total.

That's a daily increase rate of 1.35 and it's held for the last five days. Before then it was 1.4.

That gets the total number of cases to 3 million by the end of this month. I would be impressed at the efficiency of counter-measures if the Rest of the World figure stays below 4,000 by then. That's four weeks away and a raw projection would be ten times that. One can only hope that the disease will attenuate after a couple more transmissions and not remain infectious indefinitely.

There's not much 'flu in the UK at the moment which is just as well, given the inadequate and worsening staffing level of our hospitals following the Brexit exodus of trained European staff.

Anyway. Mortality. Let me try. The "median time from illness onset" to breathing difficulty is around 8 days. That's not from infection, it's from becoming a case. So if people are dying on the same day as the onset of breathing difficulty, and they become a counted case the day after the onset of symptoms, that would be a seven day gap from being first included in the "cases" count and showing up in the "deaths" count.

So we shift the deaths count back seven days and compare to the cases back then? 249 dead out of 916 cases?

Okay, I can see the logical error. Some of those counted dead were unknown cases, so I have no figure for the proportion of the dead who were counted as cases seven days previously. What I have there is a worst case mortality rate of 27%. The actual progression is several days longer, The Lancet has a good table showing reality but still gives no indication of mortality beyond its sample of 41 cases.

The medical press overall is giving the figure as 15%.

In either event it's a far worse figure than the 2%-4% shown in the press headlines, such as "Don't fear coronavirus as mortality rate only 3 percent: Pakistani health expert".
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Post by LarsMac »

So far, we are still looking at something like .02% mortality.

Influenza is approaching 7% actually down to 6.6%.

I think that mostly standard Flu protocols should protect the majority of people from this thing.

On the other hand, watching the reaction of the global community to this bug is not giving me a lot of warm fuzzies for how a real significant threat might be contained.
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Post by spot »

The issue of mortality is an odd one. If ten percent of the people entering hospital come out as corpses then the initial temptation might be to say there's a 10% mortality, but perhaps only the most unwell people have gone in to begin with. Maybe there's ten times as many people who catch the disease but don't get admitted and just recover, in which case the mortality rate is better expressed as 1%. You pays your money and you takes your chances.
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Post by LarsMac »

spot;1529999 wrote: The issue of mortality is an odd one. If ten percent of the people entering hospital come out as corpses then the initial temptation might be to say there's a 10% mortality, but perhaps only the most unwell people have gone in to begin with. Maybe there's ten times as many people who catch the disease but don't get admitted and just recover, in which case the mortality rate is better expressed as 1%. You pays your money and you takes your chances.


That's a good point. Last time I actually got the Flu, I just stayed home from work until I got better. That is generally our SOP when we get sick. So the reported cases are likely some percentage of the whole, and likely a relatively low percentage.

But then, with this alert going on, Anyone who experiences similar symptons may be likely to show up at the ER for fear of having contracted this CoV.

Aside:

The latest report update shows a 20% increase in repoted cases, and a 0% increase in fatalities.

That is a hopeful sign.

I am glad I am not in the Emergency Health Care business just now.
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Post by spot »

So, if we go back to that plot where there appears to be a change of infectivity after the 26th January. The plot was steeper for that first week, then it's levelled to a steady lower rate of increase.






I think the numbers indicate a daily increase rate of 1.25 for the entire period.

I think the first week being steeper indicates the ironing out of the suppression of facts from the ground in China, and that by the end of that week the under-reporting had been brought to a halt. From the 27th January what you see is what the hospitals can see.

Working on that assumption, the initial figures from the 20th January were one third of the real scale. From the 27th onward the reporting is self-consistent. If that line were adjusted for under-reporting up until the 27th then it would become a constant gradient.

If that's right, and if the daily rate of transmission has been 1.25 and continues, the millionth case will be reported on 20th February. That's three weeks from now. The worldwide figure today shows 14,627 - add a zero to the cases every eleven days.

What happened with SARS, MERS and Ebola could have been that those viruses really were hunted down and killed on a case by case basis, or it could have been an attenuation of infectivity after a certain number of transmissions. I think we have to hope attenuation is involved, because successfully chasing this number of cases seems an unlikely prospect within China itself. If the disease takes permanent hold there then no amount of worldwide vigilance will stop it from eventually going global.

In China the school holiday has been extended indefinitely. If they start closing the factories then there's a huge slump in world trade on the horizon.

And of course if it does stop actually killing anyone, adapting to the host, we can just ignore it. Maybe the death count will stop rising, as you say. In a couple of weeks we may get a sense of how many infected people are getting well.
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Post by spot »

LarsMac;1529762 wrote: One other note:

President Donald Trump said the situation was "totally under control"


Could I ask what-if?

If there are fifty thousand deaths in America from this by polling day in November, will it increase or decrease the President's prospect of re-election?

I can''t see him being damaged by that, but I can definitely see him being boosted if foreign peril is prominent in the mind of the electorate. It's why so many previous national leaders have engineered a war during their first term of office.
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Post by spot »

good news from the Pasteur Institute in Paris, which announced at the weekend that it had managed to isolate and grow a culture of this new coronavirus. That means the virus is available for research, which puts scientists on track to develop a vaccine.

But that isn’t a quick process. Christophe D’Enfert, a scientific director with the Pasteur Institute, told reporters in Paris the vaccine could be made available in 20 months if “all goes well.”

“At the end of August, we could enter clinical trials and, provided all goes well, obtain a vaccine candidate within 20 months,” he said.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/ ... ssing-sars




One rather wonders what planet these people live on.

The coronavirus may well stutter, fizzle and go out over the next two or three months. Given "good news" like this bit one can only hope so.

95% of the planet's population will have been exposed by this Christmas unless the infectivity takes a dive. As of this weekend it hasn't, it's been completely steady, and that's with the resources of China chasing down the contacts of every case known to them. And this chap predicts "a vaccine candidate within 20 months"?

There is a total disconnect between reality and some people's day jobs, that's what I reckon.

Here's my take on how to extrapolate from the figure for China's "today's cumulative reported cases". It won't work for the total reported for the rest of the world because cases in the rest of the world all get pounced on and isolated, so the rest of the world rate of increase is going to stay a lot lower for some months.

So - China's figures only, for the moment:

Any day's cumulative deaths will be equal to the cumulative cases reported 18 days before (so the cumulative death total which is going to be reported 18 days from now will numerically be the same figure as today's cumulative cases)

Any day's cumulative non-reported cases, all of which are the less severe and more survivable ones, will be more than 5 and very near 10 times that day's reported cumulative cases and will result in very few deaths.

So far, 60% of reported cases released from hospital have been cured, 40% have died, which suggests perhaps one in four reported cases will die since the survivors stayed in hospital for longer. That's a mortality rate of 3% for all cases, reported or not, in hospital or at home. 97% of people who get the disease will survive with immunity until the virus mutates enough in future years.

Wherever national barriers and the national isolation of contacts fails anywhere outside China, this China pattern will repeat there.

That mortality rate of 3% will hold world-wide until a mass-deployed vaccine arrives. Perhaps antiviral drug stocks are going to get hammered later this year.

The UK appears to hold around 40 million "doses" for a population of 70 million. If a treatment is 10 doses, is that 4 million treatments? I only ask because it's reasonable to assume that the Chinese survival rate is after antiviral drug treatment and will become worse by some margin if the treatment stocks run out.
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Post by LarsMac »

We have seen an almost full geographic distribution, now. The thing is everywhere.

The next couple of weeks will give a view of how contagious it proves be.

It has only been two weeks since it was confirmed and almost all confirmed cases are probably directly linked to exposure in the Wuhan region.

As those who were exposed by secondary contact begin reporting we will really get a better picture of what this thing will be.
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Post by Bryn Mawr »

It looks to be slowing down, today’s confirmed figure at 19,655 is only 14% up on yesterday, by far the lowest increase since the daily series started.
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Post by spot »

There are several things which could stop it.

It could falter for internal reasons, proving unable to sustain vigor over indefinite replications.

It could be weather-affected - maybe the hours of daylight will prevent transmission, who can guess.

Or perhaps independent of the virus itself, six million party members and police have thrown themselves into tracing contacts more diligently since they were told to take notice, and the effort is finally paying off.

Maybe there's a new national form been issued over the weekend and the counting transitioned with a hiccup.

If the gradient of that semi-log plot has changed then yes, there's a response to time. If the gradient continues then the exponential rule is still in charge.

I ought to go and look at this new figure of which you speak.



okay, back.

I have the series of daily cumulative China totals since the 20th, which is now 15 totals.

I also have an arithmetic projection of 1.25 daily exponential growth (starting on 14th December = case 1).

To the side, I have a column showing the ratio of the real world number and the projection.

Here it is. The first week shows the real world number playing catch-up as politicians finally allow the totals to be discussed openly, so the ratio goes up from 0.3 to 1. From then on the fit looks pretty solid. If that's a change in trend today, altering the projection from 1.25 to 1.24 would overwhelm it.

0.3

0.3

0.4

0.3

0.4

0.7

0.7

0.9

1.0

1.0

1.1

1.0

1.0

1.0

0.9



eta: For anyone not sure of the evidence required to call the outbreak over, it requires the cumulative number of cases to remain unchanged for two weeks. Worldwide, not just in China. At the moment the rest of the world fortunately claims to be on top of things and all we need is China to win.
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Post by LarsMac »

For several days now, the difference between deaths globally and deaths in the original region of Hubei has reamained at 12.

That should be taken as a positive sign, I think.
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Post by spot »

LarsMac;1530055 wrote: For several days now, the difference between deaths globally and deaths in the original region of Hubei has reamained at 12.

That should be taken as a positive sign, I think.


Each patient outside of Hubei is definitely getting far more hospital resource. And a lower proportion of them have run the full course of the disease to a conclusion, because they started later.

So far, 0.19% of the reported cases outside of Hubei have died. It would be excellent if that figure stays constant. The comparable proportion inside Hubei is 3.06%.
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Post by Bryn Mawr »

spot;1530050 wrote: There are several things which could stop it.

It could falter for internal reasons, proving unable to sustain vigor over indefinite replications.

It could be weather-affected - maybe the hours of daylight will prevent transmission, who can guess.

Or perhaps independent of the virus itself, six million party members and police have thrown themselves into tracing contacts more diligently since they were told to take notice, and the effort is finally paying off.

Maybe there's a new national form been issued over the weekend and the counting transitioned with a hiccup.

If the gradient of that semi-log plot has changed then yes, there's a response to time. If the gradient continues then the exponential rule is still in charge.

I ought to go and look at this new figure of which you speak.



okay, back.

I have the series of daily cumulative China totals since the 20th, which is now 15 totals.

I also have an arithmetic projection of 1.25 daily exponential growth (starting on 14th December = case 1).

To the side, I have a column showing the ratio of the real world number and the projection.

Here it is. The first week shows the real world number playing catch-up as politicians finally allow the totals to be discussed openly, so the ratio goes up from 0.3 to 1. From then on the fit looks pretty solid. If that's a change in trend today, altering the projection from 1.25 to 1.24 would overwhelm it.

0.3

0.3

0.4

0.3

0.4

0.7

0.7

0.9

1.0

1.0

1.1

1.0

1.0

1.0

0.9



eta: For anyone not sure of the evidence required to call the outbreak over, it requires the cumulative number of cases to remain unchanged for two weeks. Worldwide, not just in China. At the moment the rest of the world fortunately claims to be on top of things and all we need is China to win.


Oops, I misjudged the time difference and the figures updated to 20,440 but at 19% that’s still a drop.

The semi-log graph does appear to be flattening :-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_ ... s_outbreak

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Post by spot »

The world population isn't endangered, it's a blip disease even if it becomes one of the annual things we have to cope with. World population increases around 70 million a year at the moment, the worst this new disease is going to kill is 60 million before it dies into the background. The population will still be headed upward without a stumble.

The reason it's not yet a pandemic is that it's only endemic in one country at the moment so the en- has not become pan-. It has gone viral in China. It will go viral in other countries, one by one by one, at which point it will be pandemic. We can all hope it will fizzle out, but we're not going to succeed in killing it at this stage.

If the graph does indeed turn over and head downward then yes, it will have fizzled and a good thing too.

I look at the figure once a day, with a coffee, in the morning. Any other time would be that thing bystanders do after a car crash.
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Post by spot »

The good news this morning is that the medical establishment will release a name for the disease before the weekend. It will not include the word China or Seafood or Rapid or Harvey. I think calling it Harvey would be ideal but they'll not. No personal names, they say.

Culling Older People Sickness would do it, age and already being unwell seems relevant. COPS. Agnes copped it last week. Not that anyone's going to ask my opinion, you need a conference badge before they do that. The really good news is that perhaps only one in a hundred people are dying once they get it, assuming most people are just being ill at home at the moment.

The likelihood of a well-attended 2020 Tokyo Olympics has also been raised:

At least 10 people on board a cruise ship docked in the Japanese port of Yokohama have tested positive for coronavirus, health authorities said. Almost 300 of the 3,700 people on the Diamond Princess have been tested so far.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/cyz0z ... s-outbreak




As for that Wikipedia graph a couple of posts back, it's trying to cover the current rate as well as the early period when the reports were being suppressed and then played catch-up. I've added a yellow straight line for purely exponential growth at the current rate.

The red points are Mainland China, the blue points are still flatter because so many cases are being stopped at borders and prevented from spreading in the rest of the world. I reckon the red China plot is pretty close to the yellow exponential line since the 27th when the government instruction to be open finally took full effect.


.
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Post by spot »

Two successive dips in the rate, but no indication yet of what changed.

It's an encouraging movement though. The column below is an indication of how the daily rate compares to a nominal 20% jump in reported cases from the previous day. It show the last two days as a decline in the rate of increase. It's as simple a boiling down of the problem as I can construct.

0.2

0.2

0.3

0.3

0.3

0.6

0.7

0.9

1.1

1.1

1.2

1.1

1.2

1.2

1.2

1.2

1.1

1.0
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Post by Bryn Mawr »

spot;1530198 wrote: Two successive dips in the rate, but no indication yet of what changed.

It's an encouraging movement though. The column below is an indication of how the daily rate compares to a nominal 20% jump in reported cases from the previous day. It show the last two days as a decline in the rate of increase. It's as simple a boiling down of the problem as I can construct.

0.2

0.2

0.3

0.3

0.3

0.6

0.7

0.9

1.1

1.1

1.2

1.1

1.2

1.2

1.2

1.2

1.1

1.0


I'll give two columns that, I think, suggest better than two day's drop :-

Date Daily Increase D / (D+R)

27/01/20 64.55 63.86

28/01/20 32.31 56.17

29/01/20 29.08 57.82

30/01/20 25.69 55.47

31/01/20 21.66 51.59

01/02/20 21.96 48.10

02/02/20 19.65 43.18

03/02/20 18.80 40.21

04/02/20 19.00 35.46

05/02/20 15.19 32.81

06/02/20 11.21 29.33

The first is a straight percentage increase over the previous day's cumulative, the second is deaths as a percentage of cases that have run their course. Even allowing for the catch-up in under-reported cases in the first few days of the plot I think it shows a steady decrease over time.
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Post by spot »

Yes, I'd been staring at my numbers this last few minutes thinking there was a better option.
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Post by Bryn Mawr »

spot;1530204 wrote: Yes, I'd been staring at my numbers this last few minutes thinking there was a better option.


The main problem with your figures is the lack of precision, it could be 1.28, 1.26, 1.24, 1.20, 1.15, 1.00 or it could be 1.20, 1.22, 1.25, 1.29, 1.10, 1.00 and the two series tell totally different stories.
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Post by spot »

The problem is the figures are way more imprecise than even mine. Everything depends on what's being counted as a "reported case". There is a completely unknowable God figure which is genuinely precise, and that's the actual number of humans with this coronavirus inside their body at a moment in time. Some will fight it off with no symptoms at all but would, if tested, show positive. Some will feel unwell. Some will be admitted to hospital. I suspect the "reported cases" are hospital admissions, but nobody's said. The reported cases may be around 20% of the God figure but it could be 10%, it could be 60%, you need an epidemiologist to guess for you and few have. One in London put it at 20%.

The situation in three months from now depends on the God figure, not the admissions or the reported cases which may vary as a proportion of the God figure each time different influences and events come to bear.

The situation outside China depends on when each defence line cracks, and so far no country's defence line has been tested. It cracks when their hospitals overflow.

Do you want to catch the virus before the hospitals overflow, or after? Because if they do overflow then most of the population will go into the God count quite quickly, with far less medical intervention.

Here's another view. I found a pulse.


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Post by Bryn Mawr »

spot;1530210 wrote: The problem is the figures are way more imprecise than even mine. Everything depends on what's being counted as a "reported case". There is a completely unknowable God figure which is genuinely precise, and that's the actual number of humans with this coronavirus inside their body at a moment in time. Some will fight it off with no symptoms at all but would, if tested, show positive. Some will feel unwell. Some will be admitted to hospital. I suspect the "reported cases" are hospital admissions, but nobody's said. The reported cases may be around 20% of the God figure but it could be 10%, it could be 60%, you need an epidemiologist to guess for you and few have. One in London put it at 20%.

The situation in three months from now depends on the God figure, not the admissions or the reported cases which may vary as a proportion of the God figure each time different influences and events come to bear.

The situation outside China depends on when each defence line cracks, and so far no country's defence line has been tested. It cracks when their hospitals overflow.

Do you want to catch the virus before the hospitals overflow, or after? Because if they do overflow then most of the population will go into the God count quite quickly, with far less medical intervention.

Here's another view. I found a pulse.





The figures I’m picking up claim to be “confirmed” cases where a lab test for this specific Coronavirus has come back positive but I fully agree that the majority of cases are not likely to see the inside of a hospital.
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Post by spot »

I'm not sure I red https://www.theguardian.com/global-deve ... -indonesia correctly. Indonesia has no cases but hasn't tested anyone?

I threw a match on some petrol once. The effect may be similar.
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Post by Bryn Mawr »

spot;1530214 wrote: I'm not sure I red https://www.theguardian.com/global-deve ... -indonesia correctly. Indonesia has no cases but hasn't tested anyone?

I threw a match on some petrol once. The effect may be similar.


I think the comment was that they hadn’t tested any of the evacuees from Wuhan and that they were not in quarantine - madness!
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Post by Bryn Mawr »

A worrying development, the Japanese government has declared four more cases but then promptly ignored them because they are showing no symptoms.

This begs a couple of questions, if they are asymptomatic why were they tested and how many others out there have no symptoms but are carrying the virus?
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Post by spot »

They clearly count unless they're being seen as false positives. Nobody has so far suggested there are any false positives, not that I've heard.

I also note in passing that the last two daily Rest of the World figures were the highest to date, and over half the Rest of the World cases were recorded during the last week. Each of the last four daily China totals were higher than any previously seen too. It may be petering out but the evidence is hard to see at the moment.

My solution is to go back to business as usual and accept that there's a new disease doing the rounds. It will be less disruptive. If we all ban the selling of live animals in supermarkets that would help for next time.
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Post by Bryn Mawr »

spot;1530229 wrote: They clearly count unless they're being seen as false positives. Nobody has so far suggested there are any false positives, not that I've heard.

I also note in passing that the last two daily Rest of the World figures were the highest to date, and over half the Rest of the World cases were recorded during the last week. Each of the last four daily China totals were higher than any previously seen too. It may be petering out but the evidence is hard to see at the moment.

My solution is to go back to business as usual and accept that there's a new disease doing the rounds. It will be less disruptive. If we all ban the selling of live animals in supermarkets that would help for next time.


Was it a supermarket or a specialist livestock market such as most towns round here hold weekly?

Without those there would be no dairy industry etc.

ETA. Also, I’m not convinced by your figures, the last four days I have are 3884, 3694, 3143, 3407 which, given the previous rate of increase in the daily figures, is an improvement and the RoW figures are distorted by the cruise ships which are a hotbed environment, now contained.
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Post by spot »

Bryn Mawr;1530231 wrote: Was it a supermarket or a specialist livestock market such as most towns round here hold weekly?

Without those there would be no dairy industry etc.

ETA. Also, I’m not convinced by your figures, the last four days I have are 3884, 3694, 3143, 3407 which, given the previous rate of increase in the daily figures, is an improvement and the RoW figures are distorted by the cruise ships which are a hotbed environment, now contained.


The supermarket I was thinking of was the one I frequented in Beijing which had an area devoted to livestock. The buyers were not pet enthusiasts.

I agree with your notes on the figures but my comments were all accurate.

Our esteemed American colleagues might not have seen this photo of the Wuhan isolation flight, from the Express. I'm told it's not a hoax, though if you check that video link 30 seconds in there were five coaches. All were supplied by a local firm, Horseman of Royal Berkshire. The photographer showing just four in the photo is genius. It provided a moment of light relief, it's almost straight out of a Terry Pratchett novel. Everyone as they left was head to toe in protective clothing except the coach drivers in the standby seats without so much as a mask between them.




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Post by LarsMac »

That photo shows four empty buses. Am I missing something?
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Post by spot »

LarsMac;1530240 wrote: That photo shows four empty buses. Am I missing something?


Arriving at RAF Brize Norton. Those coaches took the evacuees north to Liverpool for quarantine. If you click the link in the text there's clarifying video.

Here it is - https://thexvid.com/video/oyydyrvuy4I/c ... in-uk.html

One of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was plague, if you remember.
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spot;1529817 wrote: I'm quite impressed at the response in China, they do seem to be open this time round.

And the British managed to test 14 contenders and signed them all unaffected. I'm not sure we'll get through the weekend that way though.


Not quite so 'Apparently' a member on a group im with, who owns a cafe put a pic up of himself wearing a face mask. He was given a box of face masks by chinese tourists (from their own stash) who told him the Chinese government had kept the epidemic under wraps for quite a few months. And it wasn't hundreds, but thousands who were sick and the death toll was much higher than had been reported. It had originally been written off as a flu virus until a particular doctor alerted everyone that something wasn't right. So not as transparent as you may guess. But still, worldwide it's such a small number/percentage of the overall population.
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spot;1530232 wrote: The supermarket I was thinking of was the one I frequented in Beijing which had an area devoted to livestock. The buyers were not pet enthusiasts.

I agree with your notes on the figures but my comments were all accurate.

Our esteemed American colleagues might not have seen this photo of the Wuhan isolation flight, from the Express. I'm told it's not a hoax, though if you check that video link 30 seconds in there were five coaches. All were supplied by a local firm, Horseman of Royal Berkshire. The photographer showing just four in the photo is genius. It provided a moment of light relief, it's almost straight out of a Terry Pratchett novel. Everyone as they left was head to toe in protective clothing except the coach drivers in the standby seats without so much as a mask between them.







A dry run I expect. We've isolated people on Christmas island. And now a private company is trying to get in on the act by offering a disused mining village in the NT. It appears there is money to be made out of all of this. And here I was cynically thinking it wass just pharmaceutical companies
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Post by spot »

magentaflame;1530248 wrote: Not quite so 'Apparently' a member on a group im with, who owns a cafe put a pic up of himself wearing a face mask. He was given a box of face masks by chinese tourists (from their own stash) who told him the Chinese government had kept the epidemic under wraps for quite a few months. And it wasn't hundreds, but thousands who were sick and the death toll was much higher than had been reported. It had originally been written off as a flu virus until a particular doctor alerted everyone that something wasn't right. So not as transparent as you may guess. But still, worldwide it's such a small number/percentage of the overall population.


I doubt an epidemic of a new virus would stay within one country for quite a few months, it's not what they do. Viruses get to airports. All the numbers from the World Health Organization point to an event near the last week of November as case 1.

As for exterminating the virus I don't think any country is more likely to succeed at that than China, and even they can only succeed so long as no other country allows it to gain a foothold. The response there couldn't happen on anything like the same scale elsewhere, or as effectively. The population at the epicentre is undoubtedly having a hard time from the authorities as a result.

That doesn't mean I think it can be exterminated or that this struggle is sensible. Were I asked I'd say let it happen, it's too late to win this time. The best outcome right now is that it loses potency and fizzles out. If any other country does allow it to gain a foothold then nobody, not even China, will be able to fight it out of existence.

There are two ways we can each become resistant to this virus, as with any other virus. We can either survive it and have antibodies, or we can be vaccinated and have antibodies. At the moment we don't have any antibodies and we don't have a vaccine, so catching it and making our own is the only choice left.
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Bryn Mawr;1530211 wrote: The figures I’m picking up claim to be “confirmed” cases where a lab test for this specific Coronavirus has come back positive but I fully agree that the majority of cases are not likely to see the inside of a hospital.


You're right about the dip. It's like watching an oil tanker braking but the figures are actually holding, no longer exponential so long as there isn't a daily rise of over 6,000 reported cases. How long the authorities can carry on disrupting so many people and jobs I've no idea, but for as long as they sustain this pressure they can hold the line. It's an amazing achievement, it's more than we could do here.

Will they prevent the pandemic? No, I don't think they can.
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