BBC: China pneumonia outbreak: COVID-19 Global Pandemic

[Wildbunny]

17 minutes ago, Larry said:

 

"We want you to do us a favor.  Your model says one million dead Americans, doesn't it?"

If it's less than 240M of dead Americans, they'll have done a great job.

[visionary]

 

[visionary]

 

 

 

 

Edited April 8, 2020 by visionary

[Long n Left]

8 hours ago, Dan T. said:

Damn.  We lost John Prine.

So ****ing sad. One of the all-time great American songwriters/performers. 😢😢

[PeterMP]

4 hours ago, visionary said:

 

 

 

 

Shanghai and S. Korea / Science Coronavirus: low antibody levels raise questions about reinfection risk

and people being re-infected tweet

 

This has been a concern with this virus because of the large number of people that test positive, but have no or mild symptoms.  A positive test and no or minimal symptoms means there probably hasn't been much of an immune response.  Not much of an immune response probably means not many antibodies.  Or even maybe the test was a false positive to start with.

 

In Shanghai at least, the story says the people had some symptoms, but they were mild (so potentially some other virus and a false positive test, maybe even a false positive test with a psychosomatic illness or just not a very severe disease to illicit much of an immune response potentially/possibly).

 

In terms of a vaccine, not sure how much of a concern it really is for a few reasons:

 

1.  The virus almost certainly doing things to suppress the immune system, which won't happen with the vaccine.

 

2.  In fact with the vaccine, they will almost certainly use adjuvants to boost an immune response.

 

3.  The vaccine can be put into places that are most likely to generate an immune response.

 

4.  They can do boosters too.  I guess if everybody has to get a shoot and go back a month later to get a booster that slows things down and is less than ideal.

 

That our bodies can't somehow make good antibodies to the specific proteins of this virus seems unlikely to me.  Either this virus does an exceptional job at suppressing some people's immune systems some times or for some reason or sometimes it just struggles to create much of an infection in some people's lungs and other tissues where it can do a lot of damage (e.g. in some people some times it doesn't travel much beyond the nose).  Or something like that.  Some parasites (e.g. the one that causes malaria) do things where they regularly shed their protein coats for new ones, which prevents the immune system from recognizing them, but I don't know of a virus that has the ability to do anything like that.  In those cases, a vaccine doesn't work. This virus doesn't seem to be has heavily disguised as HIV.

 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8199729/Scientists-Covid-19-tricks-way-human-body.html

 

And even for HIV, we make antibodies.  They just aren't overly effective, the HIV has an ability to evolve since it is integrated into the genome, which this one won't, and HIV also just wipes out the immune system cells.

 

(Though, I'm really starting to wonder if there just isn't an issue with a high false positive rate on some of these tests in some of these countries.)

Edited April 8, 2020 by PeterMP

[DCSaints_fan]

1 hour ago, PeterMP said:

(Though, I'm really starting to wonder if there just isn't an issue with a high false positive rate on some of these tests in some of these countries.)

Ive wondered about this too ... I worked in a lab for years where PCR / electrophoresis was done and although never did it myself I saw how often things went wrong even in a well controlled environment by people who knew what they were doing.  Some of the turnaround timesbeing reported ( like an hour or two )  I found hard to believe,  I bet there were a lot of mistakes but in situations like this there is pressure to pretend everything is working when in reality it didn’t work too well

[Cooked Crack]

 

 

[Spaceman Spiff]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-07/michael-burry-slams-virus-lockdowns-in-controversial-tweetstorm

 

This guy is gunning for a meeting with Trump, I'd say.

[No Excuses]

A lot of tests that China ended up shipping to Europe turned out to be junk that can’t be used. I would be very skeptical of any “re-infection” studies coming from there. 
 

In other news, virus is far more infectious than previously thought, and would align with the high # of asymptotic and mild cases we see:

 

 

[PeterMP]

23 minutes ago, No Excuses said:

A lot of tests that China ended up shipping to Europe turned out to be junk that can’t be used. I would be very skeptical of any “re-infection” studies coming from there. 
 

In other news, virus is far more infectious than previously thought, and would align with the high # of asymptotic and mild cases we see:

 

 

But the Ro calculation that is saying it is highly infectious is based on models from people that tested positive in China.  You can't claim the tests from China are garbage, and then claim it is highly infectious based on data from China on who has been infected.

 

If the Chinese tests are garbage and there is a correspondingly high false positive tests, then the Ro is much lower than they think and people that are positives and asymptomatic might be false positives.

 

(This does assume the Chinese tests are "garbage" in the false positive direction.  Which actually seems less likely to me than being garbage in the false negative direction.  But either way, drawing conclusions based on data from a country that you are saying is using garbage tests is nonsensical.)

 

 

And the low antibody results are coming from Shinghai and the people getting it again results are coming from South Korea.  Not China. (I've edited my post related to visionary's tweets to reflect that.)

 

Edited April 8, 2020 by PeterMP

[PeterMP]

54 minutes ago, DCSaints_fan said:

Ive wondered about this too ... I worked in a lab for years where PCR / electrophoresis was done and although never did it myself I saw how often things went wrong even in a well controlled environment by people who knew what they were doing.  Some of the turnaround timesbeing reported ( like an hour or two )  I found hard to believe,  I bet there were a lot of mistakes but in situations like this there is pressure to pretend everything is working when in reality it didn’t work too well

 

Yeah, but basic random human error in general for something like this is more likely to generate a false negative than a false positive.

 

A high false positive rate vs. false negative rate would indicate:

 

1.  There's some sort of fundamental error in the tests.

 

2.  There's just been broad contamination of the testing areas (which isn't just basic random human error, but a general and systematic failure of the testing facilities).

 

3.  Maybe they do a better job of re-confirming false negative than a false positive (e.g. the false negative person gets sick, and they redo the test, but if somebody tests positive and doesn't get very sick, then they don't do any further tests and just count them as an infected asymptomatic person.)

Edited April 8, 2020 by PeterMP

[No Excuses]

42 minutes ago, PeterMP said:

But the Ro calculation that is saying it is highly infectious is based on models from people that tested positive in China.  You can't claim the tests from China are garbage, and then claim it is highly infectious based on data from China on who has been infected.

 

China has only started reporting asymptomatic and very mild cases that test positive starting April. They haven’t offered an explanation as to why, although it’s speculated because of the poor sensitivity of their tests. 
 

Their official estimates were almost all cases with obvious symptoms and positive tests. Which likely cut into how many true false positives they were reporting in their initial datasets. 

Edited April 8, 2020 by No Excuses

[Spaceman Spiff]

Hospitals say feds are seizing masks and other coronavirus supplies without a word

 

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-04-07/hospitals-washington-seize-coronavirus-supplies

 

Quote

 

WASHINGTON — 

 

Although President Trump has directed states and hospitals to secure what supplies they can, the federal government is quietly seizing orders, leaving medical providers across the country in the dark about where the material is going and how they can get what they need to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.

Hospital and clinic officials in seven states described the seizures in interviews over the past week. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is not publicly reporting the acquisitions, despite the outlay of millions of dollars of taxpayer money, nor has the administration detailed how it decides which supplies to seize and where to reroute them.

Officials who’ve had materials seized also say they’ve received no guidance from the government about how or if they will get access to the supplies they ordered. That has stoked concerns about how public funds are being spent and whether the Trump administration is fairly distributing scarce medical supplies.

“In order to have confidence in the distribution system, to know that it is being done in an equitable manner, you have to have transparency,” said Dr. John Hick, an emergency physician at Hennepin Healthcare in Minnesota who has helped develop national emergency preparedness standards through the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.

 

 

Quote

The medical leaders on the front lines of the fight to control the coronavirus and keep patients alive say they are grasping for explanations. “We can’t get any answers,” said a California hospital official who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation from the White House.

In Florida, a large medical system saw an order for thermometers taken away. And officials at a system in Massachusetts were unable to determine where its order of masks went.

“Are they stockpiling this stuff? Are they distributing it? We don’t know,” one official said. “And are we going to ever get any of it back if we need supplies? It would be nice to know these things.”

 

 

PeaceHealth, a 10-hospital system in Washington, Oregon and Alaska, had a shipment of testing supplies seized recently. “It’s incredibly frustrating,” said Richard DeCarlo, the system’s chief operating officer.

 

[mistertim]

5 hours ago, visionary said:

 

 

It's interesting how the period between Trump saying something and then denying he said that exact thing has shortened over time. It used to be he'd say something and then a week or so later would say the opposite and claim he didn't ever say it. Then it shortened to days between them. Then hours. Now it's literally minutes. He'll say something and then 15 minutes later claim he didn't say it. 

 

Pretty mind bending. 

[Fergasun]

@Spaceman Spiff

I tend to agree with Burry "generally".  The path we are on is economically destructive. 

 

The "100k to 200k deaths!!" models are overestimating.  At the same time this is a crazily deadly and infectious disease.  

 

Something seems wrong when hospitals are going out of business.  

[LD0506]

Just remember kids, this is a direct, intentional culmination of Saint Ronnie the Oblivious and his deregulation orgasm that gave us for-profit hospitals and reduced even the most basic life saving care to just another commodity to be sold, and that only works if at some point you deny it, you know, supply n demand, right?

 

I hope I live to see the Nuremburg 2.0 trials and at least the beginnings of a nationwide denazification like Germany went through. 

[The Evil Genius]

14 minutes ago, Fergasun said:

 

I tend to agree with Burry "generally".  The path we are on is economically destructive. 

 

The "100k to 200k deaths!!" models are overestimating.  At the same time this is a crazily deadly and infectious disease.  

 

Something seems wrong when hospitals are going out of business.  

 

 

In the US, we've gone from 906 total deaths on 3/25 to 12,675 total deaths on 4/7. 

 

100k seems like a low target at the end of this thing, even with large states like California successfully flattening their curve. 

Edited April 8, 2020 by The Evil Genius

[StillUnknown]

 

[PeterMP]

1 hour ago, No Excuses said:

 

China has only started reporting asymptomatic and very mild cases that test positive starting April. They haven’t offered an explanation as to why, although it’s speculated because of the poor sensitivity of their tests. 
 

Their official estimates were almost all cases with obvious symptoms and positive tests. Which likely cut into how many true false positives they were reporting in their initial datasets. 

 

There were reports of people being asymptomatic in China based on positive tests results back in Feb. at least and that report is based on somebody travelling in Jan.

 

https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/publichealth/85027

 

China just started counting them in their official release of data in April.  Provinces outside of Wuhan were doing more widespread testing already.

 

(It is possible that this data set doesn't include such people.  That isn't clear to me.  But the paper is based on people that had traveled out Wuhan to other provinces that were intentionally surveilling people travelling out of Wuhan.  They focus on those cases because the health care system in those areas had not been overwhelmed yet, and they were surveilling people coming out of Wuhan intentionally.  This paper isn't based on lets test people that got sick.  This paper is based on we're worried about people that came out of Wuhan, let's see if they have Covid-19.

 

(Looking at Appendix 1, some of the people don't have hospitalization or onset dates.  Those would certainly then count as people that either have mild or no symptoms.)

 

)

Edited April 8, 2020 by PeterMP

[China]

2 minutes ago, StillUnknown said:

 

 

Why is this chart for only 63% of deaths?  Where are the other 37%?

[Forehead]

12 hours ago, Larry said:

Since Trump has put Kush kinda in charge of this disease, does that mean that 10,000 Americans have died of afluenza?  

 

I know it isn't an exact match since Ivanka is Trump's child rather than Jared, but when I look at the three of them, I definitely get the whole "Edward the Longshanks" from Braveheart vibe, as far as the old guy in power, the effeminate young male, and the hot princess that the old guy wants to screw.  

[CousinsCowgirl84]

12 minutes ago, China said:

 

Why is this chart for only 63% of deaths?  Where are the other 37%?

 

data probably isn’t ready yet...

[PeterMP]

36 minutes ago, Fergasun said:

@Spaceman Spiff

I tend to agree with Burry "generally".  The path we are on is economically destructive. 

 

The "100k to 200k deaths!!" models are overestimating. 

 

Is there a particular reason why you think the 100K to 200K death models are over estimating?

 

If you look more closely at what Burry is suggesting, it is essentially what Germany is planning on doing (even though they are even planning on limiting large gatherings still).  But that requires that you are out in front of things.  Which we've yet to be able to do.  Given the number of sick people that we have and the number of tests and ability to carry out the tests we have, we can't test enough people fast enough to be effective at what he's suggesting.  If you opened things back up, it would quickly spread and overwhelm our ability to test again, most likely.

 

(And if the newer Ro in @No Excuses post is right, even Germany isn't going to be able to keep up with testing when they open things back up.)

 

If we can get back out in front of things, a plan like Germany and what Burry is suggesting might work.  But we aren't there yet.  I'm not sure why Burry doesn't understand that.

Edited April 8, 2020 by PeterMP

[Llevron]

How much you wanna bet we are gonna stop worrying about this virus now that we know it’s basically for poor and minority people? 

[youngestson]

^^^

 

Ding-Ding-Ding!