Two Elephants named COVID

[Taem]

So the current theory goes, according to international media, that COVID-19 started somewhere in China, most likely in Wuhan, then quickly spread due to it's contagious nature, and is now a worldwide epidemic. According to international media outlets, all the world has to do is "Stay-at-Home" for 30+ days to stop the spread of the virus. Right...

Let's put this in perspective for a moment; COVID is so contagious, that just a handful of infected people from a small province in China infected the entire world in mere months, so are we to believe that once the stay at home orders are lifted, it'll be business as usual? All it will take is one asymptomatic person with COVID-19 to restart this pandemic all over and yet, nobody is talking about this?! Why are our world leaders not planning for a second bout, not even acknowledging this obvious issue? Am I missing something here?

Another concern of mine is the COVID-19 recovery rate. It is under reported and under investigated, but estimated to be very high, about 98% because scientists acknowledge the number of reported COVID-19 cases is eclipsed by the amount of cases unreported dropping the mortality rate somewhere around 1.5%. So why is the media so fixated on focusing exclusively on the death rates of COVID-19, on promoting fear-mongering as opposed to espousing that the disease might not be as bad as feared? It will be interesting to see what comes out of Sweden's decision to not enforce a 'Stay-at-Home' policy.

Overall, it feels like monkeys all running their countries in circles without a clue what to do. H1N1 was even more contagious and had a mortality rate of 1%, just 0.5% less than COVID-19, but you didn't see the entire world reacting! IDK, it feels like when the fire alarm goes off and everyone falls in line for the test.

[eppie]

So the current theory goes, according to international media, that COVID-19 started somewhere in China, most likely in Wuhan, then quickly spread due to it's contagious nature, and is now a worldwide epidemic. According to international media outlets, all the world has to do is "Stay-at-Home" for 30+ days to stop the spread of the virus. Right...

Let's put this in perspective for a moment; COVID is so contagious, that just a handful of infected people from a small province in China infected the entire world in mere months, so are we to believe that once the stay at home orders are lifted, it'll be business as usual? All it will take is one asymptomatic person with COVID-19 to restart this pandemic all over and yet, nobody is talking about this?! Why are our world leaders not planning for a second bout, not even acknowledging this obvious issue? Am I missing something here?

Another concern of mine is the COVID-19 recovery rate. It is under reported and under investigated, but estimated to be very high, about 98% because scientists acknowledge the number of reported COVID-19 cases is eclipsed by the amount of cases unreported dropping the mortality rate somewhere around 1.5%. So why is the media so fixated on focusing exclusively on the death rates of COVID-19, on promoting fear-mongering as opposed to espousing that the disease might not be as bad as feared? It will be interesting to see what comes out of Sweden's decision to not enforce a 'Stay-at-Home' policy.

Overall, it feels like monkeys all running their countries in circles without a clue what to do. H1N1 was even more contagious and had a mortality rate of 1%, just 0.5% less than COVID-19, but you didn't see the entire world reacting! IDK, it feels like when the fire alarm goes off and everyone falls in line for the test.

I think the mortality rate of covid19 will turn out to be significantly less than 1%. (maybe 05%) with the vast majority old people with several other chronic diseases.

The Netherlands also started a quite laid back policy but the criticism from people and countries around us became so heavy that we also decided to go for this lockdown.


What you say about the spread of the virus starting all over again is correct (and most media mention this......maybe not often but they do mention). This actually is already happening in China and Singapore.

What we say is that we want a lockdown so that we can control the spread rate so that we don't run into to full ICs. Which sounds reasonable.
However what I don't get is what the plan is to losen the lockdown.....do we do it after many people got infected.....or after we get the infection rate down to 0?

Point is: everybody (or at least a large part of the population) will get this disease.....and for most of us we will not notice much.

[Taem]

What you say about the spread of the virus starting all over again is correct (and most media mention this......maybe not often but they do mention).

Wow, we have had the news on in the background all day at work every day since this pandemic began alternating between Fox News and CNN and I've never heard this mentioned before, not even once! Why are Americans getting censored news?

What we say is that we want a lockdown so that we can control the spread rate so that we don't run into to full ICs. Which sounds reasonable.
However what I don't get is what the plan is to losen the lockdown.....do we do it after many people got infected.....or after we get the infection rate down to 0?

Overall, this makes me question what our world leaders really know more than anything, and what they're being told. Where are their science advisers getting their information from? What are their sources? Is information being appropriately shared collectively between all nations, or is every country conducting their own testing and basing their independent suggestions on this? It feel like it's the latter, kind of a wild west of intel out there. You really have to dig and vet your sources to get any accurate information and not sensationalism!

[eppie]

Wow, we have had the news on in the background all day at work every day since this pandemic began alternating between Fox News and CNN and I've never heard this mentioned before, not even once! Why are Americans getting censored news?

News stations are owned by certain people with certain interests. It is clear that the lockdown hits certain groups much harder. It is clear that governments (the US one is a good example) made lots of mistakes like cutting drastically the funding for the organisations that need to protect the country against pandemics.

In europe you see the same: the south of Europe is coercing the north in paying a lot of money and if they don't the end of the EU will be near.
This is what they say on e.g. Italian TV. Everything is the mistake of the North.....while they chose themselves not to spend more money on hospitals and not to collect taxes from the rich part of the population.

Everyone uses this crisis for their own interest.

Overall, this makes me question what our world leaders really know more than anything, and what they're being told. Where are their science advisers getting their information from? What are their sources? Is information being appropriately shared collectively between all nations, or is every country conducting their own testing and basing their independent suggestions on this? It feel like it's the latter, kind of a wild west of intel out there. You really have to dig and vet your sources to get any accurate information and not sensationalism!

I think everyone has most of the information but there are lots of things unclear about this new virus and decissions are made based on politics anyway. You have information and you make your evaluation and do what you think is best.

[GhastMaster]

I have found that the case fatality rate is being conflated with sometimes deaths per capita and or overall infection mortality rate in media. For a good read and up to date information on covid data I use these sites:
Excellent explanation of Case Fatality Rate(and more) and current worldwide data:
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus#d...m-covid-19
US Data:
https://covidtracking.com/data

[Taem]

I have found that the case fatality rate is being conflated with sometimes deaths per capita and or overall infection mortality rate in media.

This. Also, I failed to mention in my first post that it's been estimated the following:

1. In the US alone, in the magnitude of several hundreds of thousands of people have potentially been sick and undiagnosed and recovered without ever having been to a doctor to be tested.
2. Likewise in a similar vein, those who have gone to the doctor have found an inadequate level of testing kits, and so [initially] less than 1/10 of the people going in for testing actually got tested! Now it's closer to 75%, but you have to take into consideration the inadequate testing in the beginning when comparing numbers!
3. People in California are NOT getting sick like in New York or New Orleans because.... we already had COVID-19... without all this social distancing crap.


So.... when you're getting mortality to recovery rates out of China and other countries who test ALL of their citizens, what you are actually seeing is a 98+% recovery rate. Then you take into account America has a 5% mortality rate right now [WITH] the citizens who have actually been tested..... but has NOT been properly tracking recovered individuals or even done proper testing of citizens; taking this into consideration, it's very obvious the recovery rate is way closer to 98-99%. So if SARS and MERS were deadlier, why is the entire world freaking out over this? Leaves many questions to be answered.

My personal (although unsubstantiated) theory on all this is COVID-19 is a man-made virus that escaped quarantine, and due to the unknown aspects of releasing a man-made virus into the wild, many countries took extra precautions. The reasons I believe this are due to the two whistle-blower scientists who came out in China saying it escaped from a lab, one which later died from COVID-19, then the articles were scrubbed off the internet AFTER I had already shown it to colleges and family. You can still find an article about them warning the public, but the part where they admitted they had a part in creating COVID-19 is erased: Link, Link. I also read another article which said when viewed under CRISPR, COVID-19 showed scaring, signs of genetic altering, and the section added in seemed eerily similar to a section of Ebola thought to do with transmission.

Anyway, none of this really matters because the reality is it's just not as deadly as they [nations of the world] anticipated! I'd like to see the Stay-At-Home orders relaxed. Keep the social distances a couple of months if that helps you sleep at night, but relax the Stay at Home. Just my 2-cents...

[GhastMaster]

That LA Times story is interesting.

I suspect I had this back starting on Christmas Day. I got hit harder by the "flu" than ever. It started with a dry cough(which I always suppress by not coughing) for about a week, fever(1 day? I don't have a thermometer), and fatigue like I've never had before. I missed 7 days of work. I've never taken more than a day off for illness! It then progressed to about two weeks or more of coughing up phlegm. Basically everyone at the gathering was or became sick, with some similar others mild symptoms. My nephew was diagnosed with the flu at the time of gathering, my niece who had pneumonia at the time came back negative for the flu.

I have been using this site to watch Covid-19 also:
http://www.countycovid19.com/ - US County Data

I'm going with this video on the source of the virus. It was just a poorly run facility:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI...=emb_title

[Taem]

I'm going with this video on the source of the virus. It was just a poorly run facility:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI...=emb_title

Good solid video link there! Love the research the narrator put in. Thank you for sharing.

[eppie]

People in California are NOT getting sick like in New York or New Orleans because.... we already had COVID-19... without all this social distancing crap.

Well the getting sick doesn't have anything to do with the social distancing.
The distancing is to slow the spread of the disease but when you caught it it is you body that 'decides' how bad it will be.

So if in California lots of people already had this disease there would also be lots od casualties.


That said I agree with the fact that all these measures seem overdone.
My point is more on the damage thes measures do to the lower social classes in society. People without permanent employment contracts, people without health insurance (USA), kids that lose school, people forced to spend the last weeks of their lives in IC without being able to see their relatives. There is a lot of bad stuf happening.....and wait what will come when we hit recession....this is going to be worse than the previous one.

[Taem]

There is a lot of bad stuf happening.....and wait what will come when we hit recession....this is going to be worse than the previous one.

Indeed. Word has it in the US, social distancing is here to stay through the end of the year and up to sometime mid-2022 once 'stay-at-home' is lifted. This will impact just about everything not automated or done strictly online. Many stores will shutter from this. Either people will have to invent new directions/trends for the market to create new jobs (I see an explosion of online stores and working from home), or we will get hit hard by recession.

What's scary is looking at the current numbers for unemployment and housing prices, we're already pretty much at Depression levels minus the years of recession, at least here in the US. Will be a challenging climb.

Anyway, getting back to the social distancing, if we've learned anything from China about this, they are currently experiencing a second wave of resurgence with COVID. This means with absolute certainty Social Distancing is here to stay for a very, very long time until a vaccine is developed . Which of course (bringing it round another circle) means less employed, longer recession, etc.

[GhastMaster]

I think the social distancing is going to be the status quo for a while regardless of lifted "lock downs". Allstate in their statements about giving money back to drivers because of low travel, mentioned that they have seen the same reduction in travel in all states. All states did not "lock down". Considering the spread is not exploding in the states that have not "locked down", there is no reason for the state to implement "lock downs". People figured it out on their own. Even after the "lock downs" are lifted, people are not going to resume regular scheduled activity. I cannot imagine people lining up to go to a concert on May 1st en masse. Can you?

They are going to need to rename the Great Depression.

Good luck, Godspeed!

[eppie]

There is a lot of bad stuf happening.....and wait what will come when we hit recession....this is going to be worse than the previous one.

Indeed. Word has it in the US, social distancing is here to stay through the end of the year and up to sometime mid-2022 once 'stay-at-home' is lifted. This will impact just about everything not automated or done strictly online. Many stores will shutter from this. Either people will have to invent new directions/trends for the market to create new jobs (I see an explosion of online stores and working from home), or we will get hit hard by recession.

What's scary is looking at the current numbers for unemployment and housing prices, we're already pretty much at Depression levels minus the years of recession, at least here in the US. Will be a challenging climb.

Anyway, getting back to the social distancing, if we've learned anything from China about this, they are currently experiencing a second wave of resurgence with COVID. This means with absolute certainty Social Distancing is here to stay for a very, very long time until a vaccine is developed . Which of course (bringing it round another circle) means less employed, longer recession, etc.

Well....that is what you want to obtain.
Sweden doesn't have a lockdown and their mortality rates are not higher than most other european countries.
Also you have to decide what is important? A number of deaths of mainly elderly people with underlying diseases OR a lost generation of kids who don't get the right the schooling, people in (mental)institutions who don't get the help they need and don't understand this, an economic crisis which will cause an enormous amount of suffering and deaths (suicide, poverty etc.) etc etc,
"'we'' have chosen to make sure we limit the amount of deaths now which sounds like an incredible social thing to do but the biggest victims of the economic crisis will be the people at the lower end of society.
I hope we stop this lockdown and start thinking about another solution.

Of course another thing to remember is that a lot of the economic disaster is caused by the up till today ever increasing hypercapitalistic society we have created.

This might be most clear in the US with the failing medical infrastructure and individualistic politics. But e.g. in europe we have the issues of who needs to pay for what, who helps which country how..... with lurking around the corner the fall of the EU project.

[GhastMaster]

ever increasing hypercapitalistic society we have created.

You are confusing Corporatocracy with capitalism. Capitalism has been dead for a long time. We do not have a free market. 99.9% of the politicians that argue for less regulation, deliver the opposite. China has done more to promote economic freedom in the last 30 years, while the US and EU have clamped down. It is a strange world we live in.

If you think we do have a free market in the US research and consider the market impacts of the following:

Minimum wage laws
FDA
SEC
FTC
agriculture subsidies
Professional Licensing requirements
Federal reserve bank
Social security
food stamps
WIC
HUD
local housing laws
Certificate of Need laws(limits healthcare facilities in many states)

With regard to the EU, have you watched Brexit: The Movie ? It does some detailing of how the EU is basically the same as the US when it comes to corporations using regulatory capture. I love the segment: The Regulated Man

[Taem]

I'll just leave this right here:

Blood from 3,300 volunteers living in Santa Clara was extracted from a finger prick and analyzed at the start of April. The Stanford University study, which has not been peer reviewed yet and was posted on medRxiv, found that between 2.5 percent of 4.5 percent of people tested positive for antibodies.

Extrapolated over the county's population of two million, the data predicts that between 48,000 and 82,000 people could have been infected with the virus at that time. The upper estimate is more than 80 times higher than the official case count of 1,000.

"Our findings suggest that there is somewhere between 50- and 80-fold more infections in our county than what's known by the number of cases than are reported by our department of public health," Dr. Eran Bendavid, who led the study, told ABC News.

The results also suggested that the upper limit of the coronavirus's mortality rate was only 0.2 percent, much lower than the nationwide death rate of 4.1 percent.

Sources:

https://www.newsweek.com/covid-19-corona...er-1498740

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/17/health/sa...=hvper.com

https://www.foxnews.com/health/coronavir...esearchers

[GhastMaster]

I'll just leave this right here:...

Makes you wonder about all these asymptomatic cases. How many of them actually had the "flu" earlier in the season and are now considered asymptomatic.

https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/...it-carrier

As of Friday, some 660 sailors - nearly 14% of the crew - had tested positive for the coronavirus. The Navy has said that about 60% of those positive tests were among sailors who were symptom-free.

I have 3 friends who had their asses kicked by a bug in January or March. Their symptoms are in line with covid as were mine.

[eppie]

I'll just leave this right here:

Blood from 3,300 volunteers living in Santa Clara was extracted from a finger prick and analyzed at the start of April. The Stanford University study, which has not been peer reviewed yet and was posted on medRxiv, found that between 2.5 percent of 4.5 percent of people tested positive for antibodies.

Extrapolated over the county's population of two million, the data predicts that between 48,000 and 82,000 people could have been infected with the virus at that time. The upper estimate is more than 80 times higher than the official case count of 1,000.

"Our findings suggest that there is somewhere between 50- and 80-fold more infections in our county than what's known by the number of cases than are reported by our department of public health," Dr. Eran Bendavid, who led the study, told ABC News.

The results also suggested that the upper limit of the coronavirus's mortality rate was only 0.2 percent, much lower than the nationwide death rate of 4.1 percent.

Sources:

https://www.newsweek.com/covid-19-corona...er-1498740

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/17/health/sa...=hvper.com

https://www.foxnews.com/health/coronavir...esearchers

Yes. To me this seems logical.

[Quark]

I find it funny you're only trying to reinforce your preexisting thoughts, when they've already been shown to be wrong.

H1N1 was even more contagious and had a mortality rate of 1%, just 0.5% less than COVID-19, but you didn't see the entire world reacting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_swine...ted_States

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that from April 12, 2009 to April 10, 2010, there were 60.8 million cases, 274,000 hospitalizations, and 12,469 deaths (range: 8,868–18,306) in the United States due to the virus.

Even in the worst case estimation H1N1 was less than half as deadly in the US over 1.5 years than COVID-19 has been *this month* - and that's assuming our death count for COVID-19 is accurate. Stop underestimating this, it's irresponsible.

[Taem]

I find it funny you're only trying to reinforce your preexisting thoughts, when they've already been shown to be wrong.

H1N1 was even more contagious and had a mortality rate of 1%, just 0.5% less than COVID-19, but you didn't see the entire world reacting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_swine...ted_States

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that from April 12, 2009 to April 10, 2010, there were 60.8 million cases, 274,000 hospitalizations, and 12,469 deaths (range: 8,868–18,306) in the United States due to the virus.

Even in the worst case estimation H1N1 was less than half as deadly in the US over 1.5 years than COVID-19 has been *this month* - and that's assuming our death count for COVID-19 is accurate. Stop underestimating this, it's irresponsible.

To your point, it is more "deadly" because it is more contagious, so a larger swath of people can become infected. Yes, I completely agree, and it was remiss of me to not point that out. However to my point, it is still incredibly less deadly than estimates figured, and actually <0.8% less fatal than H1N1. As I said, what makes it more deadly is its contagiousness. And as I also said before, Social Distancing is here to stay specifically because of this, and is the reality we face economically, there's no downplaying that, but what I'm not downplaying here Quark is lifting the Stay at Home policy, sorry! I think it needs to be lifted immediately, following the guidelines of the other countries using it successfully and responsibly. I wonder, do you still feel I am being irresponsible with the information I'm giving out? Because I just saw the same info I'm spouting printed in no less than five (5) additional news presses, so eight (8) in total; I can provide links if you'd like. If anything, I'm just spreading "real" news here friend, instead of the fearmongering you hear spouted by the big news conglomerates of the day.

On a related note, I have friends who work in hospitals, some of who have friends who also work in hospitals, who have collectively sent images of their hospitals being completely barren of customers... in hot-spots. I made the argument that only the one ward where the COVID patients were being held was as it was shown on the news, but everyone retorted, "see how badly the news distorts reality?!? The keep saying our hospitals are overflowing and showing patients in the hallways when this does not reflect reality," (I'm paraphrasing). Yes, there were bodies flowing out the sick ward, but only that one wing of the hospital so my point is what you heard on the news was wildly inaccurate and overblown! So what makes you so sure what you are still hearing is going to save you?

Now I'm honestly not a Trump supporter, but I can understand why he want's to fire Fauci for unwittingly help spread misinformation without any proof to back it up. Now that we have some real numbers, watch as their tunes will change, just as the media is slowly starting to spin in a new direction. And then whose responsible for shutting down the country? Who becomes our scapegoat? Will it be Fauci? Trump? The Chinese? You tell me, because I guarantee there will be blood for this when it's all over!

[Ruvanal]

I wonder, do you still feel I am being irresponsible with the information I'm giving out? Because I just saw the same info I'm spouting printed in no less than five (5) additional news presses, so eight (8) in total; I can provide links if you'd like. If anything, I'm just spreading "real" news here friend, instead of the fearmongering you hear spouted by the big news conglomerates of the day.

I feel you are being irresponsible. Those 'news' articles you are referencing were done using a preprint paper that had not had any peer review done on it.
Quote from header of the referenced paper.

This article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed [what does this mean?]. It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/...20062463v1
And as the note says, it should not be used to guide clinical practice; much less public safety policy.

There were several bias in how they collected the data and the testing procedures that were used in the data that they did collect. The sampling was done through facebook linking and at a time when it was next to impossible to get a test done. This was leading to groups that thought they needed to be tested seeing this as their only way to get a test done. This leads to a strong bias that a higher proportion of those that were in the test sample had likely been exposed compared to the population as a whole since it was not even close to a true random sample of the population.

In addition to that the virus testing that they apparently used was one from China that has been subsequently been evaluated in Europe. The evaluation that was done placed at 9th in accuracy out of 9 testing kits checked in the study.

For a full rundown on the problems with that preprint that lead to all those articles check this link.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8Pv77R3g1E
The section about the Stanford study starts at about 5:40min.

[Quark]

https://twitter.com/wfithian/status/1252692357788479488