Coronavirus

[#1]

So, today this happens.

[#2]

Italy has 2,313 new cases in 24 hours. It seems yesterday's lull was merely a blip.

Nearly 200 deaths in 24 hours.

I am so not leaving the house ever again.

[#3]

Adding a bit of much needed levity ....

[#4]

Meanwhile, in Britain...

The Cheltenham Festival usually sees more than a quarter of a million (!) people over 4 days... seems they aren't deterred this year either. (photo is from yesterday)

[#5]

I need a nanny (male or female) for a 4-year old. Duration 2 weeks probably longer. Language: German Norwegian or English. Bring your own toilet paper.

[#6]

re: "I need a nanny (male or female) for a 4-year old. Duration 2 weeks probably longer. Language: German Norwegian or English. Bring your own toilet paper."

Jennifer: I am available to do this, as long as I can do this from home. Do you already have video cameras set up in all the rooms that the child will be in?

[#7]

---

Preston H wrote:

re: "I need a nanny (male or female) for a 4-year old. Duration 2 weeks probably longer. Language: German Norwegian or English. Bring your own toilet paper."

Jennifer: I am available to do this, as long as I can do this from home. Do you already have video cameras set up in all the rooms that the child will be in?

---

I could try a helmet camera so you can follow what he is doing. But he is very interested in his body functions at the moment.

[#8]

Italy has 2,651 new cases and 189 new deaths in the last 24 hours.

Other countries can take a look how far behind Italy they are here:

(Although for various cultural and logistical and demographic reasons hopefully they won't all be hit quite as hard...)

[#9]

Petra,

This is fascinating information. Can you please provide a source? I'm past reading specific data without sources 🙂

[#10]

---

Samantha M wrote:

Petra,

This is fascinating information. Can you please provide a source? I'm past reading specific data without sources 🙂

---

Hi Samantha,

I use https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries for the daily figures, it ties in with the official numbers reported by the countries in question but provides extra number-crunching.

The graph was created from the official numbers by a statistics guru friend of a friend, using the official data.

I'm glad you found it useful. I find some degree of comfort in nice, real, cold, unemotional, non toilet-paper-panic-buying hysterical outbursts.

The numbers tell me to stay where I am and be very, VERY grateful that I am a freelancer and won't need to leave the house again until Amazon no longer functions, in which case I'll be beeped.

Edited to add:

Some real life advice:

[#11]

In France, all schools, universities, kindergartens, and crèches are to close from Monday. And an appeal from the French president to restrict movement where possible - and many other appeals besides. Not a sugar-coated message. 

[#12]

Anoher attempt at levity ... and for John.  We'll teach you all pidgen ... no matter how.

[#13]

---

Nichola L wrote:

In France, all schools, universities, kindergartens, and crèches are to close from Monday. And an appeal from the French president to restrict movement where possible - and many other appeals besides. Not a sugar-coated message. 

---

And if you have kids that need supervision (under 16), Social Security will pay one of the parents to stay at home with them.

[#14]

This is insane. The virus is highly contagious, not highly disabling nor highly fatal. There's a very good chance you will get the virus, as there is no vaccine. Blood plasma from virus survivors is a good substitute, but you can't order that up from Amazon.

Warmer weather might help; the body creates a fever to combat infections. It might not help. Once all the symptomless cases are diagnosed, this should fall into a standard coronavirus range for fatality, somewhere under one percent. There do not appear to be any routine disabling effects from the virus, but some will pop up. Only really old people like me are at significant risk, but a few young and perfectly healthy people will catch this and die, and we won't know why. That's the great secret to medicine: we don't really know very much.

The number of people infected globally might reach into the billions before there's a vaccine, but many of them will show no symptoms and the overwhelming majority will survive unscathed. We are not in 1348 Europe and this is not the Black Death. I wish our leaders and journalists would stop spreading panic, because the greater threat is panic, not the Covid-19.

[#15]

---

Bill H wrote:

This is insane. The virus is highly contagious, not highly disabling nor highly fatal. There's a very good chance you will get the virus, as there is no vaccine. Blood plasma from virus survivors is a good substitute, but you can't order that up from Amazon.

Warmer weather might help; the body creates a fever to combat infections. It might not help. Once all the symptomless cases are diagnosed, this should fall into a standard coronavirus range for fatality, somewhere under one percent. There do not appear to be any routine disabling effects from the virus, but some will pop up. Only really old people like me are at significant risk, but a few young and perfectly healthy people will catch this and die, and we won't know why. That's the great secret to medicine: we don't really know very much.

The number of people infected globally might reach into the billions before there's a vaccine, but many of them will show no symptoms and the overwhelming majority will survive unscathed. We are not in 1348 Europe and this is not the Black Death. I wish our leaders and journalists would stop spreading panic, because the greater threat is panic, not the Covid-19.

---

_____________________

Try telling that to the countries who have been badly hit. Panic is self-sown. This is a deadly virus and leaders are doing the right thing by taking all the precautions they can before it spirals completely out of control as did the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed more people than  WW1 and WW2 combined. 

[#16]

That's a highly inappropriate comparison. The 'Spanish' flu outbreak occurred at a time when most people lacked basic sanitation, when healthcare and medicine were generally primative, and, importantly, just after an unprecedented war where millions of people were already sick/injured and where they were cramped together in the few hospitals that were available.. 

[#17]

---

Bill H wrote:

This is insane. The virus is highly contagious, not highly disabling nor highly fatal. There's a very good chance you will get the virus, as there is no vaccine. Blood plasma from virus survivors is a good substitute, but you can't order that up from Amazon.

Warmer weather might help; the body creates a fever to combat infections. It might not help. Once all the symptomless cases are diagnosed, this should fall into a standard coronavirus range for fatality, somewhere under one percent. There do not appear to be any routine disabling effects from the virus, but some will pop up. Only really old people like me are at significant risk, but a few young and perfectly healthy people will catch this and die, and we won't know why. That's the great secret to medicine: we don't really know very much.

The number of people infected globally might reach into the billions before there's a vaccine, but many of them will show no symptoms and the overwhelming majority will survive unscathed. We are not in 1348 Europe and this is not the Black Death. I wish our leaders and journalists would stop spreading panic, because the greater threat is panic, not the Covid-19.

---

You are right, most people who contract the virus will not become dangerously ill and many will not even notice they have it. But everyone who gets it will likely infect someone else, especially if they are asymptomatic. It does make enough people dangerously ill that a sudden spike will utterly swamp the US health care system. Not enough ventilators, not enough health care professionals, not enough hospital beds. That is why everybody needs to get on board with social distancing, fanatical handwashing, and any other measures our infectious disease specialists recommend. The idea is to flatten the curve of increasing cases. 

[#18]

---

Bill H wrote:

(...) this should fall into a standard coronavirus range for fatality, somewhere under one percent. (...)

---

European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control

Q & A on COVID-19:

(...)

4. How severe is COVID-19 infection?
Preliminary findings indicate that the mortality rate for COVID-19 is 20-30 per thousand people diagnosed. This is significantly less than the 2003 SARS outbreak. However, it is much higher than the mortality rate for seasonal influenza.

(...)

https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/novel-coronavirus-china

20-30 per 1,000 that's 2% to 3%. And there is no vaccine for now.

You're way outside of your area of expertise Bill.

[#19]

As Phyllis wrote, "The idea is to flatten the curve of increasing cases." 

The sad part is some countries do a much better job of this than ones pretending to be know-it-all ostriches.

[#20]

I think there is a bit of folly when discussing mortality percentages at this stage. We are just too early. No doubt there are a significant number of unreported positives out there. If I were to guess, which is a totally useless exercise I admit, it will be higher than the flu but less than something like SARS. Great. What do we want to do with these in-flight percentages for now? So if it's less than 1% we are good to go out and breath on everyone but if it's 1% we all need to hide under the bed? The reality is that this thing is highly contagious and does kill people and for now there is no vaccine. So in my view this means to think beyond our own inconvenience and take sensible precautions. In other words be a good global citizen. If we are worried about this being an "over-reaction" then one can think of it has a preparedness exercise for when the next bug comes along that makes this one look like indigestion. We'll at least have practice and the system will have had a chance to figure out what worked and what didn't. There is potentially enormous value in that. 

[#21]

Rene,

I've read the studies and I know the science. The issue is diagnosed cases. Of course it's 2-3% of diagnosed cases when infected youngsters show no symptoms, and even many infected adults show no symptoms. In densely packed areas such as Sao Paolo, Mexico City, Dhakka, Kolkata, Jakarta and Lagos, literally thousands of people every month get sick and die and nobody notices. We haven't heard from those areas.

Add in the people who become infected but never experience symptoms any more serious than other cold viruses, hence never get diagnosed, and there is certainly an enormous pool of undiagnosed cases out there. We've been using diagnosed cases, which we know isn't accurate. Using estimated cases begs the question of whose estimates to use. I have no problem with using diagnosed cases early in epidemeology of a new virus, but we should know what it means and what it doesn't.

I haven't practiced medicine in more than thirty years, but basic viral epidemeology hasn't changed much in the interim. Undiagnosed cases are the most common sources of transmission for many viruses, from HIV through Influenza A. The influenza viruses have a fatality rate of about 0.1%. Most corona viruses have fatality rates below 1% once the information is available and assessed. We don't yet know the reference range for infection to symptom display lag, nor the reference range for duration of the disease, nor the reference range for how long following symptom disappearance an infected patient might still transmit the disease to others. We're getting closer on all of those, but it takes time.

We don't have definitive data about how long the virus can live on various surfaces because we have a very small sample set. The number of things we don't know certainly exceeds the number of things we know, but it's pretty safe to assume that COVID-19 isn't the black death, and that fatality rates will decline once hidden cases are added to the diagnosed divisor.

You're right, I'm out of my area of expertise here, just not far out. I have to assume you have more kowledge of medicine and epidemeology than I do. I look forward to reading your future input.

[#22]

I think precaution is wise when dealing with the unknown. For instance, one of the coronavirus victims in Wuhan was a 36 year man with no pre-existing condition associated with coronavirus mortality.
https://time.com/5770924/wuhan-coronavirus-youngest-death/
Also, I’ve read that there seem to be 2 variants of the virus, with one being much more lethal than the other, but I doubt it can be easily determined at this time which variant a person is afflicted with.

[#23]

The overall mortality rate is not the actual problem. The rapid spread in the context of availability of healthcare, however, is. 

All the severe measures aren't in place to stop or cure the virus, but to make sure as many of the sick as possible don't die in a tent because all hospital beds are taken as possible. The measures may just help to get the numbers of the new critically ill in line with those who are discharged or die (both outcomes free up a hospital bed equally effectively)

There are not enough Intensive Care beds in to save everyone who gets seriously ill in Italy already. Fact.

Italian doctors already have to decide who gets a chance to live and who has to be left to die. Fact.

People are dying in hospital corridors already. Fact.

Flattening the curve is the only way forward and to pretend it's just a cold and if we ignore it all will be ticketyboo is nothing short of idiotic. 

I'd rather get my information from real doctors, real, current, up to date and compos mentis experts in their respective fields and those who actually do know what they're talking about, than from armchair experts who get theirs from the dumbed down "let's pretend it isn't happening then maybe it'll go away - let's not test people so we keep the numbers low" fraction

--------------------------------------------

Change of subject.

This is cute:

[#24]

DH will stay home today and the kid can play outside today.

[#25]

Quite, the numbers of people who die of flu each year are far higher by a huge extent, and flu would have killed many of the people who have died anyway. It's undeniably a problem, but an increasingly desperate and devolving media are trying to hype this up into armaggedon in the way they do everything these days. 

[#26]

---

Ramon B wrote:

Quite, the numbers of people who die of flu each year are far higher by a huge extent, and flu would have killed many of the people who have died anyway. It's undeniably a problem, but an increasingly desperate and devolving media are trying to hype this up into armaggedon in the way they do everything these days. 

---

I hate media lol They create panic. It's so crazy.

This reminds me so much of the SARS craziness. Or the anthrax stuff when people were afraid to open their mail. lol

The boomers in my area don't even seem to care. I got my nails done yesterday and there were a few boomers just doing the same. There are like 3-4 boomers that go to the gym at the same time I do. Got some inside pics of NYC and Atlanta though and they are having a meltdown. 

Today my friend who went on a cruise last week comes over where she will officially turn me into a bat flu walker. I will report in two weeks if I start eating brains.