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petra_r
Community Member

Coronavirus

So, today this happens.

 

not so funny.jpg

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AndreaG
Moderator
Moderator

Hi all,

 

This thread has been closed from further replies due to its size. We understand this topic is still ongoing and affecting our Community members. Please, feel free to start a new thread to continue discussing the latest news around the pandemic.

 

~Andrea
Upwork

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mtngigi
Community Member

There are 8 presumptive cases in my county. Had an eye appointment today and thought about canceling. Wanted to ask if any of his staff had been skiing, which is what one guy who definitely has it was doing ... he had contact with a lot of people.

 

Like Petra, I don't usually freak out - but I have medical stuff coming up that will involve poking and prodding and hospital stays. So yeah, I'm a bit freaked. Ordering things online is helpful, but then I start to think about where most product is coming from. Going to make an effort to "buy local".

 

Scary stuff. Even scarier is how our idiot president is handling this thing.


Virginia F wrote:

There are 8 presumptive cases in my county. Had an eye appointment today and thought about canceling. Wanted to ask if any of his staff had been skiing, which is what one guy who definitely has it was doing ... he had contact with a lot of people.

 

Like Petra, I don't usually freak out - but I have medical stuff coming up that will involve poking and prodding and hospital stays. So yeah, I'm a bit freaked. Ordering things online is helpful, but then I start to think about where most product is coming from. Going to make an effort to "buy local".

 

Scary stuff. Even scarier is how our idiot president is handling this thing.


I don't belive the virus could travel with packages, but whenever possible, buying local is a good policy.

jenkfreelance
Community Member

Unfortunately I am in the same situation.

10 km is the closet known case to my location.

 

It is toilet paper panic central here. Supermarket shelves are empty and people are lining up in queues in the morning when the loo paper shipments arrive.

Even just writing this sounds comical.

 

It's hard to believe that a fight has broke out here over toilet paper.

 

My biggest concern with the Coronavirus is for the elderly and people with predisposed conditions.

 

What I am not understanding is how it got to Iran and now Italy?
First it was presumed to have originated at the Wuhan live animal market, so was it transmitted via international travel between China and Iran etc?

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-07/two-women-brawl-in-supermarket-over-toilet-paper/12036218 

 

 

16 million under quarantine in Italy now.  😞  Lead story from the BBC. According to a friend in Milan the markets, pharmacies, etc. are fully stocked; getting TP, etc.is not a problem.  The real concerns are the economy ... small businesses and the poor and near-poor will be hit hard.

 

Thank God there is a social / govt. system in place that gives full health and social system help (in varying degrees) for a long way into the future.


Wendy C wrote:

16 million under quarantine in Italy now. 


And mass panic....

 

Now all those northern people are flooding down here, bringing the virus with them

Only the Italian ogvernment would be incompetent enough to leak what they plan to do the evening before they intend to do it.

 

“What happened with the news leak has caused many people to try to escape, causing the opposite effect of what the decree is trying to achieve,” said Roberto Burioni, a professor of microbiology and virology at the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University in Milan. “Unfortunately some of those who fled will be infected with the disease.”

 

Idiots. Just selfish short-sighted idiots. 


Wendy C wrote:

Idiots. Just selfish short-sighted idiots. 


yup.

 

1,492 new cases in Italy in the last 24 hours. 133 died in the last 24 hours. Almost 5 times as many in all of China.

 

Sigh 😞

 


Wendy C wrote:

Idiots. Just selfish short-sighted idiots. 


Average human beings.

kochubei_valeria
Community Member

Hello everybody,

 

A few posts have been removed from this thread. I'd like to ask the participants to refrain from posting disruptive comments, political content and personal attacks.

 

Stay safe and healthy, everybody.

~ Valeria
Upwork

here's a glimpse of how insane public paranoia is getting. and how stupid people have a stranglehold on truth.

there is a young (early 20s) asian guy who works at the same company that my wife does. he lives with a few members of his extended family. he mentioned in conversation that his uncle just got back from vietnam. a coworker overheard and immediately ran to HR. now that poor kid (who's a bit of a trainee. and needs more or less constant supervision) has to "work from home" for two weeks.

vietnam is over 2000 miles from china, and has no current recorded cases of coronavirus.


Wayne G wrote:

here's a glimpse of how insane public paranoia is getting. and how stupid people have a stranglehold on truth.

there is a young (early 20s) asian guy who works at the same company that my wife does. he lives with a few members of his extended family. he mentioned in conversation that his uncle just got back from vietnam. a coworker overheard and immediately ran to HR. now that poor kid (who's a bit of a trainee. and needs more or less constant supervision) has to "work from home" for two weeks.

vietnam is over 2000 miles from china, and has no current recorded cases of coronavirus.


_______________________

I'm sorry for the young man from Vietnam, but there have been cases there. https://www.vietnam-briefing.com/news/vietnam-business-operations-and-the-coronavirus-updates.html/ and

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/09/british-couple-contract-virus-on-flight-from-heathrow-...

 

 

Wayne G wrote:

 

vietnam is over 2000 miles from china, and has no current recorded cases of coronavirus.

___________________________________________________________________________

 

There are actually 30 confirmed cases in Vietnam -- as you can see on the left hand side. This is reliable data monitored by John Hopkins and constantly updated:  https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6      

 

Stay safe, everyone!  

 

 

e_luneborg
Community Member


Wayne G wrote:


vietnam is over 2000 miles from china, and has no current recorded cases of coronavirus.


I've never been good with miles and those measurements, and English isn't my native language, so if 2000 miles from China means the same as sharing a 1281 km border, then okay. If not, you're wrong. 

________________________
Freelancing is a gamble - To win you need skill, luck and a strategy


Eve L wrote:

Wayne G wrote:


vietnam is over 2000 miles from china, and has no current recorded cases of coronavirus.


I've never been good with miles and those measurements, and English isn't my native language, so if 2000 miles from China means the same as sharing a 1281 km border, then okay. If not, you're wrong. 


Moreover, it's under 1000 miles from Wuhan (the centre of the epidemic) to Hanoi.


Eve L wrote:

Wayne G wrote:


vietnam is over 2000 miles from china, and has no current recorded cases of coronavirus.


I've never been good with miles and those measurements, and English isn't my native language, so if 2000 miles from China means the same as sharing a 1281 km border, then okay. If not, you're wrong. 


haha was about to say just that...

versailles
Community Member


Wayne G wrote:



vietnam is over 2000 miles from china, 


Funny coincidence, Canada is also exactly 2,000 miles from the US.

 

#GeographyIsHard

 

 

 

-----------
"Where darkness shines like dazzling light"   —William Ashbless

For accurate information on CV, please visit a reliable website like

https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/q-a-coronaviruses

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/

 

Don't rely on forums, social media and other less reliable sources.

 

Lives depend on us all acting in accordance with the best evidence-based information.

joynul33
Community Member

Dear All,
3 coronavirus patients detected in Bangladesh. Pray For us! I'm living in Dhaka moreover.

Joynul
k_rocca
Community Member

The first case in my isolated Canadian town. The patient went to a mining conference attended by 25,000 people from all over the world. This is a mining town so you know he wasn't the only one. Our university has moved to online classes.

 

Be safe out there!

It's now officially been declared a pandemic.

So far the Thai authorities are refusing to ban Songkran celebrations, which are due to begin in around 4 weeks. For those that don't know, Songkran is the Thai new year and is celebrated by everybody getting drunk, becoming an idiot, and joining in with an enormous water fight up that takes place throughout the country. 

What could possibly go wrong? You'd think it would be called off, but T.I.T. (This is Thailand). 

petra_r
Community Member

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.

 

Adding a bit of much needed levity ....

 

4 GAYLE.jpg

Meanwhile, in Britain...

 

89633223_10215507601868081_2885430832716054528_o.jpg

 

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)

 

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.

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?


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.

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...)

 

behind Italy.png

 

 

smason3
Community Member

Petra,

 

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

petra_r
Community Member


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:

 

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. 

 

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

 

SHAKA Post.jpg


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.

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.


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. 

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.. 


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. 

 


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.

 

 

-----------
"Where darkness shines like dazzling light"   —William Ashbless

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.

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. 

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.

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