Coronavirus Thread

[jacketup]

Science says increased interaction leads to more infection. Science also says that in many cases, viruses temporarily dissipate during summer. The jury is out on whether the weather will have the same effect on this coronavirus.

Actually, we do know that. This isn't the first coronavirus, and with prior ones, the infection rate declined during the summer.

I had lunch with a friend this week who is a retired physician. He is now in demand because he is an expert in disinfection--for example, he went to Africa during the ebola epidemic a few years ago. He owns patents on disinfection devices. We were sitting on his back deck in the sunshine, with our shoulders about 3 feet apart. He said that if he had coronavirus, in that setting, he could not give it to me if he tried.

So much of what we have seen is completely illogical. Beaches were closed, but subways stayed open. It started with flatten the curve, and transitioned into stop the virus--which no credible expert indicated was possible.

We know who is at risk, but instead of educating those at risk and letting everyone make their own decisions, we demonstrate why the USA was ranked 59th in a review countries with the most freedom. Land of the free and home of the brave? Hardly.

 

[Deleted member 2897]

Actually, we do know that. This isn't the first coronavirus, and with prior ones, the infection rate declined during the summer.

I had lunch with a friend this week who is a retired physician. He is now in demand because he is an expert in disinfection--for example, he went to Africa during the ebola epidemic a few years ago. He owns patents on disinfection devices. We were sitting on his back deck in the sunshine, with our shoulders about 3 feet apart. He said that if he had coronavirus, in that setting, he could not give it to me if he tried.

So much of what we have seen is completely illogical. Beaches were closed, but subways stayed open. It started with flatten the curve, and transitioned into stop the virus--which no credible expert indicated was possible.

We know who is at risk, but instead of educating those at risk and letting everyone make their own decisions, we demonstrate why the USA was ranked 59th in a review countries with the most freedom. Land of the free and home of the brave? Hardly.

About 75% of our country falls into 2 groups. Group 1 thinks Group 2 has bad ideas. Group 2 thinks Group 1 are bad people. They can’t stand to be around them. I’m convinced the pandemic has given them an excuse to further extend those feelings.

Do we need masks? No then yes. Do we need to shut down? No then yes. Do we need to flatten the curve? Yes then no. And the list goes on. The smartest scientists in the world even disagree with themselves at times, even with the best of intentions. This should all remind us that very little science is ever settled, and it is absolutely possible for 2 different people who even agree on the science to support different public policies - there is nothing wrong with that.

 

[bobongo]

Actually, we do know that. This isn't the first coronavirus, and with prior ones, the infection rate declined during the summer.

Not COVID-19, according to this study, but we'll see...:

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/warm-weather-wont-stop-spread-of-coronavirus

From the article:
"In order to estimate the growth of the disease, the researchers compared the number of cases on March 20 with the number of cases on March 27.

They then looked at how latitude, temperature, and humidity affected epidemic growth.

In addition, they examined how public health measures during the exposure period of March 7 to 13 — like social distancing, restriction of large gatherings, and school closures — influenced epidemic growth.

When the researchers analyzed the data, they found little or no association between epidemic growth and latitude and temperature."


My sister-in-law is a nurse in Kuwait City and she says they've had plenty of it there.

 

[bobongo]

About 75% of our country falls into 2 groups. Group 1 thinks Group 2 has bad ideas. Group 2 thinks Group 1 are bad people. They can’t stand to be around them. I’m convinced the pandemic has given them an excuse to further extend those feelings.

Pure nonsense.

 

[RamblinRed]

FWIW, i think these tweets by Nate Silver sum up the situation in the US quite well.






I'm expecting we will likely see largely flat to small declines all summer into the fall. Then it is likely to start to spike up some in the fall as people spend more time indoors and closer to each other (there is a reason the flu season is during the winter). Even with that we are looking at 150-200K deaths by Labor Day.

I expect we will continue to slowly re-open as long as things don't start to spike back up.

There has always been some misunderstanding of the purpose of the stay at home orders. and their outcome. The idea was never to get the cases/deaths down to zero - that isn't possible currently in the US. it is to get them to a level that we can manage and have some semblance of mobility assuming people are willing to practice simple, easy social distancing etiquette (wash your hands, wear a mask around others, keep 6 ft from people).

 

[bobongo]

I've wondered how scientists can tell whether a virus came from a lab or a bat. This short article explains that sequencing shows the sequences that differ from bat viruses are scattered in a random way, which indicates it did not come from a lab. But couldn't the sequences have been added by a lab in a random-looking way, in order to mask its contrived origin? I'm asking this of someone who has a lot more knowledge of this than I do (which is none). I know there's suspicion about the origin of the virus based on its proximity to a lab, etc., but I'm asking primarily about the genetic aspect of it.

https://www.newscientist.com/term/coronavirus-come-lab/

One thing that arouses my uninformed suspicion about its origin is the very odd effect it is having. Carriers who have no symptoms, overactive immune system overresponses in children arising as much as six weeks after infection, people seeming to recover and then relapse, the permanent lung damage, the "happy apoxia" where oxygen levels very gradually decrease until people drift off to die, the unusual nature of the blood clots, the loss of smell and taste which is associated no with no swelling of nasal passages or inflammation but with nerve damage - all these seem quite strange.

Here's an article on some of the odd effects of COVID-19:

https://elemental.medium.com/the-3-strangest-covid-19-symptoms-explained-a5c257b53538

 

[RamblinRed]

FWIW, here is what is happening in GA. Best news is the positive case % is on a nice consistent downward trend. on the flip side it is still almost twice the national average.
Cases I don't pay as much attention to as they are heavily influenced by test rates - so the fact it is largely flat over the last 3 weeks (though down roughly 25% from its peak) doesn't really bother me. Deaths are still not a great picture. They have been basically flat since early april (32 was the 7 day rolling avg on Apr 7th, 33 is the 7 day rolling avg on May 15). It's down from its spike on April 21st, but is pretty consistent staying around 30-35 day. It's important to use 7 day rolling averages to smooth out the natural reporting issues (some days naturally report higher numbers and some days naturally report lower numbers based on how data is being collected and spread up the chain).

My basic feeling on GA is that it is better than it was in Mid-to-late April but that for the most part we are largely treading water. Not getting ahead of it and not letting it get to a point where it overwhelms things. You do have to be very careful if you are looking at the graphs on the GA Dept of Health website because they can give you an inaccurate sense of how things are going in terms of cases. They are backdating cases so that once they get a positive test result they place that test result back to the day it was submitted, not the day the result came back. The graphing issue with that is unless you having a tremendous spike in cases it is always going to look like the cases are going down since there is a delay between when a test is submitted and when the result is returned.

 

[RamblinRed]

I've wondered how scientists can tell whether a virus came from a lab or a bat. This short article explains that sequencing shows the sequences that differ from bat viruses are scattered in a random way, which indicates it did not come from a lab. But couldn't the sequences have been added by a lab in a random-looking way, in order to mask its contrived origin? I'm asking this of someone who has a lot more knowledge of this than I do (which is none). I know there's suspicion about the origin of the virus based on its proximity to a lab, etc., but I'm asking primarily about the genetic aspect of it.

https://www.newscientist.com/term/coronavirus-come-lab/

One thing that arouses my uninformed suspicion about its origin is the very odd effect it is having. Carriers who have no symptoms, overactive immune system overresponses in children arising as much as six weeks after infection, people seeming to recover and then relapse, the permanent lung damage, the "happy apoxia" where oxygen levels very gradually decrease until people drift off to die, the unusual nature of the blood clots, the loss of smell and taste which is associated no with no swelling of nasal passages or inflammation but with nerve damage - all these seem quite strange.

Here's an article on some of the odd effects of COVID-19:

https://elemental.medium.com/the-3-strangest-covid-19-symptoms-explained-a5c257b53538

I'll try to find the article I read on this. It had a good discussion on what you are discussing and why it points to a natural source. Basically it comes down to anything down in a labratory is never done randomly. There is actually too many gene sequences to deal with to do it randomly. if you actually put it in a random order (which scientists are not able to do) than you would not know what you are getting and whether you are creating something this is really dangeorus or really harmless.

Also, in case you are interested in an explanation of the Plandemic, here is a good 37 min video by a surgeon in NY watching the video and then discussing every point raised in it.

 

[MountainBuzzMan]

I've wondered how scientists can tell whether a virus came from a lab or a bat. This short article explains that sequencing shows the sequences that differ from bat viruses are scattered in a random way, which indicates it did not come from a lab. But couldn't the sequences have been added by a lab in a random-looking way, in order to mask its contrived origin? I'm asking this of someone who has a lot more knowledge of this than I do (which is none). I know there's suspicion about the origin of the virus based on its proximity to a lab, etc., but I'm asking primarily about the genetic aspect of it.

https://www.newscientist.com/term/coronavirus-come-lab/

One thing that arouses my uninformed suspicion about its origin is the very odd effect it is having. Carriers who have no symptoms, overactive immune system overresponses in children arising as much as six weeks after infection, people seeming to recover and then relapse, the permanent lung damage, the "happy apoxia" where oxygen levels very gradually decrease until people drift off to die, the unusual nature of the blood clots, the loss of smell and taste which is associated no with no swelling of nasal passages or inflammation but with nerve damage - all these seem quite strange.

Here's an article on some of the odd effects of COVID-19:

https://elemental.medium.com/the-3-strangest-covid-19-symptoms-explained-a5c257b53538

I am absolutely no expert and I did not even sleep in a holiday inn last night. What I could see happening is this was a purely natural virus. We do know that particular lab was going out of its way to find different Corona bat virus to study them to understand them in case a new pandemic comes out.
It is then very possible that someone there doing research got infected with a very contagious bat virus. Went down to the local wet market for some noodles.
So the virus can be both natural AND accidentally released from the lab. I think there is a significant chance that is what happened. Maybe even getting close to 50%? It is also just as likely it did come from harvesting of bats for food.

 

[WreckinGT]

It’s probably worth mentioning also that Georgia completely changed the way they report numbers when they reopened. The most recent numbers from GPH right now aren’t really trustworthy.

 

[RamblinRed]

One other topic I wanted to talk about is whether China could have prevented the outbreak from spreading internationally. The simple answer to this imo is no based on the data we have and what we now know.
While China deserves blame for underplaying the severity and not acting fast enough - their opaqueness is nothing new and US intelligence knew by early January that there was a severe outbreak happening in Wuhan that was more severe than being reported.

You have to think about the timeline. A couple of doctors in Wuhan first started raising warnings at the very end of 2019 (just before New Year's). These were the ones initially punished by local authorities. Much like elsewhere in the world if you look at the outbreak in Wuhan it took time for it to become easy to see as serious. It didn't start to ramp up until mid-January. At that point the Central Chinese Government locked down Wuhan and the Huibei province, but by then it was already too late. If they had done it by Jan 1st - it already would have been too late. This was circulating through Wuhan in December and probably back to November.

The fact that this particular virus has a high asymptomatic rate and infected people are contagious 2-3 days before showing symptoms (if they show symptoms), makes it particularly difficult to catch and isolate. According to a study in the Lancelet (one of the world's premier medical journals) a little over 15% of travel out of Wuhan by air, train and car is international travel, including 50 direct flights to the US per day in December (that doesn't include hundreds of flights from other Chinese cities each day). That is hundreds of thousands of people who were leaving Wuhan and some small percentage of them were certainly already infected in December. Those infected people started traveling to different places around the world.

We know at this point that the earliest confirmed death in the US was at the beginning of Feb in CA to a person who had not travelled. That means she has to have been infected by someone else likely by mid-January. France has found evidence of COVID19 in France now back to late December. I suspect as US scientists and doctors have more time to trace we will likely find something similar in the US.

Say China had acted faster and implemented a lockdown at the beginning of January (and who would have thought that would have been necessary at the time given the small known numbers at that point), it already would have been too late as it had already likely been spread in a number of countries around the world including France, Italy (which has alot of trade in Lombardy with the Wuhan area of China), Britain, US and likely most Asian countries. And even if they did you now have the issue of it coming in from countries other than China and you have no idea which ones or that it is even happening. If you do the math their were well over 1,000 direct flights from Wuhan to the US in the month of December - that's tens of thousands of people and all you need are for a couple of them to be infected and it is here.

China certainly deserves blame for its actions in this pandemic and its propaganda efforts are laughable, but ultimately virus' spread for a reason and this one was out of the bag before anyone could have reacted to it. Most Asian countries did very well as they had alot of muscle memory of what to do once you start to see it. Citizens immediately started to wear masks and social distance once it became known. The countries started to look for infected people immediately and then start to isolate and quarantine them. Those countries (as well as Australia and New Zealand) just had built up programs to deal with it quickly. Most Western countries without having that previous experience did not understand the potential and did not ramp up quickly enough.

 

[RamblinRed]

It’s probably worth mentioning also that Georgia completely changed the way they report numbers when they reopened. The most recent numbers from GPH right now aren’t really trustworthy.

Your comments are true. Data scientists have been very frustrated with how GA is reporting data and constantly changing definitions.
FWIW, as I showed in an earlier message deaths haven't really declined. They are stable, which is a start.

This footnote to the graph Travis tweeted shows why it isn't accurate. Basically as tests come back positive they are backdated so the most recent 2 weeks is always understated in their graph.
They also changed the definitions on their statewide GA map last week of what numbers you had to hit to have darker blue and red shadings to make it look like less counties were having issues.

* 14-day window – Confirmed cases over the last 14 days may not be accounted for due to illnesses yet to be reported or test results may still be pending.

What is happening on their website right now can be caused by one of 2 things. Either the people running and updating the website are incompetent or they are purposely trying to play with the numbers to make them look better than they actually are. Neither is a particuarly comforting thought.

 

[GoldZ]

If the area under the flattening and non-flattening curves is the same, and H1N1 infected 60+ Million Americans, and considering how Covid is much more contagious, aren't we in deep caca, period. If we don't have a vaccine for 12-18 months, which before we politicized everything was the consensus, and therapeutics are just so so in developing, I don't see how we aren't over analyzing this with models galore. Help me here, and yes I understand the original premise for flattening.
It just seems inevitable that the early on estimates of deaths was low by an order of magnitude. We have to respond to surges or the deaths will be higher than an order of magnitude, but unless I'm underestimating our vaccine/ therapeutic development abilities, we really are in deep. I'll be most receptive to those here who can convince me otherwise. Z

 

[LibertyTurns]

You don’t need artificial genetic inserts in order for the virus to have been genetically altered. You can culture it with ACE2 receptors forcing the jump to human cells via mutations in spike proteins. It’s precisely how SARS virus research was done a decade ago. But of course you all already know that which is why there’s so much media coverage calling this a conspiracy theory.

 

[Deleted member 2897]

Went and got takeout here last night. Woa nelly. The place was packed. The only people wearing masks were me, another guy getting takeout, and 1 patron. No gloves or masks for the staff. People coming and going to the bathroom using bare hands to open doors, etc. We ate at a table by the water as a family, then walked on the boardwalk by the water. Restaurants were all jam packed. At one point the crowd on the boardwalk was so big from a spilled out restaurant patio, we refused to walk through it, and turned around and went back. Majority of the people apparatus to Be in their 20s. Another larger contingent was maybe 30-40.

It will be real interesting to see what happens to cases and hospitalizations in about a month. If these guys have it to spread it, they will. If there was ever a group that could get herd immunity without a big health risk, this is it too. But there were a smattering of older people for sure.

 

[GoldZ]

Went and got takeout here last night. Woa nelly. The place was packed. The only people wearing masks were me, another guy getting takeout, and 1 patron. No gloves or masks for the staff. People coming and going to the bathroom using bare hands to open doors, etc. We ate at a table by the water as a family, then walked on the boardwalk by the water. Restaurants were all jam packed. At one point the crowd on the boardwalk was so big from a spilled out restaurant patio, we refused to walk through it, and turned around and went back. Majority of the people apparatus to Be in their 20s. Another larger contingent was maybe 30-40.

It will be real interesting to see what happens to cases and hospitalizations in about a month. If these guys have it to spread it, they will. If there was ever a group that could get herd immunity without a big health risk, this is it too. But there were a smattering of older people for sure.

Is this SC's success thus far backfiring?

 

[GT_EE78]

Why American life went on as normal during the killer pandemic of 1969
>even woodstock
schools were not shut down nationwide, other than a few dozen because of too many sick teachers. Face masks weren’t required or even common. Though Woodstock was not held during the peak months of the H3N2 pandemic (the first wave ended by early March 1969, and it didn’t flare up again until November of that year), the festival went ahead when the virus was still active and had no known cure.
Between 1968 and 1970, the Hong Kong flu killed between an estimated one and four million, according to the CDC
P/VP Johnson/Humphrey got it.So did commander of Apollo 8.
“That generation approached viruses with calm, rationality and intelligence,” he said. “We left disease mitigation to medical professionals, individuals and families, rather than politics, politicians and government.”
https://nypost.com/2020/05/16/why-life-went-on-as-normal-during-the-killer-pandemic-of-1969/

 

[bobongo]

It’s probably worth mentioning also that Georgia completely changed the way they report numbers when they reopened. The most recent numbers from GPH right now aren’t really trustworthy.

The Georgia Dept. of Public Health posted a bar chart with all the dates mixed up to make it look like the infection trend in the five hardest-hit counties was going down when it actually was more or less stable. Here's more on that. I wish they had included the graph. The one I saw had the dates all higgledy-piggledy. They've since taken it down.:

https://www.ajc.com/news/state--reg...uses-critics-cry-foul/182PpUvUX9XEF8vO11NVGO/

 

[Deleted member 2897]

Is this SC's success thus far backfiring?

Yea could be quarantine fatigue. We’re so low on hospital capacity utilization and everything else, perhaps they think we were too careful. I just don’t get why you can’t go back out and about and enjoy life but also be careful. I guess IIWII. We will see.

 

[bobongo]

.