Coronavirus Thread

[gtbeak]

Red,

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.

Red, I agree that Clay Travis is mis-using this data, but that is nothing new for him as I understand it (I don't often read his stuff). However, the data that is presented in the Ga DPH website with the footnotes is as accurate as is possible.

When trying to assess how the virus is trending in the state, you CANNOT use the date that a case or death is reported. That would be akin to investigating a murder by focusing on when the body is found and ignoring the evidence that shows when the crime was actually committed. As has been discussed quite a bit regarding this virus, we really don't know the results of our actions until 2 to 3 weeks after an action is taken.

Presenting the data as the Ga DPH is presenting it does depend on the reader being able to read the footnotes. I will point out that, in this case, the footnotes are not in any way buried, they are quite clearly presented. The 14 day "uncertain" period is even shaded differently and the lines connecting datapoints is omitted in the "uncertain" period within two weeks of the present date.

I would add a third possibility to your thoughts on their website which would be that they are presenting the data as accurately as possible and depending on the data scientists who look at the data being able to read. This doesn't reflect well on the data scientists in our state.

 

[gtbeak]

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.

View attachment 8331

View attachment 8332

View attachment 8333

Red, regarding your plot showing the percentage of positive cases, I believe that you are showing the overall positive percentage rate. The %positive rate for Georgia on daily testing has been below 10% since April 27th per this website:

https://www.covid-georgia.com/

Overall we are at 11.6% (37,321 cases out of 321,069 tests).

 

[Milwaukee]

Lmao then don’t open. That’s your right as the owner of the business. Why is this a headline lol

 

[gtbeak]

Red, regarding your plot showing the percentage of positive cases, I believe that you are showing the overall positive percentage rate. The %positive rate for Georgia on daily testing has been below 10% since April 27th per this website:

https://www.covid-georgia.com/

Overall we are at 11.6% (37,321 cases out of 321,069 tests).

Replying to myself, I wonder if the lag-time in getting test results is reflected in the 11.6% number. It could be that we have performed 321,069 tests, with 37,321 positive, but x amount with which the results have not returned. This could mean that the %positive number is actually higher than 11.6% overall and higher than the 6.2% for the last 7 days as shown at the linked website. I just don't know the answer to this question.

 

[LibertyTurns]

No chance this pandemic originated from a bioweapons lab. None. The evidence is clear.

https://thebulletin.org/2019/02/human-error-in-high-biocontainment-labs-a-likely-pandemic-threat/
https://thebulletin.org/2019/02/sup...biocontainment-labs-a-likely-pandemic-threat/

 

[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

Now, I'm really concerned, since y'all aren't talking me off da ledge. How can it be possible or even probable, that the 130,000 or so deaths isn't way underestimated? Is the area under both curves depicting infections not equal? Didn't the steep quick curve represent what we did during H1N1, which infected 60+ Million? Somehow, it seems we have lost basic logic with all the modeling and political BS.

 

[FredJacket]

I'm tired of all the theoretical analysis clouding what is practical. & yes... the political environment is making it unbearable.

This virus seems to have it's own behavior making difficult to compare to other outbreaks. Not impossible... but difficult & confuses dummies like me.

Also... in March..we never isolated ourselves to the extreme many theorize. We went to grocery stores, big box stores, hardware stores, liquor stores, etc. All essential workers kept working & went home to family & neighbors (this includes frontline healthcare). Now... as we approach June, we are not going back to 2019 behavior & interaction anytime soon... maybe ever. Useful social distancing measures will be in place.

All that to say when practically applied... discussing case numbers & death counts... the min & max should be contained in reality. & I suspect the reality is the difference between our "closed" (in April) & "reopened" (June) won't increase the spread all that much.

 

[MWBATL]

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.

Can you help me understand the point of this post? On the one hand, it sounds like you are defending China. You almost sound like CNN here. What China has done is indefensible. You fail to mention (just one example) that China shut down internal travel out of Wuhan but did not shut down international travel.
If your point is that the virus would have gotten out eventually anyway, well sure. Just like today, the virus will eventually get to everyone. But that does not mean that mitigation which slows its spread does not have benefits.Defending the slow response in China is rather like saying we shouldn’t take precautions today, because after all,the virus will get to everyone eventually no matter what we do. So, that point is silly and beneath you...so I must be misunderstanding what you are trying to say here.
So, this post simply leaves me scratching my head....

 

[LibertyTurns]

@MWBATL The data is starting to leak out. China had around 640k confirmed cases. They possibly reported 1/8 the number of cases they were really dealing with. Read their strategies on how to leverage this crisis to advance their power worldwide. Above I posted leaks on US bio weapons labs, yet some people think a brand new facility with inexperienced staff would somehow outperform the US. China’s current story is they destroyed C19 samples because of safety, they had been transferred to facilities without adequate controls. How did they get to other facilities out of a BSL-4 facility?? Not surprising China’s running a massive media campaign to deflect blame, but their culpability at the onset of the crisis & current strategy is clear to anyone looking at any of the real data analysis not just listening to whatever talking head spews out on tv.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/12/leaked-chinese-coronavirus-database-number-cases/

 

[MWBATL]

[QUOTE="RamblinRed, post: 717187, member: 1776"

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. [/QUOTE]
Since the CDC does exactly the same thing on their death chart tracking Covid deaths, you must think the same about them, right?

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm
see asterisked note below the chart

 

[RamblinRed]

[QUOTE="RamblinRed, post: 717187, member: 1776"

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.

Since the CDC does exactly the same thing on their death chart tracking Covid deaths, you must think the same about them, right?

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm
see asterisked note below the chart[/QUOTE]


to an extent yes. The CDC has a huge lag in terms of their reporting. But they have been upfront about it from the beginning. GA only started to respond to it and provide the footnotes when they were called out on it.

From an analysis standpoint you get a much better picture based on taking the data when it is reported.
They report the numbers on a specific day, but then for their charts are backdating the information, that gives you a false sense of security in terms of how the numbers are progressing.
They are now providing the footnotes but I doubt very many in the general public read that and understand.

 

[RamblinRed]

@MWBATL The data is starting to leak out. China had around 640k confirmed cases. They possibly reported 1/8 the number of cases they were really dealing with. Read their strategies on how to leverage this crisis to advance their power worldwide. Above I posted leaks on US bio weapons labs, yet some people think a brand new facility with inexperienced staff would somehow outperform the US. China’s current story is they destroyed C19 samples because of safety, they had been transferred to facilities without adequate controls. How did they get to other facilities out of a BSL-4 facility?? Not surprising China’s running a massive media campaign to deflect blame, but their culpability at the onset of the crisis & current strategy is clear to anyone looking at any of the real data analysis not just listening to whatever talking head spews out on tv.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/12/leaked-chinese-coronavirus-database-number-cases/

This is something that US intelligence has been reporting for some time. It was well known that China was greatly underreporting their numbers.
Been following this for months. Just based on the number of coffins that were being delivered to Wuhan it was likely at least 40K died in Wuhan and estimates were 100K nationwide.
I don't know who believed China's numbers, I certainly never had and I don't know if I did it on this board but I do remember posting on at least one board over a month ago about US intelligence estimated and ourside observer estimates of the outbreak inside China,

 

[RamblinRed]

Can you help me understand the point of this post? On the one hand, it sounds like you are defending China. You almost sound like CNN here. What China has done is indefensible. You fail to mention (just one example) that China shut down internal travel out of Wuhan but did not shut down international travel.
If your point is that the virus would have gotten out eventually anyway, well sure. Just like today, the virus will eventually get to everyone. But that does not mean that mitigation which slows its spread does not have benefits.Defending the slow response in China is rather like saying we shouldn’t take precautions today, because after all,the virus will get to everyone eventually no matter what we do. So, that point is silly and beneath you...so I must be misunderstanding what you are trying to say here.
So, this post simply leaves me scratching my head....

My post is simply to say that blaming everything on China failing to keep the virus within its borders is misguided. Even if they had acted quickly (which they did not), it still would have gotten outside their borders before they could have shut down.

I'm not defending the fact that they have lied about their numbers and have been engaging in a propaganda campaign for months. All of that is true.
I'm just saying trying to deflect all blame onto China is a red herring that is designed to deflect from Western leaders own poor responses to the pandemic.

 

[Deleted member 2897]

Here is how our state reports the numbers. It keeps and tracks multiple dates - when was the test collected. When was the positive test result reported. When did deaths occur. When did the death get certified and death certificate filed. They display charts like this to aid in the viewing. It can be complicated or confusing to people who don't pay attention to the footnotes, and often is. I see people posting all the time about how deaths in the last couple days are collapsing, which isn't really true if you use the SC DHEC charts. If you want to see real time numbers, you have to use the occurred chart/data. There's also variances in 'illness onset date', positive test report date, and so on. We try to capture when did the person first start to feel sick, which of course in many cases is never (asymptomatic), so they use the test date result. Its a big bowl of tangled spaghetti at times.

 

[RamblinRed]

No chance this pandemic originated from a bioweapons lab. None. The evidence is clear.

https://thebulletin.org/2019/02/human-error-in-high-biocontainment-labs-a-likely-pandemic-threat/
https://thebulletin.org/2019/02/sup...biocontainment-labs-a-likely-pandemic-threat/

Your creating a chain here that so far as no evidence to support it. There can certainly be human errors in labs. I'd never deny that. But it is different from saying a containment error could happen to saying that is the cause of the current pandemic.
Scientists worldwide have been able to identify this as a natural occuring virus, not something created in a lab.
Furthermore, it is important to understand that the Virology lab in Wuhan is not a Chinese Military Lab, it's not even just a Chinese lab, it is actually an international consortium lab that does research that is peer-reviewed and published in International Medical and Science journals. There were scientists from multiple countries in that lab last fall (including scientists from the United States).
So to go to that step of saying it was produced in a lab and then released either accidentally or purposely would mean you have to believe that the scientific community is either incorrect or lying about how the virus was created and that international scientists from outside China would keep their mouths shut about a containment issue that led to a virus that was being studied getting out of the lab.

That's a whole lot of improbable things that have to happen and so far there has been no evidence supporting that viewpoint and that whole chain of events happening. Right now US's intelligence partners believe those in the US government promoting such a theory are incorrect and are just trying to promote a political view similar to what happened when the US was pushing about Iraq WMD's before the Iraq War. I've read articles from both Australia and the UK talking about this where the 'evidence' provided by the US has been nothing more than 14 pages of articles and opinion pieces from the US, no actual intelligence reports.

 

[RamblinRed]

Nat Silver on underccounting vs overcounting. FWIW Nate has a nice tweet thread from yesterday about three areas where he thinks the media has done a poor job in reporting (which includes being too opinionated and not doing a good job of explaining the nuance and noise in the data).

 

[RamblinRed]

One piece of good news from this weekend. New Study out of Harvard suggests that heat could have up to a 25% reduction in transmission rates. That is good news for the next few months, though they also had this piece of information from the study
"There is an impact from weather conditions, specifically temperature and humidity, on the transmission rates of COVID-19, but those impacts are modest, and therefore, we cannot expect weather conditions alone to quench the epidemic over the summer."

So hopefully with the majority of people practicing good social distancing etiquette and a little warm weather we will see consistent downturn in cases and deaths during the summer. It does also suggest that once the fall cooler weather hits that other mitigation measures may have to be implemented to keep it from spiking too much in the fall and winter as you lose the positive heat effect.

Right now the national transmission rate is likely just below 1, given we are seeing slow declines in both cases and deaths. Some places - like the NY/NJ/CT area have rates likely well under one at this point, other places - like Texas, are likely above 1. If you take NY/NJ/CT numbers out of the national numbers then deaths and cases are basically flat nationwide.

 

[Deleted member 2897]

Nat Silver on underccounting vs overcounting. FWIW Nate has a nice tweet thread from yesterday about three areas where he thinks the media has done a poor job in reporting (which includes being too opinionated and not doing a good job of explaining the nuance and noise in the data).

"Excess deaths" is the same sort of phenomenon that can lead normally very smart people to conclude that thousands of people in Puerto Rico died during a hurricane when only a couple dozen deaths were actually reported and certified as related to the hurricane. We have states (as Liberty has pointed out above) now going on the record stating that their reported deaths are significantly higher than documented deaths (30% higher in California's case) because they are reporting anybody who died that happened to have the virus as a COVID-19 or even assumed to have COVID-19 as a COVID-19 death. We've had colorful conversations on here about that. Add to that a massive financial incentive for hospitals to report things as died with COVID-19 or assumed to have COVID-19 and you can see where there's such a controversy. Even virologists who are experts in this particular field are on TV stating they have COVID-19 despite having been tested numerous times and every single test came back negative.

 

[MWBATL]

My post is simply to say that blaming everything on China failing to keep the virus within its borders is misguided. Even if they had acted quickly (which they did not), it still would have gotten outside their borders before they could have shut down.

I'm not defending the fact that they have lied about their numbers and have been engaging in a propaganda campaign for months. All of that is true.
I'm just saying trying to deflect all blame onto China is a red herring that is designed to deflect from Western leaders own poor responses to the pandemic.

That's fair, with one exception. If indeed it turns out that the virus got out because of a lab error in the Wuhan Virology Lab, then I think your presumption is incorrect. That is not proven, any more than the wet market theory of origin is proven. But it is highly suspicious that numerous samples were taken from animals in the wet market and yet no reports have come out of China identifying the host animal that transmitted the virus in the wet market, nor have any western scientist been given access to those samples.

In that case, then blaming it all on China seems rather appropriate to me. Whatever you think about the response of Western Leaders, had their protocols been such that the bat virus had not escaped their lab is all on China.

 

[MWBATL]

Your creating a chain here that so far as no evidence to support it. There can certainly be human errors in labs. I'd never deny that. But it is different from saying a containment error could happen to saying that is the cause of the current pandemic.
Scientists worldwide have been able to identify this as a natural occuring virus, not something created in a lab.
Furthermore, it is important to understand that the Virology lab in Wuhan is not a Chinese Military Lab, it's not even just a Chinese lab, it is actually an international consortium lab that does research that is peer-reviewed and published in International Medical and Science journals. There were scientists from multiple countries in that lab last fall (including scientists from the United States).
So to go to that step of saying it was produced in a lab and then released either accidentally or purposely would mean you have to believe that the scientific community is either incorrect or lying about how the virus was created and that international scientists from outside China would keep their mouths shut about a containment issue that led to a virus that was being studied getting out of the lab.

That's a whole lot of improbable things that have to happen and so far there has been no evidence supporting that viewpoint and that whole chain of events happening. Right now US's intelligence partners believe those in the US government promoting such a theory are incorrect and are just trying to promote a political view similar to what happened when the US was pushing about Iraq WMD's before the Iraq War. I've read articles from both Australia and the UK talking about this where the 'evidence' provided by the US has been nothing more than 14 pages of articles and opinion pieces from the US, no actual intelligence reports.

There is also zero evidence that the virus originated in the wet market, as so many have reported. That is also merely a theory with absolutely no supporting factual evidence.

Many countries are afraid of condemning China without hard evidence. Australia ahas already been threatened by the Chinese merely for suggesting there should be an investigation of the virus' origins. It should supris eno one that countries official positions reflect the Chinese view. What does surprise me is that US media is so ready to accept one unproven theory over another unproven theory.

Like you, I will never deny that virus have originated in wetmarkets before. Just as there have been lab errors before. The only thing I have seen "proven" (or close to it) is that this virus is not engineered. No one is arguing that it is engineered. But the bat that carries this virus

• was not ever sold in thr wet market
• is not native to Hubei and lives 600 miles away
• WAS being studied in the virology labs near the wet market
• samples from animals taken from that wet market have not been shared with western scientists and (to my knowledge) no reports have bene published that certify that the virus originated in them. One would think if China had such evidence they would not only have published it but shared the raw data with the west.

Simply arguing that western intelligence services all believe something is a typical Fake News talking point which, as we have all learned by now, does not necessarily reflect real intelligence, but the politically convenient slant that is desired. You will pardon me if the Five Eyes report which you cited earlier, and which I linked the Daily Telegraph's report on earlier which indicated that report could easily be read in other ways, doesn't persuade me one wit.

I await real evidence that it was indeed the wet market. There have been SO MANY reports over the last 3 years in particular that said "the intelligence community believes" which have turned out to be terrible reporting and merely the opinion of of one source in the Intelligence community.