Covid 19 virus

[engrguy42]

FWIW, I've pretty much stopped following this thread, but I thought I'd jump in and provide some of the latest WHO data for the US. Attached is my Excel graph of total deaths as well as new deaths each day.

The blue bars are total deaths to date, and the yellow are the new deaths each day. Apparently CDC's numbers are higher (for whatever reason...I'm thinking WHO might be a day behind CDC or something) but I thought I'd stick with WHO to make them comparable to the rest of the world.

For the TL;DR crowd, basically the number of new deaths in the US has been pretty flat at between 40 and 50 each day for the last 4 days. I also adjusted the vertical scale to highlight that it's all a matter of perspective. And to allow for the inevitable increase.

[Zero999]

FWIW, I've pretty much stopped following this thread, but I thought I'd jump in and provide some of the latest WHO data for the US. Attached is my Excel graph of total deaths as well as new deaths each day.

The blue bars are total deaths to date, and the yellow are the new deaths each day. Apparently CDC's numbers are higher (for whatever reason...I'm thinking WHO might be a day behind CDC or something) but I thought I'd stick with WHO to make them comparable to the rest of the world.

For the TL;DR crowd, basically the number of new deaths in the US has been pretty flat at between 40 and 50 each day for the last 4 days. I also adjusted the vertical scale to highlight that it's all a matter of perspective. And to allow for the inevitable increase.

That's good news, but there's no need for complacency. There will be a lag between people contracting the virus, falling ill and dying. I hope the number of deaths fall in the US, but it isn't my expectation.

Constructive feedback: please choose a more sensible scale for the Y-axis and PNG format, is more suitable for graphs, than JPG.

[Nusa]

In the case of the US, it's worth looking at the data at the state level (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/). They've been together way longer than the EU, but they're still country-sized governments. We haven't been looking at the EU as a whole for the most part, and if we did we'd have a completely different feel for what is happening in Italy.

Right now New York State (population 19.5 million, 8.6 of that in New York City) with 11645 cases, which is nearly half of all cases in the US. Probably more than half in a couple days. Now on a stay-at-home order. What happens here will probably be very instructive to the rest of the country.

Compare that to California (population 39.6 million, 4 million of that in Los Angeles, 1.4 in San Diego, 7+ in the San Francisco bay area cities) with 1274 cases. Which will go up, of course, but the fact it's a tenth of New York cases for twice the population says something. Now on a stay-at-home order statewide, some days earlier for the San Francisco area. I expect the state to fare better than New York, anyway.

[thinkfat]

FWIW, I've pretty much stopped following this thread, but I thought I'd jump in and provide some of the latest WHO data for the US. Attached is my Excel graph of total deaths as well as new deaths each day.

The blue bars are total deaths to date, and the yellow are the new deaths each day. Apparently CDC's numbers are higher (for whatever reason...I'm thinking WHO might be a day behind CDC or something) but I thought I'd stick with WHO to make them comparable to the rest of the world.

For the TL;DR crowd, basically the number of new deaths in the US has been pretty flat at between 40 and 50 each day for the last 4 days. I also adjusted the vertical scale to highlight that it's all a matter of perspective. And to allow for the inevitable increase.

That's good news, but there's no need for complacency. There will be a lag between people contracting the virus, falling ill and dying. I hope the number of deaths fall in the US, but it isn't my expectation.

Constructive feedback: please choose a more sensible scale for the Y-axis and PNG format, is more suitable for graphs, than JPG.

The death count will not fall while the case count rises. Experience has shown that.

[Someone]

The death count will not fall while the case count rises. Experience has shown that.

Death count falling implies zombie apocalypse.

[rdl]

About halfway down is a map showing cases in the US by state.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/cases-in-us.html

[tinhead]

no worries, US is coming up, already top 3, till end of next week we will get 100k in US :\

Btw, all the media statements, based on the statistics are actually wrong (or really optimistic). Everybody counts death/total, but that's only true if Health System works/exists. The real important number is death/death+recovered. Only China managed to get high recovered number, so everybody counts like for China, 1.5 to 4.5 %, but does anybody else isolated milions of ppl? or build hospitals? Actually not, so how in the hell can we take numbers from China and lie to all ppl, watch e.g. Italy to understand how that ends up.

[engrguy42]

If you assume that something like 3% of confirmed cases will become fatalities at some point, and at this point in the US there are say 15-20,000 confirmed cases (actually 15,219 reported today), then it seems reasonable to assume in the next week or two we can expect the number of total deaths so far to rise from the present 200 to at least around 200 + 600 = 800 in the US.

Personally, I expect (hope) that the strong restrictions being put in place in the US are going to have a positive impact in the near future in terms of a reduction of new confirmed cases.

 

[Cerebus]

NOOOO Sal! Don't use Tomas' work! He's not a mathematician; there's a massive fundamental flaw with his blog post. He misused posterior/prior probabilities in it. In the part where he estimates 800 actual cases by the time of 1st death, he uses a 1% probability for the death.
But he should be using Bayes to incorporate the info that the person had died (in other words, a dead person is more likely to have come from a high mortality demographic than a 1% demographic). It's the same mistake that was infamously made in the OJ Simpson case. 

I get a feeling of fear whenever I hear Bayesian statistics mentioned. There's nothing wrong with Bayesian statistics, if and only if, it is in the hands of a competent trained statistician. In the hands of others who don't properly understand it, it rapidly degenerates into at best a farce, at worst a method of proving that black is white and white is black (unfortunately this does not result in the perpetrators getting killed on the next Zebra Crossing a la Douglas Adams). My loathing is based on having seem the twaddle tramped out in peer reviewed sociology journals where you could drive a fleet of buses through the Bayesian statistics used. For every 1 social scientist who actually knows what a prior probability is and how to use it properly, I'll show you 999 who don't and just pluck prior probabilities out of thin air that support their argument. Rant over.

[flyte]

I don't get it why people are focusing so much on wearing masks.

• Are they effective? Of course they are and even more so when grading goes up. There is a reason why they protect you from asbestos fibers or toxic dust. So they will protect your from infected particles or droplets. But in the present case it can give you a very false sense of security, because you can get infected in a ton of other ways as well: touching objects or other people, public infrastructure, shoes and clothes contamination, etc. if that contamination makes it into your eyes, face or mouth. Readjusting your glasses or hair without having disinfected or washed hands, is all it takes. If you isolate with your family and keep distance from other people and you strictly abide by it, then a mask is of limited use. As I've said, I had 10 FFP3's and came to the conclusion they're less useful to me but not to exposed health workers who may be within inches of Covid-19 patients' mouth or nose, hundreds of times a day. So I didn't keep them, as they were nearly begging for them.
• So why are there no masks in the west but in China there are? Because we didn't react on time and waited until stocks were depleted. Western politicians, all of them, were simply busy discussing it all or playing it down while they should have been paying attention and acting and preparing at the time. There was no sense of urgency nor duty. Now it's too late. It's like considering military purchases when you are already at war. Moreover, China clearly has a manufacturing advantage for these things, the majority of these commodities are made over there so it was probably very easy for them to gear up production for local use and restrict export.
  

[Cerebus]

The way I see it, in this case it's just the use of Bayes' theorem to estimate conditional probability.

You misunderstand, I am agreeing with him:

NOOOO Sal! Don't use Tomas' work! He's not a mathematician; there's a massive fundamental flaw with his blog post. He misused posterior/prior probabilities in it.

I get a feeling of fear whenever I hear Bayesian statistics mentioned. There's nothing wrong with Bayesian statistics, if and only if, it is in the hands of a competent trained statistician. In the hands of others who don't properly understand it...

Proper statisticians are mathematicians, mathematicians are proper statisticians.

[Tomk]

I don't think this has been posted here so far:

The Code Life Ventilator Challenge is a 2-week sprint to collect the best ideas from anywhere in the world to create or design life-saving ventilators. It’s a joint initiative between the Montreal General Hospital Foundation and the RI-MUHC.

https://www.mghfoundation.com/en/news/code-life-ventilator-challenge/
https://www.agorize.com/en/challenges/code-life-challenge

Might be interesting if you already have a design in your drawer.

[not1xor1]

Worse, because  he is urgency doctor from Granada  and he has a lot information about of Italian situation. Futhermore, he said that the italian public healthcare is less quality than the spanish public healthcare when  Italy was 1000 deaths.

there are just so many parameters that it is quite hard to compare health care systems
even comparing mortality for each kind of disease or event (e.g. gravidance) is difficult as there are different method to classify that

for instance according to official statistics Italy does much better (10 times or so) regarding birth and mother mortality than US, but once they correct that by using same counting methods that becomes just 3-4 times (do not remember exactly as it is something I read last year on the Italian edition of Scientific American) - well that still a lot better if you consider the greater health care expenditure vs. GDP of US compared to the Italian one

of course US might do much better than Italy regarding other types of diseases or treatments (so I deleted my previous extremely stupid remark)

[not1xor1]

FWIW, I've pretty much stopped following this thread, but I thought I'd jump in and provide some of the latest WHO data for the US. Attached is my Excel graph of total deaths as well as new deaths each day.

The blue bars are total deaths to date, and the yellow are the new deaths each day. Apparently CDC's numbers are higher (for whatever reason...I'm thinking WHO might be a day behind CDC or something) but I thought I'd stick with WHO to make them comparable to the rest of the world.

For the TL;DR crowd, basically the number of new deaths in the US has been pretty flat at between 40 and 50 each day for the last 4 days. I also adjusted the vertical scale to highlight that it's all a matter of perspective. And to allow for the inevitable increase.

wikipedia already provides that although it still lags behind John Hopkins University data (currently US third country in the world for cases - 26'747) while it is too early (not enough data) to seriously consider a clear trend in deaths progression

[not1xor1]

it is hard to realize how quickly this gets out of control

in 3-4 days US is likely to become the first country in the world for no. of cases
I think on next Sunday it will get 200-300 thousands cases and around 3-4 thousands deaths
in 2 weeks deaths might probably exceed 10'000 and might even get close to 20'000

[Kilrah]

So why are there no masks in the west but in China there are? Because we didn't react on time and waited until stocks were depleted. Western politicians, all of them, were simply busy discussing it all or playing it down while they should have been paying attention and acting and preparing at the time.

Also Chinese are already commonly wearing masks even when there is no immediate threat.
Go to a touristic attraction in China in normal times, you'll see 25% of people wearing masks. They're also used in polluted cities.

So there's already rolling supplies and stock for daily use.

[thinkfat]

Bad news. After 3 days of zero domestic cases in China mainland, today Chinese CDC reported one new case related to an imported case in Guangzhou. It's still too early to see whether there will be a new wave of infection, but let's hope not.

Let's hope the isolation measures still in place will slow it to a manageable pace. I heard that Singapore is preparing to maintain strict immigration screening, with every foreigner entering the country to stay in forced quarantine for 14 days, on their own expense.

[mzzj]

it is hard to realize how quickly this gets out of control

in 3-4 days US is likely to become the first country in the world for no. of cases
I think on next Sunday it will get 200-300 thousands cases and around 3-4 thousands deaths
in 2 weeks deaths might probably exceed 10'000 and might even get close to 20'000

Death toll could still look like completely different in US vs Italy.

Italy has probably half million or more mild cases not tested whereas US testing is bit more up to date currently.
Age demographics has also huge difference for outcome: spread the virus to people mostly under 60 vs infect also everyone over 70.

[engrguy42]

it is hard to realize how quickly this gets out of control

in 3-4 days US is likely to become the first country in the world for no. of cases
I think on next Sunday it will get 200-300 thousands cases and around 3-4 thousands deaths
in 2 weeks deaths might probably exceed 10'000 and might even get close to 20'000

Personally, I think your estimates are WAY too low. I think that 90% of the US will be dead by next Thursday at noon. Maybe 1pm.

Either that or there won't be any more deaths starting tomorrow.

Or somewhere in between those two.

Not sure.

[VK3DRB]

So why are there no masks in the west but in China there are? Because we didn't react on time and waited until stocks were depleted. Western politicians, all of them, were simply busy discussing it all or playing it down while they should have been paying attention and acting and preparing at the time.

Also Chinese are already commonly wearing masks even when there is no immediate threat.
Go to a touristic attraction in China in normal times, you'll see 25% of people wearing masks. They're also used in polluted cities.

So there's already rolling supplies and stock for daily use.

People wear masks for all sorts of reasons. A fashion statement, attention getters, don't want to share a cold, hiding one's face, bank holdup, rioting, social unrest, air pollution and maybe even rotten teeth.

The mask-wearing Free Hong Kongers don't wear them now because they have all gone into hiding. So much for their "we will fight to the death" rhetoric .
The mask-wearing Mouvement des Gilets Jaunes have also gone silent. Paris in lock down might be a good time for the perpetrators to be rounded up and be given some contact counselling .

[Siwastaja]

The political situation in Finland is critical. Suddenly, the government has practically claimed victory, and the prime minister Sanna Marin is giving political interviews aimed at their voters, the main content is how well they handled (yes, in past tense!) the situation. She especially highlights how the actions have happened (again, in past tense) at correct times, because the epidemic "was" here later compared to many other countries, such as Italy, it's OK to react later, as well. What she completely misses is that you should react comparatively earlier than Italy did. Yes, the government not only thinks it's OK to repeat the process seen in Italy; they don't fear saying it out loud!

The government has started talking about the whole crisis in past tense, and are mostly concerned about helping the economy to recover.

The schools have been partially reopened (for all 1st to 3rd graders); the teachers are terrified of such change. Despite starting the actions too late, last three days have been all about stopping the gradual increase of actions, and actually lifting some.

Being paralyzed by fear and not being able to do the decisions is understandable; doing the opposite and lifting the restrictions against all expert advice, OTOH, is an active choice.

There is a report from a high-level chief of diagnostics at Helsinki University Hospital, the most affected area, that the border restrictions prevent maintenance parts and personnel of critical medical equipment. At the same time, the borders are still fully open to (mostly illegal) immigration (not that it's actually a significant problem right now, but it's symbolically very interesting).

Basically, the situation has been made highly political. Politicians of the "wrong" opinion tweeting actual news verifiable from the official mass media (for example, news about single-use medical equipment being reused) are welcomed with large-scale hate campaings.

The highly political mainstream media is not too afraid about the virus itself; it's afraid of the possibility that once we get into the mindset of declaring state of emergency "too easily", we might do it, for example, in case of large-scale terrorist attack. Media thinks being able to prevent terrorism is the threat. I guess at least 80% of the people would like terrorism to be taken seriously, as well.

The trade union leader has hinted blackmailing for a pay increase of 10% in order to keep the nurses working. Of course, at such a time, such blackmailing is not tolerated anywhere; apparently we Finns are so forgiving that everybody just decided not to react to such comment at all. We hope she gets into her senses before it's too late. In such war-like conditions, blackmailing your owns and working against the health of the others easily costs your life.

The only thing helping us is that we are naturally, on average, quite less social than, for example, Italians. Many individuals and companies are taking this seriously, which helps a lot. But I'm afraid luck has too big of a role here. It may work out better than in Italy... Or it won't.

In any case, now we are in the role of just hoping for the best, and documenting the atrocities of our government for the future reference.

[flyte]

The political situation in Finland is critical. Suddenly, the government has practically claimed victory, and the prime minister Sanna Marin is giving political interviews aimed at their voters, the main content is how well they handled (yes, in past tense!) the situation.

It's disgusting how many politicians worldwide are trying to monetize this by putting themselves into the spotlights. As always they think science and action is secondary to ideology, demagoguery and words. Maintaining their political existence is the primary concern, always.

Here they were quick to reassure in the media that "much economical help" is on its way. Billions of "relief" will give "air to everyone", "we're so busy with it, just thank us" ! If you listen carefully, it boils down to postponing payment deadlines and debt emission, more credits. So, regardless of the economical tsunami which will be coming, we'll happily lend you more money and just make sure you work triple shifts the next years to pay it all back, one day.

Some politician here even said a week ago there was a breakthrough. You'd now think of a vaccine, masks arriving for all, infection numbers going down, etc. No, he was talking about how he managed to find budgetary space to fit in another billion somewhere. They're on a different planet, but they count on scientists, doctors and engineers to clean up the mess.

[coppice]

Bad news. After 3 days of zero domestic cases in China mainland, today Chinese CDC reported one new case related to an imported case in Guangzhou. It's still too early to see whether there will be a new wave of infection, but let's hope not.

The HK students who fled home from Europe's schools and universities before HK's 17th March deadline for new arrivals to need quarantine have brought new cases to HK. We have a friend's son staying with us right now because his school was shut by the UK government last Friday, but he isn't flying home to HK until next Friday. He'll have to undergo some form of quarantine when he gets home.

[iMo]

The political situation in Finland is critical. Suddenly, the government has practically claimed victory, and the prime minister Sanna Marin is giving political interviews aimed at their voters, the main content is how well they handled (yes, in past tense!) the situation.

It's disgusting how many politicians worldwide are trying to monetize this by putting themselves into the spotlights. As always they think science and action is secondary to ideology, demagoguery and words. Maintaining their political existence is the primary concern, always.

Yesterday I saw NY governor M. Cuomo during the briefing (CNN). His speech was fantastic. No cheap  or political marketing. If I were citizen of NY I would be happy to have him there.

[engrguy42]

Yeah, honestly I'm kinda shocked at how politicians around the world have been behaving in the last 5-10 years. It's like they are so incredibly hypersensitive to viral social media that they do whatever "looks good" and that people will give an instantaneous "like" to or "thumbs up". 

Whether those things are at all relevant or useful to society are not on their radar. It's whether the average person on social media, who often knows nothing about anything, and only knows about likes and dislikes and cares about cats playing piano, will approve and share with their friends in an unconscious, knee-jerk emotional reaction.

I think a lot of us boomers recall when our parents (who lived thru the major depression of the 1930's and the horror of World War II, and learned an incredible amount of rationality and wisdom from those experiences), were the "adults in the room" and kept stuff on track. Unfortunately, the adults have left the room. And we'll start learning the same lessons all over again.

And maybe someday we'll even learn how deeply destructive this whole social media and internet connectivity thing is.

Oh wait, who am I kidding.