Covid 19 virus

[SiliconWizard]

If anything, this should teach us how fragile our whole society has become. Seeing how one small virus can wreak havoc, imagine anything worse than this (which is not at all unlikely)?

Actually I think society is better equiped than ever. Imagine the Corona outbreak happened 20 years ago with the internet still in it's infancy? It is our modern communication systems which keep things going right now. All the data to stop the outbreak is shared quickly without risk of actually spreading the infection. And the Corona virus isn't the first outbreak ever.

If this happened 40y back you would hardly notice it as a pandemic of this scale. A bit stronger seasonal flu. More fatalities would be "averaged" in the yearly flu statistics..

Yeah.
We may be better equipped these days, but the worldwide movement of people has literally exploded, and I'm not going to teach you that virus spreading is by nature exponential. Current technology certainly helps mitigate things in the current context, but I'd venture it doesn't make up for the (unreasonable) movement of people we have now.

[SiliconWizard]

To be fair, whilst most of what he said was wrong, there are grains of truth here and there. For example, MRI scanners might have been on the market in 1980, but most hospitals wouldn't have had one back then,

Good old X-ray is equally capable in confirming pneumonia.

Yeah, and except in very specific cases, I'm pretty sure we still use that primarily in case of lung infection rather than costly MRI sessions.

[nctnico]

We may be better equipped these days, but the worldwide movement of people has literally exploded, and I'm not going to teach you that virus spreading is by nature exponential. Current technology certainly helps mitigate things in the current context, but I'd venture it doesn't make up for the (unreasonable) movement of people we have now.

If that where true then explain how the Spanish flu made so many casualties world wide in 1918/1919. Or how the Blach Death spread all across Europe in the 1300's.

On the upside: I think we'll see a huge baby boom after 9 months from now.

[Cerebus]

Sure, the hospitals will be massively overrun in 1980.
No DNA/RNA technology at that time.     wrong
No advanced analytical methods and equipment at that time.      wrong first ELISA test 1971, HPLC, MS-GC, PAGE all common laboratory equipment in 1980
No pneumonia/flu test at that time.     wrong
No flu vaccination at that time.     wrong - flu vaccines were available in the 1940s!
No internet at that time.      right
No high-tech ventilators at that time.      wrong
No CT scans and MRI at that time.     wrong - first commercial CAT scanners 1972, first commercial MRI scanner 1980
No special antibiotics to cope with secondary infections at that time.      wrong
No quality respirators FFP2-3 grade at that time.      wrong
Fixed line telephones, sometimes a Fax.      right
No personal computers at that time.      wrong
Cold War [for GenZ and up - "Cold War" does not mean to "fight against  commond cold"]..      right

3 out of 12. You have failed your history of technology exam.

To be fair, whilst most of what he said was wrong, there are grains of truth here and there. For example, MRI scanners might have been on the market in 1980, but most hospitals wouldn't have had one back then, DNA sequencing was in its infancy, vaccines took much longer to develop, than they do today and personal computers were expensive and uncommon; I wasn't born until 1982 and I remember receptionists using typewriters, when I was a child: my mum used to have one and I had a toy one.

DNA sequencing was not "drop it in and let the machine do it" like it is today but I knew people doing PhDs on the "The DNA sequence of <name species/protein/whatever>" the hard way. The kind of laboratory DNA/RNA test (excluding the PCR bit which wasn't invented until 1983) being used to identify the presence of SARS-Cov-2 was one of the undergraduate labs for the biochemistry students I knew (restriction enzymes, PAGE, read the plate under UV light) just done manually rather than "drop it in the machine".

Two people in my undergraduate flat (5 of us) had commercial (as opposed to homebrew) personal computers in 1981. As to typewriters, sure still plenty around in lots of offices but in 1977 I knew a bookseller (client that was getting a computer order processing system from the software house I worked for) whose secretary used a (hugely expensive) word processor.

Vaccines? Sure, the development of genetically engineered vaccines was in its early days but most slowness in developing them for practical use was down to regulatory caution. But effective vaccines for most diseases were available. Smallpox was declared eradicated world wide on 9 Dec 1979 - a consequence of effective vaccination. All of the modern flu vaccines except for recombinant ones (which have only been in active use for less than 10 years) are made in exactly the way they were back then. The ability to make recombinant vaccines existed back then, but they were many years from use (for regulatory reasons).

The uptake of MRIs by hospitals was incredibly rapid, for good reason. I remember there being a massive charity drive to fund one for the hospital nearest my university. It was installed in the early 80s, though I can't remember the exact year.

You youngsters think we were living in the stone age. 

[not1xor1]

Speaking of Italian decision making:

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/18/europe/italy-coronavirus-lockdown-intl/

He says the Italian government lagged at first. It was "lazy in the beginning... too much politics in Italy."

"There was a proposal to isolate people coming from the epicenter, coming from China," he said. "Then it became seen as racist, but they were people coming from the outbreak." That, he said, led to the current devastating situation.

 

that's a pile of bullshit... that guy is just a liar... and the proposals of the people he refers to were just pure madness (besides taking opposite directions every few days: not enough, too much... it is just flu, not enough, etc.)

People coming from China were checked and on the 31th of January the Italian government suspended all flights to and from China while the other European countries did nothing, so:

It has been subsequently reported that the origin of these cases has a possible connection to the first European local transmission that occurred in Munich, Germany, on 19 January 2020, consistent with phylogenetic analysis of viral genome

see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_Italy

Italian government probably has done a few errors, but other governments have been even worse
they could have just looked at Italy without prejudices and see how fast this runs out of control and so act as fast as possible

but everybody just thinks he is smarter
just look at what Johnson, Trump, Rutte, Macron and so on said just few days ago and how slowly they are acting

[not1xor1]

It looks like the "political correctness" is the major killer in this pandemic..

truth is the first victim in this pandemic
the proposal that guy refers to was to quarantine just Chinese children even those who had not been in China since years
pure madness that would have not served any real purpose

[not1xor1]

Years ago I had a buddy who was a PSYCH professor at a university. And he'd always tell me his little "gems of truth" about human behavior that were very well known in the world of psychology, but nobody really talked about because people might get offended.

and he kept on believing that psychology was science 
while in the last few years it has been changing and slowly becoming more and more empirically based, usually experiments suffer from  a poor choice of the sample, not so representative (usually just students) and not large enough

psychology is one of the disciplines more affected by the inconsistent results of replicated experiments

[hamster_nz]

drussel, your response is nothing more than "seems to be" and "appears to be".

And clearly you've stated an anti-US bias to have the US "knocked down a peg or two", so I think it's pretty shameful to be trying to find whatever numbers you can find to prove a totally nebulous point about "preparedness" that you obviously want to believe.

As I posted earlier, total confirmed cases in the US is around 20k. If we assume a 3% death rate that's an additional 600 deaths to add to the present 200.

The only thing we can predict with any intelligence is that we can expect to have 800 total deaths in the short term, and hope that the strong restrictions that have been put into place in the populous areas of the US will have an impact soon. The rest is just hand waving speculation.
 

You predict like a politician - i.e. mostly useless.

My personal predictions, based on:

In Italy the trending is growth of 10x over 14 days, and appears to be stable at this rate - 17% per day. Measures take ~14 days to be effective (based on data from China - they started lockdown at 2k cases and finished at 80k.)

If the USA applies the same control as in place two weeks ago, expect 1.8M cases (33k * 1.33^14), with 61k deaths when those cases are resolved. There will still be a pandemic evolving.

If the USA on the whole act as Italy has, expect there to be ~300,000 cases in two week (33k *1.17^14), eventually leading to 10k deaths when those cases are resolved. There will still be a pandemic evolving.

If the USA goes "full lockdown" this very instant, expect cases to level off in six weeks at 1.3M cases, with 45k deaths when those are resolved

An unscientific confidence interval of +/-50% on those numbers, as exponential are very sensitive to assumptions.

The last scenario is the best case scenario that data supports at the moment, without skilled modeling from somebody who is not an amateur in this.

[not1xor1]

Really, the saddest part for me was about 3 weeks ago when the spread started in Italy so forcefully, where I suddenly realized how trivial it would be for any major government or reasonably-well funded private entity to engineer and release a targeted virus to essentially wipe out some genetically related group.   

that would be quite hard if not impossible...
there is just too little genetic difference among various human groups and too much difference within a given group

[not1xor1]

drussel, have you actually looked at the WHO data? I'm not sure where you get that the US is, by far, in the worst shape in the world??

As of yesterday Italy has had a total of 4,032 deaths, China 3261, Iran 1433, and US 201.

Now you're certainly free to wave your hands and predict whatever you want for the future, but since nobody has a clue what will happen I'm not sure it's helpful to stir the pot.

it looks like you have not realized yet how this works
absolute figures mean nothing
you have to look at the trend

you will see that next sunday when US may be even in worst shape than my forecast and even if you take strict quarantine measures now as the result will arrive after 1-2 weeks

[not1xor1]

Wow! And I thought Canadian Health Authority representative was an idiot when he said "when you see Chinese people on the strret  shake their hand"

https://www.redstate.com/nick-arama/2020/03/20/italian-virologist-italys-response-was-slow-to-stopisolate-people-coming-from-china-because-fear-of-being-called-racist

the same boring lie

[Nusa]

We may be better equipped these days, but the worldwide movement of people has literally exploded, and I'm not going to teach you that virus spreading is by nature exponential. Current technology certainly helps mitigate things in the current context, but I'd venture it doesn't make up for the (unreasonable) movement of people we have now.

If that where true then explain how the Spanish flu made so many casualties world wide in 1918/1919. Or how the Blach Death spread all across Europe in the 1300's.

On the upside: I think we'll see a huge baby boom after 9 months from now.

That one's easy if you learned any history. The last year of World War 1. Millions of international troop movements in both directions both during and after the war was won. In the case of American troops, on crowded ships. Never mind that there were many people dying of a typhus epidemic, an encephalitis epidemic, famine, and weapons of war at the same time. It may not be true of modern military, but historically more troops died of disease than combat.

As for the Black Death, that's pretty well documented if you only bother to look.

[not1xor1]

No special antibiotics to cope with secondary infections at that time.

I'd rather say little problem with antibiotic resistant bacteria

[nctnico]

We may be better equipped these days, but the worldwide movement of people has literally exploded, and I'm not going to teach you that virus spreading is by nature exponential. Current technology certainly helps mitigate things in the current context, but I'd venture it doesn't make up for the (unreasonable) movement of people we have now.

If that where true then explain how the Spanish flu made so many casualties world wide in 1918/1919. Or how the Blach Death spread all across Europe in the 1300's.

On the upside: I think we'll see a huge baby boom after 9 months from now.

That one's easy if you learned any history. The last year of World War 1. Millions of international troop movements in both directions both during and after the war was won. In the case of American troops, on crowded ships. Never mind that there were many people dying of a typhus epidemic, an encephalitis epidemic, famine, and weapons of war at the same time. It may not be true of modern military, but historically more troops died of disease than combat.

As for the Black Death, that's pretty well documented if you only bother to look.

But in the end it all comes down to people moving and contacting eachother. That is the bottom line.

[not1xor1]

In Italy the trending is growth of 10x over 14 days, and appears to be stable at this rate - 17% per day. Measures take ~14 days to be effective (based on data from China - they started lockdown at 2k cases and finished at 80k.)

the new cases as percentage of previous total in the last 2 weeks:
24 11 23 21 17 20 17 13 13 13 15 15 14 10

jumps  mostly due to data from some regions lagging 3-4 times

[Cerebus]

No special antibiotics to cope with secondary infections at that time.

I'd rather say little problem with antibiotic resistant bacteria

As is often the way with these things those in know were making quite a lot of fuss about it back then. MRSA had been identified as a problem in the sixties and by around 1980 knowledge of increasing multi-drug resistance in bacteria was a commonplace among the scientific and medical community. One of the identified causes was use of antibiotics as 'growth promoters' in animal feed. It is only now that this practice is being finally banned, 40 years after anyone with a brain knew that it was a fundamentally stupid practice that was guaranteed to breed multi-drug resistant pathogens. Ditto the feminising effects of pollutants - one biochemistry lecturer I knew had been researching this on trout for several years back then. And the list goes on. The gap between what the scientific community has clearly identified needs action and the taking of action in political policy circles is huge and it takes along time for anything to happen.

No doubt somewhere there are dozens of academics who were treated as Cassandras about their warnings about future viral pandemics and attempts to get governments to develop solid preparations for when it finally happened. They have earned the right to feel smug, but I suspect they don't; I suspect they wish that they had had some way to force action before it was too late.

[iMo]

If anything, this should teach us how fragile our whole society has become. Seeing how one small virus can wreak havoc, imagine anything worse than this (which is not at all unlikely)?

Actually I think society is better equiped than ever. Imagine the Corona outbreak happened 20 years ago with the internet still in it's infancy? It is our modern communication systems which keep things going right now. All the data to stop the outbreak is shared quickly without risk of actually spreading the infection. And the Corona virus isn't the first outbreak ever.

If this happened 40y back you would hardly notice it as a pandemic of this scale. A bit stronger seasonal flu. More fatalities would be "averaged" in the yearly flu statistics..

Yeah.
We may be better equipped these days, but the worldwide movement of people has literally exploded, and I'm not going to teach you that virus spreading is by nature exponential. Current technology certainly helps mitigate things in the current context, but I'd venture it doesn't make up for the (unreasonable) movement of people we have now.

My original post has been ripped apart by few and then commented out by experts like by Dr. Cerebus who is using all today's technologies in all his hospitals around the World since 1980.. 

When you would read my post in context you will get - it is about how you would "notice" current pandemic provided it happened 40y back (1980).
There are 3 examples related to the "Geopolitical situation in 1980" - ie. whether you would had been even able to get the real information about the pandemic in 1980, and how the pandemics could have been "medialized" in 1980 on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
My post did not elaborate the severity of such a pandemic in 1980 or in 2020.
Sure, in 1980 the covid would have been much more deadly as it is today (except you would be treated in the hospitals of Dr. Cerebus).

[SiliconWizard]

Sure, in 1980 the covid would have been much more deadly as it is today (except you would be treated in the hospitals of Dr. Cerebus).

Certainly more deadly, but it would have spread slower IMO and to fewer countries, and currently the most concerning issue is how much it's spreading.

Just as an illustration, wherever we live (in the western world), many people know at least one person that has traveled to China in the past months. You're more fortunate if this is not a close relative.
That's something that was extremely rare in the early 80's.

[Cerebus]

My original post has been ripped apart by few and then commented out by experts like by Dr. Cerebus who is using all today's technologies in all his hospitals around the World since 1980.. 

Gibe all you like, but facts still beat uniformed opinions hands down every time. And please don't call me Doctor, you have to earn one of those by doing a PhD, and I never did. You can call me professor if you like, as that's merely a courtesy title that's often given to, in my experience, scumbags; I'd probably wear it well.

[Mr.B]

New Zealand to enter full lockdown within 48 hours.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/120495548/live-pm-jacinda-ardern-to-give-update-on-coronavirus-alert-level

Many NZers have been pleading with the government to move hard and fast.
Fortunately they have listened.
We can live through the economic impact, we do not want a high death toll to go with it.

[Marco]

Lowered GDP kills people too. Has anyone given an explanation for why Japan was able to weather the storm so well? Are they lying? Are they genetically less prone to get/spread it? What?

Or perhaps closing schools and lots of people wearing masks and observing government advice for hand washing is really "all" that was necessary? Increased hygiene seemed to be what nipped flu in the bud in Japan this season.

[Someone]

New Zealand to enter full lockdown within 48 hours.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/120495548/live-pm-jacinda-ardern-to-give-update-on-coronavirus-alert-level

Many NZers have been pleading with the government to move hard and fast.
Fortunately they have listened.
We can live through the economic impact, we do not want a high death toll to go with it.

That isn't a lockdown, just progressive closures similar/identical to those being taken elsewhere (Australia, UK, etc). When you can't move freely, thats lockdown.

[drussell]

drussel, where do you get your numbers from? CDC doesn't report on weekends, and WHO's data is from Friday the 20th. And both of those agree on a figure of 15k.

I think it's important to choose a single and arguably reliable source rather than grabbing data from whatever pops up. I may be wrong, but in the US I would assume the final authority is the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and I assume they forward that to WHO as official data, which is why WHO data seems to lag 1 day behind.

I have been getting my latest-case data from what is generally considered the most authoritative worldwide source, the CSSE aggregation page at Johns Hopkins University....

https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6

You can download their daily aggregate data in .CSV format via their github page:
https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19

I will admit right now that I was incorrect in my previous post on the number of new US cases that have been logged so far today.  I had inadvertently added the last two rows from New York and New Jersey twice (which I assume were essentially the results from yesterday's tests,) so my numbers were skewed up 4500+ cases....

The number added today in the US is "only" more like 9000 new cases, not the 13-something thousand that I thought it was when I quickly saw the inaccurate totals at the bottom of my spreadsheet when I hastily posted that comment before running out the door to one remaining jobsite, without actually fully importing the latest datasets...

Sorry...  My bad...

My working number now stands at 33,276 confirmed infected in the USA.

I'm sure the CDC will update their official numbers to reflect these latest state-by-state disclosures at some point in the next 24-72 hours or so.

[tautech]

New Zealand to enter full lockdown within 48 hours.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/120495548/live-pm-jacinda-ardern-to-give-update-on-coronavirus-alert-level

Many NZers have been pleading with the government to move hard and fast.
Fortunately they have listened.
We can live through the economic impact, we do not want a high death toll to go with it.

The lads here are murmuring about grabbing their rifles and going bush for a week or two hunting.....well at least until their tucker runs out. Tempted to tag along.   

[iMo]

FYI - this is the Diamond Princess assembled from below data
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1099517/japan-coronavirus-patients-diamond-princess/
https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2020.25.10.2000180
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_on_cruise_ships