The COVID-2019 Thread

[crackerjack101]

[Dillinger]

What the wife was handed entering Thailand, having been to Singapore in the past month.

[harrybarracuda]

Another interest rate cut?

The Bank of England has promised to do whatever it can to shore up the economy against the impact of coronavirus after mounting anxiety about the disease sent stock markets into freefall, Rob Davies reports.
The value of FTSE 100 companies slumped by £200bn last week, in tandem with a broader global sell-off in which global stock markets suffered their steepest falls since the 2008 financial crisis.
However, Asian markets rallied overnight as investors gambled that central banks will respond by cutting interest rates to stimulate growth, offsetting the coronavirus effect.
The UK’s central bank joined the Bank of Japan in telling investors that it is keeping tabs on the situation and stands ready to use its monetary policy levers to promote financial stability.
“The Bank is working closely with HM Treasury and the FCA [Financial Conduct Authority] – as well as our international partners – to ensure all necessary steps are taken to protect financial and monetary stability,” a spokesman said.

Coronavirus: global death toll passes 3,000 with more than 88,000 infected – live updates | World news | The Guardian

[harrybarracuda]

What the wife was handed entering Thailand, having been to Singapore in the past month.

That is so fucking amateurish. Typical of the fucking chimps innit. Should really say:

"If you have come from the epicentre of the virus, please feel free to spread it around the country for a couple of weeks, but once you get ill, don't forget to tell your doctor that we are a bunch of complete arseholes".

[Dillinger]

Nuts aint it. If you get the symptoms go walk into a busy hospital and pass this card to a doctor, if you feel like reporting it, ring the number below

[lom]

The second interpretation only takes into account the number of people infected who have either recovered or died; known outcomes - it's far more accurate for that period in time, but may change.

SK has 4279 active cases, 26 deaths, and 30 recovered.
So according to your flawed math the mortality rate is 26/26+30 ie 46.5% which you think is more correct than 26/4335 ie 0.6% a number which I think is much closer to expected than your most pessimum value.

[Troy]

Just wondering why a major city hasn't been affected yet. Why a large number of cases in a small region of Italy but not a large airport hub like Heathrow, CdG, or Frankfurt? Come to think of it why not Shanghai or Peking?

This may seem a bit controversial but is containment the best option? It is infectious but is the death rate so bad that it requires containment. I mean, it isn't exactly Ebola or anywhere near as dangerous. Would it be better to just let the virus spread and let it do its worst? Who notices how many people die from 'flu, or even car accidents. Is the current media hype going to make a bad situation worse with panic buying, industry closures, and possible border controls?

[NamPikToot]

I don't think it is being contained really, just authorities are going through the motions - if they didn't they'd get lambasted for lack of action even though the reality is that like Flu, Colds etc the mortality rate ain't a whole lot more.

[helge]

Why a large number of cases in a small region of Italy

Maybe as Herman wrote earlier, a whole lot of illegal and legal chinese social dumpers are producing shit clothes there.

Made in Italy

[Chico]

Just wondering why a major city hasn't been affected yet.

Even more surprising, why hasn't Hong Kong, Macau or Taiwan not had more people with the virus.

[harrybarracuda]

Saudi Arabia has finally put its coat in the cloakroom.

Four more deaths in the US. I guess baldy orange cunto was almost right when he said the number of sick would go down.

[Cujo]

I think due to the horrendous cost of medical care in the United states that many people will be avoiding going to the doctor unless it gets bad.

Four more people in Washington state have died from coronavirus, officials have said.

This brings the total number of US fatalities to six.

At a news conference Monday Jeff Duchin from Public Health Seattle & King County said five of the deaths were people from King County and one was a person from Snohomish County, north of Seattle, AP reported.

Researchers said earlier that the virus may have been circulating for weeks undetected in Washington state.

Coronavirus: four more deaths announced in US – live updates | World news | The Guardian

[Cujo]

Maybe as Herman wrote earlier, a whole lot of illegal and legal chinese social dumpers are producing shit clothes there.

Made in Italy

What in hells name is a 'social dumper'?

[jabir]

An infected farang walks into a hospital, do they get treated free or kicked out because they're broke?

[cyrille]

Why a large number of cases in a small region of Italy

Not to get all 'hermanesque' about it but...Milan is the capital of this 'small region', and it does indeed have the largest population of Chinese origin in Italy.

Many are attracted by the rag trade.

Italy as a whole also attracts more Chinese tourists than anywhere else in Europe.

[Bettyboo]

74 countries...

[baldrick]

the hiccup on the stock markets is just a foretaste of a full barf on the carpet

The Australian economy could be plunged into recession if the coronavirus outbreak goes global, with as much as 8% carved from growth over a year, according to new modelling by the economic expert Warwick McKibbin.

McKibbin, whose previous work on the economic impact of disease includes examining the impact of the 2002 Sars pandemic, has modelled the effects of a range of Covid-19 infection scenarios on growth in Australia and around the world.

He said if the disease went global it could carve as little as 2% from Australian growth, but this would still be enough to send the economy into recession, given that GDP increased by just 1.7% in 2019

depending how long it takes governments to start infrastructure spending will decide how long it will take to climb out of the hole

[Bettyboo]

^ "if the disease went global", Badders...

[Luigi]

^^ India's red dot is suspiciously small.


If it's exploding across western nations, you'd imagine India would be a melting pot for it, just people aren't getting themselves to registered medical facilities and the numbers aren't being reported.

[cyrille]

Doubtless that's true.

Climate could be another factor.

It's 2 degrees C in Tehran now, 6 in Milan, 22 in Muscat.

We could be in the unusual position of hoping the heat comes early.

[baldrick]

and the numbers aren't being reported.

and the current testing procedure being casting chai leaves

[Luigi]

Doubtless that's true.

Climate could be another factor.

It's 2 degrees C in Tehran now, 6 in Milan, 22 in Muscat.

We could be in the unusual position of hoping the heat comes early.

I mentioned that, Hazza pointed out it's 32 degrees in Singapore.

[harrybarracuda]

I mentioned that, Hazza pointed out it's 32 degrees in Singapore.

33 today.

[harrybarracuda]

^^ India's red dot is suspiciously small.


If it's exploding across western nations, you'd imagine India would be a melting pot for it, just people aren't getting themselves to registered medical facilities and the numbers aren't being reported.

They reported a couple of cases today, one via Italy and one via Dubai.

I agree with you, I'd expect that to explode in the slums of Mumbai and Delhi.

[harrybarracuda]

An interesting post from Reddit, grab a coffee (sorry about the formatting, I've cleaned it up as best I can).


The WHO sent 25 international experts to China and here are their main findings after 9 days


WHO

The WHO has sent a team of international experts to China to investigate the situation, including Clifford Lane, Clinical Director at the US National Institutes of Health. Here is the press conference on youtube:



and the final report of the commission as PDF after they visited Beijing, Wuhan, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Chengdu. Here are some interesting facts about Covid that I have not yet read in the media:

• When a cluster of several infected people occurred in China, it was most often (78-85%) caused by an infection within the family by droplets and other carriers of infection in close contact with an infected person. Transmission by fine aerosols in the air over long distances is not one of the main causes of spread. Most of the 2,055 infected hospital workers were either infected at home or in the early phase of the outbreak in Wuhan when hospital safeguards were not raised yet.

• 5% of people who are diagnosed with Covid require artificial respiration. Another 15% need to breathe in highly concentrated oxygen - and not just for a few days. The duration from the beginning of the disease until recovery is 3 to 6 weeks on average for these severe and critical patients (compared to only 2 weeks for the mildly ill). The mass and duration of the treatments overburdened the existing health care system in Wuhan many times over. The province of Hubei, whose capital is Wuhan, had 65,596 infected persons so far. A total of 40,000 employees were sent to Hubei from other provinces to help fight the epidemic. 45 hospitals in Wuhan are caring for Covid patients, 6 of which are for patients in critical condition and 39 are caring for seriously ill patients and for infected people over the age of 65. Two makeshift hospitals with 2,600 beds were built within a short time. 80% of the infected have mild disease, ten temporary hospitals were set up in gymnasiums and exhibition halls for those.

• China can now produce 1.6 million test kits for the novel coronavirus per week. The test delivers a result on the same day. Across the country, anyone who goes to the doctor with a fever is screened for the virus: In Guangdong province, far from Wuhan, 320,000 people have been tested, and 0.14% of those were positive for the virus.

• The vast majority of those infected sooner or later develop symptoms. Cases of people in whom the virus has been detected and who do not have symptoms at that time are rare - and most of them fall ill in the next few days.

• The most common symptoms are fever (88%) and dry cough (68%). Exhaustion (38%), expectoration of mucus when coughing (33%), shortness of breath (18%), sore throat (14%), headaches (14%), muscle aches (14%), chills (11%) are also common. Less frequent are nausea and vomiting (5%), stuffy nose (5%) and diarrhoea (4%). Running nose is not a symptom of Covid.

• An examination of 44,672 infected people in China showed a fatality rate of 3.4%. Fatality is strongly influenced by age, pre-existing conditions, gender, and especially the response of the health care system. All fatality figures reflect the state of affairs in China up to 17 February, and everything could be quite different in the future elsewhere.

• Healthcare system: 20% of infected people in China needed hospital treatment for weeks. China has hospital beds to treat 0.4% of the population at the same time - other developed countries have between 0.1% and 1.3% and most of these beds are already occupied with people who have other diseases. The most important thing is firstly to aggressively contain the spread of the virus in order to keep the number of seriously ill Covid patients low and secondly to increase the number of beds (including material and personnel) until there is enough for the seriously ill. China also tested various treatment methods for the unknown disease and the most successful ones were implemented nationwide. Thanks to this response, the fatality rate in China is now lower than a month ago.

• Pre-existing conditions: The fatality rate for those infected with pre-existing cardiovascular disease in China was 13.2%. It was 9.2% for those infected with high blood sugar levels (uncontrolled diabetes), 8.4% for high blood pressure, 8% for chronic respiratory diseases and 7.6% for cancer. Infected persons without a relevant previous illness died in 1.4% of cases.

• Age: The younger you are, the less likely you are to be infected and the less likely you are to fall seriously ill if you do get infected:

Age	% of population	% of infected	Fatality
0-9	12.0%	0,9%	0 as of now
10-19	11.6%	1.2%	0.1%
20-29	13.5%	8.1%	0.2%
30-39	15.6%	17.0%	0.2%
40-49	15.6%	19.2%	0.4%
50-59	15.0%	22.4%	1.3%
60-69	10.4%	19.2%	3.6%
70-79	4.7%	8.8%	8.0%
80+	1.8%	3.2%	14.8%

Read: Out of all people who live in China, 13.5% are between 20 and 29 years old. Out of those who were infected in China, 8.1% were in this age group (this does not mean that 8.1% of people between 20 and 29 become infected). This means that the likelihood of someone at this age to catch the infection is somewhat lower compared to the average. And of those who caught the infection in this age group, 0.2% died.

• Gender: Women catch the disease just as often as men. But only 2.8% of Chinese women who were infected died from the disease, while 4.7% of the infected men died. The disease appears to be not more severe in pregnant women than in others. In 9 examined births of infected women, the children were born by caesarean section and healthy without being infected themselves. The women were infected in the last trimester of pregnancy. What effect an infection in the first or second trimester has on embryos is currently unclear as these children are still unborn.

• The new virus is genetically 96% identical to a known coronavirus in bats and 86-92% identical to a coronavirus in pangolin. Therefore, the transmission of a mutated virus from animals to humans is the most likely cause of the appearance of the new virus.

• Since the end of January, the number of new coronavirus diagnoses in China has been steadily declining with now only 329 new diagnoses within the last day - one month ago it was around 3,000 a day. "This decline in COVID-19 cases across China is real," the report says. The authors conclude this from their own experience on site, declining hospital visits in the affected regions, the increasing number of unoccupied hospital beds, and the problems of Chinese scientists to recruit enough newly infected for the clinical studies of the numerous drug trials.

• One of the important reasons for containing the outbreak is that China is interviewing all infected people nationwide about their contact persons and then tests those. There are 1,800 teams in Wuhan to do this, each with at least 5 people. But the effort outside of Wuhan is also big. In Shenzhen, for example, the infected named 2,842 contact persons, all of whom were found, testing is now completed for 2,240, and 2.8% of those had contracted the virus. In Sichuan province, 25,493 contact persons were named, 25,347 (99%) were found, 23,178 have already been examined and 0.9% of them were infected. In the province of Guangdong, 9,939 contacts were named, all found, 7,765 are already examined and 4.8% of them were infected. That means: If you have direct personal contact with an infected person, the probability of infection is between 1% and 5%.

Finally, a few direct quotes from the report:

"China’s bold approach to contain the rapid spread of this new respiratory pathogen has changed the course of a rapidly escalating and deadly epidemic. In the face of a previously unknown virus, China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history. China’s uncompromising and rigorous use of non-pharmaceutical measures to contain transmission of the COVID-19 virus in multiple settings provides vital lessons for the global response. This rather unique and unprecedented public health response in China reversed the escalating cases in both Hubei, where there has been widespread community transmission, and in the importation provinces, where family clusters appear to have driven the outbreak."

"Much of the global community is not yet ready, in mindset and materially, to implement the measures that have been employed to contain COVID-19 in China. These are the only measures that are currently proven to interrupt or minimize transmission chains in humans. Fundamental to these measures is extremely proactive surveillance to immediately detect cases, very rapid diagnosis and immediate case isolation, rigorous tracking and quarantine of close contacts, and an exceptionally high degree of population understanding and acceptance of these measures."

"COVID-19 is spreading with astonishing speed; COVID-19 outbreaks in any setting have very serious consequences; and there is now strong evidence that non-pharmaceutical interventions can reduce and even interrupt transmission. Concerningly, global and national preparedness planning is often ambivalent about such interventions. However, to reduce COVID-19 illness and death, near-term readiness planning must embrace the large-scale implementation of high-quality, non-pharmaceutical public health measures. These measures must fully incorporate immediate case detection and isolation, rigorous close contact tracing and monitoring/quarantine, and direct population/community engagement."


https://www.reddit.com/r/China_Flu/comments/fbt49e/the_who_sent_25_international_experts_to_china/