OT: Article on why testing for COVID19 in the US has been a debacle (and other notes)
https://thedispatch.com/p/timeline-the-regulationsand-regulatorsthat
Here's a good article that explains why the US has tested so few (although that seems to be getting up to speed finally).
The FDA made it near impossible for labs to make testing kits BECAUSE of their emergency declaration. Then, they put all their eggs into one basket with a CDC test, which had a bunch of problems and was essentially unusable. And there's no good reason why they didn't just use the WHO tests.
Here's an update on the COVID19 mortality rate in Korea, which is likely the country closest to the true mortality rate because they've done the most testing.
https://twitter.com/iampaulkerry/status/1240811385660903431?s=20
After jumping up and down a bit in the beginning, it settled low but has been rising consistently and hasn't tapered off yet. It's at 1.1% as of now. The initial infected in Korea were largely young, so this is likely due to more elderly people getting infected and/or the disease running its course more fully. Reminder that the seasonal flu's mortality rate is about 0.1%.
And I'll just make a couple other remarks since I have the OP mic and you can't stop me, which you can TL;DR. It's still really early to tell how bad it can be and which countries have had the best response, besides obvious comparisons like Korea did a much better job than Italy (tracking is at least as important as testing). Italy probably got hammered with a mix of indifference until it was too late, the oldest median age population in the world, a lot of smokers, and pretty bad air pollution in northern Italy. Having said that, Japan is the 2nd oldest population and also has lots of smokers (you can still smoke in bars there! even some spots in restaurants), and also doesn't have the cleanest air in the world. While cases ramped up in Korea, testing languished in Japan and many Japanese were worried there was a coming disaster, but it hasn't materialized. Things are certainly going to get worse in the US, but urban sprawl, car ownership, and low smoking rates may help. I wonder how much is just plain luck as well. It's not entirely accurate to say China had a ton of cases. Wuhan and the surrounding provinces had a lot, but there are many provinces in China with tens of millions of people each that barely had any cases. As of a couple days ago, about 75% of all cases in Korea were in Daegu. This is largely because of a cult that had some super spreaders who had just come back from meetings in Wuhan and were very much uncooperative with authorities (avoiding testing, not telling about their contacts). New cases have dropped off dramatically since about a week ago.
I'd suggest you do a bit more reading. Start with influenza, R nought rates, morbidity and mortality statistics and then compare them to COVID-19. Then come back to Mgoblog and edit your post.
Get
A
Fuckin
Clue
There is no textbook for this. But you can read up on it. Obviously you haven't.
Most of you are worse than Russian bots on twitter. Quit fear mongering. You act like a bunch of entitled and spoiled Americans.
that to me, the fear mongering is becoming a bigger issue than the pandemic.
Consider this:
Influenza A/B, Corona Virus, insert any virulent virus here. Hundreds, hundreds of thousands need medical care, many thousands, hundreds of thousands die...we've seen this many times in history, the strong survive, the weak perish. It's terrible...but it's life on earth. Those who survive earn their place among the immune/survivors...until another round.
Pandemic panic mode right now:
stock market is in a global spiral, people are panic purchasing every scrap of TOILET PAPER...fucking TOILET PAPER for a respiratory illness...not a GI illness...raiding meats, paper products, cleaning products, absurdly disconnected things to a point of gluttony. Small business owners are on the hook, the sports world is on hold globally...schools are closed, Universities are closed...and as EVERY medical expert has stated, we really don't know...everything at this point is a projection.
I grasp the concept with Italy and how they waited far too long...and where the US may not have reached our ceiling yet...but we've done more personal damage to each other to this point than the virus has, and honestly I'll be happy to know in the end morons and American mindset turns out to be the worst of this...at least that would be the result of stopping it before it kills millions. Otherwise, we may be in for a long summer of suffering.
The media/politician caused panic is much moire dangerous.
There are only about 23,000 cases in the US right now out of a population of 320,000,000. That’s .0007% of the US population.
Actual cases are at least 10X what we measure based on historical facts in other countries. And based in how long it takes to develop symptoms bad enough to get tested and then the 2 days to get results. Cases don't stop growing until the virus cant travel from one host to another. You don’t need a degree in microbiology to understand that. Using any % is misleading. If you like percents multiply 1% time 328 million.
You don’t know what the hell you are talking about.
Coming from the guy who somehow thinks the number of confirmed diagnoses and the actual number of cases is the same thing.
The US has added 10000 cases in the past 2 days. You think those people only got the virus in the last 2 days? Get real dude.
Interesting info from Dr. Brownstein:
https://www.drbrownstein.com/coronavirus-xi:-what-the-hell-is-going-on-the-fear-must-cease/
That guy doesn’t even know how to do simple math. He claims the regular flu death rate is 10% by using the wrong denominator. This his conclusion that this isn’t a big deal. If he could do math he’d realize the actual CFR from normal flu is below 0.1%.
There is one factor I have seen very little posted about here: HIPAA laws, and their implications for public health in a pandemic.
My roommate of 4 years in Ann Arbor got his doctorate in epidemiology and biostatistics. For business reasons, he is staying completely out of the limelight. However, part of his client base RIGHT NOW are US states dealing with the implications of Hipaa laws. Very specifically, it is of great interest to public health to be extremely transparent about who has Covid-19, where they have been, where they are now, etc.
If you look at South Korea and Singapore and Taiwan, all of them believe that the need of the community is much more important than that of the individual. (This, by the way, is a huge cultural difference between the west and the east.)
If we did this in the US, we would be publishing the names, whereabouts, relatives, social contacts, places where they go, for each and every person who has contracted the Virus (along, obviously, with a rate of testing much, much higher . . . given the population of South Korea, I think we'd need to test about 50 times more people in the US than have been tested.)
I am not saying that we want to follow South Korea or Singapore's example. But they have made the extremely clear decision that for the good of the nation, they are going to sacrifice medical privacy rights, as regards the virus.
We have said in the US that we are willing to sacrifice freedom of movement and association rights. Would we be willing to also sacrifice personal privacy information, if that meant further social distancing and protection from the virus?
I would sacrifice a certain amount of medical privacy if it meant getting my freedom of movement and association back.
But they're not publishing any private information. It'll say stuff like a woman in her 40s started coughing on this date. She went to this cafe on this date. Im not a HIPAA expert but that doesn't sound like any of the info I usually hear about being a problem.
During the Governor's daily briefing today, Dr. Amy Acton, the director of the Ohio Department of Health, explained where we are in relative to the virus as preparing for a hurricane. In that you want to do everything you can before the eye hits to prepare to minimize the damage when it comes ashore and that is what they are doing with the measures they are putting in place. And you just hope what you are doing lessons the damage.
She then said that we are at the point where the "heavy rains are starting to come down and the eye is drawing nearer". Thought this was a pretty good explanation of why they are doing what they are and also where we are in regards to some sort of timeline in this fight.
China should pay for everyone's healthcare.
Very interesting. Thanks for posting.
I still don’t understand why they declined to use the WHO test.