OT: Spread of COVID-19 by Numbers
I know there are other COVID related posts today, but I thought this is such a great article that it deserves a thread of its own.
https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca
It shows in numbers how quickly the virus spreads and what the true number of infections are based on reported deaths. It also discusses how important it is for the government to act quickly to contain the spread.
Hopefully, this kind of knowledge will help you cope with the panic.
I'm being a bit pedantic, but to note that graph is CONFIRMED cases.
In other news --- amongst other B1G schools, both Iowa & PSU released statements just in the last 15 minutes regarding going to all online classes. U-M's announcement seems inevitable at this point.
You should read the article. It discusses how you may be able to project the ACTUAL infected numbers based on deaths reported. The actual numbers are likely to be orders of magnitude greater than the reported numbers.
I read the article last night - I'm familiar with it. It's a good article.
I agree with you that the number of actual cases is (I would guess 2) orders of magnitude higher than the reported cases.
Which means the actual death rate is considerably lower than what is being reported. There are certainly hundreds, if not thousands, of people who have it that have not been identified.
This seems pretty straightforward to me. It's more or less somewhere between the flu and a cold. But the reason there is panic is because 99% of people had apparently never heard of Coronavirus until this strain
Does what happened in Italy typically happen for something between a flu and the cold?
No, but the average age of those dying in Italy was 81 years old as of Monday. Not sure what it is today. 19 of the 31 deaths in this country are in 1 nursing home. Clearly, this is more dangerous than the flu, but also greatly more affecting the elderly and compromised similar to the flu. High-percentage of people in China and Korea also smoke.
I'm avoiding my parents right now, and we should all maintain some social distancing. It's the right thing to do. But if you're under 40, the estimate for mortality is 0.2%, double the flu, but also affecting more-likely, those in not great health.
People take a break from large crowds, as this article says. Flatten the curve. But stop buying all the toilet paper!
This is not true. While we don't know the denominator of infected to calculate at true case fatality rate, there is an idea of what this does in certain populations. In the nursing facility in Washington, we do know the denominator of exposed residents. They've had about a 15% mortality, which is in line with data from Wuhan, in this vulnerable group. The mortality rate of the flu in those over 65 is about 0.8% to 0.1%. So you're looking at a potential 150x multiplier.
Moreover, if everyone gets sick all at once and there's about a 10-15% hospitalization rate, we will run out of hospital beds by May.
You may want to listen to Dr Fauci’s press conference today. He was pretty clear that this was worse than the flu
‘The novel coronavirus spreading across the globe is “10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu,” the government’s top infectious disease official told a House hearing, where he warned the U.S. must take serious mitigation efforts now.
“Bottom line: It’s going to get worse,” National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci told the House Oversight and Reform Committee. “If we don’t do very serious mitigation now, what’s going to happen is we’re going to be weeks behind” in containing the spread.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-11/fauci-warns-coronavirus-far-more-lethal-than-seasonal-flu
We will see, the information the University released today seemed like they were pretty adamant to remain business as usual unless there is a confirmed case at any of the three campuses. They didn’t specifically say this in the release but the tone seems to insinuate that Michigan really doesn’t want to cancel anything unless absolutely necessary.
Update: The career fair to take place on the Dearborn campus tomorrow has been cancelled as of 3:05 pm
The problem with this is, once they have a confirmed case, it is probably too late to act. By the time one case is confirmed, there will be hundreds of other people who are sick but asymptomatic.
I agree wholeheartedly, I’d rather the school be proactive.
Why did they exclude S Korea? They've been hailed as the model of "flattening the curve" so it would be interesting how their trend differs from countries that aren't doing so well at managing it.
Read the article. The chart is in there. Countries with less cases were broken out separately as they don’t show up well on a chart with South Korea
Yeah, I see it now.
Key takeaways for me:
Social distancing is extremely effective.
The mortality rate is highly dependent on if the healthcare system is overwhelmed.
Third take away for me is that measures taken to slow the spread are likely to seem drastic to many as long as healthcare system is not overwhelmed. If and when it is, they will be seen as to little to late
not flattened yet statistically. hopefully in the following week.
I currently work for a Korean company, I would take anything they say with a large grain of salt. I would trust the Chinese more than them. I also wouldn’t put it past them to fudge their numbers just to show how much better they are at containing the outbreak than the Chinese were.
i agree most korean companies are shit, but ummm yea.. i totally disagree that the chinese government being more transparent about the outbreak than south korea... many international news outlets are actually comparing the two as case studies in terms of the openness of the government during the outbreak.
March 11th, 2020 at 10:33 PM ^
I live in Korea and this is dumb. People in China were in total lock down. I went to the east coast last week and went surfing because the semester is delayed. No one has been more transparent about cases than Korea. They've tested way more than anyone else. I get text messages if a case in Seoul is confirmed with where it happened.
Good for Japan. Taking it seriously, and even though they're so close, they flattened the hell out of the curve. And now we look at the idiotic European and Euro related nations (aka US), who just let this thing explode before giving a shit. White men always act tough and laissez faire until it bites them in the ass. I say this as a white man by the way.
Just guessing that going all authoritarian on US citizens wouldn’t go over well. We ask people to self-quarantine but it’s really on the honor system. How many people cheat that or just rationalize a quick trip to the store?
We're not testing nearly enough and the president is downplaying COVID19 every chance he gets. There's a lot more we could be doing without forceably quarantining people. Look at the comments here, way too many people aren't taking this seriously enough.
He banned flights from certain countries right away and got criticized for it among other things. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. You can’t force people who think they might have it to go to the doctor. You can’t force people not to travel or take their foreign trips. I guess that’s a byproduct of freedom.
Is this where someone mentions that he fired the NSC pandemic response team? Shrunk the CDC budget? Refused the already working tests from WHO in favor of designing our own? Claimed in a press conference the numbers were declining in the US? Claimed the fatality rate was lower than the flu? Said anyone can get tested while medical professionals have been publicly saying they don't have enough tests? Discontinued the "Predict" program that monitored the threat of animal born diseases to human? Golfed while infection was rapidly spreading?
Damned if you do, damned if you don't I guess....
I would just listen to the health experts outside the political arena and cable news networks. The budget of the CDC is fine and they are well staffed. The people on the frontline like primary physicians are most important anyways.
Well put. FWIW I voted for that fucker in 2016 and was planning on doing so again until this debacle and how insanely poorly this has been handled from start to....well where ever we are now relative to the start (clearly not the finish that's for sure). Now it looks like I'll probably vote for a guy with some form of dementia instead as the lesser of two evils. What a world we live in.
I'm a 60 year old, white, gun owning Reagan republican that actually misses Obama right now and those are words I never thought I'd say.
Obama waited until over 1 thousand Americans died before he acted on sars or the swine flu, what part of that do you miss?
sars outbreak was 2002-2004. and there were 0 deaths in USA during that time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002%E2%80%932004_SARS_outbreak
obama was in office during 2009-2017
I stand corrected, It was the Swine flu in 2009 and Ebola in 2014
Ebola never spread in US and Swine Flu had 0.02% death rate. What did you expect Obama to do about a very mild flu?
The link documenting when Obama was president was a nice touch.
How is it possible to be this misinformed? Jesus Christ
Rhymes with Rox Mews.
Did you know that exactly 0 people in the US died from SARS? And that there were a grand total of 27 confirmed cases within the US?
At 60 you should know by now that politicians from both sides are terrible! I can come up with a laundry list of criticisms for any President no matter who.
The ignorance of the current President is pretty much unprecedented...
OK, I guess we know who you don’t like.
I agree. I’m a devout bipartisan. At this point considering the candidates, all I’m looking for is a respectable human being that will speak in clear sentences and show the respect that everyone deserves. I’m tired of the name calling and the office of the President of the United States being demeaned.
Blaming Trump for the coronavirus outbreak is peak stupidity
I don’t think anyone here is blaming him for the outbreak. They are blaming him for the response.
That’s peak stupidity too. Most likely he will declare a state of national emergency, deploy resources, and people still won’t be happy.
March 11th, 2020 at 10:40 PM ^
He might. The problem is any good response is already coming too late. This exploded in China almost 2 months ago. Not to mention he cut funds for pandemics 2 years ago as widely reported.
The US also has one of the lowest rates of the virus per million people at 3-4 per million.
Unfortunately because we are testing so few people we have no way of knowing what our actual infection rate is. I own a medical device company that works with literally every US academic teaching hospital on a daily basis. To say our response to this situation was poorly handled by our government is an understatement of immense magnitude.
What about all those people who went to that Biogen conference in Boston? You think they of all people would know better. Or those people who came back from their Nile River Cruise? Etc, etc. To blame the government for what amounts to an uncontrollable natural disaster is a misplacement. Blaming the government is a cop out. Apparently every other country is bad at containing it also - should we fire everyone?
Nope. We should be testing every single person who wants one just like S Korea is doing and we falsely claim we are doing.
The fact that we are making testing so difficult is ridiculous and counterproductive. That's my issue with how this is being handled.
South Korea has 150 cases per million people. The US will test people who show symptoms or have been in contact with someone with a confirmed case.
