Corona Virus Daily Thread #31

[Mariner]

Yesterday's thread here:

http://freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3829269/posts?page=1

[TermLimits4All]

Interesting parishioners attending church. Why would a pastor subject his church to potential infection? I suspect he’s a money man versus a Godly man

[calenel]

“The Spanish Flu was not mitigated on any significant scale”

That can be disputed. There were plenty of quarantines, calls for social distancing, hand washing, etc. Time to travel was a form of mitigation inherent in the technological level of that time compared to now.

But the differences I see as most significant are the spread of the disease by asymptomatics, the contagiousness of it and the mobility of the population.

There were not tens of thousands of college students flying home to everywhere in the country from Spring Break in 1918. For example. Catch it on the beach, jump on a plane, give it to Grandma three days later before you even have symptoms or even the person you got it from has symptoms. Even if you both end up on ventilators later on.

[dfwgator]

The reason this became the monster it did was because it came right smack dab in the middle of the Chinese New Year, which is the largest human migration on the planet, with millions of Chinese traveling across the globe to be with family.

[muggs]

I was getting ready to throw out an uncomfortable bra last night. Suddenly I thought I could make 2 masks from it. Now I just need to find a way to keep them on. Right now,I would never use one in public but it things got too bad I might reconsider.

[Thud]

The addicts are going cold turkey because the Mexican drug labs can’t get the necessary precursor chemicals from China. The druggies’ income is way down and they’re probably finding some other form of criminal income. City governments are ignoring them because the epidemic has all the attention.

[Mariner]

“Mexico IS lying about their CCP-19 situation.”

Only guns on the border will stop what’s coming. They are but a few weeks behind the US.

When the big cities collapse, all hell will break lose.

[blueplum]

As much as I badmouth CCPChina, I will offer up some tentative acknowledgement of our American Chinese Californians, Oregonians and Washingtonians - who knew what they were fleeing from and hunkered down (with a little help from inter-Chinatown peer pressure and mandatory airport-assigned quarantines which went north of 20K combined). There were jerks who didn’t, to be sure, but I’m thinking our slow numbers are proof the majority did. However, I reserve a caveat, depending on release of the numbers we need:

Oregon at 548 13 deaths - Oregon not releasing hospitalization rate/ICU rate/beds occupied
https://www.wweek.com/news/state/2020/03/25/oregon-health-officials-arent-telling-the-public-how-severe-the-covid-19-outbreak-is-they-should/

Washington State at 4310 189 deaths 700? hospitalized?
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/more-than-250-people-in-washington-hospitalized-last-week-with-covid-19-like-symptoms-as-part-of-monthlong-upward-trend-state-data-shows/

California at 4543 101 deaths

San Diego - 69 hospitalizations

In LA, 317 hospitalizations:

Santa Clara, 154 hospitalizations

Santa Barbara 3

San Luis Obispo 5

Sacramento UC Davis 9 ?

Placer County 54 ?

Orange County, Riverside County, San Francisco County, and San Bernardino. not reporting

Yolo County, Dignity Health, Kaiser Permanente and Sutter Health declined to say how many COVID-19 patients they are treating

https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/investigations/covid-19-how-san-diegos-hospitalization-rates-compare-with-other-counties-across-california/2294626/
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-24/coronavirus-hospitals-los-angeles-county
https://www.sacbee.com/news/coronavirus/article241560391.html

[calenel]

“Only guns on the border will stop what’s coming. They are but a few weeks behind the US.”

I agree.

“When the big cities collapse, all hell will break lose.”

Pray it doesn’t get that bad.

[LilFarmer]

Same reason a governor would allow spring break or Mardi Gras, I imagine

[ETCM]

One of the earliest cases in San Diego, back when it was single digits, was reported as being “in the custody of CBP”. I’m sure there are many more, but that info seems impossible to find now.

[Myrddin]

When the big cities collapse, all hell will break lose.

Just read recent comments from Dave Hodges on the topic. He expects that the weak buying food will fall prey to criminals staking out the stores to steal what they can not buy. It is already happening in Greeley, CO.

The virus has our attention. Others are preparing to take advantage of our distraction.

[BusterDog]

Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) has a plan for what we do after we got over this initial curve: Massive "frontier testing" and contact tracing.

CHINA KEEPS FINDING #COVID19 CASES, BUT FAILS TO OFFICIALLY REPORT THEM. A little known but documented fact is that China doesn’t count lab🧪 positive cases if no symptoms. (Verified by @lwcalex). So no surprise- Wuhan is still finding lots of cases...🧵

2) Notably, “according to a member of ID prevention&control team in Wuhan, every day continues to have “several or more than a dozen asymptomatic infected individuals,” which are people who tested positive #Covid19, but do not feel ill and are excluded from published numbers.”

3) What does this mean? The Wuhan epidemic is not over year, despite China’s rosy official numbers. Anywhere in the world, a lab 🧪 positive case is counted as an official case. But China’s own guidelines excludes them. China cannot and should not exclude positive #COVID19 cases.

4) What lessons can other countries draw? That long term mitigation measures are not nearly enough to truly put out the wildfire of #COVID19 epidemic. Mitigation is like dumping aerial water drops via a plane- it’ll slow it down but it can’t put out every last flame on the ground

5) Thus, what will it truly take? According to @devisridhar (Chair of Global Health at @EdinburghUni), the only way is via MASSIVE TESTING on a grand scale, the likes of which only been seen in S Korea—need #COVID19 test + CONTACT TRACING, or else no hope.

6) At the same time, perhaps we can combine going back to work to a limited degree later with + MASS TESTING + MASS CONTACT TRACING - but likely only AFTER STRONG CONTAINMENT to minimize the #COVID19 wildfire down to manageable levels for mass testing & contact tracing. But wait-

7) ... NOT ALL TESTING IS THE SAME. We need to be “testing at the epidemic frontier” not merely clearing testing backlogs and late stage hospitalization testing. most countries are not testing “the frontier” but merely doing catch-up test & hospital tests after 2-4 weeks illness.

8) Testing at just the hospital means we have already lost 2-4 weeks of community spreading (likely longer given asymptomatics transmit before symptom onset). Such reactionary #COVID19 defensive backlog test is subpar- we need to battle at “frontier” of new cases as they emerge.

9) Even if asymptomatic transmission with lower viral might be slower than fully symptomatics, we are still losing precious time by testing the backlogs and hospital cases. #COVID19 has a doubling time of 6.2 days, sometimes much shorter, and so every week we lose is precious.

10) Thus, massive “TESTING AT THE FRONTIER” immediately as soon as new symptomatic #COVID19 cases emerge is critical. And it allows contact tracing to be much more effective as it is easier to find recent contacts, fewer contacts, it puts close contacts into quarantine earlier!

11) BOTTOMLINE: We know mitigation strategies only mitigate, and buying time to flatten curve isn’t enough. Let’s stop doing just hospital tests only. We can only put out the #COVID19 wildfire w/ massive FRONTIER testing of cases and massive FRONTIER contact tracing & quarantine.

https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1244168120727724032

[Mariner]

I was speaking of Mexico.

[Thud]

I seriously doubt Mexico will collapse. The Wuhan Virus is not lethal enough and most of its victims think it's only a cold. Loss of income from the border factories and remittances will be more of a problem, and not a serious one. Mexicans already despise their de jure and de facto governments.

IMO Mexico will come out of this better than we will in terms of feelings of loss. We'll take a serious decline in our standard of living, given inflation and higher taxes, and that will affect national morale.

[calenel]

Just for comparison purposes, in the US, the Swine Flu killed 12,439 over the course of 15 months, from the first death reported until the pandemic was officially declared over. That’s an average of 27 per day. Certainly there were “good” days and bad days (and an intermission), but just for the sake of comparison. About 60 million were infected.

In 1 month since the first reported death in the US, CCP-19 has killed 2,588. That’s about 89 per day. Only about 1-2 million have been infected.

So the next guy that comes along asking why we didn’t do this for H1N1, ask them what they think the death toll would have been if we didn’t do this for *this* one.

It’s not the flu.

And we still have a ways to go.

[amorphous]

Wow! This is an amazing turnaround folks (See plot below)! So much so, I tend to question the accuracy of tonight's numbers, and if I could have made an error. I double and triple checked this one, but suggest we don't get too excited just yet.

29th COB numbers:

Numbers from https://www.worldometers.info. Smaller ratio numbers are better. Data not validated. YMMV for informational interest only. PM me if you would like on or off the ping list.

Daily percentage of new Corona virus deaths to previous day's total by country. 25% = total deaths double every 3 days, 20% = every 4 days, 15% = every 5 days.

[Yardstick]

It would be interesting to know many Swine Flu killed in its first month.

[bgill]

Cover them in fabric and no one will know.

[calenel]

“IMO Mexico will come out of this better than we will in terms of feelings of loss. We’ll take a serious decline in our standard of living, given inflation and higher taxes, and that will affect national morale.”

That’s a pretty negative outlook. For the US. I think a restructuring will occur and there will be new opportunities and the clearing of deadwood. Proof that dependence on foreign entities for critical goods and resources is a bad idea will revitalize some parts of the American economy. Buy American will be as big as Make American was becoming.

I wasn’t worried about Mexico collapsing, TBH, I’m focused more on us. But remittances are a big, big part of the Mexican economy. Single largest contribution after oil, IIRC, although that may no longer be true. Don’t know. Bet a lot of them would go home now if the Mexican Army would let them, LOL.

[datura]

I hate to say this, but Sunday’s aren’t so grim - I don’t know if testing isn’t reported or just not done on Sunday without hospital admission. I’m very happy to Italy’s death count drop twice now, I pray that trend continues for months.

I was hoping last Sunday showed a flattening trend. Monday changed that. If I’m wrong, please accept my apology.