Posted on 03/15/2020 11:30:14 PM PDT by dangus
When plotted on a logarithmic graph, the graph of the number of cases of an epidemic usually reaches a certain angle, and then eventually begins to flatten out. That brings a HUGE sigh of relief to those in charge of managing an outbreak, and begins when the PERCENT increase in the number of cases declines. You'll very likely continue to have more and more new cases for a while, and you'll certainly have more and more total cases.
So, the $100 trillion question is: Is the curve flattening? Through March 8, the number of coronavirus cases in the United States increased an average of well over 40% per day. On March 9, however, there were scarcely more NEW coronavirus cases than on March 8... but on March 10, the number popped again, with 45% more cases, or almost double the number of new cases (289 from 148). But then, the number of new cases dropped again on March 11 (271). That was only 29% more cases than the day before.
March 12 and March 13 saw higher growth rates again (33% and 35%). But on March 14, the growth rate slowed to 30%. And yesterday, the growth rate dropped again, to just 23%.
Now, I should note that I'm using Wikipedia's collation of the 50 states' departments of health. This differs from Johns Hopkins U.'s ARCGIS page. But I've fact-checked Wikipedia's citations and compared their count to previous days, so I know that even if Wikipedia counts new cases more slowly, I'm comparing apples to apples when I report that the growth rate has gone down... although it seems highly possible that the growth rate could end up being recorded in Wikipedia as slightly higher, and perhaps high enough that we don't quite manage fewer cases than the previous date.
I should also note that data like this is noisy, meaning it takes some time to be sure whether a decrease in the growth rate is going to be a part of a continuing trend. And changes in the data may not reflect real changes. For instance, a surge in testing could cause a surge in the number of cases identified even after the true growth rate has slowed.
THIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT THE BATTLE IS OVER BY ANY STRETCH OF THE IMAGINATION. This is not about possibly only getting 5,000 or 6,000 cases... this is about whether we get hundreds of thousands of cases or tens of millions.
Now, I've seen from several people on Facebook a comparison on the spread of Coronavirus in the U.S. to the spread in Italy. We've gotten to 3,500 cases faster than Italy! Well, we're five times the size of Italy, so that shouldn't be surprising. But what makes the case in Italy so shocking is that 7% of the people who get coronavirus die of it. So far in the U.S., that's only about 1%, and much lower still if you don't include the Seattle cluster. So there's probably something deeply wrong with the Italian system that isn't showing up in ours.
Do everything you're supposed to: Stay out of crowds... obey the authorities (for now) (unless you can receive the Eucharist on the down-low somehow :-) )... don't go out clubbing... Make sure the older people you have are well provisioned... help the homeless to some clean food... But please, don't panic.
I think you are letting your Polish heritage influence your objectivity. This isn't about Polish plumbers. Nigel Farage, a former member of the EU Parliament and the architect of the Brexit movement, says differently:
The decision we face on Thursday is one which is fundamentally about who we are as a nation.
Remain would mean we stay part of a political union that makes the majority of our laws, which is engulfed in a calamitous eurozone crisis, and which has clear ambitions for further, deeper integration – including plans for a full EU army.
Leaving would mean that we would be taking back control. That those we elect as MPs would be the ones who make and decide our laws, rather than a bunch of unelected old men in Brussels who most people cannot name and who we cannot vote for or remove. Leaving the European Union would revitalise our democracy and mean that the big decisions were made by us instead of for us. I believe we're big enough and good enough to govern our own country.
The fact is that the European Union is a hopelessly outdated, stagnant, failed project. It is inwards looking in a global world, painfully ill-equipped to deal with the realities of the globalised world we now find ourselves in. Just look at how the EU has gone from one disaster to another, including a Eurozone crisis that has been the cause of huge amounts of human misery.
Don't forget that so many who now insist that we would be diminished as a nation if we leave the EU said that our economy would suffer if we did not join the euro. They were wrong then and they are wrong now.
Just as it was a historic, wise decision not to join the euro, it would be equally as wise for us now to untangle ourselves from a European Union that is restraining our country's potential.
EU membership increasingly holds us back from representing our own interests on the world stage. We are unable to negotiate global trade deals because we have to allow the EU do it on our behalf. But outside we would be free to act in our own national interest, unrestrained by EU bureaucracy.
As an independent country we would be free to cooperate and trade with our European neighbours whilst re-engaging with the wider world including our kith and kin in the Commonwealth.
So this decision is not about isolating ourselves in any way. It's about us taking back control of our own destiny as a nation and being free to blaze our own trail in the world.
The EU cannot be reformed. It will continue down a path of deeper, full political integration. If we remain inside we will be swept up in a United States of Europe with open borders and which is soon to expand with the addition of more countries as full EU members.
This decision is a defining moment in the history of our country. I hope that we vote to Leave and to take our place on the world stage as a country focused on the wider, global picture, free and able to act in our own national interest. On Thursday, vote to leave the EU and let's make 23 June our Independence Day.
the eu parliament doesn't make a lot of decisions for eu members - if they did, then there would be more help for Italy from other members
The concept of Parliamentary sovereignty has been a subject of much public discussion in recent years, in particular in light of the 2016 referendum on exiting the EU and the subsequent events.
There has always been some tension reconciling Parliamentary sovereignty with the supremacy of EU law.
Currently section 2(1) of the European Communities Act 1972 provides that the laws of the EU are to be given legal effect in the UK. Read along with section 2(4), this means that the UK Parliament is obliged not to legislate in a way which is contrary to EU law.
The doctrine of supremacy of EU law has the effect that EU law takes precedence over a conflicting provision of national law (irrespective of which law was made first in time). So, in the important Simmenthal case, the Court said:
“…every national court must, in a case within its jurisdiction, apply [Union] law in its entirety and protect rights which the latter confers on individuals and must accordingly set aside any provision of national law which may conflict with it, whether prior or subsequent to the [Union] rule.” (Case 106/77 Simmenthal II [1978] ECR 629, paragraph 21)
This principle was confirmed by the UK courts in the case of R v Secretary of State for Transport, ex parte Factortame (No. 2) [1990] 3 WLR 818 in which it was held that:
“If the supremacy within the European Community of Community Law over the national law of member states was not always inherent in the EEC Treaty it was certainly well established in the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice long before the United Kingdom joined the Community. Thus, whatever limitation of its sovereignty Parliament accepted when it enacted the European Communities Act 1972 was entirely voluntary. Under the terms of the 1972 Act it has always been clear that it was the duty of a United Kingdom court, when delivering final judgment, to override any rule of national law found to be in conflict with any directly enforceable rule of Community law.”
The UK courts therefore have to disapply UK law if it is found to be inconsistent with EU law.
In its case law on this issue, one line of reasoning adopted by the European Court of Justice is that, when entering into the European Union, Member States transferred some of their sovereign powers and rights to the EU institutions, thus giving those EU institutions the ability to create law which binds both individuals and Member States.
There is clearly a tension between the doctrine of supremacy of EU law on the one hand and the doctrine of Parliamentary sovereignty on the other. Some commentators consider that the UK’s joining the EU had the effect that Parliament permanently gave up some of its sovereign powers to the EU. However, in constitutional theory terms, Parliament remains sovereign since it can repeal section 2 of the European Communities Act 1972, as it has done so in section 1 of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act, the effect of which will come into force on “exit day”. “Exit day” is defined in that Act and is the day the EU treaties will no longer apply to the UK (see here for more information). Until that repeal takes effect, EU law will continue to have effect in the UK as described by this page.
It is every man for himself. The Germans have ordered that none of their medical personnel will be going to Italy to assist. The EU globalists have now become nationalists when it comes to dealing with the coronavirus. Too bad they didn't have such an attitude when dealing with the massive migrant invasion from the Middle East and Africa.
EU fails to persuade France, Germany to lift coronavirus health gear controls
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - EU officials sought in vain on Friday to persuade France, Germany and other European countries to lift controls on the export of protective medical gear, which officials said could hurt the bloc’s collective effort to fight the coronavirus.
Such bans “risk undermining our collective approach to handle this crisis” EU crisis management commissioner Janez Lenarcic said at an emergency meeting in Brussels, where officials urged solidarity in the bloc to fight the outbreak.
While the meeting was underway, EU officials working in the building hosting the ministers were sent home and a separate meeting of diplomats was cancelled, after a new case of coronavirus emerged among EU staff. That followed a first case earlier this week.
Many EU countries rely on China, the source of the outbreak, for drug ingredients, and they are now struggling to avoid shortages after the epidemic disrupted supplies and delayed shipments.
Protective gear, such as face masks, is already in short supply in most EU countries, officials said, which puts doctors and nurses at risk.
Europe needs to bring medical production back to Europe, because it relies too much on imports from non-EU countries, officials in France and Germany, the EU’s largest countries, have said.
France imports about 40% of drug ingredients from China, a situation that the French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire called over-reliance on Beijing.
“I believe these numbers because I am a statistician. The Chinese numbers don’t have the obvious flaws on the Iranian numbers, and they follow the patterns that one would expect from their mandatory quarantine. Would you put out numbers to your own people claiming no cases in a province if it was not true?”
Um, if I were CCP, yes. And there are many reports, some from people in Wuhan itself, that the Chinese numbers are false. There is also plenty of circumstantial evidence the Chinese are lying as well as plenty of history to go with it.
The Chinese had everything under control they wouldn’t have been so gun shy about letting in foreigners to look around. They’d be bragging about their “superior” system of government.
I do believe that the Chinese are perfectly capable of publishing statistically consistent numbers to support their lies. Cooking the books. The Soviets, in their day, certainly did. It is in the nature of communism to lie to further the agenda. The Iranian government is run by idiots, no surprise there.
You don’t really know what’s going on, but your conspiracy theory allows you to bypass that, I suppose.
Your grasp of the numbers is flawed and you made some factually incorrect statements.
It’s not how many the flu, which is everywhere and to which everyone is exposed multiple times every year, kills. It’s how many this could kill if allowed to run amok. There is no vaccine, no herd immunity because of past exposure.
In Italy, where attitudes like yours were prevalent, 1 in 15 cases have died. They will overtake China’s official (fake) numbers for dead in a few days. Because they did not take it seriously it overwhelmed their HCS.
In South Korea they imposed draconian measures, tested and contact traced massive number of people and every suspected case and got in front of it. So for them, it’s only about 1 in 100 cases that have died. Only 10 times as lethal as the flu. Because they took it seriously.
If we act like Italy, it WILL be a calamity. If we act like South Korea, then it’s manageable, even if terribly tragic. Which scenario presents a greater threat to President Trump’s reelection, since lives don’t seem to matter so much to you?
Not everything is a Deep State plot to take out Trump. Sometimes bad stuff actually happens.
CV first case was November 17, in Wuhan, China. At first they didn’t take it seriously, either. In January they blocked the roads and imposed a military quarantine. Two months from the first case they wrote off their main transportation hub and it’s 11 million residents, shut down their economy, quarantined another 40 million in other cities and locked down 700 million people around the country. But it’s just a Deep State plot to oust Trump. Right.
I’d say a “reasonable response” to this virus has quickly morphed into an anti-President-Trump effort. See the usual subjects comments and actions.
instead the authorities took the politically correct position of shutting everything else down but what they should have shut down first....
its politically incorrect to tell seniors to stay home but that is who should have been told from day one...
“Does it not strike you as odd that Italy’s northern neighbors - Switzerland, Germany, and Austria - have a total death toll of 28?”
They are just getting started. Why did you leave off France and Spain? They are in between, timeline wise, Italy and your cherry-picked countries.
“Even South Korea is down to 0.92%.”
Up to 0.92% from when they had fewer deaths. It was a vast source of glee for the butflubros that SK had achieved merely a 7x death rate versus the flu, when SK had only 50 deaths (75 now, but without a 50% increase in confirmed cases to keep the death rate diluted). The butflubros weren’t interested in what the numbers actually mean. The cases are resolving faster than they are finding them, which is great. But since they have found the vast majority they are not diluting the deaths with new cases. Their final number will be over 1% even with all the draconian measures they imposed.
You are misusing CFR. The numbers you are presenting are deaths-to-cases. Many of those cases that you are counting as resolving favorably, won’t. Germany, et. al., will have higher death rates. You can’t count unresolved cases in the “win” column.
We need to keep HCS collapse from happening here. That’s the first and most important objective. Math games, conspiracy theories and hypothetical sci-fi plots don’t help.
The biggest problem with the mutation theories is that there is no evidence that some mild strain has overtaken and displaced a more lethal strain. There was no population bottleneck to filter out the old strain and allow the new one to propagate. There is no reason to believe that even if a new strain evolved it would somehow oppose the other strain. So we would end up with multiple strains with no guarantee they would even mutually immunize. Some would be more lethal than others, but that doesn’t mean the worse ones would just go away. And assuming that the new strain wouldn’t be even worse is just as silly.
The infections come in waves and clusters. It takes time for the virus, as contagious as it is, to incubate in its victims. Germany and Switzerland and Austria are just not as far along.
As for the common cold, yes, that is also a corona virus. People know when you say CV these days that you mean the SARS-2 virus or Wuhan virus or CoVID-19 virus. The common flu is also a corona virus. But we need a different vaccine for each type of flu, and many people have had and survived various strains of flu so they provide some herd immunity. Attempting to correct my terminology regarding the name of the current problem virus seems like more of an effort to muddle the conversation than a necessary clarification.
“I was told last month the world was going end to in a week due to Wu Flu.”
Who told you that? The couple of true apocalyptics shut up pretty quick, and the debate has been between preppers and complacents for the most part. But the only way the complacents can justify their position is by painting the people that want to be prepared for the things happening around possibly happening here in the US is to project their panic onto the preppers.
You do like to engage in hyperbole. I see you have removed your “flubro” tagline. Not forgotten, though. Are you perhaps prepared to move beyond denial?
What is ridiculous, is that after all the necessary measures to contain and slow this thing down have succeeded - if they do - in keeping it from being the disaster here that it has been in Italy, Wuhan, Iran, and is shaping up to be in France and Spain and other places, the complacents will say “See? It was nothing.”
Who told you that? The couple of true apocalyptics shut up pretty quick, and the debate has been between preppers and complacents for the most part. But the only way the complacents can justify their position is by painting the people that want to be prepared for the things happening around possibly happening here in the US is to project their panic onto the preppers.
You do like to engage in hyperbole. I see you have removed your “flubro” tagline. Not forgotten, though. Are you perhaps prepared to move beyond denial?
What is ridiculous, is that after all the necessary measures to contain and slow this thing down have succeeded - if they do - in keeping it from being the disaster here that it has been in Italy, Wuhan, Iran, and is shaping up to be in France and Spain and other places, the complacents will say “See? It was nothing.”
LOL. I put the tagline back for you.
The fact is you Wu Flu addicts have continually exaggerated the Wu Flu. There is no “exponential” growth in fatalities. The only thing that has exponential grown is the hysterical response to something that killed all of 11 Americans yesterday. TWO WEEKS after I was told effectively the world was going to end. Well, obviously it has not.
“Where have you seen that SK’s numbers are worsening? From what I have seen, they are leveling off well.”
SK has identified the vast majority of their cases. So they are not finding many more on any given day. That’s the leveling off part.
They are experiencing a handful of deaths each day, higher in proportion than the newly found cases.
Many of the people claiming this is just the flu were saying that SK was proof that this was no big deal, and that a deaths-to-cases ratio of 0.7 (at that time) was what we should expect, or possibly even lower.
I pointed out what I stated above regarding trends in SK and warned them that the 0.7% number was going to grow. That it had to grow. That they were premature in counting the many unresolved cases as resolving favorably. That didn’t go over so well with the folks downplaying this and complaining about the “fascist” restrictions being imposed.
Today’s numbers put the deaths-to-cases ratio at over 0.9%, which is worse than 0.7%. And there are still 7k unresolved cases in SK, over 85%. There will be more deaths. Hopefully not many, but realistically, their final number when the deaths-to-cases ratio converges with the case fatality rate, will likely be at least 1.2, 1.3%. That’s the worsening part.
Containment is key. SK is the best model we have right now.
“I’d say a “reasonable response” to this virus has quickly morphed into an anti-President-Trump effort. See the usual subjects comments and actions.”
Everybody expected that the left/MSM would try to turn this on Trump. When he wins because he led, they will look as foolish as always.
Best efforts to be made are to find ways to turn it back around rather than undermining the containment effort. Stuff like:
“Look where we’d be if we had socialism like China.”
“If not for Trump’s early action, we’d be as bad off as Italy.”
“Told you we needed a wall.”
“How long has Trump been trying to make us independent of Chinese industry?”
“And you actually want to put a guy that ADMIRES the communists into the White House?”
“Imagine the chaos if the Democrats had been running the economy the way they say they want to.”
“The fact is you Wu Flu addicts have continually exaggerated the Wu Flu. There is no “exponential” growth in fatalities. The only thing that has exponential grown is the hysterical response to something that killed all of 11 Americans yesterday. TWO WEEKS after I was told effectively the world was going to end. Well, obviously it has not.”
Without the containment efforts you oppose, there would be exponential growth. If you look at the cases worldwide, there is, in fact, exponential growth. Do you expect the deaths curve to have a different trajectory? The thing that keeps this from totally exploding is the measures that are being imposed by over 100 governments to contain this thing. Every time we can kick the feet out from under it and make it start over, is a win.
https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6
All the hysteria I see is from folks like you who are ever more vigorously defending their complacency or actively rooting for the virus (like you). The world is on a war footing and you are cheering the other side. What does that make you?
So, who said the world was going to end? Still waiting, so I can tell them to stop being as stupid as you.
It will get echo waves of virus in the next month or so.
This is not a personal attack, although you did come across as pretty snotty, just an observation that I have an opinion and you merely restate the opinion of others.
Re: Switzerland, Germany, and Austria...are just getting started.
Actually, S-G-A have more than twice as many COVID-19 infections as the USA, and those cases are confined within an area that is not much larger than Texas.
South Korea was over 1.0% for almost a week. Now trending down - after many, many more infections.
USA deaths increased from 69 to 78 in the last 24 hours.
And - our CFA ticked down from 1.8% to 1.7%.
If not for ONE aberrational nursing home - just 10 miles from my house, by the way - the USA CFR would be identical to Germany, Switzerland, and Austria.
And a reminder - the CFR metric is used by the CDC in dynamic medical events. Perfect? No. Helpful? Yes.
Bottom Line for the USA...
COVID-19 is a dangerous disease for the elderly and the infirm.
Solution...
Protect the elderly and the infirm.
Do not destroy the USA economy and our standard of living.
In that case, petitioner might be the correct word to use (although i do not know for certain either).
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
Shows day to day numbers. Unfortunately, there was a big leap in daily new cases today.
Re: “Unfortunately, there was a big leap in daily new cases today.”
The big leap may be deceptive.
The CDC does not report new numbers between 4 PM on Friday until 12 Noon on Monday.
Many - perhaps all - of the new numbers come from state health departments.
It is not clear if any of the state health departments were reporting new deaths on Saturday and Sunday.
One slightly encouraging fact....
Even with the big leap in weekend deaths, the USA “Case Fatality Rate” (CFR) increased just slightly - from 1.7% to 1.8%.
Before today’s reversal, the CFR was declining or steady for the six previous days.
Thanks. I hope you are right.
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