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Forums - General Discussion - Coronavirus (COVID-19) Discussion Thread

SvennoJ on 21 May 2020
JRPGfan said:

"CFR for the USA is 8.4% atm (Reported deaths today / reported cases May 1st)" - SvennoJ

I just looked at worldometers.info, under USA.
Closed Cases : 466,195 (cases closed with outcomes):
= 371,077 (80%) (recovered or discharged) + 95,118 (20%) (deaths)

"Where is that 0.7% coming from?" - SvennoJ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDQieIJc6Zc

Boston: (~5mins+ into the video)
Anti body showed about ~9.9% of their 780,000 population had it.
551 deaths / 78,000 = 0.7%
Their "offical" confirmed cases, tested positive is like 11,000, but they suspect actual number that have had it is around ~78,000.

Theres been like 5-6 other places/countries were the same.
(in a area of spain with ~5% infected, their IFR was the same).
Im just to lazy to go look through that many old videos of his.

Even long ago, he suspected the IFR to be around 0,5% to 1%.
More and more, its looking like its atleast over 0.7%.

"It's all over the place, and that while a lot of deaths are still uncounted based on excess deaths.
Undetected cases, uncounted deaths. If 50% of deaths aren't counted, there should be at least 20x as many cases to get down to 0.7% IFR. Drawing any conclusions from anti body tests is pretty difficult with the variation in age demographics, how many nursing homes are hit and how well testing was done so far. The under reported number for one country could be completely different for the next." - SvennoJ

Valid point, and this goes for the IFR too.
Hes just takeing the deaths are face value, ignoreing that most places its heavily under counted.

I'd say John Campbell is a optimist.... but even if deaths are higher than reported numbers.
We atleast know that IFR cannot be any lower, than 0.7%.

Thanks, yep at least 0.7% I can agree with. Closer to 1.0% would be my guess, although the older estimate of 1.2% is also still in range.

It all very heavily depends on what age group is hit most in the area tested and indeed how well the deaths are tested and counted.
But it's still a scary thought that if you happen to get tested positive in Brazil, UK, Belgium and Sweden, you're already up to a 1 in 5 chance of not surviving.


I don't remember who asked for state level numbers for the USA but I see the imperial college just released a report on that
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/mrc-gida/2020-05-21-COVID19-Report-23.pdf
I haven't read it yet, the weather is too nice. Back outside!


Edit: One more thing, illustrating the big impact of age demographics.

Early estimates for the USA were up to 2.2 million deaths if 81% got infected, overall death rate of 0.83%
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/us/coronavirus-fatality-rate-white-house.html
https://www.cato.org/blog/how-one-model-simulated-22-million-us-deaths-covid-19
Using the same table for estimated deaths by age and applying it to India for 70% infected there, I came to 2.06 million deaths
That comes to an overall death rate of 0.22%

Compensated for total infected and age demographics, 3.8x higher mortality rate in the USA vs India.

Since random anti body tests already put the death rate at at least 0.7%, those early models were actually pretty accurate!

Last edited by SvennoJ - on 21 May 2020

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JRPGfan on 21 May 2020

"But it's still a scary thought that if you happen to get tested positive in Brazil, UK, Belgium and Sweden, you're already up to a 1 in 5 chance of not surviving." - SvennoJ

Thats because alot of places they dont test "healthy" looking individuals without any signs of being infected.
Alot of people have this virus, and arnt even aware of it. These type of people just assume they dont have it, so why would they bother to go get tested?

The people that go get tested, are usually the ones that already have symptoms (ei. their sickness is turning out worse than most).
or people that have bad symptoms... like alot of people will just assume "I can pull through this, its not so bad" and they dont go get tested.

Ones that get tested, are often people that have such horrible symptoms they go to the hospital, and explain their symptoms to the hospitals, and then get tested there.

Even those tents were you can just drive in and get tested, usually require you to have a doctor giveing you the "okay go get tested".
These doctors usually only give them to people with symptoms too.

So basically, we mainly test those who already are showing signs of bad outcomes.
The remaining ones with better outcomes, are just walking around ignorantly bliss, not knowing they are infected and infecting others.

"ignorance really is bliss" with this virus.
You want to go take a anti body test, find out you have antibodies, unaware that you were ever even infected.
Thats the best possible outcome to a antibody test imo.

"Thanks, yep at least 0.7% I can agree with. Closer to 1.0% would be my guess, although the older estimate of 1.2% is also still in range." - SvennoJ

Yeah I think John Campbell is over optimistic, about it being only ~0.7%.
Given that most places excess mortality are higher than reported covid19 deaths.

Last edited by JRPGfan - on 21 May 2020

JRPGfan on 21 May 2020
sethnintendo said:

Just learned that British are about as poor as Americans when looking at the lower income class. I thought they paid their lower wage workers better than here.

"According to the Money Advice Service, about 17 million people in Britain have less than 100 pounds ($122) in savings to dip into when a crisis strikes and those working in some of the sectors worst hit by the pandemic are particularly vulnerable."

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-britain-credit-ins/britons-spurned-by-banks-caught-in-a-coronavirus-credit-crunch-idUSKBN22X0IR

Alot of the wealth is centered around London.
Meaning you leave that area, you find out alot of the UK is actually not that well off.

The guardian used to have this series called "Anywhere but Westminster" with a reporter running around visiting places in the UK not nearly as well off as london.
It was about the Brexit vote, but it showed why alot of the UK almost rebelliously voted for brexit. They basically think, any change is better than what they currently have (even if its probably gonna turn out even worse).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4uIC0AwD68



Theres alot of inequality in the UK.   (watch from ~12:55 onwards OR the entire thing)

Even before Coronavirus, the amount of people homeless, jobless, depending on foodbanks, was on the rise.
Their economy was slowing down. They assume things will get better after brexit, but its likely to just get worse.
(UK joined the EU, because their economy was a mess, and thought it would help them (which it did)(eu gave them favorable deals))

UK govment isnt running things well, and hasnt for along time.
Its just used the EU as a scapegoat for ages... so they (the people) decided to shoot themselves in the foot, hopeing it would help them.

I honestly feel bad for them.
They have to go through Coronavirus effect on economy (when its already weak), and ontop of that deal with the effects of Brexit (kicks in late 2020).

Last edited by JRPGfan - on 21 May 2020

SvennoJ on 21 May 2020
JRPGfan said:

"But it's still a scary thought that if you happen to get tested positive in Brazil, UK, Belgium and Sweden, you're already up to a 1 in 5 chance of not surviving." - SvennoJ

Thats because alot of places they dont test "healthy" looking individuals without any signs of being infected.
Alot of people have this virus, and arnt even aware of it. These type of people just assume they dont have it, so why would they bother to go get tested?

The people that go get tested, are usually the ones that already have symptoms (ei. their sickness is turning out worse than most).
or people that have bad symptoms... like alot of people will just assume "I can pull through this, its not so bad" and they dont go get tested.

Ones that get tested, are often people that have such horrible symptoms they go to the hospital, and explain their symptoms to the hospitals, and then get tested there.

Even those tents were you can just drive in and get tested, usually require you to have a doctor giveing you the "okay go get tested".
These doctors usually only give them to people with symptoms too.

So basically, we mainly test those who already are showing signs of bad outcomes.
The remaining ones with better outcomes, are just walking around ignorantly bliss, not knowing they are infected and infecting others.

"ignorance really is bliss" with this virus.
You want to go take a anti body test, find out you have antibodies, unaware that you were ever even infected.
Thats the best possible outcome to a antibody test imo.

"Thanks, yep at least 0.7% I can agree with. Closer to 1.0% would be my guess, although the older estimate of 1.2% is also still in range." - SvennoJ

Yeah I think John Campbell is over optimistic, about it being only ~0.7%.
Given that most places excess mortality are higher than reported covid19 deaths.

It's hard to get to case fatality rates with all the different ways testing happens. I just used 20 days as an estimate.

It's 18.5 days on average from onset to death.
It's 5.5 days on average from infection to onset (incubation period)

People actually showing symptoms don't go to get tested until well after the incubation period, likely days after onset.
Tests can take days to come back and even longer to get included in the stats.
However, many tests are also directed / reserved for front line workers regardless of symptoms, contacts of confirmed cases and targeted testing of for example nursing homes.

Thus you have a mix of catching people during their incubation period to catching those that already had it for weeks.

Someone with bad symptoms, gets tested a week into onset, test results gets added 10 days after onset, patient dies 8 days after their results were tallied.
Or a front line worker, gets tested more efficiently and caught early, 3 days after infection, dies 20 days after their results were tallied.

Looking 20 days back was probably a bit far so my CFR estimates are still a bit on the high side for countries where there is still a lot of growth. (Wouldn't make much of a difference for those on the way down for the past weeks)

If I adjust my top 5 for 15 day period to compare with:

3. Brazil 20.5% -> 16.5%
5. UK 20.1% -> 18.5%
17. Belgium 18.7% -> 18.2%
24. Sweden 18.0% -> 16.7%
7. France 16.8% -> 16.5%

Anyway, all it shows is which countries miss the most cases.

If the IFR in the UK is indeed 0.94% (based on that early report of 510K possible deaths when 81% gets infected), the UK is only catching 1 in 20 infections. Which of course assumes again that the spread of the infection is uniform, which it probably isn't.

Now in Germany, (still 5.0% CFR comparing deaths to reported cases 15 days ago), that would mean Germany is 'only' missing 4 out of 5 infections assuming everything else is equal. (which it won't be)

Btw tests per million are pretty much equal between UK and Germany, who gets tested and where the virus spreads have a big influence.


It's impossible to make any generalizing statements of the fatality rate or how many more infections there are were. But it's a good bet it's at least 0.7% in western countries with a higher average age. (compared to developing countries) We'll need a lot more truly random anti body test screenings to get a decent idea of how many cases could have been missed in other areas.




Update for Ontario, 413 new cases, which raises the 3 day avg week over week comparison to 114%, still getting worse. We've had week over week growth for 4 days now. Might it still be the effect of Mother's day or simply catching up on tests since we're now down to 5K tests pending (while before it was as high as 17K tests pending)

CFR for Ontario (deaths / total cases 15 days ago) is 10.6%. So if actual fatality rate is under 1% we're still missing 10 out of every 11 cases.

The weather is offering a good opportunity to test the effect of UV light. UV index yesterday and today was at 9, severe. Blue skies, dry, burning sun, plenty people out. Will next week be better (UV light hampering transmission) or worse (more people out spreading infection). Or will any change be too small to draw any conclusions (likely)

Last edited by SvennoJ - on 21 May 2020

EricHiggin on 21 May 2020
JRPGfan said:
EricHiggin said:

Bit of a trick/tricky question in a few ways, but for one, if the economy doesn't come back, then you can pretty much forget about bringing dead people back period, so it better be able to come back strong, if that's the point of course.

The question would be like asking, 'Which one would we have a better chance at? Saving people's lives from Covid 19, or keeping the economy quite strong?' The question to that answer is pretty obvious, yet that wasn't even up for debate because saving as many people as possible was seen as much more important. So really, is the question worth asking in the first place?

1) dead is dead, and not coming back, reguardless of how the economy is.

2) "it better be able to come back strong, if thats the point of course"  
The reason for the shutdowns, wasn't to "help the economy come back", but to safe lives.

3) "Which one would we have a better chance at? Saving people's lives from Covid 19, or keeping the economy quite strong"
They are both connected. You cant have a healthy economy if people are scared to go out, if they notice people dropping like flies.
Also their not equal. A economy can recover, a dead person wont be brougth back to life, lateron. 
The virus is gone now, its safe to come back to life!  Doesnt work like that.

EricHiggin said:

Unfortunately I can't take that very seriously. So far the professionals educated guesses have been quite poor in this situation.

If team America, world police, did nothing about 911/terrorism, and does nothing going forward, where would we be exactly?

I don't know anyone who can reliably tell the future,
or who can guarantee a different specific past outcome if changes were made.

I think scientists have a pretty good idea now.

If you look at CFR, it varies from country to country (right now in the USA its at 20%, other places its lower).
However due to antibody tests, you can kinda get a idea of how many are actually infected, and compaire that to the deaths to get a idea of IFR (deaths per infected).

IFR is looking like its slightly above 0,7% (currently).
Various countries with antibody tests have come out with IFR numbers of so.

So we can know a possible "worst" case situation now.
We can know a "what if we did nothing and it just spread until ~70% for herd immunity.
(and our health care system didnt collapse)

Brazil is about a week or two away from hospital collapse (they say so themselves, atleast).
If that happends, its IFR will go from those ~0.7% and upto potentially 5% (john campbell estimate).
So its one too keep your eyes on, if their deaths start Sky rocketing up in a week or two, we'll start to get a picture of what happends if you went for the economy instead of saveing lives.

Think you're missing context from the earlier part of the conversation.

-You are you and aren't anyone else. Unless you get cloned. Then you are now two. Have clones always existed? What led to cloning?

-The reason for coming back strong, if that's the point, would be for financial progress leading to scientific reanimation progress and eventual success.

-You also can't have a healthy economy if you don't allow people to go out who want to as safely as possible. Those who want to stay home because they are scared, are free to do so. Most people aren't forced to go to war, they can stay safe at home. Not all economies can recover. If they could, certain empires would have existed for much longer. If you 'kill' an economy, you almost certainly cause more damage overall than would have been otherwise, other than in the worst case scenario's. A dead person can't be brought back as of now. If they could be brought back, say in 50 years, would that be ok since the economy has to recover over time as well?

Scientists would have a better idea assuming they could go back and make some changes without anything else changing because of it or just by chance. Cause and effect are about as core as it get's. To assume changes could be made without something else changing and throwing things off is assuming the universe doesn't work like it actually does. I'm not saying you're definitely wrong, I'm just saying there's no way for anyone to be truly confident that some changes could have been made and everything else would have remained the same and worked out exactly as they assumed it might.

SvennoJ said:

If only we had spend more time and money on preparing for and preventing viral outbreaks instead of focusing on terrorism, which is by far the smallest cause of death. Of course terrorism hurts the economy, so that's why it gets all the attention.

https://www.cnn.com/2016/10/03/us/terrorism-gun-violence/index.html

For every one American killed by an act of terror in the United States or abroad in 2014, more than 1,049 died because of guns.
Using numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we found that from 2001 to 2014, 440,095 people died by firearms on US soil. (2014 is the most recent year for which the CDC has data for deaths by firearms.) This data covered all manners of death, including homicide, accident and suicide.
According to the US State Department, the number of US citizens killed overseas as a result of incidents of terrorism from 2001 to 2014 was 369. n addition, we compiled all terrorism incidents inside the United States and found that between 2001 and 2014, there were 3,043 people killed in domestic acts of terrorism.* This brings the total to 3,412.

That includes 9/11. Spending the money on better flu prevention would have helped for covid19 as well. Especially since covid19 managed to spread undetected so long disguised as just a bad flu. Had airports had better disease detection instead of those useless body scanners for weapons, a lot more lives could have been saved.

Hopefully we don't eventually find out this was terrorism, and not necessarily by the Chinese, because that would be some very scary world changing news.



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EricHiggin on 21 May 2020
Ka-pi96 said:
EricHiggin said:

-You are you and aren't anyone else. Unless you get cloned. Then you are now two. Have clones always existed? What led to cloning?

You'd still be only you. The clone would be a completely different person. A clone would only have the same DNA as you, personality, memories, behaviour etc. could all vary massively.

And yes, clones have always existed. For things that reproduce asexually clones are actually incredibly common. Plus, if you consider that there are a finite number of human DNA configurations, it's entirely possible that human clones have been naturally produced before, or will be at some point in the future.

"You'd still be only you", 'except for the DNA part, which wouldn't only be you'... Could memories eventually be cloned?

Don't humans require male and female though?

SpokenTruth said:
Eric, you are reaching so hard to defend your perspective that you've suggested cloning dead people as a viable strategy to keep the economy open.

Funny you bring that up now. You didn't seem to have much of a problem with it prior, before others decided to join the convo.

I suggested? Perspective?



sethnintendo on 21 May 2020
Ka-pi96 said:
sethnintendo said:

Just learned that British are about as poor as Americans when looking at the lower income class. I thought they paid their lower wage workers better than here.

"According to the Money Advice Service, about 17 million people in Britain have less than 100 pounds ($122) in savings to dip into when a crisis strikes and those working in some of the sectors worst hit by the pandemic are particularly vulnerable."

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-britain-credit-ins/britons-spurned-by-banks-caught-in-a-coronavirus-credit-crunch-idUSKBN22X0IR

Depends. What value do you put on healthcare? Because low earning British people have that. Low earning Americans don't.

Well the ACA tried to help subsidize health plans for low income earners in USA but it was just a patch on a terrible system.  So I'd have to say at least Brits don't have to worry about being in medical debt the rest of their lives and have their wages garnished to pay off overpriced medical care. 



sethnintendo on 21 May 2020

You'd have to wait for those clones to grow up and probably be a lot of them with genetic defects compared to normal births. Be easier just to have a mass reproduction program.



jason1637 on 21 May 2020

Singed up for an antibody test scheduled for tomorrow.



SvennoJ on 21 May 2020
EricHiggin said:

Hopefully we don't eventually find out this was terrorism, and not necessarily by the Chinese, because that would be some very scary world changing news.

Terrorism has motives and a common goal, achieved by directing anger to a particular group or nation. What could possibly be the goal by releasing a slow burning virus that mostly kills the elderly.

Never mind that it has already been shown multiple times that sars-cov-2 was not made in a lab or could have come from a lab. But perhaps there are a bunch of deluded terrorists somewhere angry at the whole world, injecting bat blood from thousands of bats into many thousands of civets for many years, praying for that random mutation to occur while feasting on civet cats for years until someone finally got sick and ran out into busy markets. Yep, that's what happened.



As for cause and effect, do too little, effect shit gets out of control
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/mrc-gida/2020-05-08-COVID19-Report-21.pdf

Brazil is rapidly getting worse than the USA. They tried some measures but not enough. Rt stays above 1 and cases keep rising. We'll see how their economy is going while doing to little to stop the spread. Hopefully Brazilians will take in on their own to social distance more, it's not looking good.