For the first day since the pandemic's peak, Australia has recorded zero new community-acquired cases of the disease.

Only 2 new cases were found in total, both in quarantined returned travelers from overseas.

https://www.facebook.com/abcmelbourne/photos/a.119472683925/10158442132493926/?type=3&theater

Yet it was already present November 17th and likely earlier.
https://www.livescience.com/first-case-coronavirus-found.html

The difference with Australia at least is that they did not have any people attending the military games in Wuhan end of October (Not sure about New Zealand have to check). Europe and NA did have athletes there who reported getting sick.

The attack rate goes up exponentially with the time the disease has to spread uncontrolled. Wuhan locked down Januari 24th with 1200 confirmed cases and 40 reported deaths, Italy didn't lock down until they had 10,000 confirmed cases and 500 deaths, March 9th.

The fatality rate is also directly tied to the age distribution, avg age of 38.4 in China, 45.4 in Italy. Add in different living conditions and one big fatal error when schools closed in Italy, namely grand parents jumped in to help take care of the kids, and you have created the perfect storm for this virus.

The reproduction rate is indeed very different between areas. It heavily depends on population density, living conditions and cultural differences (hand shake or bow etc). It can spread undetected in the young and healthy (just the flu) until it hits elderly homes and people start dying. The early spread was during flu season, great way for this new virus to hide. Yet reports of strange pneumonia date back to November in Italy, UK and France.
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-03-23/Italian-expert-talks-about-strange-pneumonia-cases-in-November-P68sAd0p6o/index.html
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-05-08/First-COVID-19-cases-in-France-date-back-to-November-QjPChuck9y/index.html
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/new-evidence-race-find-france-s-covid-19-patient-zero-n1207871

I wish there was a follow up on this
https://www.insidethegames.biz/articles/1094347/world-military-games-illness-covid-19

Any anti body tests here would be helpful as well to know whether my wife already (barely) survived it in Februari. I asked the testing center but they didn't have any other tests and I guess weren't interested in early cases. She's still not fully recovered from the severe double pneumonia she had with most of the other symptoms of covid19. Atm she's struggling with this https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2020/04/stomach-complaints-common-in-covid-19-patients.html. A relapse, something else, who knows. We have been isolating for months, I don't get it.

Lol they're backtracking already

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/who-clarifies-comments-on-asymptomatic-spread-of-coronavirus-there-s-much-unknown-1.4976424

The organization held a live Q&A on its social media pages to address questions about comments made by a WHO official that suggested asymptomatic people only rarely spread COVID-19. The comments appeared to directly contradict guidance from public health organizations, including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which have said about a third of coronavirus infections may be asymptomatic. The CDC also estimates that 40% of coronavirus transmission is occurring before people feel sick, meaning they are presymptomatic.

But it may boil down to how one defines "asymptomatic." 'THERE ARE SO MANY UNKNOWNS'

Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO's technical lead for coronavirus response and head of its emerging diseases and zoonoses unit, said during a media briefing in Geneva on Monday that "it still seems to be rare that an asymptomatic person actually transmits onward to a secondary individual."

But then on Tuesday, during the live Q&A, she clarified "this is a major unknown. The majority of transmission that we know about is that people who have symptoms transmit the virus to other people through infectious droplets -- but there are a subset of people who don't develop symptoms, and to truly understand how many people don't have symptoms, we don't actually have that answered yet," Van Kerkhove said.

"We do know that some people who are asymptomatic, or some people who don't have symptoms, can transmit the virus on," she said. "So what we need to better understand is how many of the people in the population don't have symptoms and separately how many of those individuals go on to transmit to others."

Jumping the gun with a small subset of studies...

On Monday, Van Kerkhove had said that what appear to be asymptomatic cases of COVID-19 often turn out to be cases of mild disease.

"When we actually go back and we say how many of them were truly asymptomatic, we find out that many have really mild disease," Van Kerkhove said on Monday. "They're not quote-unquote COVID symptoms -- meaning they may not have developed fever yet, they may not have had a significant cough, or they may not have shortness of breath -- but some may have mild disease," Van Kerkhove said. "Having said that, we do know that there can be people who are truly asymptomatic."

"What I was referring to yesterday in the press conference were very few studies -- some two or three studies that had been published that actually try to follow asymptomatic cases, so people who are infected, over time, and then look at all of their contacts and see how many additional people were infected," Van Kerkhove said. "And that's a very small subset of studies. So I was responding to a question at the press conference. I wasn't stating a policy of WHO or anything like that," she said. "Because this is a major unknown, because there are so many unknowns around this, some modeling groups have tried to estimate what is the proportion of asymptomatic people that may transmit."

Different findings in the UK

Liam Smeeth, professor of clinical epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said that he was "quite surprised" by Van Kerkhove's original comments. "It goes against my impressions from the science so far that suggest asymptomatic (people who never get symptoms) and pre-symptomatic people are an important source of infection to others," Smeeth said In a written statement distributed by the U.K.-based Science Media Centre on Tuesday.

"There remains scientific uncertainty, but asymptomatic infection could be around 30% to 50% of cases," Smeeth said. "The best scientific studies to date suggest that up to half of cases became infected from asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic people."

One gotta wonder what did we destroy economies and millions of jobs for. 

Plenty would say that's one too many...

Europe's overall decline is stagnating, it's been around 95% week over week change for 2 weeks now.
Russia is mostly to blame, contributing 60% of the cases in Europe atm with 98.5% week over week change.

Others that might be worrying are:
Belarus: seems to hold at a bit over 800 cases per day, very slight decline.
Portugal: had peaked early April but is showing slight growth again, close to 400 cases per day.
Poland: no real peak and is still slowly growing, over 450 cases per day. Cyberpunk!
Ukraine: flat early May but slowly growing again, just over 500 cases per day.

I have never anybody irl who cared about this virus and that includes old people. I don't know anybody who knowingly had it or knows someone who had it. It seems the online crowd who supported the shutdowns switched effortlessly to "it's just the flu bro" with these protest and riots.

Consider yourself lucky. More so than the over 3 million people currently suffering through it, or the more than 400,000 and counting who've died. Or the families of those 400,000.

No one is gonna mention that in brazil, that tested around 1million people, and have found 742,000+ confirmed cases?
Brazil is basically only testing people with heavy symptoms of covid19.

I wouldn't be surprised if as a result of BLM protests, it further spreads, and kills another 20,000+ people (in the US).
Not to mention when economy is in trouble, going around burning down shops and stores, and looting, isnt helpfull.

However politicans are too afraid to be labled as racists for saying so.

Ontop of that, it wouldn't have any effect on the crowds that are protesting.
The "best" outcome is to have people in power, get off their fat asses and start makeing reform and law changes.
So you guys arnt stuck with protests for like 6months to a year's time.

USA has to pick between status quo, but looting/rioting, economy being shut down again, mass spread of the virus and deaths caused by it.
or
Gwelling the rage of the black community, with actions (of reform, and changes to the law) for greater equality.

However its more likely that trump picks "status quo".
He'll play at being a facist dictator and use military to beat down his own people instead.