By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close

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

Saw this gem, and thought I'd share:

USA:
45 Days from 1 million to 2 million cases
28 days to go from 2 to 3 million cases
15 days from 3 to 4 million cases

At the current trajectory it's close to halving the window each time, it's foreseeable that it could reach 5 million cases by Wednesday next week.

^ What do you guys think? can that actually be right? 1 million more in the next week? Exponential growth is a scary facking thing.



Around the Network
SvennoJ said:

The silver lining is that those measures will help prevent many flu deaths as well. We might have a very low death toll from flu next season. Or if people give up on social distancing, good hygiene and masks, flu and covid19 might combine to make an even deadlier combination. Infected by both might push many more over the edge.

Hopefully many more people will opt for the flu shot this year, and hopefully it's an effective one (chose the right strains) this year.

People like to have holiday in the summer, yet it makes more sense to put the 2 month school holiday during flu season...

Had to have a Flu shot for work... The other issue there is if I was to theoretically contract COVID-19, I won't get hit with the Flu at the same time increasing the health risks and implications.

Plus it can assist in eliminating the Flu-like symptoms for being the actual Flu.

I highly advise everyone to get a Flu vaccine where possible.



--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--

JRPGfan said:

Saw this gem, and thought I'd share:

USA:
45 Days from 1 million to 2 million cases
28 days to go from 2 to 3 million cases
15 days from 3 to 4 million cases

At the current trajectory it's close to halving the window each time, it's foreseeable that it could reach 5 million cases by Wednesday next week.

^ What do you guys think? can that actually be right? 1 million more in the next week? Exponential growth is a scary facking thing.

Nah i think it will be another 12-15 days. Even though states are still seeking record numbers most have become testing restrained and re increasing at slower rates.



JRPGfan said:

Saw this gem, and thought I'd share:

USA:
45 Days from 1 million to 2 million cases
28 days to go from 2 to 3 million cases
15 days from 3 to 4 million cases

At the current trajectory it's close to halving the window each time, it's foreseeable that it could reach 5 million cases by Wednesday next week.

^ What do you guys think? can that actually be right? 1 million more in the next week? Exponential growth is a scary facking thing.

The growth has actually been slowing down a bit in the USA. It topped at +45% week over week growth, yet the last 3 days it's down to +6% week over week growth. Still growing in many places. The good thing about exponential growth is that it scares people into taking action.

Assuming this weekend was not exceptionally low in reporting and the trend continues, USA will add about half a million cases in the next week, or 650K to next Wednesday. Reported deaths will still keep growing for at least a week, likely two, catching up to the reported cases.

Of course as soon as people see the numbers stop increasing, they might go back to their usual business...


And umm yeah, the slow down in growth could be test constrained as well :/



Has the white house taken over the CDC in collecting and disseminating the numbers to the public yet, will be interesting to see any affect of that policy if any and how would we know anyway



Around the Network
Barozi said:
EricHiggin said:

Well how accurate are the numbers? How accurate are any of the numbers? Clearly dying from another cause, and being counted as a covid death because it was also in their system at that time, certainly puts that into question. Hospitals being paid by the Gov for treating covid 19 patients when forced to slow or halt other medical treatments due to the pandemic? Based on covid 19 symptoms, which can be quite similar to other illnesses?

How many other uncertainties are out there? I'm sure I must have caught them all. Never miss a covimon.

Same illness, that effects people differently, because people are different. Are all workers the same? Same quality? Same productivity?

No.

So you're saying that while the illness is the same, more US citizens are infected because they are less healthy in general compared to people in other 1st world countries. Got it.

No. That could be part of the reason however as doing more testing doesn't make up the entire gap. I'm saying the more testing, the more likely you're going to find more people who have it. If you don't test at all, you're not going to have any confirmed cases, if you start testing, you're going to find people who have it. The more you test, the more cases you'll come up with in overall in general as a country. Maybe the US has way more asymptomatic cases which is why the people may not be as inclined to see the need in masking up, leading to more spread. Maybe because the US people were lied to by the head Gov specialist about the importance of masks, which he admitted, the people don't believe the suggestion of masking up now. There are a ton of reasons why the spread may be worse, or that the numbers themselves may not be as legitimate as depicted.

Also, while I haven't paid near as much attention to the death rate lately, because of the media, I immediately noticed that the news seems to be heavily focused on the increase in confirmed cases, and no longer deaths for about a week now. This is a major change from how they were laser focused on the deaths not so long ago. I wonder why they would do that? Is it because they don't care anymore, or because it's no longer so scary, so change to showing bigger increasing numbers of the general spread perhaps?

JRPGfan said:
Conina said:

USA: 146k tests per million

Germany: 82k tests per million

Italy: 103k tests per million

So the more tests could explain double of the known active cases at best , not 29x or 85x the number of known cases.

Also the USA also counts anti body tests, in that number (which alot of other natons dont).

Like in denmark we have tested 230,000+ pr million.
Testing SHOULD be higher (pr million) the more cases you have.
And yet, you dont hear our prime minister saying "we're testing too much, slow down the testing"!

If you have a few people, and miss a few people, its not the end of the world. If you dont test for them.
If you have massive spread, and miss aton of people, its gonna make it sooo much worse. Thus as more people have it, testing should go up.

USA has more cases than anywere, and thus should be testing alot more (pr population) than other places.
Thats how you stop spread, you find those infected, and ask them to stay home and not go around infecting others.

Conina is 100% correct.

EricHiggin says some odd things sometimes.

Another reason to question the numbers overall. You don't really know how many cases you have exactly without testing though. So how can you say you should be testing more based on more cases? Covid 19 symptoms aren't entirely unique. Just because you think someone might have it, doesn't mean they actually do. You have to test to confirm. Then there's also the asymptomatics who show little to no signs. What if the US has more of them then they may think? Maybe they are grouped together more which could explain why some aren't as inclined to wear a mask, unknowingly leading to more spread anyway.

100% correct though they didn't take into account the anti body tests that a lot of other nations don't? You surely can't assume everything has been taken into account. None of us know everything, because none of the experts and professionals themselves even know, or can be reliably trusted, so while there is no spoon fed final answer, it's clear there's more to it than just some nations are weaker and/or idiotic. If that's the automatic assumption someone wants to make though that's up to them.

As far as I've seen, covid 19 is much more like a cold than the flu. Which also means like a cold, your bodies immunity to it is kinda weak and short lived. Short lived like 2 weeks to 3 months, maybe a little longer. That would certainly explain why some are potentially getting infected a second time now. It's also the reason why a vaccine would be extremely tough to make and distribute, because it would almost certainly have to be administered multiple times a year to truly be effective. It's part of the reason they don't bother with cold shots, but do bother with flu shots. Your immunity against the flu is like 2 years to 10 years, so a (bi)yearly shot makes sense. Asking people to stay home for a while and get better won't solve it if your immunity is gone after a few months. This is why masking up would seem to make some sense, and why it's being pushed more and more. If you can't build up a strong long lived immunity, then you have to try and prevent yourself from getting it in the first place, or spreading it to others. If they do somehow come up with a vaccine, trying to get people to take it bi yearly or more will be the next problem to overcome.

You say that as though I'm supposed to be perfect, yet oddly screw up at times. Nobodies perfect, not even close, and this covid 19 pandemic is one screwed up situation, from all angles. It does fit so well in upside down backwards world though.



Rab said:
Has the white house taken over the CDC in collecting and disseminating the numbers to the public yet, will be interesting to see any affect of that policy if any and how would we know anyway

Yes that happend like 4days or so ago.
Data is now on a server in washington, overseen by trump and his people.



EricHiggin said:
Barozi said:

No.

So you're saying that while the illness is the same, more US citizens are infected because they are less healthy in general compared to people in other 1st world countries. Got it.

No. That could be part of the reason however as doing more testing doesn't make up the entire gap. I'm saying the more testing, the more likely you're going to find more people who have it. If you don't test at all, you're not going to have any confirmed cases, if you start testing, you're going to find people who have it. The more you test, the more cases you'll come up with in overall in general as a country. Maybe the US has way more asymptomatic cases which is why the people may not be as inclined to see the need in masking up, leading to more spread. Maybe because the US people were lied to by the head Gov specialist about the importance of masks, which he admitted, the people don't believe the suggestion of masking up now. There are a ton of reasons why the spread may be worse, or that the numbers themselves may not be as legitimate as depicted.

Also, while I haven't paid near as much attention to the death rate lately, because of the media, I immediately noticed that the news seems to be heavily focused on the increase in confirmed cases, and no longer deaths for about a week now. This is a major change from how they were laser focused on the deaths not so long ago. I wonder why they would do that? Is it because they don't care anymore, or because it's no longer so scary, so change to showing bigger increasing numbers of the general spread perhaps?

JRPGfan said:

Also the USA also counts anti body tests, in that number (which alot of other natons dont).

Like in denmark we have tested 230,000+ pr million.
Testing SHOULD be higher (pr million) the more cases you have.
And yet, you dont hear our prime minister saying "we're testing too much, slow down the testing"!

If you have a few people, and miss a few people, its not the end of the world. If you dont test for them.
If you have massive spread, and miss aton of people, its gonna make it sooo much worse. Thus as more people have it, testing should go up.

USA has more cases than anywere, and thus should be testing alot more (pr population) than other places.
Thats how you stop spread, you find those infected, and ask them to stay home and not go around infecting others.

Conina is 100% correct.

EricHiggin says some odd things sometimes.

Another reason to question the numbers overall. You don't really know how many cases you have exactly without testing though. So how can you say you should be testing more based on more cases? Covid 19 symptoms aren't entirely unique. Just because you think someone might have it, doesn't mean they actually do. You have to test to confirm. Then there's also the asymptomatics who show little to no signs. What if the US has more of them then they may think? Maybe they are grouped together more which could explain why some aren't as inclined to wear a mask, unknowingly leading to more spread anyway.

100% correct though they didn't take into account the anti body tests that a lot of other nations don't? You surely can't assume everything has been taken into account. None of us know everything, because none of the experts and professionals themselves even know, or can be reliably trusted, so while there is no spoon fed final answer, it's clear there's more to it than just some nations are weaker and/or idiotic. If that's the automatic assumption someone wants to make though that's up to them.

As far as I've seen, covid 19 is much more like a cold than the flu. Which also means like a cold, your bodies immunity to it is kinda weak and short lived. Short lived like 2 weeks to 3 months, maybe a little longer. That would certainly explain why some are potentially getting infected a second time now. It's also the reason why a vaccine would be extremely tough to make and distribute, because it would almost certainly have to be administered multiple times a year to truly be effective. It's part of the reason they don't bother with cold shots, but do bother with flu shots. Your immunity against the flu is like 2 years to 10 years, so a (bi)yearly shot makes sense. Asking people to stay home for a while and get better won't solve it if your immunity is gone after a few months. This is why masking up would seem to make some sense, and why it's being pushed more and more. If you can't build up a strong long lived immunity, then you have to try and prevent yourself from getting it in the first place, or spreading it to others. If they do somehow come up with a vaccine, trying to get people to take it bi yearly or more will be the next problem to overcome.

You say that as though I'm supposed to be perfect, yet oddly screw up at times. Nobodies perfect, not even close, and this covid 19 pandemic is one screwed up situation, from all angles. It does fit so well in upside down backwards world though.

More testing results in finding more infected. This is so obvious I don't know why you even mention it.

The important part is the positivity rate. US ranges between 8 and 10 percent here while many European countries are already sub 1%.
Why is that? Two possible explanations:

1. The US isn't testing enough.
Positivity rate will decrease when you test more people. Takes no genius to understand as you test the symptomatic people first then their family members  then their working colleagues and then other random people that had contact with them (if you can trace them). Chances you'll find infected people will decrease during every step.

The US is doing aroung 800k tests a day. To get the positivity rate down to 1% they would need to do AT LEAST 6.4m-8m tests A DAY. And that's only if these extra millions of tests don't show any more infected. So is the US testing enough? Probably since doing that many tests every day doesn't seem possible.

2. There simply are more infected people in the US.
You can test all you want but if let's say 5% of the US population is infected RIGHT NOW, the positivity rate will never go below 5%. Doesn't matter if you test 100k a day, 1 million a day or the whole population a day.

More infections lead to more deaths. This shouldn't come as a surprise either. Of course there are other factors to consider, especially the average age of the infected. There aren't as many deaths as during the first peak because the average age has decreased by quite a bit. The US was already as low as 650-700 deaths a day at the beginning of July. Three weeks later and it's back up to ~1000 a day.



EricHiggin said:

Also, while I haven't paid near as much attention to the death rate lately, because of the media, I immediately noticed that the news seems to be heavily focused on the increase in confirmed cases, and no longer deaths for about a week now. This is a major change from how they were laser focused on the deaths not so long ago. I wonder why they would do that? Is it because they don't care anymore, or because it's no longer so scary, so change to showing bigger increasing numbers of the general spread perhaps?

Or is it because infections and deaths don't happen at the same time but the death increases will be a few weeks behind the infection increases.

The earlier you react to alarming developments the better.



Phase 3 re-openings started last Friday. Not sure if we're already seeing an effect from that or if it's still an increase from phase 2


Mobility for Ontario updated until last Friday

More people are starting to go back to work.

It's a fine balance and the fact that the average age of reported cases has dropped dramatically is a worrying trend, creating a powder keg of cases with mild to no symptoms that can still spread the disease.

I wonder what it will look like a month for now, just in time to re-open the schools :/ Avg 160 new cases per day in Ontario, pretty high to open up everything, considering an anti body test in BC suggested there could be 12x as many undetected cases.