This will be a short update. Issues covered will be on COVID-19 spread, World Headlines, COVID-19 medical developments regards PPE & the role of building contamination in spreading disease in Japan, and the social media and videos COVID-19 tracking source section.
Top line, There are currently 92,138 confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide, including 3,134 fatalities as of the 3 March 2020 at 5:51 a.m. ET time hack on the BNO News corona virus traking site (https://bnonews.com/index.php/2020/02/the-latest-coronavirus-cases/) There are 70(+) and growing nations including China plus three “Chinese special administrative regions” (Macao, Hong Kong and Taiwan) that have reported COVID-19 infections. China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Thailand, Singapore, Italy, Iran, Germany, R.O.K. and the USA all appear to have local, or endemic, spread of the disease.
World Headline Summary (As of late evening 3/2/2020):
o US death toll climbs to 6; all in WA, which has 18 cases
o 2 new cases confirmed in Tampa Bay
o 1st case reported in New Hampshire
o Hubei reports 114 new cases, 31 new deaths
o Santa Clara County confirms 2 more cases, bringing county total to 9
o Gottlieb warns US cases likely in ‘low thousands’
o Illinois announces 4th case
o Boris Johnson: “A very significant expansion” of the virus is “clearly in the cards”
o Italian death toll climbs 18 to 52 while total cases surpasses 2,000
o BMW tells 150 to quarantine after Munich employee infected
o Algeria total hits 5
o Senegal becomes 2nd sub-Saharan country to confirm virus
o WHO’s Tedros: Virus is “common enemy” of humanity so don’t focus on blame
o Jordan reports first two cases
o French death toll revised to 3, total cases climb to 191
o Tunisia reports first case
o UK total climbs to 40
o OECD warns global growth could fall by half
o Indonesia reports first cases
o “Progress is being made” toward a vaccine
o Cuomo says NY expects more cases
o India confirms 2 more cases
o ‘Official’ Iran death toll hits 66
o EU confirms 38 deaths across 18 members
o First cases confirmed in Fla.
o 2 Amazon employees test positive in Milan
o Virus now in 8 US states: Washington, California, Illinois, Rhode Island, New York, Florida, Oregon and New Hampshire
o San Antonio virus patient re-hospitalized after testing positive
o China warns it could face ‘locust invasion’
COVID-19 MEDICAL DEVELOPMENTS
This article is very much worth reading in full, printing out a copy, highlighting and carrying around. I’ll excerpt a couple of sections from it below the title and link:
Unmasked: Experts explain necessary respiratory protection for COVID-19
by Stephanie Soucheray
CIDRAP News, Feb 13, 2020
How the virus travels in the air
Donald Milton, MD, a professor of environmental health at the University of Maryland, helped prove via the use of his Gesundheit machine that influenza could be spread via aerosol transmission. He said he is in contact with colleagues in Singapore who are attempting to study the transmission of the COVID-19 viruses, which are often called nCoV, for novel coronavirus..Though Chinese officials said earlier this week that they believe the coronavirus is transmitted only via droplets, implying they do not believe airborne or contact transmission plays a role, Milton said that statement is likely rooted in fear, not science..“To me this sounds like someone trying to deal with panic, because people panic when they hear airborne transmission and long-distance transmission,” he said. He said there has been scientific evidence of aerosol transmission of MERS-CoV (Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus), so it is likely possible for this novel coronavirus, as well..Milton cautions that the difference between aerosol and droplet transmission is largely in name only. Respiratory droplets, emitted with a sneeze or a cough, are commonly thought to land within 6 feet of patients and are too large to be buoyant on air currents. Respiratory aerosols are droplets too, Milton said, but smaller and light enough to travel farther..“You cannot tell the difference epidemiologically between something aerosol transmitted by weak sources and large droplet spray,” said Milton. “They behave so similar, it’s very hard to pick up the difference.”.He said he suspects the capability of long-distance transmission with COVID-19 will be connected to source strength, or how symptomatic a person is..Protection may depend on resourcesFor Ribner, the issue of correct mask use will linger until the exact route of transmission is documented, and it is established if an asymptomatic person (one having no symptoms) can shed the virus before becoming sick..“If we have a person who is shedding nCoV in the environment, the best way to stop transmission is to stick a surgical procedure mask on them,” Ribner said. “In the best of all worlds, anyone coming into the room with an nCoV patient would wear a respirator.”.But if a respirator is not available, because of cost or manufacturing, the next best option is a surgical mask, Ribner said. He said that likely contributes to the WHO’s surgical mask recommendation..
“The WHO is sensitive to the fact that not every part of the world has the resources of the US and Western Europe,” he said.
Trent Comment: Pay a lot of attention to the fact that cloth surgical masks worn by asymptomatic people on the street and by sick people at home will help reduce the spread of COVID-19. So wearing masks does in fact help, contrary to the messaging of the CDC. Please carefully note these sorts of differences between American public health messages attempting to manipulate public behavior in the face of PPE shortages for medical professionals and the real facts.
The following is translated text on the flutracker.com forum. The issue of fomite contamination hitting older people with low immune system strength in places frequented by young teens is showing up in the spread of COVID-19 in Hokkaido.
JAPAN
.Expert “Avoid airy spaces” (meaning poorly ventilated).March 02, 18:16.A national expert meeting on anti-coronavirus measures analyzed data from Hokkaido, where the number of infected people was the highest, and summarized the findings, spreading even if the young generation with mild symptoms did not notice even if infected. He refrained from going out even with mild cold symptoms, and called for as few events as possible in poorly ventilated spaces..Following the spread of infection in Hokkaido, an expert meeting of the national emergency response headquarters for the new coronavirus put together its views on the status of infection and the measures required in the future..Among them, regarding Hokkaido, “it is thought that there are many tourists from China and it is thought that those people spread the infection”, and given the situation where infected people are scattered throughout the province, considering the population ratio According to the report, the number of infected cases is overwhelmingly large in remote areas..In addition, people with mild symptoms are thought to play an important role in spreading infection in Hokkaido without noticing, especially among young people, the rate of severe disease is very low and the situation of infection spread is not visible As a result, it is believed that many middle-aged and elderly people are infected as a result..And about of the infected people, about 80% did not infect other people, while in cases where one or more people were infected at a close distance for a certain period of time in a closed indoor space. It has been reported..Furthermore, in urban areas in Hokkaido, where there are many young generations, people with active social and economic activities are more likely to gather in places where these infection risks are high, and it is said that infection is spreading without realizing it. It is believed that the infection has spread as people move to other parts of Hokkaido..In addition, if active measures were taken in the past one or two weeks, the spread of infection could be rapidly converged. Regardless, we encourage people to avoid going to places and events where they can talk at close distances in a poorly ventilated space..On the other hand, those who have no symptoms are infected outdoors, such as walking, jogging, shopping, and activities that have little contact with people, and reaching out to reach the other person and talking at a distance that is out of reach. Risk is low..
He further commented that he was “requesting” people in their teens and thirties, saying that young people could spread the disease to people at high risk of illness. Alone can stop the illness of many people and save lives. “
Trent comment: Pretty much any space with poor ventilation and repeated occupation by a “super spreader” of COVID-19 will be infectious for days or weeks if the virus gets into the cold/wet spaces in an HVAC system cooling a building, train, airplane, subway or other enclosed space.
Recommended COVID-19 Daily Search Links
Worldometers’ COVID-19 CORONAVIRUS OUTBREAK Page
Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases Map by Johns Hopkins CSSE
BNO News
Tracking coronavirus: Map, data and timeline
Nucleus Wealth Corona Virus Update Page
Twitter:
Scott Gottlieb MD
Dr Eric Ding
Steve Lookner
News Anchor & Founder of @AgendaFreeTV
Specialize in breaking news. Daily COVID-19 live streams
Live updates from the team behind BNO News. Currently covering coronavirus.
You Tube Video channels with COVID-19 Updates
Dr. John Campbell
UK Doctor w/personal connections to Iran
Agenda-Free TV
Dr. Seheult’s COVID-19 Update videos at MedCram.com
Dr. Chris Martenson COVID-19 updates
[For Peak Prosperity Prepper site]
-End-
I hate hate hate that picture with China/Italy/US responses. If it were accurate the “China” one would show people being welded into their homes, and/or thrown into makeshift prisons to either die or recover on their own. The Italy and US patients are at least being taken to proper facilities (as of now, when there are still beds available).
thread:
https://twitter.com/covid_germany/status/1234811601863221248
CRITICAL: All hospital employees in #Aachen will no longer be quarantined, if they show no symptoms, even if they were in contact with an infected. It is a decision against the current recommendations of the RKI. 1/n
A city spokey person says: “The current regulation can paralyse wards, even endangering the operation of entire hospitals and highly special care services as critical structures of health care.” 2/n
A nurse from neonatology of the University Hospital had tested positive for the coronavirus on Monday afternoon. In the past few days, she had been working at the hospital and had been in contact with about 45 employees, according to the statement. 3/n
These 45 employees would have to be quarantined for 14 days, according to the recommendations currently in place. This would put the work in the intensive care unit to a standstill. – Aachener Nachrichten 4/4
So, if they quarantine infected and possibly infected hospital workers, they’d have to shut down the hospital. So they’re going to let them keep working. Who the heck is going to go that hospital? Especially when a nurse in NEONATOLOGY is infected? Are they joking? They’re in a catch-22 here, I fully understand. This is a taste of what we’re about to see everywhere.
I want to see some results for the use of remdesivir in acutely ill cases. Vaccines are a year away and quarantine, for the reasons Brian describes above, is going to be limited.
To summarize, yesterday, no-one died in the US from the coronavirus.
On the other hand, yesterday about 530 people died in the US from regular old flu.
While about 7,500 people died yesterday in the US from other causes (heart disease, cancer, accidents, strokes, etc).
Meanwhile, in Washington State, firefighters and other first responders who may possibly have been exposed to the virus are being quarantined — which means that members of the public will die unnecessarily because of the lack of emergency response.
It seems like it is time to accept facts and apply common sense. The virus has escaped containment. Most of the efforts being taken are a waste of time. To echo what the IRA said after one of their unsuccessful attempts to assassinate Margaret Thatcher — you have to be lucky every time, the virus only has to be lucky once. The virus is going to become endemic, and we will have to live with this just like we live with the flu.
For now, the logical course of action is to focus on helping the susceptible population — the old and infirm — to avoid contact with the general population (e.g. home treatment if they get sick) while the rest of us carry on normally with the usual sensible precautions during flu season. We should also resist efforts to spread panic, since that will cause more harm than the virus.
You are just ramping up your testing now. A few days ago the BC government where I live, had tested more people that your entire country. You don’t know how bad it is in your country.
Mike: If that is something that shows success in treating the critical cases (there were headlines from a week or two ago that they were going to start actual clinical trials), is it scalable, i.e., could it at all feasibly be able to treat >1M people potentially, or would it only be a specialty treament? Because if it can’t then we’re still in the same situation of having to do anything possible to keep the number of infected as low as possible in order to preserve a functioning health care system.
(Areas of France now already out of beds, as we read about in Italy:
https://www.ledauphine.com/sante/2020/03/02/coronavirus-haute-savoie-hopital-annecy-sature-un-patient-transfere-sur-chambery-24-personnes-hospitalisee-a-annecy-change-et-1-a-hopital-chambery
As in Italy, they can still survive if the problem is kept local, and move patients to other regions, but it’s got to be contained.)
re: remdesivir, hot off the presses:
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/live-blog/coronavirus-updates-live-countries-prepare-outbreak-spreads-n1143556
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, said Tuesday that within “a period of a few months,” scientists will know whether one particular drug, remdesivir, could be used for treatment.
Fauci told the Senate that remdesivir has been developed by the company Gilead and is now being tested in a large trial in China. He said that it is also being tested in the U.S. by the National Institutes of Health in collaboration with the drugmaker.
The doctor said that within several months they might know whether the drug can successfully treat it: “If it does, the implementation of that would be almost immediate. Now, I can’t guarantee it will work. But the timetable for treatment is different than the timetable for a vaccine,” he said.
Doesn’t address the issue of scalability, though.
In a Hugh Hewitt interview last week,. Peter Navarro, who has been involved in early work on the epidemic, said they have 4500 doses on hand and a plan for 90,000 more doses ordered.
I don’t know how many does are required per case. The one WA patient treated was recovered in 24 hours, according to the NEJM case report.
Vaccines, even with humanitarian waivers, are a year away, assuming the epidemic subsides in summer in this hemisphere.
How China is purportedly containing the epidemic:
https://asiatimes.com/2020/03/china-suppressed-covid-19-with-ai-and-big-data/
The CDC has done a really good job of not finding the virus where they didn’t want to find it. They will claim that their test was only available in limited quantity so it was important to use it to confirm the cause for people that were already sick rather than look where they “knew” there was no problem or around known sources like the quarantine facilities or airports with flights from China because they had perfect faith in their precautions. Apparently, no one at the CDC has heard of confirmation bias.
Now that the horse has left the barn, we’ll have to see if they have any answers for why, after billions spent preparing for this very thing, they still didn’t have the facilities to produce an accurate test in a useful quantity. Why they used a lab that they should have known might have been contaminated since they were presumably working on the virus there for other reasons. When you are trying to detect nano or pico grams of something, cleanliness is more than a quick wipe down.
Of course, preparedness means having very expensive facilities just sitting there until they are needed, not to mention making the right call in terms of what is necessary. Then there is the fact that a lot of the equipment doesn’t like to just sit there, seals dry out, grease hardens and bearings freeze to name just a few of the problems you might see. The biggest problem is that there will always be more immediate things to spend the money on.
In the end, it probably doesn’t matter. This was out before the Chinese government knew about it. With a city the size of Wuhan, there would have been enough people traveling at any time of the year to spread something that no one knew as there to spread. The fact that the number of known cases is stabilizing just shows that they have stopped looking and are only acknowledging those they can’t avoid.
As far as the pictures of evacuating patients: I’m sure that eventually OSHA will get around to issuing a fine for inadequate PPE. It is the perfect government bureaucracy; When ever anything bad happens, they are there to show just which regulation was broken and then move on.
Of course the Chinese government stats tell us what they want us to know, but have no connection to reality. Now they are saying that everywhere except Hubei province and Beijing are supposed to start transitioning to full normalcy, which is interesting because it confirms the online stories that have said there is an outbreak in Beijing, which I don’t believe they ever acknowledged. Also note, apropos of nothing, that Xi has not made a public appearance in nearly a month. Nor as far as I am aware have the Slovak PM, or the pope, since either of them fell ill. Take any of that for what you will.
Italy just closed all schools over the entire country, not just the affected region. If you think that something like that is ever going to be necessary, doing it “too early” is infinitely better than doing it too late…Otherwise you (and by that of course I mean “we”) very rapidly will see things like this:
https://twitter.com/DellAnnaLuca/status/1235018057359097856
10/ One in ten doctors in Lombardy cannot work because of the virus (he’s ill or in preventive isolation).
12/ The major of an Italian quarantined city: “people keep dying and there are no doctors to treat the sick […] we had 5 GPs, 3 are in quarantine & 2 are sick; 1 GP volunteered [from outside but] no one gave him the tools to protect himself when he’s visiting patients.”
An additional “interesting” note is that both the US and Spain yesterday reported deaths that happened previously, but had not been tested–in the case of Spain it was more than 3 weeks ago! Reporting the official “death count” at this point is dangerous because it’s only going to feed the “just the flu” nonsense, as flu deaths are calculated statistically, not through formal tests.
MCS, I’m afraid that you have the priorities for CDC mixed up.
They were focused on gun violence and bullying.
I suspect Muslim outreach was up there on the list.
The State Department was sending visa renewals to Mohammed Atta 6 months after 9/11 so there is that evidence of competence.
Then FDA was sending inspectors to pharmaceutical plants in China that did not speak or read Chinese languages.
“Good enough for government work.”
Just the flu.
https://news.yahoo.com/italys-govt-planning-ban-public-140058565.html
ITALY’S GOVT PLANNING TO BAN PUBLIC EVENTS, CLOSE CINEMAS AND THEATRES ACROSS COUNTRY BECAUSE OF CORONAVIRUS – DRAFT DECREE
Trent,
Thanks for these updates. My primary source for all things viral.
Death6
Is Covid-19 the Elizabeth Warren of viruses?
Yesterday’s fatalities in US:
Flu – ~530
Tornados – 24
Covid-19 – 0
Of course this viral outbreak should be taken seriously — but panic over-reaction driven by a media Doomer Porn frenzy won’t help.
The part we should be taking more seriously is how to respond to the coming disruptions in supply chains — which will affect a whole lot more people.
Isn’t it convenient that Trump started the re-evaluation of supply chains two years ago?
We already have the NAFTA renegotiation done.
China thinks it has the problem solved with AI and big data.
In addition to draconian quarantine procedures, which kept more than 150 million Chinese in place at the February peak of the coronavirus epidemic, China used sophisticated computational methods on a scale never attempted in the West.
With more than 80,000 cases registered, China reported only 126 new cases yesterday, compared to 851 in South Korea and 835 in Iran, out of a total of 1,969 new cases worldwide. Chinese sources emphasize that the artificial intelligence initiative supplemented basic public health measures, which centered on quarantines and aggressive efforts to convince Chinese citizens to change their behavior.
Is this real ? Who knows?
As I mentioned in an earlier thread, cell phones could be a very powerful tool in combatting this thing, but once you got the infrastructure in place to use it, I suspect it would get used in a lot of privacy-destroying ways. Actually though, if US health authorities were taking this as seriously as they should, they could probably do a lot of contact tracing by tapping into police license plate databases and buying location data from commercial sources, who probably have most of what they would need. Even just using social media feeds would help. What are the local contacts of infected people? Did they have face to face contact with those people when they were likely infected?
I don’t get a since of urgency from the public health responses. I suspect that a lot of the personnel are still living in a dream world where Covid-19 isn’t as bad as the flu because it hasn’t killed as many people in the US after infecting maybe a couple thousand as influenza killed among tens of millions infected. I don’t get why anyone who reads without moving their lips would make that comparison—established disease that infected millions versus early stages one—but I’ve seen it a lot of places.
We’ll probably see one way or the other in a surprisingly short time. Either we’ll see the Italian and South Korean medical systems collapse under exponential spread within a couple weeks or we won’t. Iran is probably closer to that point, but they will probably cover it up if it does get that bad. If it has gotten to the several hundred to a thousand cases level near Seattle now, that will start showing up in a huge expansion of cases detected once we really start testing, followed by an ever increasing slew of hospitalizations a week to ten days later.
I think we have enough data outside China now to predict what will happen pretty accurately, but I certainly hope things happen differently in the US. Slowing the spread would make things far more manageable.
AI for COVID-19 detection:
https://thenextweb.com/neural/2020/03/02/alibabas-new-ai-system-can-detect-coronavirus-in-seconds-with-96-accuracy/
In my area local govt is allowing a huge international music festival and other mass public events to proceed as originally scheduled. At least this is the current local govt position. Perhaps it will change. It will be interesting to see if, in the absence of effective responses from many govts, Americans change their individual behavior to such an extent as to significantly reduce the severity of the epidemic.
Jonathan: Italy just banned all spectators from sporting events for (at least) the next month. It’s literally infinitely better to do that sort of thing too early than too late. The problem of course is you risk the “just the flu” folks yelling that you’re overreacting, and you can’t prove you prevented an outbreak that never happens…
The Chinese are reporting only 126 new cases yesterday. Their over the top reaction seems to have worked to some extent. It will be instructive to watch the US go through this pandemic. In Canada we may be among the best prepared nations, after dealing with SARS, and setting up new protocols for dealing with infectious diseases of this nature. Again, we shall see if we get it right.
I suspect the Chinese will make us all look like fools.
Penny: Yes, anyone who believes China’s numbers have the slightest link with reality is a fool.
“Yes, anyone who believes China’s numbers have the slightest link with reality is a fool.” That is just a knee-jerk reaction for so many people, and I think their numbers are probably pretty close. Its hard to keep track, but they are among the best at doing that.
Now you face the disease with a for profit medical system, that may doom you to far worse results. We shall see.
I see PenGun is still peddling the “for profit” healthcare system nonsense.
I have a link in the next post for him.
Go find your link Mike. We are going to see the truth as we go forward. Lets hope I’m wrong about what I think will probably happen to your country.
It’s generally a very nice thing that you don’t hang around here much anymore Penny, but if you’d peruse our coronavirus threads for the past 6 weeks or so you might learn something. Such as that the Chinese numbers could be taught in a “Fraudulent Data” class as Example 1, with Bernie Madoff’s returns being Example 1A. You don’t have to know anything about epidemiology, or know that commies are lying scum. It’s basic data analysis, and knowing some very basic properties of real data, such as sampling noise, etc.
PenGun is quite open in his ill wishes for this country. The link is in the next post. I hadn’t seen you spitting your spite lately and thought perhaps you had moved on to friendlier fields, like Daily Kos.
China may indeed be getting the epidemic under control at a cost of severe loss of freedom. However, they also have an incentive to lie as companies are re-evaluating supply chains and their vulnerability to manipulation.
“It’s generally a very nice thing that you don’t hang around here much anymore Penny, but if you’d peruse our coronavirus threads for the past 6 weeks or so you might learn something.”
Oh I have been watching. Trent prints out lists of headlines from around the world. He come up with numbers, that must reflect the Chinese numbers, and you seem to think that’s useful. The Chinese have done an amazing job of tracking, isolating and treating people who have, or probably have the virus. They are now reaping the benefits of this, and as you cannot do anything even close to what they have done, with both your medical and political systems being for profit, I expect far worse results.
Its a test! ;)
Four members of my wife’s church, including her pastor and his wife, are quarantined on the cruise liner Grand Princess off San Francisco. The first California CoVid-19 fatality was a passenger on that same cruise (he died 50-60 miles north of us), and another passenger who got off at the same time (it made multiple stops over a long cruise) is hospitalized with CoVid-19.
As I expected, most people are acting sensibly, The mere existence of the test is causing problems:
https://news.trust.org/item/20200305021522-ny0rr
This, of course, draws the worried not quite well into hot zones without offering any sort of advantage. The treatment for a non acute case of CoVid-19 is exactly the same as flu or any other crud.
I hadn’t heard about the Grand Princess. Now we get to see if the American response is any better than the Japanese. Hope for the best for your friends and the rest of us for that matter. Simply finding some place to quarantine a few thousand people will be a challenge. I hope that we will drop the illusion that this is still something that is contained soon and get on with coping with it.
It seems like awareness has started to spread in the last few days, among at least some in the media, that the number of critically ill patients is *much* more important than the fatality rate, and is why this thing is so scary. That’s good because it will hopefully make it more feasible to do the preventative measures that are needed to slow the spread, if not actually stop it, unfortunately, because it’s already too late for that. The problem is that it is also already apparent that our broken media and political system is going to make this a partisan issues, and we can’t afford any of that.
Brian, I believe Trent has made the point that there’s no way to *stop* COVID-19. It’s a novel virus for which we have no vaccine. We’ve never been able to stop people from getting colds or flu, either. Expecting that the US could have remained untouched is exceedingly unrealistic and just fuels the Doomer Pron.
Christopher: I’ve posted a probably excessive number of times here in the past month+. I’ve actually tried to post far fewer than I feel the urge to, for fear of being seen as taking over the comments. I am extremely well aware of the issues involved with this situation. And for you to even implicitly compare this to “colds or flu” shows you are fundamentally unserious. “Doomer Pron” as you dismissively say (no idea what specifically you’re talking about…) is nowhere near as dangerous as “just the flu” idiocy. The flu doesn’t put 20% of those who get sick with it in the ICU. We need to do everything we can to try to stop it, knowing that it in reality will not be perfect, but it just might save the medical system long enough for a vaccine to be discovered, which btw we should be doing a Moonshot level of effort to be developing one ASAP.
(Also, as an aside, if this sort of thing from China’s official news source doesn’t wake us up and get all manufacturing pulled out of China ASAP, I don’t know what ever will:
https://twitter.com/YanzhongHuang/status/1235300037875335170
China’s Xinhua News just posted a piece titled “Be bold: the world owes China a thank you”, which says if China imposes restrictions on pharmaceutical exports, US will be “plunged into the mighty sea of coronavirus”. )
Tom H: “Four members of my wife’s church, including her pastor and his wife, are quarantined on the cruise liner Grand Princess off San Francisco.”
Sincerely, I hope the members of your wife’s church will be ok. Indeed, let’s hope that all the passengers and crew will be ok.
Statistically, the chances of those in quarantine are excellent. On the severely mismanaged cruise ship in Japan, the overall survival rate among passengers & crew has been 99.8%. If the church members are under 70 and have no pre-existing medical conditions, their chances of survival are even higher.
Brian wrote: “It seems like awareness has started to spread in the last few days, among at least some in the media, that the number of critically ill patients is *much* more important than the fatality rate, and is why this thing is so scary.”
If someone becomes critically ill and then recovers, that seems to be profoundly different from becoming critically ill and then dying.
We all know what will happen in Jolly Olde England if the ICUs get overwhelmed with this virus. The authorities will employ the standard medical procedure of triage. Those who are over 70 or have underlying medical conditions will be put on a waiting list for admission to the ICU. If they are still around when their number on the waiting list comes up, they will get treated.
If ICUs in the US get overloaded, there will be some form of triage here too — which will keep the legal jackals in caviar & champagne for years to come. On the Left Coast, it would hardly be surprising if some mayor issued an edict from her well-protected bunker that priority for treatment in an ICU must be given to illegal aliens and homeless people.
The practical advice for those in the susceptible population (older or with pre-existing conditions) is to stay away from the medical profession as much as possible; minimize the chances of picking up this (or any other) disease. But what advice should be given to the rest of us? What happens to the kid who cannot get a tetanus shot after he falls and scrapes his knee, because the import of medications has ground to a halt?
is there a Chinese cognate for chutzpah, good grief.
You are not confused by my anonymous post, I’m sure. Where is my link Mike, have you lost it?
Brian, I agree that the number of critically ill CoVid-19 victims is more important than the fatality rate, but your numbers and definitions are off. The medical terms “serious” and “critical” are not the same. “Serious” cases require hospitalization, i.e., treatment in ordinary hospital beds where minor oxygen systems are available on a limited basis. Mechanical ventilation devices are not available in ordinary hospital wards. “Critical” cases require intensive care, which is available only in “intensive care” units in hospitals, where mechanical ventilation devices are available, and all of which provide oxygen systems.
The United States has only @ 95,000 intensive care beds, as you mentioned in an earlier thread. I forget how many total hospital beds you mentioned.
“Critical” in terms of CoVid-19 means that victims require both oxygen and mechanical ventilation systems.
My recollection of Chinese statistics are that those said about 20% of victims were “serious” and “critical” combined, with the majority being “serious”. Chinese statistics on the proportions of “critical” care victims vary from 5% to 7%. Early Italian reports from the province of Tuscany were that 9% of victims were “critical”.
It is pretty clear that the 20% figure for CoVid-19 victims being “serious” and “critical” combined is way overstated because many (or perhaps most) victims have such mild symptoms (or none at all) that they are not included in the base figures for total numbers of all victims. That issue will also bring the lethality rate down as well.
I’ve been using the 1918 Spanish Flu rates for infectiousness and lethality all along, but that is because those are IMO the most reasonable to use pending reliable data specific to CoVid-19. And I don’t think Chinese statistics on total numbers of victims are reliable. I was, and am, willing to trust Chinese statistics on the proportions of victims which are “serious”, “critical”, and fatal. It was terrifying to have the initial Italian statistics on “critical” care victims being similar to those reported by China.
IMO we do not yet have enough reliable non-Chinese statistics on infectious rate, or the differentiation of victims among the “minor”, “serious”, “critical” and fatal categories, to form accurate opinions on those. IMO we probably won’t have that information until this summer, i.e., no earlier than July and possibly not until September.
Until then all this is just guessing, and I’ll stick with use of the 1918 Spanish flu statistics as the most reasonable under the circumstances.
Tom: I agree that all these numbers are in flux, and will be for a long time, and terminology is super important and can serve to confuse, both between different countries, and between medical professionals and laymen. That’s why another one of my obsessions has been with the lack of clear communication and preparation of the public by the government concerning what is likely to happen.
We’ve already seen stories from both Italy and France about regional hospitals running out of beds to treat their serious/critical patients, and patients having to be moved to adjacent regions, which still have available space because they don’t (yet) have local outbreaks, so we know the numbers even at this early stage are more than the system can bear. There are suggestions on social media that the Seattle area is already at or near the limit as well. Third world countries are barely covered in the news, of course, but one can expect absolute nightmare scenarios.
I also pretty strongly disagree with you that we won’t know for months about these sorts of questions. I think we’ll know this month, at least in terms of if the “Really, Really Bad” possibilities are correct or not. I am very strongly in the Nassim Taleb et al camp that we should be acting to curtail the chances of catastrophe, rather than acting on assumptions of their low probability.
Right now we are looking at a 3% death rate. That’s across the world. Somewhat worse than many of us had thought.
New Update posted