General Discussion/Q&A on Coronavirus (COVID-19)

[drron]

Thanks JT these senior moments are getting too common.All corrected.

 

[pauly7]

I admit to laughing

View attachment 209635

Me too And you have to in these weird times

Bit of revenge for lack lustre climate change response is how people are making light of it!

 

[amaroo]

It’s the age bracket before the boomers that are copping the big share of the hit.

IIRC - The silent generation

 

[pauly7]

It’s the age bracket before the boomers that are copping the big share of the hit.

IIRC - The silent generation

They are all ‘boomers’ to the ‘millennials’ though when you are talking the us v them argument - It’s more the generalised ideology than the actual age cut offs.

But I know what you mean.

Terribly off topic

 

[Quickstatus]

Yes refrain from touching your face

 

[lovetravellingoz]

View attachment 209634.



So please don't let politics take over the discussion of this virus.As was said up thread Europe is now the epicentre of the virus at present though it is likely that will change in coming days or weeks.

Politics?

Your own graph shows that they have only belatedly been ramping up the number of tests. US Officials have also acknowledged that the test that they developed did not work. So their early testing had no real value.

Can you honestly state the the USA with all its wealth and medical knowledge has done well in this regard, or even ok? My belief from reading the publicaly available information and the interviews with CDC staff is that they have done poorly. The USA has been slow to act, has made mistakes, and is now belatedly trying to catch up with testing.




Number of specimens tested for SARS CoV-2 by CDC labs (N=3,958) and U.S. public health laboratories* (N=12,584)

The above numbers are woeful given the population of the USA.

Coronavirus (COVID-19) Testing

Here we show the share of reported tests returning a positive result – known as the positive rate.

ourworldindata.org

The US, on the other hand, has had big problems rolling out their testing strategy. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a total of 13,624 samples had been tested by 12 March, 2020. The total number of tests conducted in South Korea up to the same date is nearly 18-times larger

The low test coverage of the US is even starker if we look relative to the large population of the country. We see many smaller countries have been able to conduct more tests per million people.
[NB. We provide two estimates for the US. The estimate labelled “US – CDC samples tested” is from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and refers to the number of tests conducted, not the number of individuals tested. The COVID Tracking Project tracks the coughulative number of people tested in the US by tallying individual state reporting. We report these figures under the label “US – COVID Tracking Project”]
The fact that South Korea has managed to expand testing so quickly shows that it is possible. It is important that in the coming days other countries follow rapidly.
Total COVID-19 tests performed by country
.

Coronavirus: US is failing on testing, says Fauci

"Let's admit it," said top health official Anthony Fauci. "The system is not geared to what we need."

www.bbc.com

.
The US declined to use a test approved by the World Health Organization in January - instead, the CDC developed its own coronavirus test. However, there were manufacturing defects with the initial CDC tests which meant many of the results were inconclusive.

One chart shows how many coronavirus tests per capita have been completed in 8 countries. The US is woefully behind.

South Korea reported its first coronavirus case January 20. In the past seven weeks, its officials have tested more than 189,000 people.

www.businessinsider.com.au

America’s shamefully slow coronavirus testing threatens all of us

The US lags just about every developed country on testing for Covid-19 disease.

www.vox.com

The 4 Key Reasons the U.S. Is So Behind on Coronavirus Testing

Bureaucracy, equipment shortages, an unwillingness to share, and failed leadership doomed the American response to COVID-19.

www.theatlantic.com

How testing failures allowed coronavirus to sweep the U.S.

The Trump administration’s decision to forgo a World Health Organization test and create its own had fateful consequences, experts say.

www.politico.com

 

[serfty]

All patients
927/1085 (85.4%) Never Smoked
21/1085 (1.9%) Ex Smoker
137/1085 (12.6%) Current Smoker

Severe Disease
134/172 (77.9)
9/172 (5.2)
29/172 (16.9)

"Clinical characteristics of 2019 novel coronavirus infection in China"
Wei-jie Guan- China Medical Treatment Expert Group for 2019-nCoV

Interesting. That link did not work so I chased the content down.

Clinical characteristics of 2019 novel coronavirus infection in China

Background Since December 2019, acute respiratory disease (ARD) due to 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) emerged in Wuhan city and rapidly spread throughout China. We sought to delineate the clinical characteristics of these cases. Methods We extracted the data on 1,099 patients with...

www.medrxiv.org

The PDF is attached. Lots of information in the tables on pages 21 onwards. The headings "composite endpoint" relates to this: "The primary composite endpoint was the admission to intensive care unit (ICU), or mechanical ventilation, or death".

 

[amaroo]

The preppers would be well prepared for something like this - are you

 

[DC3]

If you still have money to spend...

Missouri Sues Televangelist Jim Bakker For Selling Fake Coronavirus Cure

The Missouri attorney general asked a judge to block the sale of Bakker's "Silver Solution." The FDA and FTC warned seven companies to stop hawking so-called treatments for the coronavirus.

www.npr.org

So, basically a snake oil salesman.

 

[drron]

Royal Carribean has just announced to their crews that they will be suspending services for 30 days.

 

[Pushka]

Royal Carribean has just announced to their crews that they will be suspending services for 30 days.

Started midnight with many still on planes from the west coast flying to board their now defunct cruises. One guy doing a B2B2B Cruise and Live review on CC was on a flight from west coast and knows nothing about it - May have landed by now. His last post getting onto his flight was five hours ago.

 

[burmans]

Its difficult to have a sensible discussion on the management (or lack thereof), of this virus without considering the roles of various governments in that management. This shouldn't be shut down with an easy accusation this is just 'political', far too many of ruling politicians try exactly this trick on us but now is the time for us to critically analyse what our governments are doing in our name.

 

[p--and--t]

Why the USA? Why not Europe? Active cases per 100,000 people in the USA are almost exactly the same as in Australia, (about 0.5) Compare say Germany with 3.5 cases/100,000, and Norway with 7.6/100,000.

Cheers skip

Given it was reported that 3 weeks ago the US only had very limited testing kits (and since found to be faulty) how would anyone in their right mind believe any stats out of the US? Less reliable than the Chinese stats.

I have seen many reports on social media of US citizens (not third hand - those individuals own reports) in self isolation saying they were refused testing.

South Korea with 12% of the population of the US has tested (with reliable kits) more than 80,000 citizens and is in the middle of a mass testing regime.

 

[VPS]

You do have to laugh sometimes don't you

 

[SydneySwan]

Black humour is best at these times. Apparently it is darkest just before the dawn.

 

[drron]

Given it was reported that 3 weeks ago the US only had very limited testing kits (and since found to be faulty) how would anyone in their right mind believe any stats out of the US? Less reliable than the Chinese stats.

I have seen many reports on social media of US citizens (not third hand - those individuals own reports) in self isolation saying they were refused testing.

South Korea with 12% of the population of the US has tested (with reliable kits) more than 80,000 citizens and is in the middle of a mass testing regime.

Sorry the test was found unreliable at the beginning of rebruary and ~ a week later the work around was found so 3 weeks ago that report was not true.
I am just trying to get some actual facts out there but Social Media does just take over.

 

[DC3]

Sorry the test was found unreliable at the beginning of rebruary and ~ a week later the work around was found so 3 weeks ago that report was not true.
I am just trying to get some actual facts out there but Social Media does just take over.

Seems that there were never enough testing kits available in the US anyway, whether they were reliable or not?

 

[burmans]

Seems that there were never enough testing kits available in the US anyway, whether they were reliable or not?

Well their own chief medical officer equivalent has described it as a failure, I'm inclined to believe him over Donald.

 

[lovetravellingoz]

Seems that there were never enough testing kits available in the US anyway, whether they were reliable or not?

Controversies over diagnostic testing have dominated US headlines about severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the novel coronavirus responsible for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Technical challenges with the first test developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) left the nation with minimal diagnostic capacity during the first few weeks of the epidemic. The CDC also initially limited access to testing to a narrow group of individuals with known exposure. The delayed discovery of a case of COVID-19 in California, followed quickly by evidence of community transmission in multiple states, revealed the shortcomings of this strategy. In the early stages, COVID-19 has spread beyond the nation’s ability to detect it.

AUTHORS
Joshua M. Sharfstein, MD, is in the Department of Health Policy and Management at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Scott J. Becker is at the Association of Public Health Laboratories. Michelle Mello (BA ’93) is a leading empirical health law scholar whose research is focused on understanding the effects of law and regulation on health care delivery and population health outcomes. She holds a joint appointment at the Stanford University School of Medicine in the Department of Medicine.

Diagnostic Testing for the Novel Coronavirus | Stanford Law School

(This op-ed was first published in JAMA Network on March 9, 2020.) Controversies over diagnostic testing have dominated US headlines about severe acu

law.stanford.edu

 

[tgh]

Dreadful black day for Italy .. 250 deaths….
The front line medical personnel must be suffering terribly...