Coronavirus - worldwide spread and control

I was looking at this a few hours ago. I try to wait a day before I am certain of the figures, because they might change as the day advances, but the last week has been a steady trend down. In Australia, if we quarantine all new arrivals and there is no second wave, we might be passed the outbreak in a few weeks.

 

I still think that the situation is unclear. The deaths still could be caused by sudden huge impacts of a new virus in a situation where the death rate otherwise had been low. And some countries which in certain situations of external factors (seasons, pollution, others) haven´t tried a mitigation would now suffer from visible impacts.

It might not be so, of course.

But the current numbers of some countries might support this view as well.


So I think the situation is still unclear.

 

A week ago or so India decided to make a lockdown for three weeks.

I admit that I was shocked. Most people a poor or that poor that they eat today what they have earned yesterday. What shall they eat, they might well die from hunger rather than from the virus. Furthermore, they might develop some illness from having nothing to eat, and this impact on the health might be much higher than the impact from the virus.


In an interview some official said they now care for the poor, as e.g. a lot have TB. Right, a lot should be vulnerable, and pollution is high as well, if this would be a factor.

But my impression was also a bit that they who take part in the process of deciding will endure three weeks easily enough, and might fear for themselves this new virus rather than three weeks of lockdown.


Today in the radio an African said, we will die from hunger rather than from the virus.

 

Infection Fatality Rate – A Critical Missing Piece for Managing Covid-19
by Rich Condit
"Rich Condit is a virologist and emeritus Professor, University of Florida, Gainesville and a host on This Week in Virology."

on virology blog
https://www.virology.ws/

 

Guess what happened at that time? Self isolation for people arriving from overseas:
https://www.health.gov.au/news/heal...tion-self-quarantine-for-coronavirus-covid-19

 

A news report on our national broadcaster just pointed out our lowering of case numbers may be due to the decreased arrival of infected people. The vast majority of our cases are from overseas, not local, especially cruise ships. So its unclear what trajectory our local cases are on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJMzvx1DyaU

 

Weekly deaths in Switzerland over the past years in two age groups:


Figure ends at march 22nd (not at 31th as said in the figure, according to the site).

next weeks according to worldometer and if my maths are right, all ages:

202 deaths (positive for covid)
356 deaths (positive for covid) and one more day to count


I don´t know since when Switzerland has the lockdown implemented

figure from:
https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/
site named "Facts about Covid-19", facts might be a bit selected.

 

Thanks @alex3619 and @Snow Leopard offers hope more widely.

The UK may only have 50ish confirmed cases/day as well (don't test/don't confirm!).

 

They have been attempting to contact trace all confirmed cases and only a small proportion are unexplained.

Over 300,000 tests have been conducted and just under 2% were positive.
https://www.health.gov.au/resources/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-at-a-glance

With the exception of Tasmania, community transmission is low and has been trending down.

 

Comments from @Jonathan Edwards come to mind i.e. challenging the UK Governments approach that we are going to have to catch coronavirus - herd immunity. Incredible turn around in a relatively short time period. Also, unfortunately, Jonathan's idea that once you've cleared up your domestic cases you need to avoid importing new ones --- air travel ---!
@alex3619

 

Maybe I'm misunderstanding here. Given we are in the 600/700 deaths per day from confirmed Covid 19 patients, then there will be a great deal more Covid 19 cases than 50/day.

ETA: Except for the lag of course, but that would be an incredibly dramatic drop.

 

It looks like on April 5 the UK had 5,903 new cases. Out of around 10,000 tested daily.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/

 

Would anyone agree with my calculation that in the UK, this pandemic will be over in around 6 weeks' time?

If you look at the UK death toll graph at Worldometers, the number of deaths is doubling every 4 days. This may slow down a little as the effect of lockdown kicks in, so let's say in the coming weeks the death toll will double every 6 days.

Now the UK presently has 5373 deaths, so that means in 24 days time, we will have 5373 * 2^(24/6) = 85,968 deaths.

Then using the formula devised by Tomas Pueyo, which multiplies the deaths by 800 in order to calculate the number actually infected, in 24 days we will have 85968 * 800 = 68,774,400 infected.

That's about the size of the UK population, so we can say that in 24 days time, nearly everyone will be infected, and the pandemic viral transmission phase will have run its course in the UK.

At that point, it will still take a further 2 or 3 weeks for all those infected who are unfortunately going to die to actually die, as the average time to death is about 17 days.

So that's a total of around 6 weeks, at which point the pandemic will be over in the UK.

 

Fair dinkum, i.e. to the Australian Government, for having managed to reduce the number of new cases to about 50/day. [https://www.health.gov.au/sites/def...cases-in-australia-by-notification-date_4.png].

My comment (regarding the UK) was slightly inappropriate i.e. suggesting if you don't test then you don't find --- so your numbers look better!

 

Not sure that works at all. It assumes the NHS could still cope as it is just managing to do now - the ratio of 800 is based implicitly based on that. And given we are all (mostly all) very sensibly social distancing, then we are not all, by any means, going to get infected in that time thankfully.

If we all ran amok and did the herd immunity thing then it probably would run its course in a shorter time span, but at way more horrendous human cost than is already happening. So no, I'm afraid I don't agree.

 

Unfortunately the virus does not care too much whether the NHS can cope; the virus will continue on its own course. So it's only the maths that we can consider here.

The crucial figure in the maths is the time it takes for the death toll to double.

If you look the Worldometers death toll graph for Spain, which has been in lockdown since 14 March (so for 23 days), their death toll presently doubles every 7 days. So under lockdown conditions at present, they have a 7 day death doubling time.

7 days is close to the 6 day doubling time I assumed for the UK calculation.


Italy has been in lockdown a bit longer, since 9 March (so for 28 days), and the Worldometers graph shows that it currently has a 10-day death doubling time (whereas before the lockdown its death doubling time was 4 days). The longer doubling time (compared to Spain) likely reflects the longer time in lockdown.


So a lot depends on how effective the UK lockdown will be, and how this lockdown slows the death doubling time. The UK lockdown started on 23 March (so its been running for 14 days).

 

Sorry, @Hip, but I think this is way off target. None of your assumptions look to me to be realistic.

There is likely to be a huge deceleration of the outbreak in the pipeline already from social distancing. If there isn't then we will have people dying at home and in casualty lobbies in a way even worse than Spain. I am pretty confident that the reproduction number will be about 1 now so the exponential phase is finished for now. The flattening of the death curve is strong evidence for that. The new case curve is not flattening as much as expected but I think that may reflect the increased testing that the government is trying to make its biggest selling point at the minute.

What is clear is that the curve no longer bear any relation to exponential. My guess is that infection rates are at present in the 1 in a 100 sort of range - i.e. that under-reporting is about tenfold. It might be 1 in 50 but we are still talking a very small minority. With an R0 of 1 and an incubation period of a week it would take a year or more to infect the majority. We are now beyond the point of NHS capacity - the next phase has to be reducing numbers in hospitals and it will last 3 months. In order to do that realistically we need infection rates to drop right down as in Australia. We then either have to carry on reducing and eradicate or allow another period of catastrophe in the health care sector and another an another for about four years minimum.

I think it is conceivable that the epidemic will be pretty well under control in 3 months but not because everyone has been infected, because infection rates are controlled with contact tracing and testing. But the final eradication fo the virus, which is the only feasible approach, will take at least another 6 moths of rooting out residual trails of infection through routes that are particularly hard to trace and maybe new routes through food distribution etc.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1247164419144024064


UK govt admits that none of the 17.5 million tests they ordered, actually work.

 

Or put another way no other country that is ahead of us has followed the model you propose. They are all seeing a drop off from reduced transmission, not because of saturation.

An interesting caveat is that there might be saturation of certain sectors of society like politicians and jet setting socialites who irresponsibly spread germs everywhere. But they remain a tiny minority.