Coronavirus - worldwide spread and control

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mango said:
We will know more in a few days.
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Today so far there are reported 114 new deaths in Sweden.

If one divides them by five, one would have to add 23 new deaths to each of the last four days.

This doesn´t change the tendency of declining.


Tendency of declining is noticeable in many countries, roughly begin of april +/- ten days. Some countries with small numbers (reported) might still go up.

Iran has plateaued mid of march and is declining since ~april 4th.


(A bit a technical answer here.)
 
spinoza577 said:
Today so far there are reported 114 new deaths in Sweden.

If one divides them by five, one would have to add 23 new deaths to each of the last four days.

This doesn´t change the tendency of declining.
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Maybe, maybe not. Please be aware that the daily statistics are based on data submitted before 11.30 am on the day. It says on Folkhälsomyndigheten's website that the number for current day and the day before is therefore incomplete and won't be complete until the following day. Based on that, and seeing that Friday, Sunday and yesterday were national public holidays in Sweden, I'd say it's still too early to draw any conclusions.

Sorry for nit-picking.

ETA: Quote from today's press conference:

Anders Tegnell Folkhälsomyndigheten said:
– I Sverige är det fortfarande så att vi inte riktigt är i vardag än, först imorgon får vi riktiga siffror så att säga. Vi ligger kvar p å samma nivå som förra helgen. Vi får se vad som händer imorgon med de fall som inte hunnit in i systemet än. [...]

– Avlidnasiffran är den vi kan lita minst på i nuläget, det kommer att fyllas på, med mycket högre siffror på alla dagarna.
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Google Translate said:
- In Sweden, we are still not really back to everyday life, not until tomorrow will we get real numbers so to speak. We remain at the same level as last weekend. We'll see what happens tomorrow with the cases that haven't gotten into the system yet. [...]

- The death figure is the one we can trust the least at the moment, it will be added to, with much higher numbers on all days.
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Is no one concerned about this narrative?

People may have missed the post yesterday when threads were being tidied up


Bill gates BBC interview on a vaccine for covid...

Its news to me that he is a health expert...


Bill gates verbatum:
there is the period when I and other health experts.......
there will be a trade off the vaccine will have less safety testing than we typically would have and so governments will have to decide do they indemnify the companies and really say lets go out with this when we just don't have the time to do what we normally do so eighteen months is about what we would expect we are doing everything we can .....we will write cheques for those factories faster than governments can

If you want to see if aside effects turn up later that takes two years so....there will be a trade off...
.governments working on a co operative basis will be involved in the decision to say hey the regulator said go ahead even though you haven't take the normal time period.....

 
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dreampop said:
1/4 of the world's population is being tested at rates .0003 per capita but seem to have actively spreading COVID- India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Phillipines, Mexico, Brazil. Several of these countries began their lockdown relatively late - end of March and are very population dense. However, their death rates are very low and you would expect that number to be higher if there were a large number of untested active COVID. Could this be a result of temperature/sunlight, lower average age?
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If you combine the observation that people in care homes account for approx half the deaths in Europe
with the statement that death rates in the places you mention are low (NB I think it’s hard to accurately estimate death rates this early),
we now need to look at population age (and health) profiles in the countries being compared
to see if we’re seeing (for example) old people who have been kept in relatively sterile conditions and well cared for succumbing to the virus now in some countries
whereas, in other countries, similar people who might be vulnerable to this virus may have already died of another cause (maybe flu or another infection) earlier.

I think there is very little to support the idea that warm or equatorial climates are protective.
If you’re tempted to explore that sort of thing, remember to look at Australia as a comparator to Europe or North America (similar populations, lifestyle, affluence etc but opposite season and plenty of warm climate locations to observe). Note that population densities will be different outside of large cities though.

Frequency of air travel (per head of population) would be a variable I’d check if I were looking for patterns too. Most countries in the world received their infection from people who travelled - but not all countries have a high rate of international travel. ...or migration.

Also consider what is meant by “lockdown relatively late”: do you mean in absolute time or in time from, say, their first 100 cases?

Just initial thoughts, off the top of my head.
 
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...octor-death-certificates-latest-a9462796.html

‘I’ve never written so many death certificates’: Is Sweden having second thoughts on lockdown?

‘The data says we are heading for catastrophe, we are now part of an experiment without informed consent,’ expert tells Heba Habib, reporting from Stockholm

“I’m proud that Sweden is allowing us to take responsibility ourselves instead of being under lockdown,” says Therese Börjlind, a 35 year old accountant, rushing to a family gathering.

Despite the mounting concerns of experts both at home and abroad, Sweden continues what Anders Tegnell, the country’s chief epidemiologist, has called a “low-scale” approach. He insists this “is much more sustainable” in the long run.

But Sweden’s cases are rising. The country of some 10 million now has more than 10,000 cases and 887 deaths. Its total death toll is higher than that of all the other Nordic countries put together.

The government has said repeatedly that the main cornerstone of their strategy is to protect the elderly. Since the beginning of the crisis, they have been asked to stay home but despite these measures, the virus has spread to one-third of nursing homes in Stockholm, which has resulted in a spike in fatalities.
 
Director of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control says :

‘Nothing would have prevented’ virus spread, says health agency chief

The rise of the novel coronavirus is the moment the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control was created for. Conceived after the 2003 SARS pandemic, the EU’s infectious diseases agency helps countries monitor diseases' spread, assess risk and plan how to cope.

Yet the ECDC wasn’t able to help the bloc avoid an unprecedented state of lockdown, which kicked in less than three months after the virus was first reported in China. Director Andrea Ammon acknowledged in an interview that the agency’s advice — which is nonbinding — couldn't have prevented the spread.
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https://www.politico.eu/article/ecdc-chief-nothing-would-have-prevented-coronavirus-spread/
 
COVID REPORT 14 04 20

Published on 14 Apr 2020
Counting the Dead. Tonight's host is Afua Hirsch and our guests are: Dr Anthony Costello, Director of the Institute for Global Health, University College London Dr Allyson Pollock, Director of the Institute of Health and Society, Newcastle University Dr Bharat Pankhania, Senior Clinical Lecturer, Exeter Medical School Dr Rosalyn Moran, Reader in Theoretical Neurobiology, King's College London

Dr Anthony Costello says the UK death toll could easily hit 40,000. Which would make the UK the worst or 2nd worst in the world (after the US) for the death toll.

Dr Bharat Pankhania starts speaking at about 6min30, and talks about why coronavirus spreads so rapidly in care homes (he says: agency workers moving from home to home to home who are spreading the virus, lack of PPE, no quality control over what PPE they are wearing or who they are seeing, many are on zero hour contracts so as a result they may come to work even though they may not be feeling right).

Worth watching the rest of it.

 
Post copied to thread on symptoms of Covid-19
Leila said:
Or is loss of smell/taste common in other infections, too?
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Yes... common in other infections... is what I have heard.

I’m waking up to (on radio) somewhat depressing predictions for Australia’s future...

Ongoing outbreaks predicted until the year 2025. Low standard of living to be expected for years.

And...

Lack of PPE for Japanese health workers... calling for plastic raincoats, ponchos, anything... terrible.
 
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Barry said:
I can imagine that when this is recent history, modelling will be done for all counties showing what could have reasonably been achieved, if governments had truly heeded genuine best science, compared to what actually happened. Not benefit-of-hindsight recriminations, but benefit of what was fully appreciated at the time, if only those in power would have listened. Some countries will have got things not too wrong, other horrendously wrong. I would be very disappointed if such analyses were not done.
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Looks like this is already starting to happen ...

The Huge Cost of Waiting to Contain the Pandemic

upload_2020-4-15_20-6-45.png
 
lunarainbows said:
Split from the Coronavirus Worldwide Spread and Control thread

From the COVID-19 symptom tracker app:

View attachment 10601

It shows the prominence of loss of smell. This is data from the UK. It looks like they’re using people who have been tested in this graph.

https://covid.joinzoe.com/us

Ive been recording on the UK app though every day. And most people don’t get tested. So I wonder how they track symptoms and what they use to say “this is coronavirus”? I’ve been recording unusual fatigue, shortness of breath, headache, sore throat, for the past 3-4 days, but I’m pretty sure that’s because of allergies, some kind of pollen allergy combined with worse asthma, but I’m recording it anyway because those are my day to day symptoms.

It also shows that just using cough & fever as a way of finding symptomatic people, isn’t good enough.

There is an open letter: “A collective letter requesting transparency on the evidence behind the period (7 days from onset of symptoms) and indication (only cough or fever) for self-isolation as per UK guidance, which is different from most other countries. Please share.”(Dr Nisreen Alwan) which is about this: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSca2En67yMi1JnK1CX4COAJSxmySZni0B0NGgYp21GxkElm6w/viewform

“We are also concerned about the narrow spectrum of symptoms the UK is using as an indication for self-isolation. Initial data demonstrate that other common symptoms include sore throat, fatigue, shortness of breath, and myalgia and we are aware that other countries are using a broader range of symptoms for self-isolation.”
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This really shows how important the need for widespread testing is.
 
The latest news, it seems, is that the UK doesn’t have an exit strategy. There have been calls to use this time in lockdown, to start implementing large community networks of testing, tracing and monitoring, by Anthony Costello, among many others, (earlier in this thread) so that the UK can have a strategy for coming out of lockdown. And we have heard before that the UK was planning to increase their testing capacity to 100,000 a day at the end of April. (They are currently at around 15,000-18,000 and still only testing those very sick in hospitals and only some health care workers).

However according to the Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...o-exit-plan-for-covid-19-lockdown-say-sources

“Ministers are under orders to avoid talking about exiting the lockdown but Nadine Dorries, a health minister, hinted on Wednesday night that it would be a long process, tweeting: “There is only one way we can ‘exit’ full lockdown and that is when we have a vaccine. Until then, we need to find ways we can adapt society and strike a balance between the health of the nation and our economy.”

One government source with knowledge of the situation said there was no secret plan and the necessary conversations had not yet even happened at the right level , adding: “People are looking at the evidence but there is nothing central and cross-government that has been produced. It’s lots of shadow-boxing at the moment.”

Which is worrying.
 
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lunarainbows said:
Until then, we need to find ways we can adapt society and strike a balance between the health of the nation and our economy.
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I think this statement will one seen to be more and more bizarre as time goes by. The means to protect the health of the nation and to protect the economy are exactly the same- as China has shown. There is no trade off. They are to eradicate the virus. Any loosening of control will dome damage to the economy by prolonging the lockdown period. China are more or less out of it in three months. Why do we have to wait eighteen months for a vaccine, during which time the alternation of lock down and loosening will mean that the economy will have no chance of recovery?

I think events will dictate what happens though. UK will be in lockdown for long enough to see that easing of lock down in other European countries will put them right back to where they were.
 
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Maybe it's just me, but I find it a little bit odd that the models at the IHME (https://covid19.healthdata.org) haven't been updated with real data since last Sunday - this just as the "peak" was about to hit. The model for California hasn't been updated since last Saturday. At first I thought it was due to the Easter weekend, but now it's Wednesday.

The explanation could be entirely benign, but the sceptic in me wonders if the real results have not matched their predictions, so they are once again adjusting their predictions.

Of course, I'm sure that the minute I post this they will update their site with no adjustments to their predictions at all.:)


ETA 4/16/20:
Closely watched coronavirus model of US deaths expected to be lowered in new projection
https://www.foxnews.com/media/closely-watched-coronavirus-model-to-revise-deaths-downward
 
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Arrgh! The resistance to NZ's elimination strategy is getting organised. I can't find any reason for it other than that they're a bunch of academics peeved that the government has chosen to listen to more cautious voices, rather than to them. I do wonder though if they don't also have other motives because setting up a website and employing a PR firm seems a rather over the top reaction to a mere peeve.
According to a group of academics, the New Zealand response doesn’t match the threat posed by Covid-19 and should be substantially loosened. Siouxsie Wiles unpicks their claims.

A group of six New Zealand academics yesterday announced their “vision for a balanced response” to the Covid-19 pandemic. They are calling that vision “Plan B”. They even have a website and a PR firm attached. They are clearly serious.

Their plan is for New Zealand to return “to normality as soon as possible” by moving to something like alert level two. They want most people to be able to get back to work, for schools and universities to open, and for people to be able to travel around the country again.

And the reason they are advocating this plan? Because, they say, “international health data and experience is showing that New Zealand’s lockdown may now be unnecessary, and even more harmful than the problem we’re trying to solve.”
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Rest of article here, debunking the so-called "Plan B": https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/15...es-of-over-reaction-on-nzs-covid-19-response/

So far it looks like we're continuing on the cautious route. Very pleased to finally see some random community testing being done. The decision of whether to extend the current 4-week lockdown is due to be made on Monday so data from random testing will be very important.
 
Ravn said:
Arrgh! The resistance to NZ's elimination strategy is getting organised. I can't find any reason for it other than that they're a bunch of academics peeved that the government has chosen to listen to more cautious voices, rather than to them.
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To me it seems that it´s the elimination strategy that is more academic like. I find it highly unlikely that it should prevail. You would need only one inaccuracy and you had to start again, furthermore, you would need to accurately tighten the borders with quarantine or an 100% accurate test. Maybe in a world where everyone could behave completely patiently and very accurately, this might be possible. In my view, with this virus, it is in a way naiv to think that the try will come out as supposed, indeed academic like, I would say. Things are not that easy done than thought.

To my knowledge, the only infectious disease that has been eradicated is small pox.
 
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