Coronavirus - worldwide spread and control

https://twitter.com/user/status/1243234980790177792


“Dr Lewis Mackenzie, a Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council Discovery Fellow, commented: “Why on earth has this been sent to the media via a third party PR company instead of the Oxford University press team? Seems very irresponsible to encourage reporting on this topic before the scientific community had a chance to comment and peer-review it.

Caibre Sugrue is the founding director of Sugrue Communications, a technology PR agency. He is also a non-executive advisory board member of 100%Open, an innovation consultancy – which has worked for several British Government agencies, including the UK Ministry of Defence’s Defence, Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) and a leading charity which co-owns the Cabinet Office’s Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) or ‘nudge unit’.”

 

It´s driving through fog, for the next couple of ...

 

I don't remember where I read that there are thousands of Chinese working near Milan, so the Milan fashion houses can say the clothes are made in Italy.

 

Hospitals are reaching peak capacity in major cities now in CA and NY especially, and many healthcare workers are getting sick, unfortunately one nurse has died in NYC already. PPE is now a common word on every news channel.

Note that these are massive hosptials to be fair, but so far Mass. has run low on total numbers of infected and this suggest there are many more in fact. But it's communte proximity to NYC is small and CT, NJ, PA are redzone candidates as well.

 

Here's something interesting that could explain a few things:

The mayor of Bergamo says a soccer match between the Atalanta and Valencia teams held in Milan may have spread the virus in Italy and Spain. Several members of the Valencia team later tested positive. There were 40.000 people in the stadium and Atalanta is a team from Bergamo.

There also was a patient early on whose covid-19 went undetected for a while and he spread the virus to healthcare workers.

 

Well worth reading.
He gives three possibilities.
1. All countries will control the virus simultaneously (unlikely)
2. Let the epidemic rip (terrifying)
3. Flatten the curve (takes forever and economy destroyed)

I think however unlikely 1 may seem as a pure option it has to be what ends up being done even if after false starts because the others are unthinkable. It is the choice China has taken. It is the choice the WHO recommends.

 

Would it possible for countries to eradicate it individually and then only open up borders to similar countries?
It might be hard to patrol all borders.

 

That was sort of what I was meaning by ending up with 1 after false starts.
Air travel is going to be a thing of the past for a few years now. Borders are going to need staffing in a completely new way. What you do with long porous borders on big continents I have no idea but the Soviets managed it for forty years. The aftermath of Covid19 may look eerily like post war Europe all over the world.

 

That game was in February 19th in Italy (Milan). It would've been very early for both countries, but it's possible it contributed. I remember many were already calling the 2nd legs (just two weeks ago) of the CL to be called off, it seems insane that they went on even at the time, particularly Liverpool hosting Atletico Madrid, and the 2nd leg of the Valencia Atlanta game. There was also PSG/Dortmund and Spurs/Leipzg at the same dates. On those dates March 10/11 Germany had around 2000 cases, Italy 10,000, France 2200, UK 460.

I suspect it was many forms of transmission going on at once early on, but mass gatherings were certainly a problem.

 

Thought this was an interesting report in the BMJ (it's open-access):Covid-19: identifying and isolating asymptomatic people helped eliminate virus in Italian village

Look forward to seeing his data published.

 

In the last few hours, the US has surpassed both Italy and China to become the country with the most confirmed coronavirus cases in the world. This is just a day after the US passed 1000 total deaths, and occurs as the total global number of cases passes 500,000, also today. Below is a list of all the the countries with the number of confirmed cases of 10,000 or greater. The full list containing all countries in the world can be found at https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries.

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Notice that the US is the only country in this list (and in the world) with more than 10,000 new cases; no other country has even half as many. The number of daily cases in the US is expected only to grow for the foreseeable future.

If you click on the country name, you will end up on a country page with much more statistical information about the country. Of particular interest are the graphs and charts of the cases and deaths for each country. For example, for the US, here is a graph of the total confirmed cases, followed by a chart of the new daily cases. These figures are updated at the end of each day (GMT time), so today's figures are not reflected here. Nevertheless, a clear pattern of fairly pure exponential growth can be seen here, and today's figures from the chart above merely confirm that trend. There is no indication that this trend is beginning to turn at all yet.

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For more context about how exponential growth works and what it means for the future spread of this disease, I would again recommend the following YouTube video, which was referenced in my previous post.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kas0tIxDvrg

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-52052694

 

Yet..
A week ago.. “Yes we’ve engaged with that process today. We’re not clear how many ventilators we will get, we’re getting on with it”.
Didn’t seem like they missed the emails.

I really am hoping they do join future schemes because it sounds like it would have helped the Uk a lot.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1243275366367727616

 

Todays briefing from White House, just the doctor's, I had to transcribe this so I hope there are no errors.

Deborah Brix

• States w/ low numbers can do contact tracing
• 550,000 tests run (14% positive rate in people symptomatic enough to get tested)
• Focused on UK report from 500,000 to 20,000 deaths in a model (ferguson?), looking at that to understand that adjustment
  • In that model you need to have a large group of asymptomtic that don't present for test to get to 60M ppl infected because in no country do you see an infection rate of 1/1000 people OR transmission is wrong
  • Prediction of those models don't match results in China or Italy. Italy should have 400,000 deaths with those predictions
  • Enough data to make predictions more sound
  • 20% of a population getting infected does not match data
• NYC does have enough ventilators [this is contradictory topic in news], ventilators can be moved to urban areas
  
• No reality where 60-70% of Americans get infected in 8-12 weeks.
• [me wondering - is she ignoring the "if nothing is done scenarios"]
  
• Only ppl over 1/1000 are small population countries (Monaco, Lichenstein)

Fauci

Vaccines - just starting multiple phase 1 trials, 3 months minimum, phase 2 (high number phase 2/3) looking for 'efficacy signal' despite high infection rates, possibly rushed after that, at least 6 months of production. Working to produce vaccines before trials are complete. Understands risk of vaccines.

Therapies - only wants to talk about rcts, confident in some effective or semi-effective therapy developing.

Questions

-Want IGG droplet test to test asymptomatic case rates.

Source: Content starts after the 30 minute mark.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBgdxv9WQ_k

 

Guess we won't really know for a couple of weeks. The health authorities keep saying to expect cases to rise for at least another 10 days or so, possibly into the thousands.

This seems to be some of the modelling data they're using, not dissimilar to the Imperial College study.
https://cpb-ap-se2.wpmucdn.com/blog...ession-and-Mitigation-New-Zealand-TPM-006.pdf

Radio NZ report on the above:
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/covid-19...ws-nz-s-lockdown-could-buy-time-for-a-vaccine

And this:
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/in-depth...g-nz-s-covid-19-spread-from-his-kitchen-table

 

Updating you with the results of day 2 of the New Zealand experiment. So far, our curve isn't looking as good as Japan and Singapore at the same timepoint (4 days since 100 cases), but it may be too early to tell:

Edited: this figure was incorrect - see latest one for april 5 here.

 

youtube channel numberphile shows modeling spread. It´s essentially a fun channel, sometimes said to be a bit yellow. However, paremeters being:
S - people who can get infected
I - actual infected people
R - people who don´t have the infection anymore (dead or being immune in some sense)

Graphs start at about 13.00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6nLfCbAzgo

 

That's excellent, @Ravn, thanks for posting!

 

Coronavirus: Why Germany has such a low COVID-19 death rate

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-why-germany-has-such-a-low-covid-19-death-rate-11964051