New SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19 Thread

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Aim_Deep wrote:

British epidemiologist who predicted over 2 million Americans — and 500k Brits — would die from coronavirus now says his model, which went viral, is wrong. Says England is unlikely to have more than 20k deaths & potentially much less. Whoops. Sorry for sending world economy into a depression and destroying millions jobs and small business' forever.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2238578-uk-has-enough-intensive-care-units-for-coronavirus-expert-predicts/

In other news they claim only 3.3 million are unemployed. in USA But that only counts those who filed. I bet less than 20% have filed and many can't like contract workers. I bet 20-30 million are unemployed as of right now and you'll hear it next week when 50 million are.

He is also crediting the lockdown, you know. Convenient of you to miss that bit. The whole point of the lockdown is to keep things under control. Even the original paper they published predicted only a few thousand deaths if there were strong suppression efforts - from millions down to a few thousand, that's how wide the range was depending on the social response.

But never mind that - more fundamentally, did you just trumpet one officials opinion (and this isn't even a published paper btw, as the original was, just the voice of one member of the team) while in the very next paragraph dismissing another official statistic? And you didn't even bother supporting the latter with some contrary official take, just your own take. Confirmation bias much?

Btw, if anyone wants to try their hand at seeing (the basics of) and even making these epidemiological models, there's actually free versions out there that you can download and use yourself. Here's a vid showing how to use one of them - https://youtu.be/k6nLfCbAzgo

Note that the ones being used for the actual virus are more complex than this. This is sort of a beginner's guide to help people see the basic trends of how these things work, and how exponential changes work in general.

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Exile009 wrote:

Btw, if anyone wants to try their hand at seeing (the basics of) and even making these epidemiological models, there's actually free versions out there that you can download and use yourself. Here's a vid showing how to use one of them - https://youtu.be/k6nLfCbAzgo

Note that the ones being used for the actual virus are more complex than this. This is sort of a beginner's guide to help people see the basic trends of how these things work, and how exponential changes work in general.

Cool vid! Thanks!

Some quick-and-dirty data: https://imgur.com/gallery/7JCIOvj

All I can say about it is that I haven't tried to seek confirmation of any of it. So, expect a lower confidence level than many would like. "Seems legit."

The takeaway is that there are various susceptibility rates, mortality rates, etc, in any population. So, for instance, infection rates will differ from those in "the wild" to those in hospital settings, among healthcare workers, other patients, etc.

Mortality rates seem mostly effected by those with existing conditions and among the aged. The latter may be due to existing age-related issues or... not. Certainly, those with pre-existing health conditions fare far worse across the board.

Significantly, men seem more susceptible to the worst effects. YET, women with pre-existing vulnerable conditions seem to be at larger risk in their own age cohort. (Maybe?)

It is very unlikely that those under the age of 15 would be hospitalized when compared to older age groups and extremely unlikely they would face a mortal illness.

No matter how one washes the numbers, the lesson to be learned is that it is a deadly virus. There are no "immune" populations as no human being has had a chance to develop any antibodies prior to this initial exposure. (Novel virus) Infection rates are high. Transmission rates, being the rate/number of people infected by a person who currently has the virus, are currently above the number necessary to "stop" an "epidemic." (ie: They are greater than 1. That means one infected person typically infects xx people during the time they can do so. To be able to be stabilized into a "not an epidemic" it'd have to be less than "1." That's the whole "social distancing" thing.)

Great vid, again. Just wanted to provide some quick numbers for people to plug in. AFAIK, the linked info is "real data" that has not been massaged by anyone. It could be wrong... If so and if there are people out there trying to change the data for some reason, they should probably be hanged. Just sayin'... :))

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Morkonan wrote:

We still can't tell what the weather is going to be in 24 hrs unless it's "extreme." The model in question was basically a "worst case" scenario and any number of factors could have impacted real-world performance.

Of course it is extremely hard to predict weather patterns as the models are governed by non-linear equations for which the solutions are highly dependant on the initial conditions. Think chaotic behaviour.

A mathematical model tries to describe reality but it is and remains just that, a model, an approximation of the truth.

One of the earlier mathematical models (from a Belgian professor) to describe the spread of the virus was just a Gaussian.

If you are interested in mathemtical modeling of biological processes:

By today the USA has the most active cases and only New York does major testing.

There are other states which likely are in similar situations. This pandemic shows how much of a difference 2 weeks of taking action does.

According to Gov. Cuomo 5327 patients are hospitalized and 1290 are ICU patients. Those numbers will grow and so will the number of deaths after the ventilators cannot keep the patient alive anymore.

Spain some European countries are around 8 days behind Italy in terms of growth- The USA is around 10 days behind Italy.

Soon the battle for ventilators will begin and I suspect some "Do nothing" Governors will not attribute deaths to Covid-19. And this is where the chaos will ensue.

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Aim_Deep wrote:

British epidemiologist who predicted over 2 million Americans — and 500k Brits — would die from coronavirus now says his model, which went viral, is wrong. Says England is unlikely to have more than 20k deaths & potentially much less. Whoops. Sorry for sending world economy into a depression and destroying millions jobs and small business' forever.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2238578-uk-has-enough-intensive-care-units-for-coronavirus-expert-predicts/

In other news they claim only 3.3 million are unemployed. in USA But that only counts those who filed. I bet less than 20% have filed and many can't like contract workers. I bet 20-30 million are unemployed as of right now and you'll hear it next week when 50 million are.

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Raycheetah wrote:

Good news, everyone! That expert who set expectations off mass die-offs due to Covid-19 has revised his estimations:

https://trendingpolitics.com/breaking-british-expert-who-predicted-millions-of-coronavirus-deaths-makes-stunning-reversal/?utm_source=economics

Aren't experts awesome? =^[.]^=

did u guys actually read the article?

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He said that expected increases in National Health Service capacity and ongoing restrictions to people’s movements make him “reasonably confident” the health service can cope when the predicted peak of the epidemic arrives in two or three weeks. UK deaths from the disease are now unlikely to exceed 20,000, he said, and could be much lower.

in the uk weve been decking out large arenas full of 1000s of beds and we have our entire country on lockdown.

So BECAUSE we put our country into lockdown and massively boosted our capacity to hospitalise sick people the models say we are now unlikely to go beyond 20,000 deaths. Yeah, experts are great and im sure hes not sorry that modeling which estimated 500k deaths now shows 20k deaths thanks to measures taken to make sure 500k people didnt die.

if the model shows 20k deaths with the entire country on lockdown and our medical capacity greatly multiplied how many deaths do you think we would have been expecting if we didnt lock down the entire country and let our vastly insufficient medical capacity get overwhelmed to the point where it fell apart?

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Aim_Deep wrote:

Then why would farmers/ranchers/truck drivers etc put their ass on the line while u sit at home watching netflix?

theyre out there doing it right now, so whatever presumptions your making based on your ideas that everyone is a sociopath are obviously flawed. maybe where u come from thats true but i can assure you that is not how most human beings around the world think. if thats how you are expecting things to work out over there then im genuinely sorry but thats not the spirit of society over here.

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if the model shows 20k deaths with the entire country on lockdown and our medical capacity greatly multiplied how many deaths do you think we would have been expecting if we didnt lock down the entire country and let our vastly insufficient medical capacity get overwhelmed to the point where it fell apart?

I think we might see this in America. Brazil and Mexico clearly don't care. Trump will also likely remove the restrictions too early. As of now, the US has the most cases in the world.

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

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Raycheetah wrote:

Good news, everyone! That expert who set expectations off mass die-offs due to Covid-19 has revised his estimations:

https://trendingpolitics.com/breaking-british-expert-who-predicted-millions-of-coronavirus-deaths-makes-stunning-reversal/?utm_source=economics

Aren't experts awesome? =^[.]^=

did u guys actually read the article?

Yes, of course I read the article.

My point was that, due to this "expert's" overblown and alarmist predictions, many people believed that millions would be dying in the streets from this. The socio-economic consequences of the ensuing panic he caused will be far worse than the actual death toll, and this downward revision comes too late to prevent them.

Still hard to call where the true outcome of this outbreak will end up, but certainly nothing like the doomsaying we got right out of the gate. And whether or not shutting down the world as a result of the initial panic has saved us all, or simply added to the misery of what may always have been little more than a passing flu with a good publicist, it was based as much on wild speculation as on any concrete scientific understanding of the disease. From the article (you did read it,yes?):

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5/ One last point here: Ferguson gives the lockdown credit, which is *interesting* - the UK only began ita lockdown 2 days ago, and the theory is that lockdowns take 2 weeks or more to work.

For the record, I have never believed that there would be "millions" of deaths from Covid-19 (not withstanding the fact that we cannot be sure what is happening inside China). It is all too easy to say that the experts and politicians (and yes, I am including the POTUS in this list*) have rescued us all from the very jaws of death, when in fact we may never have been in those jaws to begin with. That's all I have to say about this, except that the cure probably will turn out to be worse than the disease, at least on a macro level. ='[.]'=

*Any discussion about the political ramifications of this statement sadly cannot be posted on this forum; Support is watching. ='[.]'=

If you claim to be informed why are you still calling it a fucking flu?

USA USA USA USA

Most cases now, Trump 2020.
I remember when it was just "15 cases and soon would be almost zero".
Nek minute, 85 000+ cases.


Taiwan on the other hand, they were on the ball.
24 million people, similar population to my country (Australia), 267 cases only, whilst Australia is over 3000 cases now.

Taiwan numba ONE!