Coronavirus Pandemic Information- Local and Worldwide

yosemitesam1

emaherx wrote: »

Because everyone is distancing themselves.

The percentage testing positive should have been increasing if it was behaving like a pure epidemic. The positive test numbers are fairly consistently related to the number of tests done anywhere in the world. The annual flu epidemic doesn't behave in this way.
It just so happens that the typical percentage of positive tests is pretty much in the same range that you'd expect to find normal endemic coronavirus strains to be contributing to respiratory disease.
If it was the disease society has been led to believe it is, it should be behaving differently.

emaherx

yosemitesam1 wrote: »

The percentage testing positive should have been increasing if it was behaving like a pure epidemic. The positive test numbers are fairly consistently related to the number of tests done anywhere in the world. The annual flu epidemic doesn't behave in this way.
It just so happens that the typical percentage of positive tests is pretty much in the same range that you'd expect to find normal endemic coronavirus strains to be contributing to respiratory disease.
If it was the disease society has been led to believe it is, it should be behaving differently.

Percentage testing positive increased exponentially in countries which were slow to inact social distancing.

Here is a thread for You:
https://touch.boards.ie/thread/2058056380/1/#post112618430

blue5000

While we're on the morbid theme, I was at a funeral yesterday, or rather the hearse and about 7 cars passed by on the way from the house to the graveyard. We stood in small groups (2m apart) at gateways and road junctions. Big change for rural Ireland where once an English man described a funeral as a half day for the Irish.

I think it's very sad for families concerned, especially if a loved one dies in a nursing home these days, I don't think people will get a chance to mourn.

yosemitesam1

emaherx wrote: »

Percentage testing positive increased exponentially in countries which were slow to inact social distancing.

Here is a thread for You:
https://touch.boards.ie/thread/2058056380/1/#post112618430

The positive numbers increased exponentially pretty much in line with testing increasing exponentially. The percentage positive has not increased exponentially anywhere.
In comparison the percentage of tests carried out in a flu epidemic goes from less than 5% positive to over 70% positive in a matter of weeks.
If it is a new and greatly increasing disease, it should be easier and easier to find it as the epidemic progresses.

If it doesn't look like a duck, quack like a duck and swim like a duck, how do you know it's a duck?

alps

Important that we hear a diversity of views, particularly the "come on in, the waters not that cold"

At some point, we'll have to jump in..

Injuryprone

yosemitesam1 wrote: »

The percentage testing positive should have been increasing if it was behaving like a pure epidemic. The positive test numbers are fairly consistently related to the number of tests done anywhere in the world. The annual flu epidemic doesn't behave in this way.
It just so happens that the typical percentage of positive tests is pretty much in the same range that you'd expect to find normal endemic coronavirus strains to be contributing to respiratory disease.
If it was the disease society has been led to believe it is, it should be behaving differently.

Boris Johnson and Donald Trump both flirted with the theories you're spouting. Given that even they abandoned that path should be a good enough indication to you that you're completely wrong in this argument.

And even at that, their delayed action will have cost countless lives. Have a look at the UK for example. It's a similar enough country to us, geographically speaking (ie an island in the north west of Europe, perhaps a bit more connected because of the chunnell). The outbreak started at roughly the same time, and yet their death rate per capita is double ours, and they are only recording people that die in hospital, not in nursing homes or in their own homes.

And the only real difference between them and us is they kept the country open for that extra week.

I was reading the other day that the death rate for the normal flu is something like 0.02%. Well in Italy, in little over a month, they've already gone past 0.02% of their entire population have succumbed to this disease. But yeah, the death rates are being overstated. No offence, but you're off your game

Water John

Interesting case of the choir in US. They 60 of them met for rehearsal on Tues 3rd March. This was five days before there were instructions for people not to meet in larger groups. On Fri and Sat a number started showing symptoms. 45 in total showed symptoms. Some recovered but then relapsed worse than originally. Two died.

Thus close contact and singing together caused a very high level of transmitance.
Also 45 of the 60 showed symptoms, not all tested. Don't have a figure for that.
15 may not have got it or not showed symptoms.

_Brian

blue5000 wrote: »

While we're on the morbid theme, I was at a funeral yesterday, or rather the hearse and about 7 cars passed by on the way from the house to the graveyard. We stood in small groups (2m apart) at gateways and road junctions. Big change for rural Ireland where once an English man described a funeral as a half day for the Irish.

I think it's very sad for families concerned, especially if a loved one dies in a nursing home these days, I don't think people will get a chance to mourn.

Mrs was saying that anecdotal evidence looking online that deaths from
Nursing homes seems significantly increased at the moment. Been running high for last two weeks.
Could be Covid19 or not but she says it’s noticeable.

Water John

I think the tabulating the numbers from nursing homes is slower than the hospitals. They are added in about a week later TMK.
I see there are 29 clusters of Covid 19 in nursing homes. That means at least 90 positives.

emaherx

yosemitesam1 wrote: »

The positive numbers increased exponentially pretty much in line with testing increasing exponentially. The percentage positive has not increased exponentially anywhere.
In comparison the percentage of tests carried out in a flu epidemic goes from less than 5% positive to over 70% positive in a matter of weeks.
If it is a new and greatly increasing disease, it should be easier and easier to find it as the epidemic progresses.

If it doesn't look like a duck, quack like a duck and swim like a duck, how do you know it's a duck?

It doesn't look like a duck because it's a fecking goose bigger uglier and more aggressive than a duck.

Yes testing can be misleading based on amount of testing. But there is nothing misleading about the simple fact that globally health systems that normally deal with flu and corronavirus have been completely overwhelmed. Even if there was no test it wouldn't take a genius to figure out this is a major event much worse than the usual seasonal viruses.

Buford T. Justice XIX

alps wrote: »

Important that we hear a diversity of views, particularly the "come on in, the waters not that cold"

At some point, we'll have to jump in..

The old saying, you only know who's swimming naked when the tide goes out, springs to mind here.

I'm going waiting till I'm sure my mankini is on before I take the plunge.:p

yosemitesam1

Dear Chancellor,

As Emeritus of the Johannes-Gutenberg-University in Mainz and longtime director of the Institute for Medical Microbiology, I feel obliged to critically question the far-reaching restrictions on public life that we are currently taking on ourselves in order to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

It is expressly not my intention to play down the dangers of the virus or to spread a political message. However, I feel it is my duty to make a scientific contribution to putting the current data and facts into perspective – and, in addition, to ask questions that are in danger of being lost in the heated debate.

The reason for my concern lies above all in the truly unforeseeable socio-economic consequences of the drastic containment measures which are currently being applied in large parts of Europe and which are also already being practiced on a large scale in Germany.

My wish is to discuss critically – and with the necessary foresight – the advantages and disadvantages of restricting public life and the resulting long-term effects.

To this end, I am confronted with five questions which have not been answered sufficiently so far, but which are indispensable for a balanced analysis.

I would like to ask you to comment quickly and, at the same time, appeal to the Federal Government to develop strategies that effectively protect risk groups without restricting public life across the board and sow the seeds for an even more intensive polarization of society than is already taking place.

With the utmost respect,

Prof. em. Dr. med. Sucharit Bhakdi

1. Statistics
In infectiology – founded by Robert Koch himself – a traditional distinction is made between infection and disease. An illness requires a clinical manifestation. [1] Therefore, only patients with symptoms such as fever or cough should be included in the statistics as new cases.

In other words, a new infection – as measured by the COVID-19 test – does not necessarily mean that we are dealing with a newly ill patient who needs a hospital bed. However, it is currently assumed that five percent of all infected people become seriously ill and require ventilation. Projections based on this estimate suggest that the healthcare system could be overburdened.

My question: Did the projections make a distinction between symptom-free infected people and actual, sick patients – i.e. people who develop symptoms?

2. Dangerousness
A number of coronaviruses have been circulating for a long time – largely unnoticed by the media. [2] If it should turn out that the COVID-19 virus should not be ascribed a significantly higher risk potential than the already circulating corona viruses, all countermeasures would obviously become unnecessary.

The internationally recognized International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents will soon publish a paper that addresses exactly this question. Preliminary results of the study can already be seen today and lead to the conclusion that the new virus is NOT different from traditional corona viruses in terms of dangerousness. The authors express this in the title of their paper „SARS-CoV-2: Fear versus Data“. [3]

My question: How does the current workload of intensive care units with patients with diagnosed COVID-19 compare to other coronavirus infections, and to what extent will this data be taken into account in further decision-making by the federal government? In addition: Has the above study been taken into account in the planning so far? Here too, of course, „diagnosed“ means that the virus plays a decisive role in the patient’s state of illness, and not that previous illnesses play a greater role.

3. Dissemination
According to a report in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, not even the much-cited Robert Koch Institute knows exactly how much is tested for COVID-19. It is a fact, however, that a rapid increase in the number of cases has recently been observed in Germany as the volume of tests increases. [4]

It is therefore reasonable to suspect that the virus has already spread unnoticed in the healthy population. This would have two consequences: firstly, it would mean that the official death rate – on 26 March 2020, for example, there were 206 deaths from around 37,300 infections, or 0.55 percent [5] – is too high; and secondly, it would mean that it would hardly be possible to prevent the virus from spreading in the healthy population.

My question: Has there already been a random sample of the healthy general population to validate the real spread of the virus, or is this planned in the near future?

4. Mortality
The fear of a rise in the death rate in Germany (currently 0.55 percent) is currently the subject of particularly intense media attention. Many people are worried that it could shoot up like in Italy (10 percent) and Spain (7 percent) if action is not taken in time.

At the same time, the mistake is being made worldwide to report virus-related deaths as soon as it is established that the virus was present at the time of death – regardless of other factors. This violates a basic principle of infectiology: only when it is certain that an agent has played a significant role in the disease or death may a diagnosis be made. The Association of the Scientific Medical Societies of Germany expressly writes in its guidelines: „In addition to the cause of death, a causal chain must be stated, with the corresponding underlying disease in third place on the death certificate. Occasionally, four-linked causal chains must also be stated.“ [6]

At present there is no official information on whether, at least in retrospect, more critical analyses of medical records have been undertaken to determine how many deaths were actually caused by the virus.

My question: Has Germany simply followed this trend of a COVID-19 general suspicion? And: is it intended to continue this categorisation uncritically as in other countries? How, then, is a distinction to be made between genuine corona-related deaths and accidental virus presence at the time of death?

5. Comparability
The appalling situation in Italy is repeatedly used as a reference scenario. However, the true role of the virus in that country is completely unclear for many reasons – not only because points 3 and 4 above also apply here, but also because exceptional external factors exist which make these regions particularly vulnerable.

One of these factors is the increased air pollution in the north of Italy. According to WHO estimates, this situation, even without the virus, led to over 8,000 additional deaths per year in 2006 in the 13 largest cities in Italy alone. [7] The situation has not changed significantly since then. [8] Finally, it has also been shown that air pollution greatly increases the risk of viral lung diseases in very young and elderly people. [9]

Moreover, 27.4 percent of the particularly vulnerable population in this country live with young people, and in Spain as many as 33.5 percent. In Germany, the figure is only seven percent [10]. In addition, according to Prof. Dr. Reinhard Busse, head of the Department of Management in Health Care at the TU Berlin, Germany is significantly better equipped than Italy in terms of intensive care units – by a factor of about 2.5 [11].

My question: What efforts are being made to make the population aware of these elementary differences and to make people understand that scenarios like those in Italy or Spain are not realistic here?

https://swprs.org/open-letter-from-professor-sucharit-bhakdi-to-german-chancellor-dr-angela-merkel/

In recent weeks, most of the Eastern European nurses who worked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week supporting people in need of care in Italy have left the country in a hurry. This is not least because of the panic-mongering and the curfews and border closures threatened by the „emergency governments“. As a result, old people in need of care and disabled people, some without relatives, were left helpless by their carers.

Many of these abandoned people then ended up after a few days in the hospitals, which had been permanently overloaded for years, because they were dehydrated, among other things. Unfortunately, the hospitals lacked the personnel who had to look after the children locked up in their apartments because schools and kindergartens had been closed. This then led to the complete collapse of the care for the disabled and the elderly, especially in those areas where even harder „measures“ were ordered, and to chaotic conditions.

The nursing emergency, which was caused by the panic, temporarily led to many deaths among those in need of care and increasingly among younger patients in the hospitals. These fatalities then served to cause even more panic among those in charge and the media, who reported, for example, „another 475 fatalities“, „The dead are being removed from hospitals by the army“, accompanied by pictures of coffins and army trucks lined up.

However, this was the result of the funeral directors‘ fear of the „killer virus“, who therefore refused their services. Moreover, on the one hand there were too many deaths at once and on the other hand the government passed a law that the corpses carrying the coronavirus had to be cremated. In Catholic Italy, few cremations had been carried out in the past. Therefore there were only a few small crematoria, which very quickly reached their limits. Therefore the deceased had to be laid out in different churches.

In principle, this development is the same in all countries. However, the quality of the health system has a considerable influence on the effects. Therefore, there are fewer problems in Germany, Austria or Switzerland than in Italy, Spain or the USA. However, as can be seen in the official figures, there is no significant increase in the mortality rate. Just a small mountain that came from this tragedy.

https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/

whelan2

569 deaths in the UK since yesterday :eek:

emaherx

whelan2 wrote: »

569 deaths in the UK since yesterday :eek:

It's ok, the previous poster says it's not happening.

I think they were just sleepy and needed a rest.

Water John

He's simply saying, it doesn't matter, not denying it's happening.

nelly17

Panch18

I think it is unfair and wrong to dismiss the points that Sam is raising in his posts. There are plenty of legitimate arguments to be made regarding the cost of this virus - to both the Irish and the world economies. I think it would be foolish not to have a proper rational discussion on those aspects.

Whilst i personally agree with the approach that the Irish government has taken and i think they are handing the situation quite well, I also have some major questions in my head - particularly around when this ends and how the government can make it end. so if come September we are still reporting say 100 cases a day and maybe a couple of deaths per day - do we re-open schools? do we re-open businesses? Until such point as a vaccine is readily available or some kind of antibody test is available to the vast majority of the worlds population then i don't know how we are going to reach a point where the worlds governments can say lets open up again and get back to normal

Also if the death toll in Ireland reaches say 300 (now personally i think it will be much higher than that) will that have been worth closing down the entire country for months? After all its not that long ago that that number of people were dying in road accidents in Ireland, but yet we didn't spend billions improving our roads until the late 90's/2000's. These are points that will be discussed, and as time goes on then more and more people will start to think its not worth it. And it is a good theological question, how many deaths would be the maximum that people would say the government should not take any action, should shut down the country etc. And the answer is simply not "oh 1 death would be too much". That's a great soundbite, but the reality is that every single day of every year the government make decisions which cost or save lives. It require a bit more debate than that

For the record i do agree with the Governments approach - i don't know when it will end, how it will end, how much it will cost and i don't think they really had a different option to take. But we should be able to discuss the cost of this without referring to hitler or things like that

alps

Unbelievable (or not)

Of today's 402 positive cases...

72 of them contracted the virus abroad...

How many have they infected since?

whelan2

alps wrote: »

Unbelievable (or not)

Of today's 402 positive cases...

72 of them contracted the virus abroad...

How many have they infected since?

100 cases in a nursing home in the east including staff

Base price

alps wrote: »

Unbelievable (or not)

Of today's 402 positive cases...

72 of them contracted the virus abroad...

How many have they infected since?

I wonder how many of them are health care workers that came home last week and even though they are self isolating for 14 days.

Water John

All the data suggests you won't have 100 cases a day in Sept. It should be well tailing down once we're into June. The main risk is that it will return in the Autumn.
We will have antibody test kits and those positive can return to work first. We'll also find out how widespread the infection is.
But back to the more immediate problem. Keeping the numbers down so that ICU can cope with the numbers. We're down to 10% daily growth. If we can get that to zero we have flattened the curve.

Gillespy

Masks work but we were told they didn't so as not to lead to a shortage for medical staff. Think of that. Not let's get a plan together and start knocking out masks. The British gave everyone a gas mask in 1939. 38 million of them.

Widespread antibody testing can't come soon enough but based on the testing we have seen in Ireland so far I'm not confident it will be soon or widespread.

alps

Reckon we cant hold this lockdown until the end of April...they'll surely try to extend beyond Easter Sunday, but unease is going to set in pretty quick...
Whatever decisions are going to be made about return to work, at risk groups are going to have a long summer indoors and pubs, restaurants, sports gatherings are going to be quiet.

Water John

We'll have to keep it going until the numbers start falling away and then wait another 2/3 weeks.

alps

Water John wrote: »

We'll have to keep it going until the numbers start falling away and then wait another 2/3 weeks.

Dont believe peoples patience or pockets will hold that long..

Water John

If someone asked you six weeks ago, could the country efffectively shutdown except for essential services, you'd have said the idea was daft. That people couldn't be persuaded to do that. And if you read the thread of all the racegoers who couldn't fathom Cheltenham not being held, you also doubt it.
But once a collective mass decide what is the new norm, it's amazing how society can alter its behaviour.

Buford T. Justice XIX

If you're wondering why people seem to be hoarding toilet paper...
https://marker.medium.com/what-everyones-getting-wrong-about-the-toilet-paper-shortage-c812e1358fe0

yosemitesam1

https://mobile.twitter.com/FScholkmann/status/1245742543121387520/photo/1

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51979654

enricoh

Farming is probably the least affected industry that I can think of, most of my friends are at home tipping around the garden bored senseless.
My neighbour is dairying and says he was told if the factory staff gets one case of Corona it'll be closing and milk won't be collected. If it's true, lads won't be long questioning policy then.

BENDYBINN

alps wrote: »

Dont believe peoples patience or pockets will hold that long..

Tha alternative is death and lots of it.......