China and Italy are different in other ways.
China is very different from Japan and Korea, but those two learned from China, implemented similar steps, and stopped the epidemic. They did not violate anyone's constitutional rights. Their governments are not autocratic. Everything they did would be allowed under EU and U.S. laws. We might have done it, but we did not.
yesterday they warned there will be a spike in part due to test platform throughput upgrade where a backlog of 3-4 days can be processed at once
They who? Who warned this?
Just saw over 4K new cases in the U.S. today. It’s making me think our multiplier should go from 1.3 to 1.4
I am hoping this is due to increased testing, and those cases were there all along, rather than being a sudden increase. Maybe "hoping" is the wrong word?
In Italy there are 5,322 new cases. That's 1.27 times yesterday. The "shut down everything" tactic does not appear to be working. This is roughly the same growth rate they had before they shut down.
This is the same growth rate the U.S. is experiencing.
1. The Exponential model is relevant only to the early stages, and eventually flattens out.
Yes. That is what I said. We are still in the early stages, because there are not enough recovered patients with immunity to affect the numbers. The curve will flatten when a significant fraction of the population is immune. The math becomes more complicated at that point, and my simple graph will no longer apply. As I said. My graph is simple, but I am not "playing with numbers." It is rooted in reality.
As you would expect, there are huge cutbacks in progress, as Pilot/Flight Attendant trips are being canceled at this very moment . . .
When hearing these first hand accounts, all I can think of are those salivating to: "shut it all down". Easy to say, when not the one having to suffer the consequences.
Delta has reduced flights by 70% according to the Atlanta Journal. But why do blame this on the people "salivating" to "shut it down"? A person would have to crazy to fly anywhere today. An airplane is as dangerous as a cruise ship. Corporations have cancelled business travel. All conferences such as the American Physics Society have been cancelled. All flights to Europe and China have been shut down, so you can't go even if you want to. Even if you are in favor of keeping the airlines open, people are not going fly unless they absolutely have to.
It is not the advocates of "shutting it down" who have done this. It is the passengers.
What are be the consequences of flying? An extra 1,000 deaths over the next several months? The equivalent of 3 air crashes. Would you fly if you knew that next month, three airplanes were going to crash? I sure wouldn't. It might be an extra 10,000 or 100,000 cases, if everything goes wrong.
Playing with numbers on spread sheets and then calling those with unbelievable complexity in managing this affair idiots, certainly does not impress me any.
The numbers I am using come from authoritative sources. All of the projections I have made for the past 2 weeks have been spot on. The trend has not changed. This is the easiest kind of projection you can make. It is straight out of 18th century biology. Similar graphs have been published in every newspaper. If this were "playing" with numbers my predictions would be far off by now.
Experts worldwide have said that the administration and the U.S. medical establishment has made terrible mistakes. They say this is an "unmitigated disaster" (Harvard Global Health Institute director). They say hundreds of thousand and possibly millions of people may die unnecessarily, because the U.S. ignored the lessons taught in China, Korea and Japan. If that is not idiotic, what would be? This is quite a lot like ordering soldiers to walk upright into machine gun fire in WWI.
How one small Italian town cut coronavirus cases to zero in just a few weeks
the town was put on lockdown, and all 3,300 residents were tested for coronavirus.....This mass testing revealed that about 3% of residents were infected with the virus, and of these, about half did not show any symptoms,...….
This is why testing is so critical.
Why stop at 190 million Jed, go to 109 days and infect the entire country. You’re simply doing math. If we are to assume that is true, correct and uncontrollable
I stopped at 190 million because experts say that is the upper limit to fraction of the population that can be infected. I wouldn't know, but they say that after a while herd immunity prevents further infections.
I am not simply doing math. I am doing classic biology, that has been known since the 17th century. Everyone who understand epidemics does this math, and in uncontrolled circumstances with no changes such as weather, this is how the curve looks at this stage.
I do not believe that the entire country will be infected with Covid 19. It is possible, sure but I do not think it is probable.
No, it is not possible.
If it stops at 190 million in mid-April, and the mortality rate is 3.5%, as it is in a country with no functioning hospitals, that will be ~6.7 million dead. At the peak of the curve, for several weeks, the U.S. will have effectively no functioning hospitals. The hospitals we have will not be able to treat more than a small fraction of the patients.
If the curve can be flattened, even if 190 million are infected by August or September, fatalities will be much lower because the hospitals will be able to treat more patients. As some recover, there will be room for others.
New cases in the U.S. today are at 2,582. There will probably be more before midnight. The daily increase in the U.S. is now 1.4, up from 1.3.
If the rate continues at 1.3, by March 31 there will be 272,000 cases, 78,000 new cases per day. By April 27 the projection is the entire U.S. population, but that is biologically impossible.
In Italy, the increase for the last 4 days was 1.0, 0.9, 1.1 and 1.2. It was 1.3 from March 1 to March 13:
(my graph, not worldmeters)
I conclude the "shut everything down" approach is not working well, and it is definitely not sufficient to avoid a catastrophe. It has not had time to take effect in the U.S., but if it only works as well as it has in Italy, it is likely that millions of Americans will die. Not hundreds of thousands; millions. The number is higher because the hospitals will be swamped. The curve is not flattening out at all so far. Even if it does start to flatten, I doubt it will be enough. There will be far more people needing beds and ICU bed that the total available. All of the hospitals in the world will not suffice.
You are letting your hatred for Trump show through!
I am not Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. I was quoting him.
How come 70+ countries have restricted or closed their borders such as Germany, Canada, New Zealand and many European countries? They must not agree with you, but then you know better do you not?
Every public health expert and epidemiologist agrees that once an epidemic takes hold, and transmission is from one person to another within the country, closing the borders has no effect. Of course you should test and quarantine anyone who comes in.
You were around for the 2009/2010 Swine Flu pandemic. In the early days of it, were you as alarmed of it's potential mortality, espousing the same "shut everything down" approach as you are now? I am curious, because I have read up on that pandemic.
No. Nor did I react that way to SARS. It is not the mortality rate alone that counts. It is mortality plus the infection rate. Furthermore, a disease with a very high mortality rate can be self-limiting. If the disease is apparent soon after the infection, and it kills the patient quickly, the patient usually dies before infecting anyone else. It is actually easier to stop the spread of such diseases. The R0 is low.
I was not in favor of the "shut everything down" strategy in the U.S. at first, because there was no need for it. They have not shut everything down in Korea or Japan, and they are fine. The epidemic is under control. Even if several more sick people come into the country, they will be detected, quarantined, and cured. The "shut everything down" strategy was needed in China at first, especially in Wuhan, but it is now being undone in stages. The country is opening up and going back to work. Like Korea and Japan, it has the epidemic under control. No doubt cases will flare up, but they will be tracked, and every person who is infected -- or might be infected -- will be quarantined and tested.
This method was invented by the Chinese in January. It would never have been possible in any previous epidemic. It depends on the internet, big data, and other 21st century tools that were not available in the past. Also, it depends on massive deployment of test kits. It works. There is no question about that. If other countries had done what China, Korea and Japan did, this pandemic would have been stopped. We would have ~150 cases per day in the U.S., and the numbers would not be rising. It would be a steady state until a vaccine is deployed.
A few weeks ago, I took it for granted that Europe and the U.S. would use similar methods.
Unfortunately, the U.S. has not implemented a single aspect of the Chinese method. No testing, no follow up, no tracing cases, no quarantine. No accounting for cases, and no treatment. In Georgia today, you cannot even see a doctor if you have the coronavirus. They tell you not to come to the hospital, according to today's Atlanta Journal. They cannot even add your case to the totals for the state, because no doctor or nurse checks you, tests you, or records the case. This is medical malpractice. It is much worse than that. It is manslaughter, mass murder, and public health lunacy. It may lead to millions of deaths. It is the policy of doing nothing. Not responding or even trying to contain the outbreak. It is the worst possible response to an epidemic.
Given that U.S. leaders are lunatics, totally unfit to deal with this, our only option is to "shut everything down," like medieval peasants responding to the Black Death. We might as well have no idea what causes it and no modern medicine if our only response is to do what people did in 1347. We are not even doing as much as Americans did in 1918. We must shut everything down because the medical establishment has failed us, and the administration has brought "an unmitigated disaster upon the population." We have no good options left. Even if we still have the power to implement the Chinese method, it is clear that no one has any plans to do so. Shutting down is the best of the remaining catastrophic options.
Trump marveled that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose popularity. (He never meant he wanted to do that, but only that his popularity is Teflon tough.) XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX-- people who could easily have been saved -- and yet still be re-elected. If he is re-elected it will prove that Americans have turned their backs on science and technology. These things were our birthright and the best things we have contributed to civilization. The tools that China, Korea and Japan use using to control this virus include public health techniques, data analysis, the internet, big data computing, and so on. All of them were invented in the UK and the United States! Yet we are not using them.
Edited for content by Shane.
Not sure South Korea can be used as a realistic sample for any of this.
There is 0 human foot/vehicle traffic crossing borders from different counties into SK, it’s a peninsula, like Florida, only smaller, about the size of Indiana.
Nearly every case in S. Korea, Japan and the U.S. was from someone else already in the country. A handful of patients China started all of these infections. They were patient zero in a chain of infections. All of the ones that followed were from patient 1, 2, 3 . . . all of them natives. It just takes one person to start an epidemic. This epidemic, when uncontrolled, spreads at a rate of 1.3 per day. Here's how it works:
Take 1 person. Multiply by 1.3 (in other words, no infection the next day). multiply that by 1.3 . . . Now you have 2 people. On day 5 you have 3 people. On day 30 you have 2,015 people. You don't need anyone else coming in from outside the country. You have a full scale epidemic underway.
On day 100, you have 190 million people infected. Starting from one person.
You and Mr. Trump seem to think we can stop an epidemic by closing the borders. That's wrong. That can only work if not a single infected person enters, ever.
Here is another opinion from the people that know stats:
The title is:
"A fiasco in the making? As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data"
That is completely wrong. The experts in China, Korea and Japan now have highly reliable data. They have it for tens of thousands of patients, and hundreds of thousands of healthy people who were tested. The data covers many weeks of illness. That is a long time in this case, because this illness seldom lasts longer than 2 weeks. (It would not be useful if this lasted for months or years, as some diseases do.) People either recover or die more quickly than the timespan of this data. The data covers every age range and state of health. It covers people who got the best ICU care available, and people who could not be cared for because the hospitals in China were initially swamped. So this data is statistically significant in every dimension, for every purpose.
Let me rewrite that headline to reflect reality: "We in the United State are making decisions without reliable data because we are ignoring the Chinese, Korean and Japanese data, along with their recommendations. What is worse, we using the garbage data from the U.S. healthcare system, which is worse than the Iranian data, according to the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. He said, 'This is an unmitigated disaster that the administration has brought upon the population.'"
A rush into potentially risky vaccines and therapies will betray that trust and discourage work to develop better assessments.
That is a sensible policy for now. But, if the present steps fail and we have a million new cases per day in mid-April, and ~1,000 deaths per day, that will no longer be a sensible policy. If that happens, I think they should immediately begin widespread vaccination on large groups of volunteers, to see if the vaccine works. I realize that is a risky thing to do, but letting a thousand people die per day is not risky, it is catastrophic. It will lead to millions of deaths in the U.S. Risking the health of a group of volunteers is worth the trade-off. I would volunteer immediately, if I were asked.
The present steps have had no effect in the U.S. The rate is actually increasing. Perhaps it is too soon to see the curve start to flatten. It appears to be flattening in Italy, Spain and the UK, thank goodness.
So go ahead and read the article. Then answer this: "if the mortality could be as low as a bad flu season as they say, are the draconian, economy killing steps we are undertaking, proportional to the threat?"
This is wrong on many levels.
The mortality rate in Korea, the best country, is now ~1%. That's ten times worse than a bad flu season. Furthermore, 43% of Americans get a seasonal flu shot, and most of them are either immune or they have only a mild case. So that's about 14 times worse mortality than a bad flu season. Furthermore, with seasonal flu, the vaccinated 43% give the rest of the population a measure of herd immunity. So even if the cononavirus was only 0.1%, if it is not checked, 100% of the population will be vulnerable instead of 57%, so the economic impact would be larger.
The mortality rate in Korea and Japan is low because every patient is cared for, and there still ICU beds available. They can sustain the present daily number of patients indefinitely, without straining their hospital or ICU capacity. When the hospitals are swamped with people, the mortality rate goes much higher. The hospitals are swamped in Italy, and in 2 weeks they will be in the U.S. Korea is at 1% because they have hospital beds available. If the U.S. rate does not change, by April 12 there will be million new cases per day. All of the hospitals in the world could not accommodate that. The mortality rate will be ~3%, because most patients will not be cared for.
I do not think these steps are draconian. I myself would far rather stay in my house for a month than get seriously ill with the coronavirus. Even seasonal flu is no joke. It once sent me to the hospital for a week. I realize that many people cannot work, or they have to take care of children, but with unemployment insurance they can be okay. When the crisis began and the Japanese government closed the schools, they immediately put in place 70% unemployment insurance for anyone who got sick or had to stay home to take care of a family member. As far as I know, it lasts until the crisis is over. We could do that, and eliminate nearly all personal financial hazard. Tax the rich and the corporations to pay for it.
Even if these steps are draconian, they are the only sane alternative now. If we do not do them, millions of people per day will get sick, and thousands per day will die. But the need for these drastic steps was not caused by the virus. That's the key thing. This is not a symptom of the virus. It is a symptom of stupidity. It was caused by anti-science, anti-intellectual attitudes and gross ignorance. We could have easily avoided the draconian steps entirely, by doing what they did in Korea and Japan. The Chinese had to use draconian methods because they were first, and they were unprepared. Korea and Japan learned from them, and prepared. They will not experience gigantic economic jolts. They are free, democratic societies. The citizens are going along with the steps willingly, without complaint. No one considers things like drive-in testing "draconian" or onerous. Because they implemented unemployment insurance, few individuals are suffering financially. Because they have national health care, everyone is taken care of, and no one avoids the doctor because they cannot afford healthcare, so no one is out working and spreading the virus. Whereas in the U.S., 90 million people will do that. The steps now being taken in Italy, France, Spain and the U.S. were only necessary because our leaders and our citizens are idiots. We brought this catastrophe on ourselves. We could have avoided it.
But from the video this seems to be a totally different approach which I've never heard of.
It is same as far as I know. It is happening more quickly than ever before. An expert said that is because the tools and techniques have improved. (I don't recall where I read that.)
The real heroes will be those in the octogenarian vaccine test group
There isn't an octogenarian group, is there? This video said they are all under 55. All are in good health.
First 45 human volunteers are given coronavirus vaccine.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/17…-browning-trnd/index.html
I admire these people.
The U.S. had by far the largest 1-day increase, 1776. I would like to think this is mainly because of increased testing, but I doubt that. I believe many of the cases listed in the tally were never tested for.
This is 1.38 times yesterday's count.
