Tag: healthcare

First, if you think this is fear porn, then you aren’t old enough to remember either AIDS or the Cold War. Second, this can’t be “the same as SARS” or other recent epidemics, because corona-chan is observably at least one, and possibly two, orders of magnitude more infectious.

The SARS epidemic in 2003 reported 8098 cases with 774 deaths, and was eventually brought under control by July, 2003, in a matter of 8 months. Although 26 countries reported cases, the vast majority of cases were concentrated in five countries or regions: China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Toronto, Canada. SARS was eventually contained by means of syndromic surveillance, prompt isolation of patients, strict enforcement of quarantine of all contacts, and in some areas community-level quarantine. By interrupting all human-to-human transmission, SARS was effectively eradicated.

By contrast, there are presently 134,317 reported cases with 4,968 deaths in 116 countries in less than three months of the present pandemic. One of these things is not like the others. To claim that it is accomplishes nothing but to parade one’s statistical innumeracy.

The refusal to take action in the face of potential adversity is not indicative of courage or intelligence. To the contrary, it is paralysis based on denial, fear, and binary thinking.

Neither pestilence nor war are influenced by your opinion of the reality of their existence.

Now, you are certainly welcome to bluster and posture about how you aren’t afraid of no virus, or pontificate concerning the probabilities that corona-chan is just a hoax, and so forth. I don’t mind that sort of thing. Everyone deals with these situation in a wide variety of different ways. Personally, I find the bluster-prone to be as needlessly annoying as the panic-stricken.

But what I do mind is actively telling people not to prepare for 2-3 weeks of quarantine, and here is why. Preparation is necessary if you are planning to stay home and keep the excursions outside to a minimum, we all understand that. But what most people fail to keep in mind is that if you, or anyone in your family, even gets knowingly exposed to the virus, (much less actually comes down with a case of the Wu-flu) you will be facing the same 2-3 weeks of home quarantine, only then it will be too late for you to obtain the necessary supplies. And then you will become an unnecessary burden on someone else to keep you supplied.

I understand that not everyone believes a nine-month supply of red and white wine supplemented by a six-month supply of prosecco – yes, we’re ready now – is necessary, but there is literally no harm in doing the month’s grocery shopping ahead of time and it might make your family’s life considerably more easy in the next six-eight weeks if you take the trouble to do so.

One more thought on the subject. If corona-chan is a hoax being perpetrated by the good guys for Storm-related purposes, FFS, play along! 

UPDATE: There is also a major US military exercise taking place in Europe right now.

UPDATE: CDAN asks: “Does anyone think this will turn into The Purge?”

An epidemial modeling explains why it is hugely beneficial to slow the rate of viral transmission even if the entire population gets infected, based on the Chinese numbers:

Total population 327 million, with a single initiating infection. 12 day course of disease, initial R0 of 3.5 (as per the stats from China that Steve linked.) Assume 5{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} of cases are critical, 2{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} of those critical cases die with ICU care, 5{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} with general hospital care, and 50{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} with no care. 90,000 available ICU beds and 900,000 available hospital beds.

Run this model through to completion and it sweeps through the population in about a year, infecting most everyone (less about 9 million who escape), killing 5.4 million.

Now, suppose we impose infection controls on day 80, right about when there’s 1000 deaths from this thing. And then we vary how strong those controls are: from 0.35 (what the Chinese managed) up to nothing at all.

Here we see how the # of deaths varies with the strength of our controls. If we impose Chinese-style controls, we get away with only 5K deaths, or 1000-fold fewer than without the controls. But the inflection point isn’t just at 1.0. In particular if we can get the R0 below about 1.5 that gets us down under 500K, or a 10-fold reduction. At 1.0 we get down to about 50K.

And this is why it is best to leave the opinionating on these matters to those who are, at the very least, statistically numerate. Don’t be like the NBA idiot who, in his clueless effort to demonstrate his brave lack of concern over corona-chan, went out of his way to touch all of the media’s microphones and promptly contracted the virus.

It costs very little to alter your day-to-day life for a few weeks, so why take even a low risk of putting yourself through the experience, even if it is nothing more than a bad flu. If you don’t suck on the runny noses of strangers on the bus just to prove you’re not afraid of the flu, why would you feel any need to avoid taking a few simple steps to avoid altering your routine now?

I could be wrong, but that’s how I’m seeing this play out.

President Donald Trump told the nation he was ordering an immediate shut-down of all travel from Europe to the United States as he addressed the nation on the coronavirus in a prime time Wednesday speech.

‘We will be suspending all travel from Europe to the United States for the next 30 days,’ Trump announced, in a speech from the Oval Office to the nation.

One step at a time….

Nuova stretta sul contrasto al coronavirus. Il premier, Giuseppe Conte, nel pomeriggio ha riunito a Palazzo Chigi i capi delegazione dei partiti di governo. Alle 20.30 ha annunciato su Twitter: “Questa sera mi collegherò in diretta per darvi alcuni importanti aggiornamenti”. Quindi si è rivolto ai cittadini: “Grazie agli italiani che compiono sacrifici. Al primo posto c’è la salute degli italiani”. Quindi ha indicato le nuove misure: “Saranno chiusi tutti i negozi tranne quelli per i beni di prima necessità, come farmacie e alimentari. Le industrie resteranno aperte ma con misure di sicurezza. Saranno garantiti i trasporti”.

Translation: the Italian premier just announced that all retail stores are closed across the country except for pharmacies and grocery stores.

In other news out of Italy, the Boomercaust is officially upon us “as country’s top doctors say intensive care units should stop treating the elderly.”

Definite le nuove misure nazionali di contenimento dell’emergenza. Nell’articolo 1 della bozza del nuovo decreto del governo compare il divieto di ingresso e di uscita dalla Lombardia e da altre 11 province, e l’estensione delle zone controllate a Piemonte ed Emilia-Romagna. Nel dettaglio, le province diventate “zona rossa” sono le seguenti: Modena, Parma, Piacenza, Reggio Emilia, Rimini, Pesaro e Urbino, Venezia, Padova, Treviso, Asti e Alessandria. Tutte le nuove disposizioni sono valide da oggi marzo fino al 3 aprile.

No travel into or out of Lombardia and a number of other provinces until April third, which is a quarantine of 16 million people. Good thing we’ve got the wine cellar well-stocked through September, at the very least! Seems like a bit of an overreaction to me, but we’ll see. In the meantime, I anticipate most Italians will consider this to be a grand holiday of sorts.

And no, I’m not particularly concerned despite the drastic measures being taken. The country with the largest known test sample, South Korea, is seeing a mortality rate of 0.6 percent, which is only four times more lethal than the average flu. And while the 4 percent death rate based on the official numbers in Italy looks bad, the fact is that most people who have been infected don’t know they have it and have not been counted as an official case.

I strongly suspect something that we simply don’t understand is taking place, and that we’ll eventually be able to put the pieces of the puzzle together. In the meantime, get plenty of sleep, drink plenty of fluids, and take vitamins C and D.

Besides, it’s still not a pandemic, right?

UPDATE: While the government has announced the quarantine of Lombardia as well as parts of the Veneto, Emilia Romagna, and Piemonte, they aren’t shutting down the roads or the airports yet. They haven’t even closed the borders with France or Switzerland at this point.

An enforced vacation from the gym:

This would be almost Biblical if it were true:

The Vatican has confirmed in a statement that Pope Francis and two of his aides have tested positive for the novel Coronavirus. The three new cases add up to the over 400 cases confirmed in Italy under a week. Pope Francis missed a planned Mass with clergy in Rome yesterday after showing Coronavirus-like symptoms.

However, I haven’t seen any mention of this in the Italian media or from the Vatican press office site, so I’m highly dubious.

As large quantities of deaths fail to appear in Italy or anywhere else outside of China, there is some reason to at least begin to suspect that the potential danger from Corona-chan has been significantly exaggerated:

An editorial published Friday in the New England Journal of Medicine speculated that the coronavirus currently causing panic in world markets could turn out no worse than “a severe seasonal influenza” in terms of mortality.

Citing an analysis of the available data from the outbreak in China, the authors note that there have been zero cases among children younger than 15; and that the fatality rate is 2{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} at most, and could be “considerably less than 1{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3}.”

Those who have died have been elderly or were already suffering from another illness — as with ordinary flu. The underlying data suggest that the symptoms varies, and fewer than one in six of the cases reported were “severe.”

The authors note that coronavirus looks to be much less severe than other recent outbreaks of respiratory illnesses:

[T]he overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3}) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} and 36{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3}, respectively.

The vast majority of patients recover, and among those who are hospitalized, the median stay thus far is 12 days.

Alternatively, the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine may be heavily invested in the equity markets and are looking for a dead cat bounce to shed the remainder of their stocks. At this point, virtually no one outside of China actually knows anything.