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[elbows]

Just listening to the live WH coronavirus presser on now and approx 41k Americans have sadly died with projections to be around 60k by the time the virus passes - so, if that end figure pans out it will be well under the 100k original projection that was made. The main concern is the possibility of certain states opening up too quickly and a relapse in fatalities occur.

They say those figures because they are using the IHME model that we have talked about lots before, and that plenty of people criticise, probably for rather good reason.

IHME | COVID-19 Projections

Explore forecasts of COVID-19 cases, deaths, and hospital resource use.

covid19.healthdata.org

And a site that shows how this model projections have changed over time, all nicely graphed:

COVID Projections Tracker

www.covid-projections.com

 

[krtek a houby]

Im just commenting on the most up to date WH presser, it’s a misconception/sport that I ‘support’ Trump, I’m just more aware of the anti-Trump bias.

It was Mike Pence that stated they’ve tested 4 million Americans to date and Trump who stated the over supply of ventilators even going as far as informing they still have federal emergency reserves of ventilators not fully utilised.

The general tone of this press briefing was of the beginning of a tailored and measured approach to re-opening counties within states based on data, characterised by a female official (can’t remember her name or position) as a sunrise rather than an on/off switch.

On a separate note, I’ve heard that the govt here in the U.K. may be starting to allow certain business to re-open like garden centres.

You're unquestioningly accepting the word of a regime that is more concerned with its image and election chances than its dead.

He's egging on the protesters, as he did in Charlottesville.

He's also contradicting the advice of his medical experts and himself, whilst creating more anti-asian sentiment.

There's plenty propaganda and vicious bile coming from the White House without you assuming the devil's advocate guise and reposting it in a watered down, palatable fashion.

 

[wayward bob]

I'm sure we've got places here in the UK that could churn PPE gowns etc. out by the thousand. They just need to take control of the factories and make the stuff. And that's even ignoring we've had months of notice now.

there are many volunteer efforts to do just this but yes, it should be the government doing this.

i've joined a (crowd funded) group set up by tv/film costumers. materials are centrally ordered, pre-cut and then distributed to individuals/small businesses with industrial machines for assembly. they have people directly in touch with the hospitals who distribute finished scrubs according to stated needs.

this only covers the re-usable portions of uniform, not single-use, but it's a thing, and it's being done. imagine if the government was half so time-motivated or organised

 

[teqniq]

 

[two sheds]

Brave people, powerful message them just standing there saying nothing.

Biden's people are doing good videos showing up Trump (lower down that first link) - bit of a shame we don't seem to be getting the same from Labour.

 

[zahir]

Faroe Islands

 

[crossthebreeze]

Arundhati Roy devastating writing on the situation in India: The Pandemic is a Portal
The long march home of people made unemployed and newly homeless back to villages, anti-muslim conspiracy theories and stigma, a growing healthcare crisis, and Modi's yoga nidra videos.

 

[SheilaNaGig]

Im just commenting on the most up to date WH presser, it’s a misconception/sport that I ‘support’ Trump, I’m just more aware of the anti-Trump bias.

It was Mike Pence that stated they’ve tested 4 million Americans to date and Trump who stated the over supply of ventilators even going as far as informing they still have federal emergency reserves of ventilators not fully utilised.

The general tone of this press briefing was of the beginning of a tailored and measured approach to re-opening counties within states based on data, characterised by a female official (can’t remember her name or position) as a sunrise rather than an on/off switch.

On a separate note, I’ve heard that the govt here in the U.K. may be starting to allow certain business to re-open like garden centres.

But you didn’t comment on it, you merely repeated it, as if it was a fact.

Contrary to the claim that they’re testing a million people a day (just think about the that Marty1 ... how is it even possible to be testing one million people a day in America?) , this report from CNN says it’s 150,000 a day.

US coronavirus death toll tops 40,000 as researchers call for more testing before reopening economy

The United States' coronavirus death toll topped 40,000 on Sunday afternoon, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

edition.cnn.com

“Testing nationwide is currently at 150,000 per day, they said, adding that "If we can't be doing at least 500,000 tests a day by May 1, it is hard to see any way we can remain open."...”


(See how that works? I didn’t say “they’re testing 15,000 a day” I said “this report says that they’re testing...”)


It doesn’t matter if it was Trump or Pence who said the thing about the vents; it’s the Trump administration, which is supporting Trump’s ambitions for a second term.

This idea of America being able to get back to normal in a week or two is dangerous nonsense. I can’t believe you believe it. Do you really beleive it ? On what grounds? Other than the say-so of a female whose name and credentials you can’t recall?

What the UK is doing or not doing is not relevant here, other than to say that we’re several weeks ahead of the US and only now considering the possibility of loosening the lockdown, so how can America be ready for releasing their much less comprehensive lockdown?

As for your unbiased opinion of Trump, I’d have more respect for that if you could support any of his claims with reports from anywhere that wasn’t FOX or the Mail or some other brown-nose.

 

[2hats]

US coronavirus death toll tops 40,000 as researchers call for more testing before reopening economy

The United States' coronavirus death toll topped 40,000 on Sunday afternoon, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

edition.cnn.com

“Testing nationwide is currently at 150,000 per day, they said, adding that "If we can't be doing at least 500,000 tests a day by May 1, it is hard to see any way we can remain open."...”

A basic sanity check:

As of a few minutes ago the US had performed 3,861,596 tests in total.

If they are testing 1 million per day, that's a lot of time squandered spent navel gazing.

If they are currently testing 150,000 per day that's easily a month's worth of testing, if not the best part of two months allowing for ramp up.

Which makes most sense?

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Has Marty1 become an U75 project?

Educating Marty

 

[two sheds]

I like it that we're "biased" against a racist, homophobic, narcissistic, white supremacist who's been accused of rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment. Says volumes that Marty virtually always sides with him.

I was bloody tempted to report the post for "being a dick" but didn't want to take editor's time up. Can we throw a celebratory party thread when it's finally banned?

 

[SheilaNaGig]

A basic sanity check:

As of a few minutes ago the US had performed 3,861,596 tests in total.

If they are testing 1 million per day, that's a lot of time squandered spent navel gazing.

If they are currently testing 150,000 per day that's easily a month's worth of testing, if not the best part of two months allowing for ramp up.

Which makes most sense?

I don't know.

None of this makes much sense tbh.

Maybe the point is that it's not really possible to know anything for sure right now, so just repeating whatever is said at a WH press conference can't be relied on as truth.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Oh I think we can rely on whatever is said at a WH press conference being very far from the truth.

It is bizarre, tbh, the state we're in. The UK govt avoids giving out any information really at its press conferences in its feeble attempt to hide the truth of its fuckups. Trump just outright lies. And contradicts what he himself said before without the slightest compunction. How the hell did we get here?

 

[SheilaNaGig]

Has Marty1 become an U75 project?

Educating Marty

I've been trying to work out why I'm engaging.
Maybe because I have much-loved friends and family in America and it pains me to see dangerous bullshit posted up as fact.

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

Am I being to cynical that the same souless fuckers who initially had their way in pushing for a hurd immunity response , are now thinking in terms of resolving the pension black hole and houseing shortage all in one fell swoop.

I'm not certain its possible to be too cynical. Just when I think I've reached "peak cynicism" and can't be surprised any more, I get yet another example of how low some people are willing to go.

 

[2hats]

I don't know.

None of this makes much sense tbh.

Maybe the point is that it's not really possible to know anything for sure right now, so just repeating whatever is said at a WH press conference can't be relied on as truth.

No, there is one easy answer in this case.

More generally, there are answers. One just needs basic maths and critical thinking skills to eliminate the bullshit (as if there were any doubt).

 

[SheilaNaGig]

No, there is one easy answer in this case.

More generally, there are answers. One just needs basic maths and critical thinking skills to eliminate the bullshit (as if there were any doubt).

Yes. Sorry. I was being flip and faux-disingenuous. Should have added a or something to my post.

 

[elbows]

littlebabyjesus I found a research topic if you are interesting in doing some digging. I was researching something else at the time, so havent had time to check facts or investigate, but its about Germany so I thought you might be interested. I heard that UK excess winter mortality generally sucks compared to Germany. So maybe there are a bunch of things they are always better at, or better placed to cope with for any number of reasons, than us. And this pandemic is perhaps reflecting those things as well as the obvious stuff like testing and size of epidemic at the point of lockdown.

 

[2hats]

I don't think we've had this - an article (UK focussed but relevant to data gathering across many countries), by two London based health biostatisticians, that underscores some of the issues and various difficulties in counting, reporting and modelling mortality data during this epidemic:

Why counting coronavirus deaths is not an exact science | Gianluca Baio and Marta Blangiardo

It’s the data that gets all the headlines, but the two main sources of information in the UK have their own limits, say Profs Gianluca Baio and Marta Blangiardo

www.theguardian.com

 

[elbows]

Why counting coronavirus deaths is not an exact science | Gianluca Baio and Marta Blangiardo

It’s the data that gets all the headlines, but the two main sources of information in the UK have their own limits, say Profs Gianluca Baio and Marta Blangiardo

www.theguardian.com

They havent been looking at the spreadsheet tabs properly!

One crucial difference between the two meta sources is the temporal resolution: the DHSC provides daily updates, while from 31 March the ONS has been reporting weekly data. Thus the DHSC data is instrumental in estimating the underlying mortality trends. ONS data can be used only to make week-on-week comparisons.

Actually the spreadsheet I got from the following ONS site has daily numbers on the 'Covid-19 E&W comparisons' and 'Covid-19 England comparisons' tabs.

Deaths registered weekly in England and Wales, provisional - Office for National Statistics

Provisional counts of the number of deaths registered in England and Wales, by age, sex and region, in the latest weeks for which data are available.

www.ons.gov.uk

 

[smokedout]

Okay, this may be meaningless because of how noisy the data is but since I don't have much better to do and I bothered to work it out. There seems to be a correlation between the Case Fatality Rate (to date) and how much testing has gone on.

Based on the worldmeters's site (more noise) the 10 countries that have tested most have the following CFRs:

Iceland .508% CFR
12% population tested
0.38% infected

UAE .610% CFR
7.7% Population tested
0.06% infected

Luxembourg 2.05% CFR
5.3% population tested
0.4% infected

Malta 0.69% CFR
5.2% population tested
0.09% infected

Bahrain 0.73% CFR
5.2% population tested
0.11 infected

San Marino 8.45% CFR
5% Population tested
1.36% population infected

Estonia 2.6% CFR
3.08% population tested
0.16% infected

San Marino is a bit of an outlier, although they do have a much higher infection rate than anyone else and are probably deeper into the curve. All the other countries will see more deaths. I left out the Faroe Isle, Falklands, and Gibraltor (who have all tested like mad) because they don't have any recorded deaths yet, although they have a total of 327 cases betwen them. To put these figures in context Spain, France and Italy all have CFRs of around 10-15%.

Looking at countries with similar infection rates, the UK has an infection rate of 0.177% and a CFR of 13.37% with 0.7% of the population tested so far whilst Germany has an infection rate of 0.174%, a CFR of 3.18% with 2% of people tested. Belgium has an infection rate of 0.34%, a CFR of 14.57% and has tested 1.4% of the population, Switzerland has an infection rate of 0.32, a CFR of 5.03% and has tested 2.6% of people.

Anyway the correlation doesn't hold up so well at the lower end of the scale, in places that have done fuck all testing, including Japan who seem to have a v low CFR so far, but that could be because those countries are very early into their outbreaks or are not recording all deaths. And also the CFRs to date of anywhere don't really give us any indication of how those countries will end up. I just thought it was interesting and perhaps points to the CFR being towards to lower end of what has been feared, as well as suggesting that a high CFR and a lot of deaths may point to a much larger rate of transmission then testing has revealed. Or not, like I said, it's all a bit noisy, gave me something to do though.

 

[2hats]

Okay, this may be meaningless because of how noisy the data is but since I don't have much better to do and I bothered to work it out. There seems to be a correlation between the Case Fatality Rate (to date) and how much testing has gone on.

At the risk of repeating what has been said before: if a country does not test widely and sufficiently enough (for its size of population) then the case counts are meaningless. The apparent CFR (crude CFR) is artificially high (especially in places like the UK where the vast bulk of those tested to date have been the seriously ill).

In those countries the case figure is under-reported by one, by an order of magnitude, if not more.

For the UK, the current case count (as I type this) is 120,067. Both evidence and modelling points to the true number being at least ten times this.

 

[elbows]

Variations in testing make all the difference in the world to CFR's, its one of the reason I've tried to completely ignore the CFR since the early days.

Ultimately, having seen how much the total number of deaths for a week went up by in ONS data, compared to how many ones with Covid-19 on death certificate were listed for that week, I am probably going to judge the pandemic on total deaths rather than ones we actually label Covid-19. There are a bunch of reasons, and its a very long-term phenomenon which has been commented on for a long time.

Lets travel back in time to 1951:

Discussion: Influenza 1951 - SAGE Journalsjournals.sagepub.com › doi › pdf › 003591575104400903 (page labelled 22)

"The total mortality from all causes during influenza epidemics rises much more than can be accounted for merely by the number of deaths certified due to influenza. This is something that has been noticed for a very long time. Farr commented on it in regard to the influenza of 1847, mentioning, incidentally, that a similar sort of thing had happened during the Great Plague of 1665. It was discussed by Stevenson in the Registrar-General's report on the 1918-19 epidemic, and was studied in some detail sixteen years ago by Stocks."

In terms of numbers of deaths there were 6,000 more deaths from influenza registered in the Great Towns in the first eight weeks of 1951 than of 1950, but the total deaths from all causes increased by 25,000. The weather during the early weeks of this year was not exceptionally cold-as it was in 1947 with the resulting increase in total mortality shown in Fig. 2-so that the increase in numbers of deaths in 1951 must be presumed due in some way to the influenza epidemic. Various suggestions have been put forward from time to time to account for the excess of deaths from all causes that regularly occurs during epidemics of influenza. The explanation that at once comes to mind is that the additional deaths were really due to influenza but were either not recognized as such or, if so recognized, were not stated by the certifier as being associated with influenza. This is not necessarily the whole story, however, and other suggestions that have been made hypothesize an "epidemic constitution" or else a separate epidemic of the secondary bacterial invaders of virus influenza.

 

[smokedout]

At the risk of repeating what has been said before: if a country does not test widely and sufficiently enough (for its size of population) then the case counts are meaningless. The apparent CFR (crude CFR) is artificially high (especially in places like the UK where the vast bulk of those tested to date have been the seriously ill).

In those countries the case figure is under-reported by one, by an order of magnitude, if not more.

For the UK, the current case count (as I type this) is 120,067. Both evidence and modelling points to the true number being at least ten times this.

Well yes, that was kind of my point, and I posted some data showing how that might impact on what the CFR turns out to be which I thought was interesting.

 

[little_legs]

Has Marty1 become an U75 project?

Educating Marty

Can we rename it to Futile Attempts to Reason with the Board's Proud Boy

 

[Pickman's model]

Has Marty1 become an U75 project?

Educating Marty

marty21 has long walked the boards as a thespian in the world of am dram. back in 1998 he played professor higgins in a run of bernard shaw's pygmalion. if anyone should educate the lacklustre Marty1 it should be he

 

[elbows]

I don't think we've had this - an article (UK focussed but relevant to data gathering across many countries), by two London based health biostatisticians, that underscores some of the issues and various difficulties in counting, reporting and modelling mortality data during this epidemic:

Why counting coronavirus deaths is not an exact science | Gianluca Baio and Marta Blangiardo

It’s the data that gets all the headlines, but the two main sources of information in the UK have their own limits, say Profs Gianluca Baio and Marta Blangiardo

www.theguardian.com

By the way I note the article briefly mentions in passing:

For instance, there is evidenceto suggest a strong association between air pollution and Covid-19-related mortality. This may explain why heavily polluted areas such as Lombardy in Italy have been badly affected by the virus.

If this were a film and I was writing the script, the virus would only kill when certain kinds of pollution were present, and the film would be called 'The Virus that Ate Cars'!

 

[planetgeli]

Bit surprised nobody has mentioned the real outlier in the world here, Nicaragua. Ortega has refused to implement social distancing let alone lockdown, insisting the virus is a 'sign from God' against militarism and hegemony. (It says here).

Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega reappears to call coronavirus 'a sign from God'

President, 74, who had not been seen in public for over a month, has played down crisis, claiming only one Covid-19 death

www.theguardian.com

Not only that, having spent the last few years suppressing social protest and mass gatherings, he is now positively encouraging them.

Nicaragua has reported 10 cases and 2 deaths. The salt is over there ------->

 

[weltweit]

Brazil's Bolsonaro joins anti-lockdown protests

Mr Bolsonaro has clashed in recent weeks with state governors who have imposed lockdowns, denouncing the measures as "dictatorial".

As of Sunday, Brazil had more than 38,000 confirmed cases, the highest number in Latin America.

More than 2,400 people there have died.

..
Journalists have noted that at Sunday's rally the president neither wore a face mask, even though he coughed on occasion, nor gloves - precautions which many other politicians in the region are taking.

He has in the past dismissed coronavirus as "little more than a flu".
..

The president did not wear a mask and was seen coughing
..
Last week, the president sacked his health minister, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, who had backed the lockdown measures.

President Bolsonaro argues that the lockdown measures are damaging the economy and has argued that they should be eased and Brazil's borders reopened.

from 20/04/2020 Brazil's president joins anti-lockdown protests

 

[weltweit]

Is Ghana right to ease lockdown?

Some say Ghana's President Nana Akufo-Addo has taken a risky move, noting that the country has confirmed more than 1,000 known cases of coronavirus.

However, low-income earners such as street traders, have welcomed the lifting of the restrictions - they would have found it difficult to feed their families if it had continued.

..
But in recent days some health experts had been calling for the lockdown to be extended and even widened across the country.

The official data shows that the African continent is still the least affected by the coronavirus pandemic.

from: 20/04/2020 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-africa-47639452