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weltweit said:
Pretty good progress. The welding seems to be done and now they are putting walls and roofs on.

Well right now it looks like they are having a tea break :)
Click to expand...

It may not be fully complete, but patients are already being moved into the parts that are.
 
Sounds like the genetic sequences for the 2 cases in England have been shared on GISAID, adding to that pool of knowledge.

Not that its a pool I can do anything with directly, I am obviously entirely reliant on expert interpretation of such data. And I wouldnt have any special epectation that any particular sequence will bring with it an interesting new angle to discuss. If the UK samples are like those from other recent sequences, the most obvious thing they will show is the entirely expected level of virus evolution compared to the early samples.
 
Oh yeah, I just checked and the England samples are shown on the GISAID Phylogeny tree:


Again I am not fit to make the best use of this tool but I can still wave my mouse pointer over the tree and see numbers relating to divergence.
 
TopCat said:
Quick summary for the less educated please?
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The maths with the current data does not provide particularly useful predictions.

However, every 5 days the number with the virus doubles.

This coronavirus is killing people at several times the rate of seasonal flu. Experts are predicting the mortality will drop as the numbers add up.

Most people who have died are over 60. Or have preexisting immune or lung conditions.
 
With the twats we have in charge, boasting of 500 beds for this virus is daft. It may be contained in the UK but it may not. I’ve heard from experts tonight that excellent work is being done in richer nations in doing this tracking.

Airport screening simply will not contain the virus but it will catch a few and is a good opportunity to raise awareness and provide further info in case of illness.
 
I attended a talk tonight by researchers currently working on this and they were explicitly coy about making predictions. To the point they repeated several times thats what they were not doing. However, the very first speaker covered the 2009 flu pandemic and how that panned out. This was a talk on specifically coronavirus. The stats from the 2009 pandemic showed a steady increase in cases from Jan ‘09 until the start of the following April where there was a huge spike in cases until it dropped off again with the same month. Will we see a huge spike in March? We dont know but i’m making small, quiet preparations.
 
TopCat said:
Quick summary for the less educated please?
Click to expand...

To do quick justice, I'd need to know what angle you want. I'll assume personal risk angle, let me know if you want something else covered:

Everyone is waiting to see if it can be contained or whether it quickly spreads into a pandemic. A bunch of optimism well and truly faded I dunno, around 10 days or so ago, but I cant say how much longer we will have to wait to see if it becomes a pandemic. It will be defined as a pandemic if sustained spread is shown to be happening in many countries, as opposed to the current situation where cases detected in other countries so far have been sporadic and linked to travel from affected areas of China.

Even if it becomes another pandemic, in practical terms, it still has much in common with all the illnesses that are always out there and pose an extra risk seasonally. So most of the steps and reasonable precautions that people should always try to take in regards hygiene and minimising spread and personal risk will also apply to this virus. All the usual stuff about hand washing and coughs and sneezes, elbows and tissues, etc.

The actual mortality rate wont become clear for ages. And there will be a very large number of factors, many of which we dont understand properly, that will affect the diseases progression in different people. Just like flu and a bunch of other diseases, we will hear plenty of warning that people with various existing health issues may be more at risk of severe disease. But even when there is a great big dollop of truth to that, many people who are theoretically vulnerable will still actually be spared. And sometimes it turns out that the virus actually favours other groups far more and this side of things doesnt really turn out quite as conventional wisdom expects. I just heard about an example of that with this new coronavirus, but I havent been able to look into it properly yet.
 
Part-timah said:
The stats from the 2009 pandemic showed a steady increase in cases from Jan ‘09 until the start of the following April where there was a huge spike in cases until it dropped off again with the same month. Will we see a huge spike in March? We dont know but i’m making small, quiet preparations.
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I dont think that is how I would characterise the shape of the 2009 pandemic over time, but it depends, do you have a link, was that a global figure or a particular country?

I wouldnt want to make a forecast for February, let alone March. Seasonal aspects are expected to feature, but sometimes novel infections dont respect seasonal boundaries so much initially - eg with flu in 2009 the UKs first big spread happened in July, with a peak towards the end of that month that was larger than the later peak at the end of October.

And an additional complication is that the nature of the data tends to change if the outbreak goes past a certain point. Eventually countries stop doing the sort of testing that they did at the start of the 2009 H1N1 outbreak, and are currently doing with this 2019 coronavirus. If this coronavirus becomes a pandemic then they wont be using lab testing resources to try to confirm every case they can any more, diagnosis will become more assumption based, with different methods for obtaining estimates, and different sorts of surveillance.

OK I will make one prediction for February, by the end of it I will have a much better idea of whether its a pandemic or not! If it is one then I dont think we have that long to wait to see further indications of this. But if spread within other countries should happen to remain rather limited by the end of the month, optimism might even start to return.
 
Jump to 3 minutes 20 seconds, information about how well the virus spreads and its fatality rate


Case fatality rate...

Ebola 50 - 60%

SARS 10 %

Coronavirus 2 to 3 % (might be less if you include people who do not seek treatment)


www.bbc.co.uk

BBC World Service - More or Less, Coronavirus

Fact checking claims about the spread of Coronavirus
www.bbc.co.uk www.bbc.co.uk
 
Part-timah said:
Most people who have died are over 60. Or have preexisting immune or lung conditions.
Click to expand...

Actually this is one of those areas I was referring to where conventional wisdom didnt necessarily match early findings with this disease.

For example in the study of the first 99 patients that was published in the Lancet, 51% were said to have an existing chronic illness, but only 1% had a chronic respiratory system disease.

However there are several reasons why I should wait for broader studies in this area and not read too much into the early cases alone. Especially since the vast majority of cases that have happened by now have been due to human-human spread not directly related to the market. But back in the days of this study, 49% of those patients had a direct exposure history with the market (mostly market workers, but also 2 customers). So they arent exactly a typical sample, and similar studies in different places at different times might give different impressions. I've not bumped into any others to compare to the Lancet 99 one yet.

(I suppose I should post a link to that study again even though we've had it before https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30211-7/fulltext )
 
elbows said:
BBCs version of 'its not a pandemic yet but we better start talking about that angle'.

Contains pretty much nothing of note, mostly posting it as a further sign of the moment we are at.

www.bbc.co.uk

Coronavirus: What is a pandemic and why use the term now?

The World Health Organization says coronavirus "can be characterised as a pandemic". What does that mean?
www.bbc.co.uk
Click to expand...

It's comforting that the BBC have ended that headline with a question mark.
 
Are lots of people in the UK wearing masks? I flew on a domestic flight in Turkey and quite a lot of people were wearing them, which made no sense to me.
 
JimW said:
There's been twelve recoveries to one death in Beijing so far so hoping that record will keep up.
Click to expand...
Reportedly odds are much better than that (for you not the virus).

miss direct said:
Are lots of people in the UK wearing masks? I flew on a domestic flight in Turkey and quite a lot of people were wearing them, which made no sense to me.
Click to expand...
Quite a lot of Chinese people (though not most by any means) wearing them in E14 area where I work. Not many on the trains, I've seen one or two. My family haven't experienced any corona virus related racism/panic yet but there are a lot of reports of it so my wife's a bit wary.
 
The report that lead to the 'Germany cases suggest asymptomatic transmission is possible' thing was not strong enough on its own to be proof of that, but now it turns out that the research had another flaw that really undermines this suggestion:

“During her stay, she had been well with no sign or symptoms of infection but had become ill on her flight back to China,” the authors wrote. “The fact that asymptomatic persons are potential sources of 2019-nCoV infection may warrant a reassessment of transmission dynamics of the current outbreak.”
Click to expand...

But the researchers didn’t actually speak to the woman before they published the paper. The last author, Michael Hoelscher of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich Medical Center, says the paper relied on information from the four other patients: “They told us that the patient from China did not appear to have any symptoms.”
Click to expand...

Afterward, however, RKI and the Health and Food Safety Authority of the state of Bavaria did talk to the Shanghai patient on the phone, and it turned out she did have symptoms while in Germany. According to people familiar with the call, she felt tired, suffered from muscle pain, and took paracetamol, a fever-lowering medication. (An RKI spokesperson would only confirm to Science that the woman had symptoms.)
Click to expand...

Science | AAAS

www.sciencemag.org www.sciencemag.org
 
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