International COVID-19 Megathread

[100% pro-life no matter what]

While 80 people have died, only 59 have actually recovered and been released from hospital according to the statistics.

Here is a take on this from the flutrackers forum:

Now 2500+ confirmed cases in China with 80 deaths....and 51 discharges. 51. Really? That doesn't even seem possible. How could they have had so few discharges? It becomes even worse when you consider that 28 of the first 41 cases have been discharged, so only 23 other people have recovered from this virus in all of China? I can think of a few possibilities:

1. This virus is much more severe than reported. This seems unlikely, given that Nepal has discharged its case, Japan has discharged at least one, and Thailand has discharged 5 of 8. This wouldn't be happening if this virus really had anywhere near the 60% CFR that is computed using only cases that have resolved.
2. China is keeping most recovered patients in the hospital as a precaution because they're not really sure that they're not carrying the virus.
3. The case definition or the testing regime in China are so fouled up that in order to be confirmed, you have to be so sick that you really have a 60% chance of dying. If this is true, it means that 1500 people are going to die from this virus in the next week. I think this is probably unlikely as well, but possible.
4. China is massaging the numbers to under report the total case count by replacing each discharge with a new case, keeping the total number hospitalized correct, but not having to report the new case. The problem with this explanation is that if there are only 23 of these other recoveries in China, at some point someone would find 24+ survivors of the virus (on Weibo?) and severely damage China's credibility.
5. A slightly more severe version of #4: So many people are ill that authorities cannot keep track of which patients are confirmed and which are not, so they can't accurately report the discharge of confirmed cases.
6. You can't discharge a case if you never hospitalize it. Late in the 2003 SARS outbreak, when the number of actual confirmed ill cases worldwide had dropped to a few dozen, the USA count of ill suspected cases began to exceed the actual number of confirmed cases worldwide. The CDC was reporting about 75 suspected cases with only about 30 discharges. It took a few weeks to determine that the US was only reporting a case as discharged if it had actually been hospitalized. Cases that were so mild that they didn't need to be hospitalized (in this case, because they weren't SARS) had been excluded from the discharge count. The CDC in 2003 made a sudden adjustment once this was detected, and the US discharge count jumped up from 30 to about 70, bringing its numbers in line with the world. Perhaps China's nCoV discharge count will make a similar jump in coming days.

Personally, I'm guessing #2, followed closely behind by #4 or #5. Right now, this anomaly is worsening by the day and prevents any attempt to calculate a CFR for this virus.

There could be one other option:

-The illness peaks quickly, and death (if fatal) comes relatively early in the course of the illness, but it takes survivors a while to fully recover.  Maybe different countries are using different standards of what is no longer "sick".

[100% pro-life no matter what]

You kind of cut your post off there mid-thought.

Everyone is focusing on China vs. the Rest of the World. Let's look at Hubei Province vs. the Rest of China. The death rate compared to number of cases reported is significantly worse in Hubei than it is Rest of China. It makes me wonder if this has some kind of intensity factor, because taking a simplistic face value look at the numbers, "Rest of China" with more than half the cases should have all things being equal 150 to 200 deaths.

Hubei Province - 11177 cases, 350 deaths
Rest of China - 6028 cases, 11 deaths
Rest of World - 181 cases, 1 death

That tells me that the case count in Hubei may be exponentially higher with the non-severe cases going unreported.  The non-Hubei China death rate suggests almost 200K cases in Hubei.

[100% pro-life no matter what]

Western Australia had 37 cases detected in the community today, the highest number in two years.

1 person is in hospital.

37 New Community Cases

https://youtu.be/MB9GYi0MNhc

Total panic stations, masks everywhere or you get arrested.

You are not allowed into any shops or restaurants without a digital vaccine certificate showing evidence of double or triple vaccination.

Man arrested, charged and faced Court yesterday for using a jpg if a friends certificate.

I thought Australia had given up on this sort of thing and COVID was widespread? I guess Western Australia is still zero-COVID but the rest of Australia is lax?

Western Australia is so isolated geographically by desert that they've been able to largely maintain Zero Covid, even as the other states have started to accept it.  They'll have to give up sooner or later, though!