International COVID-19 Megathread

[Mike88]

21 cases reported so far in Portugal. A single person has contaminated 9 people, almost half of the reported cases.

Also, as I write, the Health minister is announcing that several schools and universities will shut down in the North region of country, and visiting hospitals and prisons will be forbidden also in the same region.

By region, the number of cases is as following:

North: 15 cases
Center: 1 case
Lisbon: 5 cases
Alentejo: 0 cases
Algarve: 0 cases
Azores: 0 cases
Madeira: 0 cases.

[seb_pard]

China numbers suggest that they have Covid-19 under control (average 0.3% daily growth in confirmed cases last week, 0.4% for Hubei), how reliable are those numbers?

[Middle-aged Europe]

Germany: 947 cases
- NRW: 484
- Baden-Württemberg: 182
- Bavaria: 148

No deaths.


Italy: 5,883 cases, 233 deaths.

[Middle-aged Europe]

My 92-year old grandma is in the hospital with pneumonia. Fortunately, she's living in Saxony-Anhalt, the only state which continues to be the only one without any confirmed infections so far.

[America Needs R'hllor]

My 92-year old grandma is in the hospital with pneumonia. Fortunately, she's living in Saxony-Anhalt, the only state which continues to be the only one without any confirmed infections so far.

I hope she recovers easily!

[parochial boy]

China numbers suggest that they have Covid-19 under control (average 0.3% daily growth in confirmed cases last week, 0.4% for Hubei), how reliable are those numbers?

Likely fairly reliable. WHO people on location are corroborating that the number of people being hospitalized for respiratory issues in China have fallen massively over the last month, beds are being freed up, the queues of sick people have disappeared...

Whisper it, but it also looks as if the number of new cases on Korea have plateaued. It’s been around 500 a day for the last 10 days ago, so hopefully a sign of things starting to be brought under control

[Mike88]

The 2 main hospitals in Portugal are putting up field hospitals to treat patients with coronavirus:

https://twitter.com/Publico/status/1236593375798837248

#Coronavirus: INEM field hospital next to St. John Hospital, in Porto, where 17 of the 25 confirmed cases in Portugal are:

The government' ban on visiting hospitals, prisons and nursing homes is in full implementation today, and is extended to all 5 districts in the North region. However, workers unions are warning that many prisons in the region are still authorizing visits, as they were informed of the ban by the media and not by an official government paper.

[Penn_Quaker_Girl]

China numbers suggest that they have Covid-19 under control (average 0.3% daily growth in confirmed cases last week, 0.4% for Hubei), how reliable are those numbers?

Likely fairly reliable. WHO people on location are corroborating that the number of people being hospitalized for respiratory issues in China have fallen massively over the last month, beds are being freed up, the queues of sick people have disappeared...

Whisper it, but it also looks as if the number of new cases on Korea have plateaued. It’s been around 500 a day for the last 10 days ago, so hopefully a sign of things starting to be brought under control

The ROK's handling of the coronavirus has been some of the best in the world with regards to response and testing.  

[parochial boy]

Apparently Italy is going full Hubei. Good. Much of the rest of the world should follow suit. It will be easier to slow down now than if we dilly-daddle for another few weeks until things get worse. Epidemics do not get better on their own. --- correction, actually they do get better on their own... after a large % of the population has been infected...

https://twitter.com/yarotrof/status/1236374825175834624

This is how we can beat the virus! It worked in China. Sadly, just like China, Italy took too long to do this. Still it is better than nothing. Let’s hope other countries take suit and remove any leaders who don’t by any means necessary.

Nothing like Hubei actually. They’re still happily running trains between Switzerland and Milan as of this afternoon; people able to leave the regions concerned as long as they have a reason...

[Middle-aged Europe]

Germany has surpassed 1,000 this afternoon.

We have now 1,028 confirmed infections. 484 in NRW, 214 in Bavaria, and 182 in Baden-Württemberg.

Federal health minister Jens Spahn has recommended that any public event with more 1,000 attendees should be cancelled. This would among other things include soccer games, and Bundesliga officials are planning to discuss this soon. A possible compromise is to continue the current soccer season, but to ban all spectators from the stadiums.

[President Johnson]

Germany has surpassed 1,000 this afternoon.

We have now 1,028 confirmed infections. 484 in NRW, 214 in Bavaria, and 182 in Baden-Württemberg.

Federal health minister Jens Spahn has recommended that any public event with more 1,000 attendees should be cancelled. This would among other things include soccer games, and Bundesliga officials are planning to discuss this soon. A possible compromise is to continue the current soccer season, but to ban all spectators from the stadiums.

I was expecting this for Monday.

Also, first German citizen, a 60 year old man, has died in Egypt.

[Penn_Quaker_Girl]

Italy reporting a pretty striking 133 new deaths

https://twitter.com/BNODesk/status/1236704475554988033

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

My god, Italy adds 1,492 new cases and 133 new deaths all in one single report.

That is a 9% deaths from those marginal added cases. Brings the overall crudely calculated fatality rate in Italy up to 5% (366 deaths / 7,375 cases). Not a good sign at all, especially for countries with older populations (like basically all of Europe and USA) especially if the medical system gets overwhelmed like seems to be happening in Lombardy.

https://bnonews.com/index.php/2020/02/the-latest-coronavirus-cases/

[President Johnson]

Italy reporting a pretty striking 133 new deaths

https://twitter.com/BNODesk/status/1236704475554988033

Holy sh*t. This thing is completely out of control now. If warm weather doesn't change the direction we're headed in very soon, this could be another Spanish flu.

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

Report from a doctor in Italy (translated via twitter):

https://twitter.com/V2019N/status/1236678678538383361

https://drive.google.com/file/d/11rJiaY7856DChpqY8_360OQaMeUIsndS/view

We publish the speech on the social networks of Daniele Macchini, a doctor at the Humanitas
Gavazzeni Clinics. An important testimony on the real extent of the coronavirus and on the doctors
in the trenches to face the emergency.

"In one of the constant emails that I receive from my health department on a more than daily basis
now these days, there was also a paragraph entitled" doing social responsibly ", with some
recommendations that can only be supported. After thinking for a long time if and what to write
about what is happening to us, I felt that the silence was not at all responsible. I will therefore try to
convey to people "not involved in the work" and more distant from our reality, what we are
experiencing in Bergamo during these pandemic days from Covid-19. I understand the need not to
create panic, but when the message of the danger of what is happening does not reach people, and I
still feel who cares about the recommendations and people who gather together complaining about
not being able to go to the gym or to be able to play tournaments. soccer, I shiver. I also understand
the economic damage and I am also worried about that. After the epidemic, the tragedy will start
again.

However, apart from the fact that we are literally also devastating our national health system from
an economic point of view, I allow myself to raise the importance of the health damage that is likely
throughout the country and I find it nothing short of "chilling" for example that a red zone already
requested by the Region has not yet been established for the municipalities of Alzano Lombardo and
Nembro (I would like to clarify that this is purely personal opinion). I myself looked with some
amazement at the reorganizations of the entire hospital in the previous week, when our current
enemy was still in the shadows: the wards slowly "emptied", the elective activities interrupted, the
intensive therapies freed to create as many beds as possible. Containers arriving in front of the
emergency room to create diversified routes and avoid any infections. All this rapid transformation
brought in the corridors of the hospital an atmosphere of surreal silence and emptiness that we still
did not understand, waiting for a war that was yet to begin and that many (including me) were not
so sure would never come with such ferocity (I open a parenthesis: all this in silence and without
publicity, while several newspapers had the courage to say that private health care was not doing
anything).

I still remember my night guard a week ago passed unnecessarily without turning a blind eye,
waiting for a call from the microbiology of the Sack. I was waiting for the outcome of a swab on the
first suspected patient in our hospital, thinking about what consequences it would have for us and
the clinic. If I think about it, my agitation for one possible case seems almost ridiculous and
unjustified, now that I have seen what is happening. Well, the situation is now nothing short of
dramatic. No other words come to mind. The war has literally exploded and the battles are
uninterrupted day and night. One after the other, the unfortunate poor come to the emergency
room. They have anything but the complications of a flu. Let's stop saying it's a bad flu. In these two
years I have learned that the people of Bergamo do not come to the emergency room at all. They did
well this time too. They followed all the indications given: a week or ten days at home with a fever

without going out and risking contagion, but now they can't take it anymore. They don't breathe
enough, they need oxygen. Drug therapies for this virus are few.
The course mainly depends on our organism. We can only support it when it can't take it anymore. It
is mainly hoped that our body will eradicate the virus on its own, let's face it. Antiviral therapies are
experimental on this virus and we learn its behaviour day after day. Staying at home until the
symptoms worsen does not change the prognosis of the disease. Now, however, that need for beds
in all its drama has arrived. One after the other, the departments that had been emptied are filling
up at an impressive rate. The display boards with the names of the patients, in different colours
depending on the operating unit they belong to, are now all red and instead of the surgical operation
there is the diagnosis, which is always the same damn: bilateral interstitial pneumonia. Now, tell me
which flu virus causes such a rapid tragedy.

Because that's the difference (now I'm going down a bit in the technical field): in classical flu, apart
from infecting much less population over several months, cases can be complicated less frequently,
only when the virus destroys the protective barriers of our airways allowing bacteria normally
resident in the upper airways to invade the bronchi and lungs, causing more severe cases. Covid 19
causes a banal influence in many young people, but in many elderly people (and not only) a real Sars
because it arrives directly in the alveoli of the lungs and infects them making them unable to
perform their function. The resulting respiratory failure is often serious and after a few days of
hospitalization, the simple oxygen that can be administered in a ward may not be enough. Sorry, but
to me as a doctor it doesn't reassure you that the most serious are mainly elderly people with other
pathologies. The elderly population is the most represented in our country and it is difficult to find
someone who, above 65 years of age, does not take at least one tablet for blood pressure or
diabetes.

I also assure you that when you see young people who end up in intubated intensive care, pronated
or worse in Ecmo (a machine for the worst cases, which extracts the blood, re-oxygenates it and
returns it to the body, waiting for the organism, hopefully, heal your lungs), all this tranquillity for
your young age passes there. And while there are still people on social networks who pride
themselves on not being afraid by ignoring the indications, protesting that their normal lifestyle
habits are "temporarily" in crisis, the epidemiological disaster is taking place. And there are no more
surgeons, urologists, orthopaedists, we are only doctors who suddenly become part of a single team
to face this tsunami that has overwhelmed us.

The cases multiply, we arrive at the rate of 15-20 hospitalizations a day all for the same reason. The
results of the swabs now arrive one after the other: positive, positive, positive. Suddenly the
emergency room is collapsing. Emergency provisions are issued: help is needed in the emergency
room. A quick meeting to learn how the first aid management software works and a few minutes
later they are already downstairs, next to the warriors on the war front. The screen of the PC with
the reasons for access is always the same: fever and difficulty breathing, fever and cough,

respiratory failure etc ... Exams, radiology always with the same sentence: bilateral interstitial
pneumonia. All to be hospitalized. Someone already to intubate goes to intensive care. For others,
however, it is late. Intensive care becomes saturated, and where intensive care ends, more are
created. Each fan becomes like gold: those of the operating rooms that have now suspended their
non-urgent activity become places for intensive care that did not exist before. I found it incredible,
or at least I can speak for Humanitas Gavazzeni (where I work) how it was possible to implement in
such a short time a deployment and a reorganization of resources so finely designed to prepare for a
disaster of this magnitude. And every reorganization of beds, wards, staff, work shifts and tasks is
constantly reviewed day after day to try to give everything and even more. Those wards that
previously looked like ghosts are now saturated, ready to try to give their best for the sick, but
exhausted. The staff are exhausted. I saw fatigue on faces that didn't know what it was despite the
already gruelling workloads they had. I have seen people still stop beyond the times they used to
stop already, for overtime that was now habitual. I saw solidarity from all of us, who never failed to
go to our internist colleagues to ask "what can I do for you now?" or "leave alone that shelter that I
think of it." Doctors who move beds and transfer patients, who administer therapies instead of
nurses. Nurses with tears in their eyes because we are unable to save everyone and the vital signs of
several patients at the same time reveal a fate that has already been marked. There are no more
shifts, schedules.

Social life is suspended for us. I have been separated for a few months, and I assure you that I have
always done my best to constantly see my son even on the days of taking the night off, without
sleeping and putting off sleep until when I am without him, but for almost 2 weeks I have not
voluntarily I see neither my son nor my family members for fear of infecting them and in turn
infecting an elderly grandmother or relatives with other health problems. I'm happy with some
photos of my son that I regard between tears and a few video calls. So be patient too, you can't go
to the theater, museums or gym. Try to have mercy on that myriad of older people you could
exterminate. It is not your fault, I know, but of those who put it in your head that you are
exaggerating and even this testimony may seem just an exaggeration for those who are far from the
epidemic, but please, listen to us, try to leave the house only to indispensable things. Do not go en
masse to stock up in supermarkets: it is the worst thing because you concentrate and the risk of
contacts with infected people who do not know they are higher. You can go there as you usually do.
Maybe if you have a normal mask (even those that are used to do certain manual work) put it on.
Don't look for ffp2 or ffp3. Those should serve us and we are beginning to struggle to find them. By
now we have had to optimize their use only in certain circumstances, as the WHO recently suggested
in view of their almost ubiquitous impoverishment. Oh yes, thanks to the shortage of certain
devices, I and many other colleagues are certainly exposed despite all the means of protection we
have. Some of us have already become infected despite the protocols. Some infected colleagues
have in turn infected family members and some of their family members already struggle between
life and death. We are where your fears could make you stay away. Try to make sure you stay away.

Tell your family members who are elderly or with other illnesses to stay indoors. Bring him the
groceries please. We have no alternative. It's our job. In fact, what I do these days is not really the

job I'm used to, but I do it anyway and I will like it as long as it responds to the same principles: try to
make some sick people feel better and heal, or even just alleviate the suffering and the pain to those
who unfortunately cannot heal. I don't spend a lot of words about the people who define us heroes
these days and who until yesterday were ready to insult and report us. Both will return to insult and
report as soon as everything is over. People forget everything quickly. And we're not even heroes
these days. It is our job. We risked something bad every day before: when we put our hands in a
belly full of blood of someone we don't even know if he has HIV or hepatitis C; when we do it even if
we know that he has HIV or hepatitis C; when we sting with the one with HIV and take the drugs that
make us vomit from morning to night for a month. When we open with the usual anguish the results
of the tests at the various checks after an accidental puncture hoping not to be infected. We simply
earn our living with something that gives us emotions. It doesn't matter if they are beautiful or ugly,
just take them home. In the end we only try to make ourselves useful for everyone. Now try to do it
too though: with our actions we influence the life and death of a few dozen people. You with yours,
many more. Please share and share the message. We need to spread the word to prevent what is
happening here from happening all over Italy ».

[Mike88]

The President of Portugal, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, canceled all of his agenda after a class of students from a school in Felgueiras city where a student tested positive for the virus, visited the presidential palace and took photos with the President, last week. However, the student infected and his own class didn't visited the palace. The decision was made just for security reasons, as the President doesn't have any symthoms and to avoid crowds of events he was to be part of. 

[Tender Branson]

My wisdom teeth are aching.

I’m more concerned about this right now than about Coronavirus ...

[Eraserhead]

My wisdom teeth are aching.

I’m more concerned about this right now than about Coronavirus ...

Extremely relevant.

[urutzizu]

China reported 40 new cases of the coronavirus on Monday, its lowest number since its health commission began publishing nationwide data on 20 January.

Of the 40 cases, 36 were from locked-off Wuhan - while the remaining four were cases imported from Iran. China is quarantining all arrivals from affected regions. So we have gone full circle. China has essentially beat the Virus.

And it shows, one can either take "authoritarian" proactive prevention measures quickly, at a relatively low cost (China outside Wuhan, Singapore, Taiwan, Russia...), or wait and be forced to take far more drastic steps at containment later at a massive cost, both economic and human (Wuhan, Italy, Iran...). Europe seems adamant to take the latter path.

[Sir Mohamed]

China reported 40 new cases of the coronavirus on Monday, its lowest number since its health commission began publishing nationwide data on 20 January.

Of the 40 cases, 36 were from locked-off Wuhan - while the remaining four were cases imported from Iran. China is quarantining all arrivals from affected regions. So we have gone full circle. China has essentially beat the Virus.

And it shows, one can either take "authoritarian" proactive prevention measures quickly, at a relatively low cost (China outside Wuhan, Singapore, Taiwan, Russia...), or wait and be forced to take far more drastic steps at containment later at a massive cost, both economic and human (Wuhan, Italy, Iran...). Europe seems adamant to take the latter path.

That may be one explanation, but the PRC has changed their counting methods multiple times. Also, I doubt these numbers are accurate.

[CumbrianLefty]

But that China is getting on top of the virus seems increasingly indisputable now.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

There's no reason to believe that numbers there have not fallen dramatically. At a regional or local level especially the number of cases in a virus outbreak typically fall as quickly as they rise once they hit their peak. Of course, this is also why one must be careful about declaring this or that response to any outbreak as 'successful' or not.

[CumbrianLefty]

Now 319 confirmed UK cases.

[Middle-aged Europe]

It has happened. Almost two weeks after the beginning of the current outbreak in Germany, North Rhine-Westphalia has reported the first two deaths: One in the county of Heinsberg and one in the city of Essen.

Confirmed infections now at 1,156.
515 in NRW, 256 in Bavaria, and 199 in Baden-Württemberg.