International COVID-19 Megathread

[Sir Mohamed]

Now there are reports that the first Covid19 case in France could be dating back to November 2019. For reference, the PRC informed WHO on December 31. Haven't seen US media picking this up yet, but if confirmed, would be a big deal (a friend from abroad sent me th said information).

https://twitter.com/KlimaZen/status/1258424493531430915

[Tender Branson]

Today's Austria update:

15.752 cases that were ever tested positive (+68 compared with yesterday)

  1.445 active positive cases (+8)
     609 dead (+1)
13.698 recovered (+59)

360 are hospitalized (-58) ... and down from a peak of 1.300 patients
  92 are in ICUs (-5) ... and down from a peak of 280 patients

The most interesting part is that ca. 90% of the new daily infections are in Vienna and Lower Austria.

The only death yesterday was also in Vienna.

Active positive cases have slightly risen again yesterday, after dropping almost every day now.

Link

The rise in active cases was a 1-day event it seems.

Active cases dropped by about 100 yesterday, while hospitalizations and ICU cases also dropped by a lot once again.

30-50 new positive test cases each day now, but 150 recoveries.

+5 deaths yesterday though.

[palandio]

Interesting. While on a local scale in some Italian and French regions overmortality has been shockingly high, the outbreak was suppressed in an early stage in most parts of these countries. The hardest hit country so far seems to be Belgium, although the UK could soon overtake Belgium.

[Meclazine for Israel]

OK,

Latest predictions for Active Cases in the major countries.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ (data source)

UK



UK 8 May - Active Cases
Predicted peak of Active Cases: 84,614 – April 24
Recoveries added to curve – 117,000

UK has a slight increase coming. It's been building slowly for a few weeks, but I have few more recoveries able to add which reflects underlying growth in cases somewhere.  One thing is for certain, it is fast becoming the biggest case centre in that part of the world. I would not be surprised if it has a second peak above the first one.


France



France 8 May - Active Cases
Predicted peak of Active Cases: 59,955 – April 11
Recoveries added to curve – 77,500

France on it's way down.


Germany



Germany 8 May - Active Cases
Predicted peak of Active Cases: 66,264 – April 6
Recoveries added to curve – 10,400

Germany looking really good. I simply add the data, and it plots immediately on par.


Spain



Spain 8 May - Active Cases
Predicted peak of Active Cases: 78,610 – April 9
Recoveries added to curve – 34,000

Spain continues to decline slowly.


Italy



Italy 8 May - Active Cases
Predicted peak of Active Cases: 68,528 – March 30
Recoveries added to curve – 81,000

Italy continues to decline. They are starting to report recoveries with 14,000 recoveries add as a catch up in the last three days.


USA



USA 8 May - Active Cases
Predicted peak of Active Cases: 494,087 – April 24
Recoveries added to curve – 570,000

USA has a weekly rhythm of peaks on Thursday-Friday and lows on Sunday-Monday which are gradually losing steam. In two weeks time, the numbers in the USA should start to drop more substantially, but over the last fortnight, numbers have been fairly flat.


Growth Curve

When all the growth curves in Active Cases are plotted together, we get:



All growth curves have been smoothed with 3 point averaging.

[Tender Branson]

New weekly overmortality statistics for Austria (through calendar week 17, April 20-26).

Here's my updated chart (click right for large version).

Source Link (Statistics Austria)

Key aspects:

* The blue area shows the deaths since the lockdown on March 16th.

* Between March 16 and April 26, there were 10.426 deaths in Austrian towns compared with 9.275 on average in the same weeks of 2016-19.

* That is 1.151 deaths more than in the average of the past 4 years, or +12.4%

* In the same time, the government showed 546 official COVID deaths in Austria, which leaves 605 surplus deaths compared to previous years.

* Calendar weeks 14+15 had the highest increases vs. the average of 2016-19, with +15.4% and +14.9%, while the latest CW 17 had a slower increase of 6.8%

* If you look at palandio's overmortality chart of European countries above, Austria had one of the lowest overmortality rates in Europe, along with France and Italy. Especially in weeks 14/15 it was much lower than elsewhere.

[President Johnson]

11,000 new cases in Russia since yesterday. Looks like Russia and Brazil, whose "leader" is in total denial, are on track to become the next hotspots.

[Silent Hunter]

Outside Moscow, and St Petersburg, the Russian healthcare system is pretty poor. It was never that great during Soviet days either.

[CumbrianLefty]

Nearly 600 deaths, again, announced in the UK yesterday.

Those screaming, almost unhinged headlines about "MONDAY MEANS FREEDOM!!!!!!" in the right wing press a few days ago look even more stupid now than they did at the time.

[parochial boy]

Back to normal in Austria

https://mobile.twitter.com/marioschoe/status/1256935332194500608?ref_src=twsrc%5...

[Tender Branson]

Back to normal in Austria

I wouldn't say "normal", but aside from the mask-wearing in supermarkets and a few other things like tourism and short work, it's not much of a difference compared to before.

[Silent Hunter]

346 new UK deaths reported today. Also, the quarantine proposal, which seems very much to be one of those "leak it and see what the reaction is" moves, is a sledgehammer to crack a nut that has already given someone anaphylactic shock.

Also, if we're still running a lot of cases, who exactly is going to come here on holiday?

[Meclazine for Israel]

Back to normal in Austria

I wouldn't say "normal", but aside from the mask-wearing in supermarkets and a few other things like tourism and short work, it's not much of a difference compared to before.

Mothers Day shopping in Joondalup shopping centre yesterday:



Only one person scratching their head.

Learning we have 6-7 Active Cases in our state with 99% recovery, people obviously up to their teeth with this virus and have finally snatched it.

[Meclazine for Israel]

Brazil have few choices with their strategy towards dealing with the Corona-virus.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-08/coronavirus-warnings-brazil-economy-on-verge-of-collapse/12227298

The Government will argue that lockdowns would be more devastating to the population than the virus itself.

They may have backed themselves into a corner and are looking at a trajectory towards 1M cases at the present rate of growth.

[Tender Branson]

Bloomberg article on the Ischgl ski resort fiasco:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-09/ibiza-of-the-alps-under-scrutiny-as-emails-tell-new-virus-tale

Only 1 person is still infected there and under quarantine, while Tyrol as a whole had cases dropping significantly.

Of the 1.200 or so active cases in Austria, about half are in Vienna now.

[Tender Branson]

Sunday morning update:

~40 new cases, ~100 recoveries, active cases dropped to around 1.200

14.000 recovered.

+3 deaths.

Burgenland and Carinthia have zero patients in ICUs left, Vorarlberg just 1 and Salzburg 2.

Salzburg state has not seen a new infection in a week.

[President Johnson]

Meh, Germany's reproduction rate yesterday rose to 1.1. Hopefully this isn't a trend, because it means the numbers start rising again.

[CumbrianLefty]

Almost universal agreement that the "new" government messaging is nonsensical.

"Stay Alert" - meaning what exactly? "Control The Virus" - how do you even "control" a virus FFS??

Seriously, who came up with this utter cack?

[Silent Hunter]

Meh, Germany's reproduction rate yesterday rose to 1.1. Hopefully this isn't a trend, because it means the numbers start rising again.

Isn't the R figure based on comparing cases recorded per day? Also, it's a flawed measure, because no-one infects 1.1 people.

[Silent Hunter]

Almost universal agreement that the "new" government messaging is nonsensical.

"Stay Alert" - meaning what exactly? "Control The Virus" - how do you even "control" a virus FFS??

Seriously, who came up with this utter cack?

Not really much better than the previous one. Those dying in care homes were hardly going clubbing after all.

[Tender Branson]

My state, Salzburg, is almost Corona-free.

No new infection since one week, 37 active cases left (-4 since yesterday, of which 28 are in hospital).

2/6 districts have 0 known cases left. My district has 10 cases left.

All French ICU patients that were flown to the Salzburg City hospital for care have recovered and were flown back to France.

https://www.salzburg.gv.at/corona-virus

[Former President tack50]

Meh, Germany's reproduction rate yesterday rose to 1.1. Hopefully this isn't a trend, because it means the numbers start rising again.

Isn't the R figure based on comparing cases recorded per day? Also, it's a flawed measure, because no-one infects 1.1 people.

That's not how maths work I am pretty sure. Iirc an R of 2 would mean that every person infects 2 people in turn right? Therefore an R of 1.1 should mean that on average each person would infect 1.1 other people. Or if you prefer integers, that a group of 10 people on average would turn on to infect 11 others.

Or for the more mathematically inclined, the equation would be something like f(x)=R^n where R would be the R value and n would be the "generation" correct? (basically a function of time)

I am not an epidemiologist or really know what R value is though, so anyone can correct me if I am wrong.

[Silent Hunter]

Yes, I know that's how mathematics work. An integer measure, say 10/11, would be easier to understand.

Also, the R figure is an average that masks huge variations even in a single community.

[palandio]

Meh, Germany's reproduction rate yesterday rose to 1.1. Hopefully this isn't a trend, because it means the numbers start rising again.

Personally I would wait for the next days and see.

1.1 is only an estimate for the real reproduction rate. This estimate is based on daily new infection numbers which for the most recent days are using a now-cast that extrapolates past trends. Additionally a 4-day averaging method is used although reporting oscillates in a 7-day pattern.

That being said it is true that for the past few days the relative decline of new reported cases compared to the week before has become less. (But there is still a decline in new cases!) If this accurately reflects the ground truth, then it would be a sign of the reproduction rate going up.

This might be the effect of certain social inhomogeneities. In most parts of the society the (potential) infection rate has been very low due to social distancing and hence the spread of the virus has been drastically reduced. But in some parts of society it is more difficult to keep down the (potential) infection rate and now the virus is spreading particularly in these places: Elder care facilities and residential camps for foreign meat factory workers. In fact at least three local hotspots are at meat factories where in each case several hundred workers are infected. Regarding the elder care facilities for a long time mass testing was not paid for by the public health insurance and instead only a handful of counties paid for it by themselves. Some days ago that has thankfully changed and now more and more elder care facilities are systematically tested.

Edit: Not only elder care facilities and meat factories, of course. I forgot to add asylum seekers' mass accomodation. It should go without saying that I don't blame elders, asylum seekers and meat factory workers for the conditions they have to live in.

[Silent Hunter]

The range given in the Robert Koch Institute report was between 0.90 and 1.34.

[Middle-aged Europe]

The new Robert Koch Institute numbers are a bit worrisome, although there's still hope that they turn out to be a statistical fluke (we already had a similar one a while back).

On the other hand, it wouldn't be totally implausible if infection rates are on the rise again. On May 1, before most of the recent restriction liftings hadn't even taken effect, I was on a stroll in a park in Berlin. I witnessed a larger group of people playing table tennis there, another group of maybe six or seven people was getting very close to each other to make a selfie of themselves. A group of maybe four police officers were walking by, not doing or saying anything despite the fact that both aforementioned groups were in violation of standing ordinances. Maybe a month earlier, the police would have approached them and asked them to disperse. But now, nobody was giving a sh**t any longer. There's definitely a bit of a "well, we tried the restriction thing out for a while, but enough is enough and from now on we just let it run its course" attitude going around.

At the same time, anti-lockdown protest have gotten larger and angrier in Germany, despite the fact that the restrictions continue to be progressively lifted. I can remember a least three or four seperate reports of incidents where journalists were physically assaulted by such protesters. If they're that aggressive now, what would happen in case of a second, even more severe infection wave which leads to a complete reconsitution of restrictions? It would potentially be a powder keg waiting to explode.

Now, I don't want to sound like an alarmist. I'm just painting the worst-case scenario. So, let's hope of the R figure is nothing more than a statisitical fluke again.