International COVID-19 Megathread

[Tintrlvr]

Italy: 378 infections, 12 fatalities

It seems to be stabilizing a bit there. The numbers are still growing but not at the same rate than in the previous days.

I think Italy just has undetected cases. Currently South Korea and Italy have the same number of deaths, but there are 3x the number of reported cases in South Korea as in Italy. Almost certainly there are at least 1,000 cases in Italy when including minor/asymptomatic cases or people who simply have not been tested. South Korea is doing an excellent job of testing everyone, but other countries (Italy, Iran, Japan, etc.) are not.

[Tintrlvr]

It's hard to believe mortality is so different between developed countries. Italy and US have a high rate compared to others (Germany has more confirmed cases than US and 0 deaths?). Especially Italy compared to other European countries is highly suspicious. Indicates there's a much higher number of infected people "flying under the radar". Likely due to a lack of testing. Wouldn't be surprised if the real number of infected Italians is 5 times higher than reported/confirmed. Or even 10 times more.

South Korea is the only country doing truly thorough testing. Mortality rates and infection rates should be based off of mortality and infection in South Korea. Everywhere else (including China) is understating infections.

[Tintrlvr]

On that notes it's possible that the slower spread in Hong Kong and Singapore relative to the colder climates in Europe, North America or Japan and Korea is a positive sign. Although, it's also likely the case that both countries having experienced the SARS crisis just means they were better prepared for something like this.

There isn't really any difference in spread between northern and southern China, though, even though the temperatures are hugely different. Guangdong is one of the larger nodes outside of Wuhan.

[Tintrlvr]

To the people here who doubt China's reports of reducing its new infections to just a few dozen a day -- how would you explain the nearly-equal success of countries like Singapore, Korea (despite Christian apocalyptic cult), and Japan to reduce their new infection rates as well, and with less draconian measures than China at that? With the exception of Korea, none of these countries have faced the exponential growth and spiking death rates seen in the southern European outbreak.

Japan is having "success" for the same reasons the US is reporting dramatically lower numbers than other countries...

I don't know. You can't hide hospitalizations and deaths, at least not in a democracy with a free press. Japan is probably understating cases due to a lack of testing, but not by the huge margins that this seems to imply.

I think a big part of it is the generally less contact-oriented culture in east Asia (bowing instead of shaking hands, no hugs or kisses with friends or acquaintances, etc.). And there is a greater social fear of disease and pandemics to begin with, so people started isolating almost immediately, people who were coughing immediately started wearing masks, people were already more thorough with hand-washing, etc.

[Tintrlvr]

That was the initial UK idea, but the Imperial College projections said that would still lead to a quarter of a million deaths in the UK alone.

Sweden is apparently still taking this approach, as I've heard.

[Tintrlvr]

coterie meeting

I didn't know this word and had to look it up, and initially I thought you tried to write "covfefe meeting" but had a typo.

Not sure if that's a good translation for the Spanish word ''tertulia''

I just googled it. There's no word in English except for "coterie" that I found, but I've never heard anybody use the word "coterie" in my life. Uncommon word.

We would say...

Book/poetry/world news    club/group/meeting/gathering

Possibly you never heard the word ''cterie'' because it has became old-fashioned, or maybe it's only used in England. I usually resort to online dictionaries when I don't know how to translate a word. In this case I was unsure and added ''meeting'', but ''tertulia'' refers to a particular kind of meeting and maybe ''coterie'' is more fitting

"Coterie" is definitely used in American English, too, but is also definitely an unusual word. I don't think it would be used to describe a meeting, though. A "coterie" is a small and exclusive group of people, maybe who are in charge of something or who hold themselves separate from a larger group. It's roughly synonymous with the more common English word "clique" (both direct borrowings from French, of course).

[Tintrlvr]

There aren't frankly enough cops and military in any country to enforce a total, nationwide lockdown. The Chinese could only do it for one province.

Even in Wuhan, you could go out for exercise (at least, according to my colleague whose family lives in Wuhan, as of a few weeks ago).

[Tintrlvr]

Bergamo does also have 3x the population of Lodi so would be expected to have more cases and more potential for growth. Lodi may have just reached near-saturation levels.

[Tintrlvr]

Country with an odd ratio of serious cases and total active cases
data from worldometers, only countries with almost one thousand of active cases

too low, 1% or less
Mexico 1 on 1,151
Pakistan 12 on 1,997
Philippines 1 on 2,165
UK 163 on 26,987

too high, 10% or more
China 466 on 2,004
Iran 3,871 on 29,084
France 5,565 on 42,023

With China, maybe this is just that non-serious cases have mostly recovered while serious cases are lingering.

[Tintrlvr]

Just updating today's data with new predictive graphs. Sunday is pretty quiet, so I will do it again on Monday.

UK



April 11 UK Active Case Curve - Predicted peak of 77,072 Active Cases on April 18

First things first. I have added 8,200 recoveries to the UK data.

I looked at the 'Total Cases' 14 days ago on 28 March 2020 which was 17,089. Since then, these cases have either recovered or died. Given that 8,856 patients have died since 28 March, I have added the difference (8,200) as recoveries.

What does this say about the reported UK data?

It says the numbers are most likely missing something. It is highly unlikely that 50% of a normal population of cases tested on March 28 have died according to the data reported.

Hence the UK dataset needs to be looked at more carefully over time. My suspicion is that if the mortality numbers are correct, then:

• the initial reported cases are under-representative of wider community spread; and
• they are only testing really sick people.

One flaw with this logic is the underlying assumption that all of the deaths since March 28 are people who had tested positive by March 28. While it takes at least a couple of weeks from infection to death, it's a flawed assumption that you have two weeks from a positive test until death. Probably a lot of the deaths are people who got tested when already very sick and died within a few days of testing, if not almost immediately or even whose positive results weren't reported until after they died, which does improve the survival rate of people who had tested positive by March 28.

It is obvious that the UK is not testing anyone but very, very sick patients, though. I do question the logic of this; there doesn't seem to be much value to knowing whether a patient in the ICU in respiratory distress has coronavirus. At this point, it's basically guaranteed that they do. Testing should be focused much more on mild cases where the flu, the common cold, allergies, etc. are also plausible causes and oriented away from hospital emergency rooms. (This also goes for the US, where at least here in NYC the approach on testing is similar.)

[Tintrlvr]

Is it premature to consider this the 'silver bullet' that will finally bring the COVID pandemic in the developing world under control at last?

https://twitter.com/alfonslopeztena/status/1482318783687581701

A new Covid-19 vaccine is being developed by Texas scientists using a decades-old conventional method that will make the production and distribution cheaper and more accessible for countries most affected by the pandemic and where new variants are likely to originate due to low inoculation rates.

The team, led by Drs Peter Hotez and Maria Bottazzi from the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development at Baylor College of Medicine, has been developing vaccine prototypes for Sars and Mers since 2011, which they reconstructed to create the new Covid vaccine, dubbed Corbevax, or “the world’s Covid-19 vaccine”.

Although more than 60 other vaccines are in development using the same technology, Bottazzi said their vaccine is unique because they do not intend to patent it, allowing anyone with the capacity to reproduce it.

The developing world has plenty of vaccines now, and this one is coming far too late to matter. The issue is not vaccine availability, but rather distribution networks as well as, in some areas, hesitancy.

[Tintrlvr]

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?