COVID-19 Megathread 4: Grandma Got Run Over by the Dow Jones

[Del Tachi]

Anyone know why new cases in New York went up by so much today? Outside of New York, new cases in the U.S. dropped.

New York added a bunch of "probable" deaths/cases backdating all the way back to March 11.  Extremely questionable stuff.  We don't even attempt to count deaths from other respiratory diseases with such a level of precision. 

From the article you quoted:

People whose death certificates don’t mention the virus still are not counted. From March 11 through April 13, 8,184 city residents died of causes not classified as confirmed or probable coronavirus.

I think that's a factual misrepresentation on the part of Poltico (wouldn't be the first time).  From the press release from NYC Department of Health:

A death is classified as probable if the decedent was a New York City resident (NYC resident or residency pending) who had no known positive laboratory test for SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) but the death certificate lists as a cause of death “COVID-19” or an equivalent.

Key phrase being "or an equivalent".  What's an equivalent?  Are all pneumonia deaths from March 11 forward now being counting as COVID-19?  No answer from NYC Health there. 

Do you have any methodological basis for questioning these results or is this more of your wishful thinking/motivated skepticism?

Anytime you have a disease that primarily effects older people with severe comorbidities, its more difficult to determine a singular cause of death.  If an 87-year old with CHF develops rapid-onset pneumonia and dies in the hospital, should it get counted as COVID-19?  Different countries have varying (yet reasonable) standards for who gets counted and who doesn't, which is one reason why death counts in a country like Germany are so low.     

Individual causes of death may be difficult to precisely and accurately identify. But looking at overall statistics, large spikes in number of deaths are pretty obvious, and you can get close to the deaths causes by the pandemic by taking total actual deaths and subtracting expected deaths (based on prior years' statistics).

100% agree.  At some point in the future, the all-cause mortality figures will allow us to model COVID-19 deaths as accurately as possible.  Until then, attributing all respiratory deaths to COVID-19 (like NYC looks like they might be doing) is going to produce a very imprecise measurement.   

[Beet]

Fox News is reporting that sources who have been briefed on details believe initial transmission of the virus was bat-to-human, and that "patient zero" worked at the laboratory, then went into the population in Wuhan.

I do find it suspicious. The virus is 96% similar to bat coronavirus, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), China's only Level 4 bioresearch lab, was studying bat coronavirus. We know that there have been past (minor) viral outbreaks based on employees at labs accidentally infecting themselves. There have also been cases of employees at labs taking animals no longer used for testing, and attempting to sell them at markets. And while natural viruses have certainly emerged in China, they typically do farther south, such as Hong Kong, Guangdong province, Guangxi, Yunnan, or even Vietnam or the Philippinnes. Wuhan is awfully far north. Nor is there any report that bats or pangolins were sold at the Huanan Seafood Market.

Further, early in the epidemic, there was heavy speculation that a graduate student whose name is listed on the WIV website but whose photo and bio were scrubbed, was patient zero. When contacted, WIV initially denied her existence until confronted with Internet evidence from their own website. Then, they changed their story to say she left in 2015 and has been healthy ever since living in other provinces. However, despite this, no one has been able to locate her and the government has not produced her, which would have squashed the rumors. The only thing against this theory is that she hasn't published papers since 2015. But it is curious why she is not produced.

Nonetheless, this is separate from the Fox report.

[100% pro-life no matter what]

I have no idea if this is true or not, but this would be a pretty massive thing to report if you weren't sure about it:

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/coronavirus-wuhan-lab-china-compete-us-sources

[Progressive Pessimist]

Protesters in Michigan have Trump flags and Confederate flags. Suffice to say, this protest is really NOT about Whitmer, is it.

https://twitter.com/tburages/status/1250490683938521093

What is especially disheartening about these protests is the complete lack of will for political activism on the progressive side.  

There should be a million people marching on Washington right now demanding universal testing.  I would totally participate in this even at the risk of personal exposure.  

Why do progressives just want to curl up into a ball right now and fruitlessly hope that Trump magically transforms into a different person rather than actually doing something to stop him?

I'm not all that worried (for now, at least). Democrats are actually turning out to vote, even in spite of the pandemic. Just look at Wisconsin. That election result in itself was worth more than any protest, which as said before would just risk further exposure to the virus anyway at this present time.

[Del Tachi]

Anyone know why new cases in New York went up by so much today? Outside of New York, new cases in the U.S. dropped.

New York added a bunch of "probable" deaths/cases backdating all the way back to March 11.  Extremely questionable stuff.  We don't even attempt to count deaths from other respiratory diseases with such a level of precision. 

From the article you quoted:

People whose death certificates don’t mention the virus still are not counted. From March 11 through April 13, 8,184 city residents died of causes not classified as confirmed or probable coronavirus.

I think that's a factual misrepresentation on the part of Poltico (wouldn't be the first time).  From the press release from NYC Department of Health:

A death is classified as probable if the decedent was a New York City resident (NYC resident or residency pending) who had no known positive laboratory test for SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) but the death certificate lists as a cause of death “COVID-19” or an equivalent.

Key phrase being "or an equivalent".  What's an equivalent?  Are all pneumonia deaths from March 11 forward now being counting as COVID-19?  No answer from NYC Health there. 

Do you have any methodological basis for questioning these results or is this more of your wishful thinking/motivated skepticism?

Anytime you have a disease that primarily effects older people with severe comorbidities, its more difficult to determine a singular cause of death.  If an 87-year old with CHF develops rapid-onset pneumonia and dies in the hospital, should it get counted as COVID-19?  Different countries have varying (yet reasonable) standards for who gets counted and who doesn't, which is one reason why death counts in a country like Germany are so low.     

In what universe is a person with an underlying condition that is exacerbated by contracting COVID-19 not a death attributable to COVID? Trying to determine a singular cause of death is needlessly narrow and no serious public health expert thinks this way. Good lord are you tying yourself into knots to downplay this.

I hope you're being disingenuous here rather than inadvertently straw-manning due to a lack of reading comprehension skills.  If people test positive for COVID-19 and they die before recovering, then those deaths should absolutely be attributed to COVID.  What NYC did this week was retroactively attribute a bunch of old deaths (all the way back to March 11!) where there was no positive test.  I'm sure some of these were COVID deaths, but we can't say all of them were.  I agree that "trying to determine a singular cause of death" in many cases is a fool's errand, but that's exactly what NYC Health is doing with the backdating of cases.

[KaiserDave]

Is the recent spike of cases just the underreported stuff or is there a genuine surge going on?

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Anyone know why new cases in New York went up by so much today? Outside of New York, new cases in the U.S. dropped.

New York added a bunch of "probable" deaths/cases backdating all the way back to March 11.  Extremely questionable stuff.  We don't even attempt to count deaths from other respiratory diseases with such a level of precision.  

From the article you quoted:

People whose death certificates don’t mention the virus still are not counted. From March 11 through April 13, 8,184 city residents died of causes not classified as confirmed or probable coronavirus.

I think that's a factual misrepresentation on the part of Poltico (wouldn't be the first time).  From the press release from NYC Department of Health:

A death is classified as probable if the decedent was a New York City resident (NYC resident or residency pending) who had no known positive laboratory test for SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) but the death certificate lists as a cause of death “COVID-19” or an equivalent.

Key phrase being "or an equivalent".  What's an equivalent?  Are all pneumonia deaths from March 11 forward now being counting as COVID-19?  No answer from NYC Health there.  

Do you have any methodological basis for questioning these results or is this more of your wishful thinking/motivated skepticism?

Anytime you have a disease that primarily effects older people with severe comorbidities, its more difficult to determine a singular cause of death.  If an 87-year old with CHF develops rapid-onset pneumonia and dies in the hospital, should it get counted as COVID-19?  Different countries have varying (yet reasonable) standards for who gets counted and who doesn't, which is one reason why death counts in a country like Germany are so low.    

Individual causes of death may be difficult to precisely and accurately identify. But looking at overall statistics, large spikes in number of deaths are pretty obvious, and you can get close to the deaths causes by the pandemic by taking total actual deaths and subtracting expected deaths (based on prior years' statistics).

100% agree.  At some point in the future, the all-cause mortality figures will allow us to model COVID-19 deaths as accurately as possible.  Until then, attributing all respiratory deaths to COVID-19 (like NYC looks like they might be doing) is going to produce a very imprecise measurement.    

The measurement is already imprecise because there are thousands of people who have died and not been tested!

In New York State in the entire year of 2017 there were 7250 lower respiratory deaths and 4000 pneumonia and flu deaths. New York City found an excess of 3000 respiratory deaths with COVID-like symptoms in the last month and that's not even counting the number of confirmed deaths.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/states/newyork/newyork.htm

The estimate is going to be much less accurate if you don't account for the unattributable and untested deaths. I'm not even sure why precision of the estimates is being invoked here.

[emailking]

Well they might be sure the officials believe that, but that doesn't necessarily mean it happened that way.

[Bandit3 the Worker]

What everyone in the whole country needs to do is get in their cars and all honk their horns at the exact same time to protest not getting tests.

[lfromnj]

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/493027-california-offering-500-in-coronavirus-relief-to-undocumented-immigrants

California to give checks to illegals too,
WTF!

Abolish SALT deduction completely.

[It’s so Joever]

I have my doubts about this virus being a bioweapon or even being from a laboratory.
Firstly, while bats are likely the original source of the virus, pangolins are a suspected vector for the virus which would help explain how it spread to humans. Pangolin meat is unfortunately popular (relatively) in China, and pangolin scales are peddled as medicine. Also, Hubei is a hub for the illegal pangolin trade.
US intelligence also doesn’t seem to buy into the lab-created idea.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/14/covid-19-origin-lab-general-mark-milley

I think it’s more likely that some a***ole who was involved in the pangolin trade got infected with a slightly mutated version (which would become Covid) and spread it to other people unknowingly. It’s even possible this hypothetical patient 0 was asymptomatic which would further spread. This guy may have not even been connected to the Huanan Seafood Market, as it’s believed this virus has been spreading since late November. It’s entirely possible Huanan Seafood market just happened to be the first large cluster.
It’s not impossible it was lab-created, but it still seems unlikely.

[Bandit3 the Worker]

I'm starting to think this virus might actually be seasonal. (We have had some unusual drops in new cases lately if you don't count the 3,778 old cases from New York.)

[Grassroots]

Is the recent spike of cases just the underreported stuff or is there a genuine surge going on?

Unreported cases being dumped at once.

I'm starting to think this virus might actually be seasonal. (We have had some unusual drops in new cases lately if you don't count the 3,778 old cases from New York.)

In the south this is particularly true. Florida has been rather ok despite DeSantis's negligence, and Louisiana has been freefalling in new cases.

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

As a novel virus sweeps across the globe in a pandemic, hordes of former human beings howl mindless as they seek the kill the surviving humans (oops, my mistake) Republicans demand Ohio governor DeWine end the state-wide quarantine.

[Skill and Chance]

Washington State's latest update has only 89 new cases over 24 hours. That's down from over 600 per day at our peak.

https://twitter.com/seattletimes/status/1250573126884360193

89 cases per day is fine for reopening the economy and schools. The west coast pact should release the measures on Washington and see how things go.

After they have already announced schools are closed for the academic year?

[Grassroots]

Washington State's latest update has only 89 new cases over 24 hours. That's down from over 600 per day at our peak.

https://twitter.com/seattletimes/status/1250573126884360193

89 cases per day is fine for reopening the economy and schools. The west coast pact should release the measures on Washington and see how things go.

After they have already announced schools are closed for the academic year?

Yes.

[HisGrace]

Washington State's latest update has only 89 new cases over 24 hours. That's down from over 600 per day at our peak.

https://twitter.com/seattletimes/status/1250573126884360193

89 cases per day is fine for reopening the economy and schools. The west coast pact should release the measures on Washington and see how things go.

Yeah, that seems pretty good. Unless someone thinks we've all got to stay locked up in our houses until there is absolutely no coronavirus anywhere on the globe. Which would not really be realistic.

[Meclazine for Israel]

Latest Active Case Growth data.



Latest growth in line with expectations.

Spain has issues with data reporting. Their New Cases and Recoveries are strangely proportional on the same day. But these two datasets should be two weeks apart. That raises a question mark over the accuracy of their reported data.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/spain/

England does not report recoveries at all anymore. Italy is way (80-90%) underneath on reporting recoveries as well.

The German and US datasets looks pretty clean.

[Gass3268]

Good job morons:

https://twitter.com/ZachGorchow/status/1250452278944899072?s=20

[Grassroots]

Noticed something interesting about Italy's numbers.

New cases per day in Italy is going downward, but it's doing so in an interesting pattern. It's going downward like a staircase, not like a slope. I'm unsure if this pattern is due to reporting flaws as it goes downward, or if the cases are actually fluctuating while overall decreasing. Take a look for yourself:

[emailking]

I have my doubts about this virus being a bioweapon or even being from a laboratory.
Firstly, while bats are likely the original source of the virus, pangolins are a suspected vector for the virus which would help explain how it spread to humans. Pangolin meat is unfortunately popular (relatively) in China, and pangolin scales are peddled as medicine. Also, Hubei is a hub for the illegal pangolin trade.
US intelligence also doesn’t seem to buy into the lab-created idea.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/14/covid-19-origin-lab-general-mark-milley

I think it’s more likely that some a***ole who was involved in the pangolin trade got infected with a slightly mutated version (which would become Covid) and spread it to other people unknowingly. It’s even possible this hypothetical patient 0 was asymptomatic which would further spread. This guy may have not even been connected to the Huanan Seafood Market, as it’s believed this virus has been spreading since late November. It’s entirely possible Huanan Seafood market just happened to be the first large cluster.
It’s not impossible it was lab-created, but it still seems unlikely.

Maybe I'm missing something, but from reading the stories on Fox and CNN, it seems the officials think it may have made the jump to humans while being studied in a lab, but not that it was engineered.

[jimrtex]

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/493027-california-offering-500-in-coronavirus-relief-to-undocumented-immigrants

California to give checks to illegals too,
WTF!

Abolish SALT deduction completely.

How can they document their undocumented status?

[jimrtex]

Noticed something interesting about Italy's numbers.

New cases per day in Italy is going downward, but it's doing so in an interesting pattern. It's going downward like a staircase, not like a slope. I'm unsure if this pattern is due to reporting flaws as it goes downward, or if the cases are actually fluctuating while overall decreasing. Take a look for yourself:

Saturday is higher than Sunday or Monday or Tuesday for the past several weeks.

[Grassroots]

Noticed something interesting about Italy's numbers.

New cases per day in Italy is going downward, but it's doing so in an interesting pattern. It's going downward like a staircase, not like a slope. I'm unsure if this pattern is due to reporting flaws as it goes downward, or if the cases are actually fluctuating while overall decreasing. Take a look for yourself:

Saturday is higher than Sunday or Monday or Tuesday for the past several weeks.

So you are saying what exactly?

[It’s so Joever]

I have my doubts about this virus being a bioweapon or even being from a laboratory.
Firstly, while bats are likely the original source of the virus, pangolins are a suspected vector for the virus which would help explain how it spread to humans. Pangolin meat is unfortunately popular (relatively) in China, and pangolin scales are peddled as medicine. Also, Hubei is a hub for the illegal pangolin trade.
US intelligence also doesn’t seem to buy into the lab-created idea.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/14/covid-19-origin-lab-general-mark-milley

I think it’s more likely that some a***ole who was involved in the pangolin trade got infected with a slightly mutated version (which would become Covid) and spread it to other people unknowingly. It’s even possible this hypothetical patient 0 was asymptomatic which would further spread. This guy may have not even been connected to the Huanan Seafood Market, as it’s believed this virus has been spreading since late November. It’s entirely possible Huanan Seafood market just happened to be the first large cluster.
It’s not impossible it was lab-created, but it still seems unlikely.

Maybe I'm missing something, but from reading the stories on Fox and CNN, it seems the officials think it may have made the jump to humans while being studied in a lab, but not that it was engineered.

Officials are looking into the idea as they should be, but they are finding the theory as unsupported and seem to skew towards the natural origin theory. Also, while there are bat coronaviruses being tested at Wuhan Virology Institute, they don’t genetically match with Covid.
It still is possible that Covid came from a lab, and we should be considering the idea, but it just doesn’t seem likely.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/theory-coronavirus-accidentally-leaked-chinese-lab-2020-4%3famp