Slitherine

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ORIGINAL: CaptBeefheart

Rader: Good luck to you. Where are you based?

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ORIGINAL: Cap Mandrake

Trusting the Chicoms to accurately report their Covid-19 cases is like expecting Trump AND Obama to play a round of golf and both accurately record their scores.

These are the same homies who suppressed reports of an outbreak, did the same exact damn thing with SARS, disappeared 21 million Chinese cell phone accounts during the time of the epidemic, hid the Tienanmen massacre and the epic disaster of the Cultural Revolution AND put a toxic chemical in dog food to fake protein testing.

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ORIGINAL: Cap Mandrake

"Gangnam style"

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ORIGINAL: Sammy5IsAlive

Thought this was a little interesting. Satellite images of light pollution in Europe - have a look at northern Italy and also Holland and Belgium which seem to be reporting fairly high case numbers proportionate to their populations:

https://www.telesurenglish.net/__export/1511686334659/sites/telesur/img/news/2017/11/26/light_pollution_-_nasa_x1x.jpg_1718483346.jpg


By way of comparision this is a similar image of the US

https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/images/712129main_8247975848_88635d38a1_o.jpg


It may well mean nothing - maybe they just like to leave their lights on in northern Italy.

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ORIGINAL: alanschu

quote:

ORIGINAL: Sammy5IsAlive

Thought this was a little interesting. Satellite images of light pollution in Europe - have a look at northern Italy and also Holland and Belgium which seem to be reporting fairly high case numbers proportionate to their populations:

https://www.telesurenglish.net/__export/1511686334659/sites/telesur/img/news/2017/11/26/light_pollution_-_nasa_x1x.jpg_1718483346.jpg


By way of comparision this is a similar image of the US

https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/images/712129main_8247975848_88635d38a1_o.jpg


It may well mean nothing - maybe they just like to leave their lights on in northern Italy.

There is definitely some regional aspects. You can't quite see it as it's just chopped off, but light map of Alberta is actually pretty intense for its population levels. In part because there was a philosophy of having the area be one of the best lit areas in the world (for some reason...).

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ORIGINAL: Sammy5IsAlive

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ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

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ORIGINAL: USSAmerica

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ORIGINAL: Q-Ball

Looks like US will be #1 in total cases by tomorrow morning; as of right now, just a little behind Italy and China, but we are growing much faster.

Already there as of 6:00 pm, eastern.

It shouldn't be a surprise that, as our diagnostic testing capabilities get rolling in earnest, our positive case count climbs. We *could* be like Russia (and Japan) and neither test nor report, but I'd really feel better with achieving 'ground truth' as soon as possible.

Like stock markets-the uncertainty is the worst part. I'd much rather have 'bad news' (higher case counts via testing) than uncertainty.

Does anybody here with strong Google-fu have access to the denominator of the equation? Numerator= number of cases positive. Denominator= number of (approved) tests conducted overall.

I don't think there is anything complicated behind the rapid increase of cases in the US. The USA covers pretty much the same land mass as Europe. Europe's land mass is split between c.50 (depending on which countries you count) different nations.

As things are being reported at the moment, Italy; Spain; Germany; France and the UK are reported separately. If you transplanted them onto a map of the US they would all fit within your single country. The total cases of those five countries is c224,000.

That said, on the last chart I saw of case increases by region (i.e. showing Lombardy, Madrid, Hubei etc) New York's trend was looking the worst of anywhere. I think it could get very bad, very fast there. More positively Washington and maybe California were looking as if they may have 'flattened the curve'. Will try and find the chart and post it.

Edit - this is the chart I was talking about - I don't know how to embed it so if somebody sends me a PM with instructions I'll edit the post show it shows properly. Even more worryingly for NY it is showing deaths and not cases. In case anyone is wondering Catalonia is essentially Barcalona and Ile-De-France is essentially Paris.

https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/http%3A%2F%2Fcom.ft.imagepublish.upp-prod-eu.s3.amazonaws.com%2F1ca7fac6-6fab-11ea-89df-41bea055720b?fit=scale-down&quality=highest&source=next&width=1260

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ORIGINAL: BBfanboy
That has to be an old chart. The line for New York ends around 10 days into the X axis. New York has been fighting this much longer than this and definitely had its 10th death from the virus more than 10 days ago.

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ORIGINAL: BBfanboy

That has to be an old chart. The line for New York ends around 10 days into the X axis. New York has been fighting this much longer than this and definitely had its 10th death from the virus more than 10 days ago.

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ORIGINAL: obvert

An article responding to the Oxford study from a few days ago I posted that in one scenario stated there could be up to tens of millions already infected with the virus.

This moderates those claims a bit, while also stating some good figures and ranges for what we might expect actual numbers to be. The author is an epidemiologist, Adam Kucharski.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/26/virus-infection-data-coronavirus-modelling

There is growing evidence that, on average, people who show Covid-19 symptoms have a 1–1.5% risk of death. This has been estimated in studies of data from Wuhan, early international cases, and the Diamond Princess (with data adjusted to account for the older age of the cruise ship passengers). But this 1–1.5% risk just tells us what happens to people who have clear symptoms. If, as the above studies suggest, only 20–80% of infections come with symptoms, it would mean that for every 100,000 people who get infected with Covid-19, we would expect somewhere in the region of 200–1,200 deaths (ie between 100,000 x 20% x 1% and 100,000 x 80% x 1.5%).

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ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

We're all aware that Germany has been doing better than many other European countries, and we've discussed possible reasons here.

These graphs from Worldometers are of interest. You can see that the number of deaths in Germany is beginning to rise noticeably. On the other hand it seems that the number of new cases has plateaued. As many have noted in here, mortality lags behind the new cases, which is what we're seeing.

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ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

I like to compare Apples to Apples, so it's my preference to compare per capita figures. I know we're about 340 MM people here domestically, and that a "bad" flu season would be circa 50,000 deaths. That equals 147/MM people here. The far right column in this chart shows whose mortality level is approaching or exceeding that subjective comparative threshhold.

Unfortunately, it looks like Italy is already there and will probably far exceed that threshhold. I would venture that Spain will be there soon too...

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ORIGINAL: Sammy5IsAlive

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ORIGINAL: BBfanboy

That has to be an old chart. The line for New York ends around 10 days into the X axis. New York has been fighting this much longer than this and definitely had its 10th death from the virus more than 10 days ago.

Wikipedia has NY state as reporting total 12 deaths on 16/03.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_New_York_(state)

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ORIGINAL: Sammy5IsAlive

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ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

I like to compare Apples to Apples, so it's my preference to compare per capita figures. I know we're about 340 MM people here domestically, and that a "bad" flu season would be circa 50,000 deaths. That equals 147/MM people here. The far right column in this chart shows whose mortality level is approaching or exceeding that subjective comparative threshhold.

Unfortunately, it looks like Italy is already there and will probably far exceed that threshhold. I would venture that Spain will be there soon too...

I'm not sure if that works though

CDC seems to have on average 500,000 people needing hospital treatment for flu a year in the US. So c. 1.5% of the population or 15,000 per million.

If you apply that to the current US figures for CV19 you get
15000/258 = 58
58 x 4 = 232 deaths/million

If you do the same thing for Italy you get
15000/1333 = 11
11 x 136 = 1500 deaths/million

I appreciate that there are lots of other factors to take into account (as an example the flu numbers may well include repeat admissions for the same individual) but from a purely numerical point of view have I gone wrong with the maths? I'm not a scientist or mathematician by training so I appreciate I may well be missing something fundamental!

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ORIGINAL: witpqs

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ORIGINAL: Sammy5IsAlive

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ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

I like to compare Apples to Apples, so it's my preference to compare per capita figures. I know we're about 340 MM people here domestically, and that a "bad" flu season would be circa 50,000 deaths. That equals 147/MM people here. The far right column in this chart shows whose mortality level is approaching or exceeding that subjective comparative threshhold.

Unfortunately, it looks like Italy is already there and will probably far exceed that threshhold. I would venture that Spain will be there soon too...

I'm not sure if that works though

CDC seems to have on average 500,000 people needing hospital treatment for flu a year in the US. So c. 1.5% of the population or 15,000 per million.

If you apply that to the current US figures for CV19 you get
15000/258 = 58
58 x 4 = 232 deaths/million

If you do the same thing for Italy you get
15000/1333 = 11
11 x 136 = 1500 deaths/million

I appreciate that there are lots of other factors to take into account (as an example the flu numbers may well include repeat admissions for the same individual) but from a purely numerical point of view have I gone wrong with the maths? I'm not a scientist or mathematician by training so I appreciate I may well be missing something fundamental!

He's talking deaths, not hospitalizations. 50,000 or 60,000 is a very bad flu year in the US, 20,000 is a more average year.

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ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

Mortality lags, but you can allow for the lag in the calculations/interpretations.

Pardon my layman's ignorance, but I have much more confidence in the utility and reliability of mortality numbers.

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ORIGINAL: JohnDillworth

Mortality is a lagging indicator and will actually change in the next months and years. Reported infections is probably the best number for predictive analysis

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ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

If we're willing to shovel $USD 2.5T onto this thing as a short-term economic Band-Aide, why not a "Manhattan Project" level of commitment to upgrading our creaky public health infrastructure? It's gotta be done.

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ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

I'm intrigued by the pattern of disease domestically. NYC and surrounds are still circa 60% of our national caseload. For an area of what-give or take-14 million people? So roughly 4.2% of our population has 60% of our national cases.

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ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

We're all aware that Germany has been doing better than many other European countries, and we've discussed possible reasons here.

These graphs from Worldometers are of interest. You can see that the number of deaths in Germany is beginning to rise noticeably. On the other hand it seems that the number of new cases has plateaued. As many have noted in here, mortality lags behind the new cases, which is what we're seeing.

If these numbers are accurate it could be that Germany's death rate will soon level off (unless the number of cases hasn't actually plateaued, but we'll know more about that soon).

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ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

Remember early projections, like the Oz think tank (or university) study that came up with seven scenarios, the best of which had 17 million deaths worldwide? We're still on course to deal with numbers utterly unlike that.

Some of this is in good faith. As JohnD noted above, varying numbers a bit has huge consequences when dealing with exponential equations. But the dadgum media.

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ORIGINAL: Lokasenna


"armchair spreadsheet artists pontificating on a forum."

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ORIGINAL: BBfanboy

A boneheaded stunt in the news: A woman in Philadelphia (I think that was the city) purposely sneezed over a cooler section of produce in a grocery store. Ha ha!
The store has to throw out $35K worth of fresh produce to ensure they will not be held liable if someone gets sick after visiting the store. The woman was turned over to police. Not sure what charges might ensue but the store should be able to sue for damages.
Lets hope stupidity is not so contagious!

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ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

I'm intrigued by the pattern of disease domestically. NYC and surrounds are still circa 60% of our national caseload. For an area of what-give or take-14 million people? So roughly 4.2% of our population has 60% of our national cases.

Case counts in the other big cities: Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston haven't moved nearly that much.

Locally, San Antonio area has less than 100 cases. I can't keep up with individual cases as much these days, but the vast majority of them until recently have been travel-related. Limited community spread. Houston, TX (soon to become the country's third most populous metropolitan area for all you home demographers out there) has a similarly small number. If the trend holds, I'd ask what is different about these urban centers than New York City per se. I have some ideas, but I'd like for the locals to put in their two bits about why they think New York City's metropolitan area is such a hotbed of disease compared to some other really big metro areas in this country.

I think there's more evidence to suggest that there's "New York City and then there's everywhere else in the US." Which may be an encouraging prospect-for everyone not in New York City that is.

All of the major metropolitan areas in this state have been proactive in shutting things down. Most Texas schools were on Spring break the first week in March (typically a week before most of the rest of the country). Many school districts (including my kids') slapped on an extension onto that time during the break. At first, it was until March 20. Then that was extended to April 6. Now it's April 24. So as far as our schools are concerned-we've been in de facto 'lockdown' for 20 days as of today. That will continue another 29 days at a minimum.

Statewide and county/city lockdown mandates have come through in the interim. These 'essential worker only' mandates are in effect at least through April 9 here in San Antonio.

Did New York City serve as an immediate warning for us here in Texas? Or were we watching Italy's agony and extrapolating that back here?

Does this buttress the argument that the United States-with its disparate people and regions-really doesn't operate on a 'one size fits all' national mandate?