Coronavirus - Overall
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@Mick-Gold-Coast-QLD said in Coronavirus: should I be panicking yet?:
@canefan said in Coronavirus: should I be panicking yet?:
Hopefully the economy will start cranking up soon!
I had a bunch of items unsent from China that all got shipped out today, so this is not idle talk
Just to be sure, when the boxes arrive have Fedex drop 'em in the front yard, and give 'em a good hose over. After they dry off don't unpack 'em anywhere near your computer. That little fan you hear might suck dust and other particles in and they might drift through the tubes under the Ta$man and out an open vent here in Southport, you see, which would be sub optimal.
It will take at least 2 weeks to deliver so it's all good
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@canefan said in Coronavirus: should I be panicking yet?:
@Tim said in Coronavirus: should I be panicking yet?:
From local government:
With the concerted effort of Suzhou people, prevention and control of COVID-19 has produced positive results over the recent month. By February 24, 2020, there has been no new confirmed or suspected case in Suzhou for 7 consecutive days. Jiangsu Province lowered COVID-19 emergency response level from first level to second. However, we must be aware of the severity and complexity of COVID-19 outbreak at the global scale. With confirmed cases surged in some countries, the spread of the disease is yet to be contained effectively. A few countries declared raising the COVID-19 alert level to the highest.
Hopefully the economy will start cranking up soon!
I had a bunch of items unsent from China that all got shipped out today, so this is not idle talk
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@Tim My daughter is in South Korea. They teach online now and its quite hectic. We are really worried. I was in Lagos last week and the Nigerian customs were really on it. Scanning every passenger and had to fill in a form. Flying back, Johannesburg was quite relax. They had the scanner but no personel. Maybe it was 5 in the morning and outside their working hours. If that virus hit any Africa country (specially Lagos with 20+ million) it will be devastating.
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The thing that is really bugging me is why are infection rates in Italy and S Korea skyrocketing yet China is flat-lining?
All possible answers to that are pretty horrible to imagine.
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@Rembrandt said in Coronavirus: should I be panicking yet?:
The thing that is really bugging me is why are infection rates in Italy and S Korea skyrocketing yet China is flat-lining?
All possible answers to that are pretty horrible to imagine.
That's a great visualization page, who's updating that?
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@Kirwan said in Coronavirus: should I be panicking yet?:
@Rembrandt said in Coronavirus: should I be panicking yet?:
The thing that is really bugging me is why are infection rates in Italy and S Korea skyrocketing yet China is flat-lining?
All possible answers to that are pretty horrible to imagine.
That's a great visualization page, who's updating that?
Honestly don't know but it seems inline with official figures. Aussie got a new case in the last day or two, weirdly enough no story on it but it is backed up on government website.
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@Kirwan said in Coronavirus: should I be panicking yet?:
@Rembrandt said in Coronavirus: should I be panicking yet?:
The thing that is really bugging me is why are infection rates in Italy and S Korea skyrocketing yet China is flat-lining?
All possible answers to that are pretty horrible to imagine.
That's a great visualization page, who's updating that?
In December, 2019, a local outbreak of pneumonia of initially unknown cause was detected in Wuhan (Hubei, China), and was quickly determined to be caused by a novel coronavirus,1 namely severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The outbreak has since spread to every province of mainland China as well as 27 other countries and regions, with more than 70 000 confirmed cases as of Feb 17, 2020.2 In response to this ongoing public health emergency, we developed an online interactive dashboard, hosted by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA, to visualise and track reported cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in real time. The dashboard, first shared publicly on Jan 22, illustrates the location and number of confirmed COVID-19 cases, deaths, and recoveries for all affected countries. It was developed to provide researchers, public health authorities, and the general public with a user-friendly tool to track the outbreak as it unfolds. All data collected and displayed are made freely available, initially through Google Sheets and now through a GitHub repository, along with the feature layers of the dashboard, which are now included in the Esri Living Atlas.
The dashboard reports cases at the province level in China; at the city level in the USA, Australia, and Canada; and at the country level otherwise. During Jan 22–31, all data collection and processing were done manually, and updates were typically done twice a day, morning and night (US Eastern Time). As the outbreak evolved, the manual reporting process became unsustainable; therefore, on Feb 1, we adopted a semi-automated living data stream strategy. Our primary data source is DXY, an online platform run by members of the Chinese medical community, which aggregates local media and government reports to provide cumulative totals of COVID-19 cases in near real time at the province level in China and at the country level otherwise. Every 15 min, the cumulative case counts are updated from DXY for all provinces in China and for other affected countries and regions. For countries and regions outside mainland China (including Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan), we found DXY cumulative case counts to frequently lag behind other sources; we therefore manually update these case numbers throughout the day when new cases are identified. To identify new cases, we monitor various Twitter feeds, online news services, and direct communication sent through the dashboard. Before manually updating the dashboard, we confirm the case numbers with regional and local health departments, including the respective centres for disease control and prevention (CDC) of China, Taiwan, and Europe, the Hong Kong Department of Health, the Macau Government, and WHO, as well as city-level and state-level health authorities. For city-level case reports in the USA, Australia, and Canada, which we began reporting on Feb 1, we rely on the US CDC, the government of Canada, the Australian Government Department of Health, and various state or territory health authorities. All manual updates (for countries and regions outside mainland China) are coordinated by a team at Johns Hopkins University.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30120-1/fulltext -
@Rembrandt said in Coronavirus: should I be panicking yet?:
The thing that is really bugging me is why are infection rates in Italy and S Korea skyrocketing yet China is flat-lining?
All possible answers to that are pretty horrible to imagine.
2 week incubation period I would assume. Should expect numbers to plateau 2 weeks after first discovery / media blow up.
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@raznomore said in Coronavirus: should I be panicking yet?:
A major product that we draw upon in my line of work is about to run out in Australia. Loss of work is far scarier right now than a hospital bed.
my town's entire economy is fuuuuucked. We pretty much only have one industry these days. The flow on effects will be felt soon.
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is there any data (I havent seen or looked to deeply for it) around the people that have died from this virus, assume they must be collating that data?
I mean are they healthy folk, or like when flu season is in full swing, it is more the elderly, young kids or those with other health issues already?
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@taniwharugby said in Coronavirus: should I be panicking yet?:
is there any data (I havent seen or looked to deeply for it) around the people that have died from this virus, assume they must be collating that data?
I mean are they healthy folk, or like when flu season is in full swing, it is more the elderly, young kids or those with other health issues already?
Everything I've seen is that it's the latter. 98% of people will just get a bit sick and then recover as per most viral infections.
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@taniwharugby said in Coronavirus: should I be panicking yet?:
is there any data (I havent seen or looked to deeply for it) around the people that have died from this virus, assume they must be collating that data?
I mean are they healthy folk, or like when flu season is in full swing, it is more the elderly, young kids or those with other health issues already?
Old people and those with comorbidities.
Meanwhile more people die in road related accidents per day than have succumbed to this virus so far...
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@Kirwan said in Coronavirus: should I be panicking yet?:
@Rembrandt said in Coronavirus: should I be panicking yet?:
The thing that is really bugging me is why are infection rates in Italy and S Korea skyrocketing yet China is flat-lining?
All possible answers to that are pretty horrible to imagine.
That's a great visualization page, who's updating that?
This is better
And https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-cases/
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@MajorRage said in Coronavirus: should I be panicking yet?:
@Rembrandt said in Coronavirus: should I be panicking yet?:
The thing that is really bugging me is why are infection rates in Italy and S Korea skyrocketing yet China is flat-lining?
All possible answers to that are pretty horrible to imagine.
2 week incubation period I would assume. Should expect numbers to plateau 2 weeks after first discovery / media blow up.
They've changed their definition of 'infected' twice which has had a big effect on the numbers.
China fall in coronavirus cases undermined by questionable data
Experts say decline in new infections is likely but official count also mired in politics
As President Xi Jinping vows to restart China’s economy, a marked slowdown in reported new coronavirus cases is helping his cause.
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On Monday, Chinese health authorities reported only 11 new cases outside of Hubei, the central province where the virus originated. Over the past two weeks, the number of new confirmed cases has dropped by more than 80 per cent.
China’s count has been swung by changes to how individuals are officially diagnosed, leaving experts concerned over their ability to draw conclusions from the figures. “We don’t know whether the case numbers tell us about the real trend in incidents or are just a result of testing practices,” said Benjamin Cowling, head of epidemiology at Hong Kong University.
In the space of a week in mid-February, China’s government switched to a broader measure of diagnosis and then rolled it back again. Many foreign epidemiologists, as well as doctors in China, argued that the broader approach was necessary, as the virus overwhelmed local capacity to conduct diagnostic laboratory tests.
So China’s National Health Commission instructed Hubei to start reporting “clinically diagnosed cases” — those diagnosed with viral pneumonia through a CT lung scan. The new category was an addition to “confirmed cases”, whereby evidence of the virus was found with a nucleic acid lab test kit, and “suspected cases”.
All other provinces continued to report only confirmed and suspected cases. The result was that on February 13, Hubei reported a surge of more than 14,000 new cases — more than 10 times the average number reported over previous days.
“It made a lot of sense for Hubei to switch to this ‘probable’ case definition,” said Prof Cowling. “These tests are difficult, the reagents [used in lab tests] are expensive and not every hospital can do it.”
But the change was revoked by the NHC after less than a week, leading to a sudden decline in Hubei’s infection numbers on February 20. At a press conference that day, an NHC expert explained that Hubei’s testing capacity had “hugely improved” and that “nucleic acid tests were no longer a problem”.
Sceptics point out that the shift in numbers has come after Mr Xi took a more prominent role in the “war” against the disease and flagged the importance of restarting the world’s second-largest economy. The fallout from the virus has taken a heavy toll, with factories across the country prevented from reopening and workers kept away from manufacturing sites.
This has led some experts to question whether the count has become subject to political influence. “Over the last week the virus has become politicised, with Xi Jinping stepping back centre stage,” said Rodney Jones, a veteran Asia watcher at Wigram Capital Advisors. “The dilemma for local governments is that high infection rates would now be seen as directly undermining Xi.”
Bruce Aylward, head of the World Health Organization’s foreign experts’ mission to China, acknowledged questions had been raised over the statistics. But, speaking on Monday at a press conference organised by the NHC, he added: “The decline that we see is real.”
Neil Ferguson, professor of epidemiology at Imperial College London, said he stood by his initial estimate that only 1 in 10 infections in China had been detected. But he added that cases were likely to have declined as a result of the large-scale shutdown of people and businesses.
The view that China’s lockdown has had an impact was shared by a virus researcher in Beijing, who wished to remain anonymous. “Hubei has been doing a blanket search and quarantine of all suspected infected cases, which possibly reduced the transmission rate,” the person said.
As the overall trend points towards a decline, there remain concerns about potential under-reporting outside Hubei. Medical experts in southern Guangdong, the hardest hit province after Hubei, said official figures there were likely to be underestimates.
According to one officer at Guangdong Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention, who asked not to be identified, some cases had gone undetected because local authorities could not fully track migrant workers who had returned from Hubei. He also suspected that the incubation period was probably longer than the current 14-day standard — meaning people who tested negative initially might become ill later. Two hospital staff in the Guangdong city of Shenzhen also said that they were seeing more virus cases than were being officially reported.
It is not just China under scrutiny. There are concerns that Iran has under-reported the spread of the virus within its borders. Iran reported 61 infections and 12 deaths on Monday, an almost 20 per cent fatality rate compared with about 3 per cent in China, implying that dozens if not hundreds of other cases there have gone undetected.
Jianghu Dong, a biostatistics expert at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, said the virus epidemic has been “a big lesson for our government” in China. He added: “We really hope we can set up a transparent [testing and reporting] system.”
Additional reporting by Robin Yu in Hong Kong and Qianer Liu in ShenzhenMy big concern from this article is this:
“The dilemma for local governments is that high infection rates would now be seen as directly undermining Xi.”
I guess all will be revealed in about 7 days