Corona Virus

[begreen]

We still have much to learn about the nature of this novel virus.

Mystery In Wuhan: Recovered Coronavirus Patients Test Negative ... Then Positive

NPR interviewed four residents of Wuhan who contracted the virus, recovered — but then had a retest that turned positive. What does that mean for China's recovery from COVID-19?

www.npr.org

 

[CaptSpiff]

We had a little clinic down town that tried but closed because the numbers weren't there. I wouldn't expect them or anyone else in the "industry" to build 1300 bed units in 8 days.
If it's to a point of national security, then those involved to that end would be involved.

I'm thinking the NYC Jacob Javits convention center was re-purposed and outfitted in about that time, and even 2900 beds.
By the wonderful folks in the NY National Guard.

 

[CaptSpiff]

We still have much to learn about the nature of this novel virus.

Mystery In Wuhan: Recovered Coronavirus Patients Test Negative ... Then Positive

NPR interviewed four residents of Wuhan who contracted the virus, recovered — but then had a retest that turned positive. What does that mean for China's recovery from COVID-19?

www.npr.org

This NPR article is an eye opener:
In February, Wang Chen, a director at the state-run Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, estimated that the nucleic acid tests used in China were accurate at identifying positive cases of the coronavirus only 30%-50% of the time.

I keep hearing that the Govt of China is fudging the numbers. Reading the article make me think they have no real idea what their numbers are.

Hoping our promised "15 minute" tests have better accuracy!

 

[Medic21]

True to a point... Blew my acl a year and a half ago; called and saw the family doc, sent me to the specialist, who sent me for an MRI and then replaced it. Yes, it needed approval; but in a completely government run operation I'd probably still be waiting for surgery because you can "live" with a blown acl... Maybe that's a little exaggerated, but I believe the private sector can do anything more efficiently than government. I think we have the right idea in this country, it's just poorly executed - too much special interests and pork...

I’ll give you the other side of it. I pick up grandma after being on a ventilator for sepsis and taker back to the nursing home. Then I pick her up 16 hours later and put her back in a ventilator and she goes back into the icu. Difference is the hospital can’t bill because she was admitted again within 24 hours but, the only reason she was discharged was because her ICD code only allowed so many days of admission, not because the dr wanted her to be discharged.

I see this every shift I work.

 

[begreen]

This NPR article is an eye opener:
In February, Wang Chen, a director at the state-run Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, estimated that the nucleic acid tests used in China were accurate at identifying positive cases of the coronavirus only 30%-50% of the time.

I keep hearing that the Govt of China is fudging the numbers. Reading the article make me think they have no real idea what their numbers are.

Hoping our promised "15 minute" tests have better accuracy!

I am sure they are making mistakes and learning along the way. There is a lesson to be learned here, the need for truthfulness, timeliness and openess so that science can be done properly. That is an important lesson for all countries.

 

[Woody Stover]

I dont believe we came from monkeys. Guess I have no brain

Various claims are made that nearly half the US citizens do not believe in evolution including the VP.

When he was our governor, he espoused the theory that the space dudes engineered us, which got him many votes from the progressive population here.

A lot of people are likely afraid to handle or eat the produce right now, I suspect.

Wash your produce, I am not eating salads more like cauliflower broccoli etc veggies that we cook

I remember years ago, before there was much organic food available, reading about washing produce in bleach water to remove pesticides. That would surely kill the virus. I don't recall the concentration of the solution.
For many years we've been using a vegetable steamer basket or double-boiler pot. I'd think that would kill the virus. But we don't steam 'em real long, we leave 'em crispy to retain nutrients so I don't know if that's long enough.

Stay home for two weeks and drink whiskey, it’s like hand sanitizer for your insides.

Naturally, that was my first inclination, but then I remembered that it also weakens the immune system. We all have to make sacrifices in times like these.
They say that for alcohol to be a good disinfectant, it needs to be a concentration of at least 2/3. I've got some but $60+ for a bottle of hand sanitizer seems a bit steep.

 

[festerw]

I remember years ago, before there was much organic food available, reading about washing produce in bleach water to remove pesticides. That would surely kill the virus. I don't recall the concentration of the solution.
For many years we've been using a vegetable steamer basket or double-boiler pot. I'd think that would kill the virus. But we don't steam 'em real long, we leave 'em crispy to retain nutrients so I don't know if that's long enough.

2 things,
1. Organic produce doesn't necessarily mean no pesticides. Unless you're growing it yourself (and even then) assume it needs washed anyway.
2. Bleach while effective needs an extremely long contact time to be effective against some viruses. 10 minutes is the recommended and in that time the surface needs to stay wet to be effective.

Steam should be better but I don't know enough about that as a disinfectant to be sure.

 

[kennyp2339]

Naturally, that was my first inclination, but then I remembered that it also weakens the immune system. We all have to make sacrifices in times like these.

Possibly the most sensible thing you have said so far in 2020

 

[Woody Stover]

Possibly the most sensible thing you have said so far in 2020

Me? Sensible??! There must be some mistake..

 

[begreen]

Long tangent on healthcare has been moved here:

Healthcare

The reasons are known. CDC budgets cut. CDC pandemic response team cut. Advance CDC epidemiologist in China, cut. Stock piles of masks, ventilators, cut. Just in time supply chains sound good when one wants to maximize efficiency and profit, but that model doesn't fit for health care. The...

www.hearth.com

Let this thread stay on the topic of the SARS- CoV-2 virus.

 

[MTY]

Locally there have been announcements of deaths due to the virus. 3 people in a couple of days, all 80-90 years old. I hope it has not found its way into a care center.

 

[SpaceBus]

How China's 'Bat Woman' Hunted Down Viruses from SARS to the New Coronavirus

Wuhan-based virologist Shi Zhengli has identified dozens of deadly SARS-like viruses in bat caves, and she warns there are more out there

www.google.com

 

[SpaceBus]

Locally there have been announcements of deaths due to the virus. 3 people in a couple of days, all 80-90 years old. I hope it has not found its way into a care center.

The death toll is up to three here in Maine as well.

 

[Grizzerbear]

My aunt in laws father is in a coma I learned this weekend from the virus. Apparently him and his wife and a few other of his family members had been somewhere in Texas. Came back home.... felt ill...so they went to the hospital in Springfield and they confirmed his case and told his wife to go home and quarantine for 14 days. I heard yesterday she has been confirmed to have it now as well but so far she is doing just fine. He has had heart/health problems before this that made his case worse. What I heard friday was that they dont believe he is going to make it. His son, wife and a newborn went with them to Texas.....no word if they have it as well.

 

[Ashful]

Very sorry to hear that, Griz. Unfortunately, there may be more of these tales posted in the next few weeks.


One thing I don’t understand in all of the discussions of mortality rate is why people keep dividing the number of cases ending in death by the number of new (incomplete) cases. Mortality rate should be number of cases ending in death divided by number dead plus number recovered. If you were diagnosed yesterday, and your disease has not run it’s course, you are not part of the mortality rate stat, yet.

In the USA, it is 2500 dead out of 7000 completed cases, so a mortality rate of 36%. That may go up or down as more cases terminate in recovery or death, and change even more now that testing is more wide-spread, but this is the number today. How does 36% keep getting quoted as 1% - 3%?

 

[WinterinWI]

In the USA, it is 2500 dead out of 7000 completed cases, so a mortality rate of 36%. That may go up or down as more cases terminate in recovery or death, and change even more now that testing is more wide-spread, but this is the number today. How does 36% keep getting quoted as 1% - 3%?

Are you really trying to imply that the mortality rate for this virus is 36%? If so, you probably have a job waiting for you at one of the fabulous media outlets.

# of completed/recovered cases is unknown, as not everyone that gets it goes in for treatment. Anyone claiming they know what the mortality rate is guessing.

The mortality rate could be determined amongst those who seek treatment. Still not an applicable number to the population at large.

Total number of deaths due to the virus is easy to determine. The denominator (recovered + dead cases) is not.

 

[peakbagger]

I am glad this thread went back to Corona Virus with the Health Care discussion being given its own thread.

Now back to CV-19.

Sadly the mortality rates are cases that have been in the system for 2 to 3 weeks. These people were exposed before the fed and most of the most impacted states realized that CV-19 was in the population. Given the significant poor decisions by the administration, testing got delayed and still is lagging so the extent of the spread was and still is unknown. Even the new instant Abbott Labs test is not going to really get into heavy distribution until late April and even then its going to get rationed for a couple of months. Until then its only the rich and the folks in the heaviest impacted urban areas that might see it.

This virus got its start on the East and West coasts and is going to burn its way into the central US establishing "beachheads" in central US urban areas. The current administration's base is generally regarded as poor and rural and that base has not even seen a major impact. Plenty of healthy "Typhoid Mary's" have already spread out into the general population in the last month and its just matter of time before they start up new beachheads. Coincidentally this just happens to line up with the November election.

Folks want certainty in their lives, the human brain is wired to make connections between random data to make correlations that do not exist and are no more than random chance. The current statistics may be better than nothing but not by much. In the short term the best approach is slow possible transmission down by social distancing and non essential work bans and possibly quarantines in the most impacted areas until testing is more widely deployed and treatments for those infected are proven. Eventually a vaccine will get made but its long after this pandemic is slowed down.

 

[Medic21]

I am glad this thread went back to Corona Virus with the Health Care discussion being given its own thread.

Now back to CV-19.

Sadly the mortality rates are cases that have been in the system for 2 to 3 weeks. These people were exposed before the fed and most of the most impacted states realized that CV-19 was in the population. Given the significant poor decisions by the administration, testing got delayed and still is lagging so the extent of the spread was and still is unknown. Even the new instant Abbott Labs test is not going to really get into heavy distribution until late April and even then its going to get rationed for a couple of months. Until then its only the rich and the folks in the heaviest impacted urban areas that might see it.

This virus got its start on the East and West coasts and is going to burn its way into the central US establishing "beachheads" in central US urban areas. The current administration's base is generally regarded as poor and rural and that base has not even seen a major impact. Plenty of healthy "Typhoid Mary's" have already spread out into the general population in the last month and its just matter of time before they start up new beachheads. Coincidentally this just happens to line up with the November election.

Folks want certainty in their lives, the human brain is wired to make connections between random data to make correlations that do not exist and are no more than random chance. The current statistics may be better than nothing but not by much. In the short term the best approach is slow possible transmission down by social distancing and non essential work bans and possibly quarantines in the most impacted areas until testing is more widely deployed and treatments for those infected are proven. Eventually a vaccine will get made but its long after this pandemic is slowed down.

Well, since it uses one of tens of thousands of platforms already in Drs offices, ERs, etc and they will be shipping 50,000 a day by Thursday I think you are wrong. In fact our shipment of them for the ambulances will be here tomorrow.

 

[Ashful]

Are you really trying to imply that the mortality rate for this virus is 36%? If so, you probably have a job waiting for you at one of the fabulous media outlets.

Simple math. Try it sometime. 2500 dead out of 7000 completed cases = 36%. My ten year old can do that math.

You can argue about the validity of those published numbers, but those are the only numbers we have today.

 

[semipro]

One thing I don’t understand in all of the discussions of mortality rate is why people keep dividing the number of cases ending in death by the number of new (incomplete) cases. Mortality rate should be number of cases ending in death divided by number dead plus number recovered. If you were diagnosed yesterday, and your disease has not run it’s course, you are not part of the mortality rate stat, yet.

In the USA, it is 2500 dead out of 7000 completed cases, so a mortality rate of 36%. That may go up or down as more cases terminate in recovery or death, and change even more now that testing is more wide-spread, but this is the number today. How does 36% keep getting quoted as 1% - 3%?

View attachment 258785

The metric you suggest does seem to make more sense to me but the devil is in the details, in this case, the definitions.
What you're referring to seems to be most similar to the CDC's "Death to Case Ratio" defined here:
(broken link removed to https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dsepd/ss1978/lesson3/section3.html)

 

[WinterinWI]

Simple math. Try it sometime. 2500 dead out of 7000 completed cases = 36%. My ten year old can do that math.

You can argue about the validity of those published numbers, but those are the only numbers we have today.

Sigh. If you really want to believe this virus kills 1 in 3 then have at it.

 

[Ashful]

Sigh. If you really want to believe this virus kills 1 in 3 then have at it.

That’s not what I said. I’m simply pointing out that the quoted numbers of 1% to 3% are not based on the number of deaths divided by the number of completed cases. If you divide the number of recorded deaths by the number of known completed cases, which would be the truest definition of mortality rate, then the number is 36%.

We all know there are many reasons that number is flawed, most notably the lack of complete test data. But from where on earth do they make the conclusion that the rate is 1% for the USA, versus 3.4% for China, based on these numbers? Dividing the number of deaths into the number of known cases, when the majority of those cases have not yet reached conclusion, is a completely meaningless number. That’s all I was saying.

 

[Ashful]

The metric you suggest does seem to make more sense to me but the devil is in the details, in this case, the definitions.
What you're referring to seems to be most similar to the CDC's "Death to Case Ratio" defined here:
(broken link removed to https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dsepd/ss1978/lesson3/section3.html)

Kinda... but even that states “new cases in a time period”.

Right now, the published numbers state that 36% of the people who have been confirmed to have had Corona virus long enough to reach a final outcome (death or recovery) have terminated in death, and 64% of those recorded cases have terminated in recovery. No need to argue over definitions in that pretty simple statement, all we can debate is the validity of the published data, or how many more undiagnosed or unconfirmed cases there may be.

 

[SpaceBus]

This is really serious, what this really means is that 1 in 3 people who develop symptoms will die. All of you who still continue to spread the rhetoric that the virus isn't deadly will probably die from it.

 

[mcdougy]

The true rate as ashful is stating will not be known for a long time. Simple as to why as well......to be confirmed recovered by definition, you need to test negative twice within a 24hr period. The lack/backlog of testing capacity currently is not allowing for the true number.
Many, possibly 80% or more of people testing positive are told to go home and recover. I'm not sure about you, but if I started to feel recovered , I think the last place I would be heading is back "out" to be confirmed as recovered.
Until this new test with fast results come into play, the true negative test result is somewhat eluding.
Also I'm not sure how all countries are collecting their data, as in , confirmed positive numbers or are they adding presumed positive in the number? I'm thinking that's why your seeing politicians and doctors having different outlooks.
The data is a mess.