Coronavirus: How dangerous a threat?

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Governor Newsom (California) has released their broad plan to start reopening the state. Obviously testing and more testing is the first requirement. They are hopeful of a new serum test will work for the virus and that they can ramp up production of it with quick results. Next is a reliable supply of PPE. After that they need to see 2 weeks of declining numbers of both hospitalization and ICU patients. Then they start to very, very carefully start allowing things to reopen. The Governor said don't even ask about a time frame until May when they are hopeful to see the first two things in place. After that is a reliable and approved treatment which will start to allow even more things to start reopening. Governor Newsom also said no mass gatherings in California until there is herd immunity and a vaccine.
 
Starting tomorrow, masks are now mandatory in my county while in a grocery store or other place of business. The potential fine is $500 for a violation.
The Governor said don't even ask about a time frame until May when they are hopeful to see the first two things in place. After that is a reliable and approved treatment which will start to allow even more things to start reopening. Governor Newsom also said no mass gatherings in California until there is herd immunity and a vaccine.
The last time the Rose Bowl was not held in CA was 1942 after Pearl Harbor. I am tired of watching Wisconsin lose in Pasadena, so I am fine if we skip my annual New Year's day misery.
 
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Starting tomorrow, masks are now mandatory in my county while in a grocery store or other place of business. The potential fine is $500 for a violation.
The last time the Rose Bowl was not held in CA was 1942 after Pearl Harbor. I am tired of watching Wisconsin lose in Pasadena, so I am fine if we skip my annual New Year's day misery.


I can understand that although I saw an article that was saying colleges may not reopen campuses until after a vaccine is found. Likely meaning no college sports until after a vaccine is found.

I'll be surprised if the governor where I live makes masks mandatory (local government won't), however, I did just get a homemade mask from a friend who is making them. So at least I know have one.
 
I was surprised by your post that there is many asymptomatic in elderly people in that place.

On the Diamond Princess cruise ship, the proportion of positive people with no symptoms was greater for people > 50 years than for younger people. It was about 50% or more for all age groups up to 80+.

The wet market is the obvious source, the conditions there are like a laboratory for new diseases - so it makes sense.

There has been a paper published by Chinese scientists claiming that the virus originated from a nearby lab studying bat viruses. The presence of a lab nearby is not proof, of course, but another claim is that there were no horseshoe bats for sale in the market, nor any in the wild anywhere close to Wuhan. I don't know, though, how they established there were no bats in the market (did they go around interviewing all the vendors? would you trust a vendor to admit selling bats at this point?), and even if that was the case, the virus might have jumped from a bat into some other animal sold at the market.

Anyway, it doesn't really seem to matter which scenario is the correct one.

Some depressing news, if it applies widely. A friend of mine says two friends of his have recently applied for unemployment, and are now getting regular checks. As a result of this experience, neither has any plans to return to work when that becomes possible, but want to stay on unemployment permanently.

The town of Vo, in Italy, tested all 3300 of its inhabitants on March 3, and quarantined all who tested positive. This was in addition to a general lockdown. They found 90 positives, about 3% of the town's population, more than half of which were asymptomatic. Nine days later, they tested everyone again. They found just six positives. The aggressive testing clearly stopped the spread of the virus almost entirely. The results also indicated the few new positives resulted from transmission by asymptomatics.
 
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It seems some countries including the UK are not counting nursing home deaths in their Coronavirus figures. A UK nursing home advocate interviewed today who also mans a helpline said the situation in UK nursing homes with Coronavirus is dire.
 
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The Californian data

Very interesting and IMO sensible interview. She makes reference to antibody tests already underway, and while she doesn't provide any figures, indicates that they indicate a fairly low prevalence so far.

If you look at Johns Hopkins data, we’ve done close to 3m tests, and we’ve only found about 1% of those to be positive. That may be an overestimate, because people who are tested are generally symptomatic. If you test more people, including those who are asymptomatic, you may find that the percentage is going to be on the order of 0.5% to 1-2% overall.

Right now, the proportion of cases is about 0.2%, so the difference would be made up partly by asymptomatics, and partly by symptomatic people who just haven't been tested. These figures are consistent with a proportion of asymptomatics of 50% or more, but probably not 90%.

There was a study of sewage, I think in NY, that estimated from the presence of viral RNA that there were 5-30 times more infected people than were actually identified in the area contributing to the sewage, but I don't know how accurate estimates like these could be.
 
Some things are crystal clear.
every worker every day should be tested..if for nothing less than a standard battery..bacteria present on hands,fever and questions about health..have you been coughing ? Do you have a sore throat?
should be asked of every nursing home worker in the US..every day before shift.
federal government should mandate a pandemic uniform for nursing homes.
it should not be left up to States or private enterprise.
every employee should be wearing a mask.and gown.and gloves.
should not be a regional or personal standard.
We don't have gloves,gowns or mask so we didn't use them is an unworkable and unacceptable answer.
this is not combined with the complexity of widespread testing. Testing looks far off for most of the US.
Masks.gloves ,goggles safety glasses and face shields should be littering our streets,clogging storm drains and causing space issues at every landfill nationwide..
We should be having discussions on PPE storage facilities in the middle of the desert or old football stadiums..
having seniors get a death sentence because of lack of PPE basics is a capital offense
 
Another huge issue is "the curve"
The curve is short for slowly ripping off the band-aid. And when the bandage is ripped off from each hair follicle..gushes blood requiring hospitalization.
without the slow steady suffering,you get a tsunami of patients in life or death circumstances trying to crowd into the hospital the size of a phone booth..
some survive but most die wo available treatment.
Any discussion by any government..official anything that doesn't have the primary component of social distancing is silly.
this isn't slightly over or undercooked toast..the byproduct is undesirable bread..this experiment only ends with dead bodies.
I don't want my remaining grandmother tested for her pain threshold or her immune system stress tested for lack of a @$1 dollar mask
what I saw today in the US was shocking.
 
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There has been a paper published by Chinese scientists claiming that the virus originated from a nearby lab studying bat viruses. The presence of a lab nearby is not proof, of course, but another claim is that there were no horseshoe bats for sale in the market, nor any in the wild anywhere close to Wuhan. I don't know, though, how they established there were no bats in the market (did they go around interviewing all the vendors? would you trust a vendor to admit selling bats at this point?), and even if that was the case, the virus might have jumped from a bat into some other animal sold at the market.
the way I understood it, bats can't infect humans anyway. It's very likely that the virus came through pangolins instead, which were infected by bats before.
 
Here's some information on the massive Stanford antibody test being conducted with the help of MLB to test people in multiple locations. Here's the article from ESPN about it:

 
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the way I understood it, bats can't infect humans anyway. It's very likely that the virus came through pangolins instead, which were infected by bats before.
Some types of Flying Foxes naturally carry the Hendra Virus. There was an outbreak in Australia in the 90s. Horses picked it up from the Flying Fox droppings and some humans caught it from the body fluids from the horses, mainly trainers and vets who had daily close contact with them. Horses and some humans died.
 
Some types of Flying Foxes naturally carry the Hendra Virus. There was an outbreak in Australia in the 90s. Horses picked it up from the Flying Fox droppings and some humans caught it from the body fluids from the horses, mainly trainers and vets who had daily close contact with them. Horses and some humans died.
yeah, what I meant to say is, that it doesn't really matter if they sold bats on that market or not. The pangolin may have been infected earlier on (at the merchant's place or so - I guess it doesn't come close to bats in wildlife too often)
 
Here's some information on the massive Stanford antibody test being conducted with the help of MLB to test people in multiple locations. Here's the article from ESPN about it:

Very interesting. However, I'm not clear if the sample is going to be truly random:

The speed with which MLB coordinated logistics and ensured participation from a wide range of people, including players, front-office staff, concession workers and others, made it the right choice for the study, according to doctors running it.

I don't see how you can get a truly random sample just by focussing on employees of one business. Most of the players, of course, are in a restricted age group, and while others might be older, very old, retired people would be excluded, as well as children. With the game currently on hold, though, players and other employees would be widely scattered over the country, which helps. And maybe other people are being tested. It's not really clear from the article if this is the case.
 
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Some things are crystal clear.
every worker every day should be tested..if for nothing less than a standard battery..bacteria present on hands,fever and questions about health..have you been coughing ? Do you have a sore throat?
should be asked of every nursing home worker in the US..every day before shift.

A German virologist who has very popular podcast (https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/info/podcast4684.html) demanded exactly this weeks ago, before any of the lockdown measures were put in place in Europe, but I'm not sure if the hospitals there followed his advice.
 
On the Diamond Princess cruise ship, the proportion of positive people with no symptoms was greater for people > 50 years than for younger people. It was about 50% or more for all age groups up to 80+.

Why is that? Other question is if ratio of asymptomatic stayed that high after some time. That asymptomatic patients could be symptomatic after week or two after they were testes positive. Is that high number of asymptomatic patients common with other viruses for example influenza?
 
It seems some countries including the UK are not counting nursing home deaths in their Coronavirus figures. A UK nursing home advocate interviewed today who also mans a helpline said the situation in UK nursing homes with Coronavirus is dire.
In the Madrid region, by 8 April, 5,586 people had been included in the official COVID-19 death tally. This figure did not include 781 people who were confirmed COVID-19 cases and who had died in nursing homes, nor 3,479 people who had died in nursing homes without a COVID-19 positive test but with symptoms. Just to give an idea of the potential scale of the problem.
 
Some depressing news, if it applies widely. A friend of mine says two friends of his have recently applied for unemployment, and are now getting regular checks. As a result of this experience, neither has any plans to return to work when that becomes possible, but want to stay on unemployment permanently.

The town of Vo, in Italy, tested all 3300 of its inhabitants on March 3, and quarantined all who tested positive. This was in addition to a general lockdown. They found 90 positives, about 3% of the town's population, more than half of which were asymptomatic. Nine days later, they tested everyone again. They found just six positives. The aggressive testing clearly stopped the spread of the virus almost entirely. The results also indicated the few new positives resulted from transmission by asymptomatics.
Combined with the Iceland testing data, the 50% number is probably the best estimate for asymptomatic infection. I would like to see a followup on those same people to see if there was an antibody response. Pulling small amounts of viral RNA from a swab in the nose might not mean there was an actual infection. Similar to the stories about viral RNA being picked up 17 days after people had left the cruise ship.
The Californian data

One of the problems last week was one of the epidemiologists said that the virus was probably here in CA in December and people jumped to the conclusion that he meant there was an earlier outbreak. Considering that the first USA case detected was in mid Jan in WA, it is possible that the first case in CA may have been in December due to the extensive contacts between the state and the Pacific Rim. But that would be sporadic infection, nowhere near what is necessary to get herd immunity. And the sequencing of strains doesn't indicate that there was an early outbreak in CA. Mainly because most of the NYC strains indicate they were seeded from Europe. Highly unlikely if CA had this big under the radar outbreak.
 
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Very interesting. However, I'm not clear if the sample is going to be truly random:



I don't see how you can get a truly random sample just by focussing on employees of one business. Most of the players, of course, are in a restricted age group, and while others might be older, very old, retired people would be excluded, as well as children. With the game currently on hold, though, players and other employees would be widely scattered over the country, which helps. And maybe other people are being tested. It's not really clear from the article if this is the case.


It's people from different parts of the country. It's employees who work at the different stadiums not just players. They are wanting to test people scattered around the country, not just people in California.
 
That was actually a good write-up by Passan. It doesn't sound like the Cellex test if it only takes 10 min. There are many diagnostics being made, so it will be interesting to see which one they used. I imagine the pre-print will be up within a week or two.
 
Combined with the Iceland testing data, the 50% number is probably the best estimate for asymptomatic infection. I would like to see a followup on those same people to see if there was an antibody response. Pulling small amounts of viral RNA from a swab in the nose might not mean there was an actual infection. Similar to the stories about viral RNA being picked up 17 days after people had left the cruise ship

Well that is interesting idea to test Iceland positives for antibodies and find some correlation between antibodies and symptoms.. There is small sample and false positives/negatives but still.