I also know China is as concerned with it's world image as it is with any military or economic power it has. The world doesn't need to get into an open fight for it to hurt them.
SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)
- Thread starter Don't Kill Bill
- Start date
It's the deaths which are in relation to other large European countries much lower so far, it's a good western example of how numbers can be low for now even here alongside the other Asian countries that have heavily controlled it. People keep flagging up China saying a huge amount more died but 80k cases and 3k deaths while Germany sit at 113k cases, million tested with 2k dead shows the numbers can be real or close. Add in the strict lockdown of China, testing/tracing, removing infected from their families and large capacity and top healthcare in China with some of the best equipment only they have, similar numbers can be real and really you just have to look at other Asian countries to see the preparedness. Europe is damage control at best.
Germany could well slowly amount to 5-15k deaths and more, it's not a direct comparison and I don't see European countries carrying on with these softer lockdowns long enough so Germany and elsewhere will see more deaths.
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Around the time of the last kids half term, so late Feb, my sister had been to Portugal, but that barely had any reported infections at the time.
She did get ill though, and rang 111 as she had just returned from said trip, but they wouldn't test her, she's a big gig/concert goer so likely picked up what ever she got from mixing there.
Like I say every symptom can be attributed to loads of other things, loss of taste & smell can happen with other viruses, as can dry coughs, etc, and my mum who would be classed as at risk never got anything, but it's only fair to wonder,
The main reason they have such large number of cases is because they’re testing so many more people than every other country in Europe. 10 times as many tests as France, for example.
Ah. Ok. Late Feb makes covid more likely. Especially after recent travel (might not have been high risk area but airports will have been full of virus around that time) Thought you were one of those people who got a dose in December/January and thought they had the virus already. That’s what I think is extremely unlikely.
Aye, if anything it’s just proof that many many more are infected than some think. Which, in itself is good news.
Shock horror, Priti Patel is showing herself to be a cnut.
Flu seasons vary. This winter was supposedly quite a bad one with more cases than usual, up to twice as many according to some media sources. Maybe there is something new out there or a resurgence of another flu virus like swine flu. It's not Covid-19 though. These two charts should explain why (and consider things got considerably worse after the date on this first one):
Then there is this, which provides a trend line of the average of daily deaths of over 65s for any reason (green line), compared with what is actually being seen this year (red and orange line).
There is absolutely no way this circulates for a significant period of time without us knowing about it.
But if it’s so contagious wouldn’t it have spread like wild fire from feb and we wouldn’t be waiting untill March/April to lock down.
There’s so many unknowns still, we desperately need antibody testing
What does this mean?
Part of the UK death rate will be to do with the health of the average person, which is shocking compared to a lot of other countries, binge drinking, chain smoking and obesity can't be helping
Again, and I’m not absolutely disagreeing with you but if this virus is as contagious as been said, as soon as the first few thousand leave China in December it would start being passed around wouldn’t it? If it’s left on door handles etc for days, elevators, taxis, buses, shopping trolleys, events. All this happening with such a contagious virus going around and people leaving China since December with it, I find it strange it takes 3 months for it to hit countries if it is that contagious, you can’t convince me not enough people travelled here from China in that first month or the next three!Flu seasons vary. This winter was supposedly quite a bad one with more cases than usual, up to twice as many according to some media sources. Maybe there is something new out there or a resurgence of another flu virus like swine flu. It's not Covid-19 though. These two charts should explain why (and consider things got considerably worse after the date on this first one):
Then there is this, which provides a trend line of the average of daily deaths of over 65s for any reason (green line), compared with what is actually being seen this year (red and orange line).
There is absolutely no way this circulates for a significant period of time without us knowing about it.
It just doesn’t make sense to me
Both my father (tested and hospitalised) and fiancee (untested as no severe symptoms) have had Covid 19 without losing sense of smell.
Per capita they're testing close to a number of other countries, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Portugal, Norway for example. They're doing well at containing it but not really any better than some others like Austria and Portugal with a similar number of cases and deaths per capita. We just focus on Germany because they have a large population and the numbers stand out further, and comparable countries size wise are faring badly. It took Italy by surprise, Spain a little too, and France seems content to pretend it's not there.
Does this wind anyone else up, or just me?
Germany's goverment actually isn't exhausting all options in that regard. Schools and non essential businesses have closed down, but people are still allowed to leave their flats and houses as they please, as long as no more than two peole who don't share a household meet; playgrounds are closed, but parks are open. Everyone is aware that other countries have decided to use stricter measures, but thus far that knowledge is only used as a warning threat towards people not following guidelines. I guess since currently there seems no way of neutralizing the virus the level of shutdown is dictated by (projected) healthcare system load.
Its that self-evident regardless?
Bang on. The fear is that those putting themselves is harm’s way during this crisis will be shafted once more after it’s all over. I really hope that we’ve hit an inflection point, following which our society changes for the better. I won’t hold my breath though because human beings have consistently shown an ability to learn from seismic events.
I think the underlying health of African-Americans is worse than other groups. We all know why that is but it means they will suffer.
I got a PM from someone called @fellwin re an interesting bit of research in Denmark. They tested everyone who donated blood and found 1.5% of them were producing antibodies. So they can extrapolate from that a similar % of the overall population is probably positive. Which is many more times higher than the official number of cases. Obviously, a long way short of herd immunity though, unfortunately.
She’s an absolutely repugnant cow. I despise her.
It’s underpinned by the deprivation over a prolonged period suffered by that cross section of the population. Don’t believe all this bollocks about Covid-19 being a great leveller. I’d love to see Boris’s treatment compared to a rank and file member of the population.
I’m not trying to argue that they’re the one and only country in Europe who is dealing with this well.
Re Portugal etc there’s a few people getting quite excited about BCG vaccination programmes being somehow protective, based on the countries with the lowest death rates. I’m not convinced, personally.
Well the treatment can't be upgraded can it? There isn't really treatment per se.
I’m not saying everyone with covid gets anosmia, nor am I saying anosmia is unique to covid. It is, however, a characteristic and unusual symptom and wasn’t something anyone was talking about when people were getting “bad flus” in December/January. Lots of people get a bad dose of flu every year. Deciding that they probably had covid this year is just confirmation bias.
That's just how exponential growth goes. Maybe it did arrive 3 months prior but it takes time for it to spiral. Over 3 months, assume 1 person infects 2 others each week.
Week 1 - 1 person has it
Week 2 - 3 people have it (including the first)
Week 3 - 9
Week 4 - 27
Week 5 - 81
Week 6 - 243
Week 7 - 729
Week 8 - 2187
Week 9 - 6561
Week 10 - 19683
Week 11 - 59049
Week 12 - 177147
By the time you hit 12 weeks you can see how the first 7 weeks become little more than rounding errors.
It could well have arrived in Europe before Christmas, in Italy they think it arrived January 1st at the latest. However once it's taken hold there is no chance it's mistaken for regular flu.
Yes, so when it leaves China in November/December and day one starts in another country we would have 200,000 cases in said country by February. That doesn’t seem to be what happened
Edit: also if people travelled from China to uk (via other countries maybe) in December , using your relatively low numbers of just one person infecting two in a week the uk would already be up to millions infected
I'm not saying probably, I'm saying its very unlikely just not impossible. Should be a line of enquiry once we've got the antibody tests.
I know what you’re getting at and I agree.
However, there are genuine genetic reasons for black people having underlying health issues (hypertension etc) which makes them more likely to die from covid. In fact, one of the theories about why black people get worse hypertension (which causes heart disease, renal failure etc) is because of a dysfunctional hormonal regulation system that involves the exact same receptors that the SARS-COV-2 virus spikes bind to.
As long as we come out of this with only the right sort of people having died, our governments will be judged to have done a good job.
I’m using the word treatment loosely in this sense, while drawing a parallel between Boris and a normal person to make a point. What’s clear to me is that the NHS is stretched to the very limit and a major part of this is the deep and prolonged funding cuts. You also see poorer parts of society being disproportionately impacted by the crisis due to a variety of the same old factors. To be honest, I’m feeling pretty fecked off by the way this country is run and think our chickens have come home to roost. I hope we hold our government to account after this is all said and done instead of slinking off back into an apathetic state. There are actually people who thinking this government has handled the situation well
But the epidemic could progress very slightly slower, or result in a smaller % being admitted to hospital. Its easy to model a situation where it can happen, its not impossible, but as I said above unlikely.
I’d be interested to see whether there are people who have presented the same sort of symptoms as Boris who have been instructed to stay at home as opposed to getting the very best care the NHS has to offer.
Those figures by 1101011 were very optimistic and only two people getting infected by one person each week. Surely that is the lowest possible end of the scale of infection if this is as contagious as being said.
I’m not sure of this at all, the o my thing I mm sure of at the moment is staying in the house incase, but the numbers are hard to make sense of
We shouldn’t have to go through this again. He’s the feckkng prime minister of a country. Whether you like him or not, he has to get tested
A PROMISING COVID-19 TREATMENT GETS FAST-TRACKED
Arturo Casadevall and collaborators at Johns Hopkins and beyond have worked around the clock to develop a convalescent serum therapy to treat COVID-19 using blood plasma from recovered patients. If early promising studies on the therapy done in China are confirmed by U.S. trials, thousands of survivors might soon line up to donate their antibody-rich plasma. "I absolutely think this could be the best treatment we have for the next few months," Hopkins pathologist Aaron Tobian says.
Those are just random numbers i used to demonstrate how exponential growth works.
If it arrived on 1st January as the Italians think it did, by April 1st you would expect 200,000 cases but until mid February you would not have noticed it. There may have been a few cases here and there mistaken as flu in January, but once it takes hold in a significant way, say around mid-end of February, there is no disguising it.
That's almost exactly what happened.
If it had been here in a big enough way to be spiking death rates in December, or to have infected half the population, as people were suggesting earlier in the thread, we would be looking at millions of deaths worldwide by now.
That’s not the point I was making but feel free to go off on one.
Ok I misssed your point, what was it?
That’s interesting.
Think Sweden will announce today plans to test 1000 randomly picked Stockholmers next week, that should give us some really important data, not least because we haven’t closed schools here so you’d expect our infection rate to Be much higher than Denmark.
Random numbers but I thought you used the 1 person infects two in a week? So it would be a low estimate if cases.
I just can’t get my head around if this virus is as infectious as reported, incubation period, being left on surfaces etc it would have rapidly increased in January and February. It just doesn’t make sense to me.
Either the numbers are no where near right or it’s no where near as infectious as reported.
How can’t thousands and thousands full stadiums every week for two months in January and February without this spreading like wild fire?