List of countries with at least 5,000 known COVID-19 cases.
United States - 123,750 (118,292 / 3,231 / 2,227)
Italy - 92,472 (70,065 / 12,384 / 10,023)
China - 81,439 (2,691 / 75,448 / 3,300) 4.2%
Spain - 73,235 (54,968 / 12,285 / 5,982)
Germany - 57,695 (48,781 / 8,481 / 433)
France - 37,575 (29,561 / 5,700 / 2,314)
Iran - 35,408 (21,212 / 11,679 / 2,517)
United Kingdom - 17,089 (15,935 / 135 / 1,019)
Switzerland - 14,076 (12,282 / 1,530 / 264)
Netherlands - 9,762 (9,120 / 3 / 639)
South Korea - 9,583 (4,398 / 5,033 / 152)
Belgium - 9,134 (7,718 / 1,063 / 353)
Austria - 8,271 (7,978 / 225 / 68)
Turkey - 7,402 (7,224 / 70 / 108)
Canada - 5,655 (5,199 / 396 / 60)
Portugal - 5,170 (5,027 / 43 / 100)
The listings are in the format:
X. Country - [# of known cases] ([active] / [recovered] / [dead]) [%fatality rate]
Fatality rates are only listed for countries where the number of resolved cases (recovered + dead) exceeds the number of known active cases by a ratio of at least 2:1. At the moment China is the only country to meet that criteria according to their official numbers. Several experts more knowledgeable than me believe China is (once again) understating their COVID-19 rates.
Since the last compilation Turkey, Canada, and Portugal have joined the club no one wants to join.
New Zealand has had the first death from covid-19 it was announced today. We are currently self isolating for about 4 weeks (but I wouldn't be surprised if it were longer).
The Imperial College team seem to have come up with figure of just over 5000 deaths predicted. I'm not sure it's a good idea to produce different figures like this. Suppose it ends up being 200 000?
The Imperial College team seem to have come up with figure of just over 5000 deaths predicted. I'm not sure it's a good idea to produce different figures like this. Suppose it ends up being 200 000?
Actually this was a separate study - albeit by someone also at Imperial College - which basically took the curve seen in Hubei and applied it (adjusting for reported cases) elsewhere - there is no reason to think that other governments will be able adopt the same measures.
Story in the Guardian that intelligence groups have been predicting a pandemic as the biggest danger facing the US, for years. "The system was blinking red". (Micah Zenko).
I gather the person predicting around 5000 deaths is neither a medic or an epidemiologist, but an engineer from Imperial giving an independent opinion based on reading the stats.
Not as fearfully ignorant as we'll be where the BBC cannot reach GK. I'm sorry, but this will be as big and bad as Partition, as big and bad as the Churchillian Bengal Famine. There are screaming Munch face extreme scenarios even worse: India... Pakistan
Was there anything especially ghastly that you wish to highlight as regards India?
One can only sympathise with the incredible pressure being placed on the Indian government, and health services, though they have shown in the past how they can rise to a lesser challenge (remember Bopal?).
FWIW, our neighbouring parish's Vicar is Indian, and, having been on sabbatical, and then on holiday with his parents in Kerala, is now unable to return to the UK. His (English) wife and family miss him, as you can imagine.
...Nazi police on the street beating people and making them perform obeisance...
Sorry, not obeisance, humiliating public displays, which made me think of Brown Shirts.
Although someone on one of my wife's Facebook groups observed that if there is a spike in the birthrate, it's a spike that will consist almost entirely of firstborn children ...
I gather the person predicting around 5000 deaths is neither a medic or an epidemiologist, but an engineer from Imperial giving an independent opinion based on reading the stats.
See the tweet I linked from the author of the study (which was completely separate to the other Imperial College study).
I agree about forecasting. In the UK and lots of other places the numbers of the dead appear to be doubling every two to three days. In two weeks that's about 5 doublings.
Given current UK totals of a thousand, if that does indeed double 5 times, the total will be 32,000. If that's the peak, there will still be deaths after that. Given that the current self isolation forecast is not two weeks but two months, the government seems to be anticipating quite a long tail off.
That's not forecasting of course. It gives us some idea of the kind of stark speculations the government and the medical services are having to look at.
Because of course from the medical services POV the numbers dying are the tip of the iceberg. The majority of those ill enough to require extended intensive hospital care will not die.
I gather the person predicting around 5000 deaths is neither a medic or an epidemiologist, but an engineer from Imperial giving an independent opinion based on reading the stats.
I'm beginning to wonder when the news will begin concentrating on the positive?
I'd like to know this about the people who are coming down with mild symptoms and who are recovering:
What do their "mild symptoms" consist of?
How did they progress, and over what time span?
What treatment did they avail themselves of?
How long was it before they started feeling better?
When did they finally feel that they were symptom-free?
Once they were symptom-free, were they still contagious?
And, most importantly, are they now immune?
Sooner or later, people who have recovered are going to start wanting to go out and about again. As much as I loathe the current occupant of the White House and denounce him as a fraud and an incompetent, I hate to admit that he just may have a point.
I gather the person predicting around 5000 deaths is neither a medic or an epidemiologist, but an engineer from Imperial giving an independent opinion based on reading the stats.
Argh! Engineer Syndrome?
What about risk engineering? WTF is that? Anyway, Taleb is one.
The symptoms are pretty wide ranging: fever, temperature, cough, with possibly or possibly not, a headache, aches and pains, catarrh, exhaustion and/or sneezing. I suspect I've had it as we're pretty sure my daughter has and in this tiny flat I can't avoid it. She has still got a cough and has had some very unfunny breathing difficulties over a week after the original cough started. That seems typical from other accounts. I've had a few days of feeling feverish, more tired than usual and a bit of a cough, but nothing I'd normally pay attention to. Who knows though, as there's no testing. And who knows about contagion after the symptoms have gone. The cough continues for longer than the other symptoms. Treatment: lots of liquid and rest.
I'm beginning to wonder when the news will begin concentrating on the positive?
I'd like to know this about the people who are coming down with mild symptoms and who are recovering:
What do their "mild symptoms" consist of?
How did they progress, and over what time span?
What treatment did they avail themselves of?
How long was it before they started feeling better?
When did they finally feel that they were symptom-free?
Once they were symptom-free, were they still contagious?
And, most importantly, are they now immune?
Sooner or later, people who have recovered are going to start wanting to go out and about again. As much as I loathe the current occupant of the White House and denounce him as a fraud and an incompetent, I hate to admit that he just may have a point.
In the absence of mass testing (by which I mean testing absolutely everyone à la South Korea), there is simply no way of answering these questions with any high degree of accuracy.
One of the strongest criticisms of confinement is that there is no exit strategy: absent massive testing, there's simply no way to bring it to an end, plus those who have behaved themselves and stayed locked down will have had no exposure and thus no immunity.
However, it still looks like the best way of not immediately overwhelming the hospital system and buys time for the disease to be better understood and treatments and/or vaccines to be developed - and roll out more tests (which France says it's preparing to do).
One difficulty I see is getting this message across adequately in the long term. The French government says that 85% of covid-19 cases are benign. That might sound reassuring in terms of one's personal odds, but having 15% of the population seriously ill enough to require hospital care at more or less the same time is much less so.
One might consider two extreme approaches.
One would be to lock the entire world population down all at the same time and without exception. After several weeks, in theory the virus would have nowhere left to go and disappear, but implementing this strategy is clearly unworkable besides being more than authoritarian.
The other extreme would be to do nothing at all and, as BoJo said, "take it on the chin". The social cost of this would undoubtedly be to kill off many of the most vulnerable and in all likelihood kill off many more than with any mitigation strategy, disregarding the likely social costs of a completely uncontained pandemic.
Pretty much the entire world is muddling along somewhere between these two extremes leaving us all wondering just what it is we value in terms of our daily lives.
The symptoms are pretty wide ranging: fever, temperature, cough, with possibly or possibly not, a headache, aches and pains, catarrh, exhaustion and/or sneezing. I suspect I've had it as we're pretty sure my daughter has and in this tiny flat I can't avoid it. She has still got a cough and has had some very unfunny breathing difficulties over a week after the original cough started. That seems typical from other accounts. I've had a few days of feeling feverish, more tired than usual and a bit of a cough, but nothing I'd normally pay attention to. Who knows though, as there's no testing. And who knows about contagion after the symptoms have gone. The cough continues for longer than the other symptoms. Treatment: lots of liquid and rest.
What point does Trump have? Well, he has made the US number one, in the infection totals.
Not a Trump fan, but I find comparing infection totals between countries whose populations differ widely unhelpful in the extreme (and much beloved by the media).
Also, totals tell us very little. The most meaningful number I can see for any given population is the rate of new infections per day, but that is not one that the media pay much attention to.
As previously noted, Trump is sending out mixed messages. My theory is that this is his usual MO so that if things work out, he can point to something he said corresponding to how they worked out and take the credit, and if they don't, he can point to something he said criticising what was being done and point the blame.
I'm beginning to wonder when the news will begin concentrating on the positive?
I'd like to know this about the people who are coming down with mild symptoms and who are recovering:
What do their "mild symptoms" consist of?
How did they progress, and over what time span?
What treatment did they avail themselves of?
How long was it before they started feeling better?
When did they finally feel that they were symptom-free?
Once they were symptom-free, were they still contagious?
And, most importantly, are they now immune?
Others have addressed some of these points, but on the last two from stuff I've read and may have misunderstood.
In the vast majority of cases those who have contracted the virus and recovered are immune. As has been said, for many diseases where you would normally expect people to be immune after contracting it there is a very small incidence of people who do not develop immunity and hence can catch it again. This also happens with immunisation, where a small minority of those immunised don't gain immunity - which is why it's essential that everyone gets their shots (unless you have a really good medical reason why you can't), this develops a level of population immunity that provides protection to that small number of individuals who don't have immunity.
Some diseases also, in a small number of cases, go through phases where symptoms disappear (even to the point of resulting in negative results for the presence of live virus) but remains present in the patient with a subsequent flare-up. In the absence of blood tests that can detect both live virus and antibodies there's no real way of knowing if a second round of symptoms is a re-infection or a second phase of a single infection (and, even then it may be unclear).
Also, without testing there's no way to know if someone with symptoms definitely has this virus, so you may have been sick but not be immune because you'd had something else.
So, someone who has contracted the virus (with a positive test) and recovered would in the vast majority of cases be immune, and not be producing virus particles (ie: they're not contagious). However, they can still be vectors for transmission (eg: if they touch a contaminated surface and go onto touch another surface) and so should still maintain social distance and continue hand washing etc to protect others.
No. The tendency for engineers to think their expertise and methods is readily transferable to other fields.
See also: over-representation among climate change deniers.
Interesting. As in the guy who, confronted by me decades ago with the hole in the ozone layer, said "well we can just build some factories to pump a whole load more ozone back up there"?
I'm beginning to wonder when the news will begin concentrating on the positive?
I'd like to know this about the people who are coming down with mild symptoms and who are recovering:
What do their "mild symptoms" consist of?
How did they progress, and over what time span?
What treatment did they avail themselves of?
How long was it before they started feeling better?
When did they finally feel that they were symptom-free?
I can tell you my symptoms, I have not been tested (little testing here in the UK unless you are admitted to hospital, one reason why the stats on how many have it are inaccurate) but nhs 111 suggests I have it, as does my research app.
My 15 year old son woke up with unusual cough. Persistent throughout the day but isolated coughs not coughing fits. He stayed otherwise well except occasional mild fatigue first week. Still has a slight cough almost 2 weeks later. His friends also had the same cough, as do some of our neighbours.
A day later I developed a sore throat and the same odd cough. The next day I got fatigue. I had fatigue for several days but no fever. Some days I woke up fine but deteriorated later. A week later I felt well enough to do a little work admin.
That evening I suddenly developed a tight chest and slight shortness of breath. This was the scary bit - I am a ex-nurse and I found it scary, especially at night. Anxiety, of course, makes the symptoms worse. My chest symptoms started improving yesterday, on day 11. I think it will take at least another couple of days to recover fully. So 2 weeks minimum. I have not taken any treatments, I just take vit C and zinc.
My husband just has the cough, no other symptoms. My 18 year old son is asymtomatic. ‘Mild’ is a very variable state.
Interestingly (to me, at least) is that my asthma (mild, no regular treatment) and my 15 year old’s asthma (steroid inhalers, prior hospitalisation with acute attack) appear to be unaffected. My chest symptoms aren’t like my asthma ones. My oxygen saturation levels were also normal (I checked them on a pulse oxymeter).
No. The tendency for engineers to think their expertise and methods is readily transferable to other fields.
See also: over-representation among climate change deniers.
Do you mean you know a lot of engineer climate change deniers? That would be weird - I'm an engineer, we think a lot about systems, inputs and outputs, and modelling - which makes us, on the whole, pretty worried about the climate. The IMechE trade rag has been split 50-50 between articles on recycling / climate /clean energy, and defence projects, for years - that's what people are working on.
ETA - if you mean managing directors, boards, finance directors and shareholders of manufacturers are in denial - then I see what you mean.
The symptoms are pretty wide ranging: fever, temperature, cough, with possibly or possibly not, a headache, aches and pains, catarrh, exhaustion and/or sneezing. I suspect I've had it as we're pretty sure my daughter has and in this tiny flat I can't avoid it. She has still got a cough and has had some very unfunny breathing difficulties over a week after the original cough started. That seems typical from other accounts. I've had a few days of feeling feverish, more tired than usual and a bit of a cough, but nothing I'd normally pay attention to. Who knows though, as there's no testing. And who knows about contagion after the symptoms have gone. The cough continues for longer than the other symptoms. Treatment: lots of liquid and rest.
Some people get chicken pox twice, but not many.
Yep, I had the chicken spots twice. Second time the blasted things were worst on my feet making it difficult to walk. On the whole, I think I would prefer the chicken pox to Covid-19, mainly because I have done the former already and know how miserable it makes me. My general conviction is that nobody knows what the hell they are doing in the present situation, so I am going easy of the politicians and other folks who have to do the guessing. At the end of the day no-one will get it absolutely right, but some will do better than others.
My county and the two independent cities within it has so far remained Covid-19 free - or at least, there are no reported cases. I think that is because (a) our population density is fairly low, and (b) we took the advice, socially distanced, and cut out non-essential activities quickly. The only danger is that our unsubtle governor will panic at the number of cases up in the DC 'Burbs and issue a shut down order for the whole state rather than just Fairfax and adjacent counties, which is where the outbreak is concentrated here.
No. The tendency for engineers to think their expertise and methods is readily transferable to other fields.
Yes. They're the same thing. Knew a NASA Apollo English rocket engineer online. He thought that validated, gave authority for, his bizarre theology. Hawking talked utter twaddle on interstellar transport. And of course fusion engineers think that'll work. Even in their own field. Professor Sir Fred Hoyle, Eric Laithwaite and many, many others. Einstein even, wasting his life for decades at Princeton. All opining beyond their bailiwicks.
My experience of university engineering is that professors (UK usage) are vain, and that vain people are often at least partially hoist by their own doodah. It might be especially jarring in an engineer, who (in their own field) is limited in the bollocks they can spout by the necessity of measurements on physical systems to test their hypotheses.
(I had a friend in a business department who reckoned he could supervise any PhD, having done a few. It didn't take long to come up with a few titles to put him off - 'Fatigue behaviour of reinforced concrete in long-span cantilever bridges', 'Tarmac-rubber friction models for the prediction of yadah yadah yadah'. Generally, we keep it real).
No. The tendency for engineers to think their expertise and methods is readily transferable to other fields.
I suspect this is easy to do because it's almost true. Methods do transfer quite well between fields, probably the majority of statistical analysis in medical research papers is still bogus, and science is not different just because a different person is doing it. But the kicker is "almost true" - you might be the world expert on corrosion in stainless steel, and all that knowledge and instinct that you have about steel doesn't help you even with understanding the behavior of a different material, let alone a different field entirely.
s has been said, for many diseases where you would normally expect people to be immune after contracting it there is a very small incidence of people who do not develop immunity and hence can catch it again. This also happens with immunisation, where a small minority of those immunised don't gain immunity
I never had pneumonia until the year I got a pneumonia vaccine.
I've had Valley Fever, to which you're supposed to be immune after you've had it. However, I have a friend who also had it and who caught it again.
What point does Trump have? Well, he has made the US number one, in the infection totals.
He puts the economy = money first. Everything else is secondary.
I fear the US is going to go under due to his, and his administration’s lack of ability to coordinate the effort to combat this virus.
Things I order from Amazon, like my fish food, I’ve got extra stocks in. I think it’s possible companies like Amazon will go under too.
I also worry for the safety of Internet servers. I just hope there are contingency plans in place for when their staff start to get sick. 4G data is excellent but expensive.
What point does Trump have? Well, he has made the US number one, in the infection totals.
He puts the economy = money first. Everything else is secondary.
I fear the US is going to go under due to his, and his administration’s lack of ability to coordinate the effort to combat this virus.
Things I order from Amazon, like my fish food, I’ve got extra stocks in. I think it’s possible companies like Amazon will go under too.
I also worry for the safety of Internet servers. I just hope there are contingency plans in place for when their staff start to get sick. 4G data is excellent but expensive.
I notice that various right wing pundits are saying that the US should get back to work, and if a few oldies snuff, or even several million, that would be a gallant and patriotic gesture, which future generations will venerate. Some of them even offer themselves upon the Trumpian auto-da-fe. Not sure if that's the right word, but I like it.
What point does Trump have? Well, he has made the US number one, in the infection totals.
He puts the economy = money first. Everything else is secondary.
I fear the US is going to go under due to his, and his administration’s lack of ability to coordinate the effort to combat this virus.
Things I order from Amazon, like my fish food, I’ve got extra stocks in. I think it’s possible companies like Amazon will go under too.
I also worry for the safety of Internet servers. I just hope there are contingency plans in place for when their staff start to get sick. 4G data is excellent but expensive.
I notice that various right wing pundits are saying that the US should get back to work, and if a few oldies snuff, or even several million, that would be a gallant and patriotic gesture, which future generations will venerate. Some of them even offer themselves upon the Trumpian auto-da-fe. Not sure if that's the right word, but I like it.
They forget that overwhelmed health services would mean that every minor road accident/broken limb/infection/name your health problem would easily become fatal without treatment.
I'm beginning to wonder when the news will begin concentrating on the positive?
I'd like to know this about the people who are coming down with mild symptoms and who are recovering:
What do their "mild symptoms" consist of?
How did they progress, and over what time span?
What treatment did they avail themselves of?
How long was it before they started feeling better?
When did they finally feel that they were symptom-free?
Once they were symptom-free, were they still contagious?
And, most importantly, are they now immune?
Sooner or later, people who have recovered are going to start wanting to go out and about again. As much as I loathe the current occupant of the White House and denounce him as a fraud and an incompetent, I hate to admit that he just may have a point.
Yeah, but no. For one, we do not know that once infected, forever immune is true with this. Two, we do not know how far it must mutate before it is essentially different, therefore infectious again. Three, recovered people will encourage the idiots who think they can rely on herd immunity and the bellends who will go out anyway.
We are still too deep into the reality of the negative to paint pretty pictures.
The argument has more merit than might be imagined, but apart from the ethical considerations it raises, it has two major defects:
1) not everybody who gets it badly is old
2) the potential for these martyrs to the economy to be super-spreaders and thus make the problem much worse.
Engineer Speaking (technically not true, so don't trust me on steel either)
My understanding is that they are mostly separate issues. Although it does have a cost. Part of the reasons having lots of antibiotics, phages and a healthy environment is important is that a bacterium can't optimise for everything. So widespread MResistantSA (with or) without antibiotics would be less deadly than just SA without antibiotics, you might need to only have one spare child rather than two :rollseyes:
That said, some diseases are similar, useful antibodies in general target elements that are found in many antigens (while hopefully avoiding targeting features of their own body-the way they do this is pre-natal experiment, everything about the immune system is fascinating)
And if the lack of immunity is from another cause (at the extreme end AIDS, but I'm sure there are milder reasons) then that will apply across the board.
__
The other thing with Engineer pronouncements in this case, is that an error of 3 days makes an error of 100%
No. The tendency for engineers to think their expertise and methods is readily transferable to other fields.
See also: over-representation among climate change deniers.
Do you mean you know a lot of engineer climate change deniers? That would be weird - I'm an engineer, we think a lot about systems, inputs and outputs, and modelling - which makes us, on the whole, pretty worried about the climate. The IMechE trade rag has been split 50-50 between articles on recycling / climate /clean energy, and defence projects, for years - that's what people are working on.
ETA - if you mean managing directors, boards, finance directors and shareholders of manufacturers are in denial - then I see what you mean.
I know a literal rocket scientist who is a climate denier. Probably the single most intelligent person I know. But there are two problems. One is that facts cannot trump belief* and the other is the fallacy Dunning-Kruger is only applicable to the unintelligent.
What point does Trump have? Well, he has made the US number one, in the infection totals.
He puts the economy = money first. Everything else is secondary.
I fear the US is going to go under due to his, and his administration’s lack of ability to coordinate the effort to combat this virus.
Things I order from Amazon, like my fish food, I’ve got extra stocks in. I think it’s possible companies like Amazon will go under too.
I also worry for the safety of Internet servers. I just hope there are contingency plans in place for when their staff start to get sick. 4G data is excellent but expensive.
I notice that various right wing pundits are saying that the US should get back to work, and if a few oldies snuff, or even several million, that would be a gallant and patriotic gesture, which future generations will venerate. Some of them even offer themselves upon the Trumpian auto-da-fe. Not sure if that's the right word, but I like it.
They forget that overwhelmed health services would mean that every minor road accident/broken limb/infection/name your health problem would easily become fatal without treatment.
Whatever your age.
Also, I don't think they quite get the idea of exponential growth, so you can restrict it to certain demographics. Surely, white people don't get it?
Isn't that how karma, not God, is supposed to work?
Depends on your theology for either. Plenty of Christians think that is how God works and there are karma believers who do not see it as such a direct and finite effect.
Comments
The listings are in the format:
X. Country - [# of known cases] ([active] / [recovered] / [dead]) [%fatality rate]
Fatality rates are only listed for countries where the number of resolved cases (recovered + dead) exceeds the number of known active cases by a ratio of at least 2:1. At the moment China is the only country to meet that criteria according to their official numbers. Several experts more knowledgeable than me believe China is (once again) understating their COVID-19 rates.
Since the last compilation Turkey, Canada, and Portugal have joined the club no one wants to join.
Actually this was a separate study - albeit by someone also at Imperial College - which basically took the curve seen in Hubei and applied it (adjusting for reported cases) elsewhere - there is no reason to think that other governments will be able adopt the same measures.
Even the author of the study now admits it was too low and that 20-30K is much more likely if the measures taken so far are successful, so people should stop quoting that figure.
Your insight is as good as anyone's.
Sorry, not obeisance, humiliating public displays, which made me think of Brown Shirts.
Although someone on one of my wife's Facebook groups observed that if there is a spike in the birthrate, it's a spike that will consist almost entirely of firstborn children ...
See the tweet I linked from the author of the study (which was completely separate to the other Imperial College study).
Given current UK totals of a thousand, if that does indeed double 5 times, the total will be 32,000. If that's the peak, there will still be deaths after that. Given that the current self isolation forecast is not two weeks but two months, the government seems to be anticipating quite a long tail off.
That's not forecasting of course. It gives us some idea of the kind of stark speculations the government and the medical services are having to look at.
Because of course from the medical services POV the numbers dying are the tip of the iceberg. The majority of those ill enough to require extended intensive hospital care will not die.
Argh! Engineer Syndrome?
I'd like to know this about the people who are coming down with mild symptoms and who are recovering:
Sooner or later, people who have recovered are going to start wanting to go out and about again. As much as I loathe the current occupant of the White House and denounce him as a fraud and an incompetent, I hate to admit that he just may have a point.
What about risk engineering? WTF is that? Anyway, Taleb is one.
The symptoms are pretty wide ranging: fever, temperature, cough, with possibly or possibly not, a headache, aches and pains, catarrh, exhaustion and/or sneezing. I suspect I've had it as we're pretty sure my daughter has and in this tiny flat I can't avoid it. She has still got a cough and has had some very unfunny breathing difficulties over a week after the original cough started. That seems typical from other accounts. I've had a few days of feeling feverish, more tired than usual and a bit of a cough, but nothing I'd normally pay attention to. Who knows though, as there's no testing. And who knows about contagion after the symptoms have gone. The cough continues for longer than the other symptoms. Treatment: lots of liquid and rest.
In the absence of mass testing (by which I mean testing absolutely everyone à la South Korea), there is simply no way of answering these questions with any high degree of accuracy.
One of the strongest criticisms of confinement is that there is no exit strategy: absent massive testing, there's simply no way to bring it to an end, plus those who have behaved themselves and stayed locked down will have had no exposure and thus no immunity.
However, it still looks like the best way of not immediately overwhelming the hospital system and buys time for the disease to be better understood and treatments and/or vaccines to be developed - and roll out more tests (which France says it's preparing to do).
One difficulty I see is getting this message across adequately in the long term. The French government says that 85% of covid-19 cases are benign. That might sound reassuring in terms of one's personal odds, but having 15% of the population seriously ill enough to require hospital care at more or less the same time is much less so.
One might consider two extreme approaches.
One would be to lock the entire world population down all at the same time and without exception. After several weeks, in theory the virus would have nowhere left to go and disappear, but implementing this strategy is clearly unworkable besides being more than authoritarian.
The other extreme would be to do nothing at all and, as BoJo said, "take it on the chin". The social cost of this would undoubtedly be to kill off many of the most vulnerable and in all likelihood kill off many more than with any mitigation strategy, disregarding the likely social costs of a completely uncontained pandemic.
Pretty much the entire world is muddling along somewhere between these two extremes leaving us all wondering just what it is we value in terms of our daily lives.
Sorry this is not more positive!
Some people get chicken pox twice, but not many.
Not a Trump fan, but I find comparing infection totals between countries whose populations differ widely unhelpful in the extreme (and much beloved by the media).
Also, totals tell us very little. The most meaningful number I can see for any given population is the rate of new infections per day, but that is not one that the media pay much attention to.
No. The tendency for engineers to think their expertise and methods is readily transferable to other fields.
In the vast majority of cases those who have contracted the virus and recovered are immune. As has been said, for many diseases where you would normally expect people to be immune after contracting it there is a very small incidence of people who do not develop immunity and hence can catch it again. This also happens with immunisation, where a small minority of those immunised don't gain immunity - which is why it's essential that everyone gets their shots (unless you have a really good medical reason why you can't), this develops a level of population immunity that provides protection to that small number of individuals who don't have immunity.
Some diseases also, in a small number of cases, go through phases where symptoms disappear (even to the point of resulting in negative results for the presence of live virus) but remains present in the patient with a subsequent flare-up. In the absence of blood tests that can detect both live virus and antibodies there's no real way of knowing if a second round of symptoms is a re-infection or a second phase of a single infection (and, even then it may be unclear).
Also, without testing there's no way to know if someone with symptoms definitely has this virus, so you may have been sick but not be immune because you'd had something else.
So, someone who has contracted the virus (with a positive test) and recovered would in the vast majority of cases be immune, and not be producing virus particles (ie: they're not contagious). However, they can still be vectors for transmission (eg: if they touch a contaminated surface and go onto touch another surface) and so should still maintain social distance and continue hand washing etc to protect others.
See also: over-representation among climate change deniers.
Interesting. As in the guy who, confronted by me decades ago with the hole in the ozone layer, said "well we can just build some factories to pump a whole load more ozone back up there"?
And creationists.
My 15 year old son woke up with unusual cough. Persistent throughout the day but isolated coughs not coughing fits. He stayed otherwise well except occasional mild fatigue first week. Still has a slight cough almost 2 weeks later. His friends also had the same cough, as do some of our neighbours.
A day later I developed a sore throat and the same odd cough. The next day I got fatigue. I had fatigue for several days but no fever. Some days I woke up fine but deteriorated later. A week later I felt well enough to do a little work admin.
That evening I suddenly developed a tight chest and slight shortness of breath. This was the scary bit - I am a ex-nurse and I found it scary, especially at night. Anxiety, of course, makes the symptoms worse. My chest symptoms started improving yesterday, on day 11. I think it will take at least another couple of days to recover fully. So 2 weeks minimum. I have not taken any treatments, I just take vit C and zinc.
My husband just has the cough, no other symptoms. My 18 year old son is asymtomatic. ‘Mild’ is a very variable state.
Interestingly (to me, at least) is that my asthma (mild, no regular treatment) and my 15 year old’s asthma (steroid inhalers, prior hospitalisation with acute attack) appear to be unaffected. My chest symptoms aren’t like my asthma ones. My oxygen saturation levels were also normal (I checked them on a pulse oxymeter).
Do you mean you know a lot of engineer climate change deniers? That would be weird - I'm an engineer, we think a lot about systems, inputs and outputs, and modelling - which makes us, on the whole, pretty worried about the climate. The IMechE trade rag has been split 50-50 between articles on recycling / climate /clean energy, and defence projects, for years - that's what people are working on.
ETA - if you mean managing directors, boards, finance directors and shareholders of manufacturers are in denial - then I see what you mean.
Yep, I had the chicken spots twice. Second time the blasted things were worst on my feet making it difficult to walk. On the whole, I think I would prefer the chicken pox to Covid-19, mainly because I have done the former already and know how miserable it makes me. My general conviction is that nobody knows what the hell they are doing in the present situation, so I am going easy of the politicians and other folks who have to do the guessing. At the end of the day no-one will get it absolutely right, but some will do better than others.
My county and the two independent cities within it has so far remained Covid-19 free - or at least, there are no reported cases. I think that is because (a) our population density is fairly low, and (b) we took the advice, socially distanced, and cut out non-essential activities quickly. The only danger is that our unsubtle governor will panic at the number of cases up in the DC 'Burbs and issue a shut down order for the whole state rather than just Fairfax and adjacent counties, which is where the outbreak is concentrated here.
Yes. They're the same thing. Knew a NASA Apollo English rocket engineer online. He thought that validated, gave authority for, his bizarre theology. Hawking talked utter twaddle on interstellar transport. And of course fusion engineers think that'll work. Even in their own field. Professor Sir Fred Hoyle, Eric Laithwaite and many, many others. Einstein even, wasting his life for decades at Princeton. All opining beyond their bailiwicks.
(I had a friend in a business department who reckoned he could supervise any PhD, having done a few. It didn't take long to come up with a few titles to put him off - 'Fatigue behaviour of reinforced concrete in long-span cantilever bridges', 'Tarmac-rubber friction models for the prediction of yadah yadah yadah'. Generally, we keep it real).
Heh. This morning I preached on 2 Cor 10:12-16 and in this time of confinement concentrated on v13:
I suspect this is easy to do because it's almost true. Methods do transfer quite well between fields, probably the majority of statistical analysis in medical research papers is still bogus, and science is not different just because a different person is doing it. But the kicker is "almost true" - you might be the world expert on corrosion in stainless steel, and all that knowledge and instinct that you have about steel doesn't help you even with understanding the behavior of a different material, let alone a different field entirely.
I never had pneumonia until the year I got a pneumonia vaccine.
I've had Valley Fever, to which you're supposed to be immune after you've had it. However, I have a friend who also had it and who caught it again.
He puts the economy = money first. Everything else is secondary.
I fear the US is going to go under due to his, and his administration’s lack of ability to coordinate the effort to combat this virus.
Things I order from Amazon, like my fish food, I’ve got extra stocks in. I think it’s possible companies like Amazon will go under too.
I also worry for the safety of Internet servers. I just hope there are contingency plans in place for when their staff start to get sick. 4G data is excellent but expensive.
I notice that various right wing pundits are saying that the US should get back to work, and if a few oldies snuff, or even several million, that would be a gallant and patriotic gesture, which future generations will venerate. Some of them even offer themselves upon the Trumpian auto-da-fe. Not sure if that's the right word, but I like it.
They forget that overwhelmed health services would mean that every minor road accident/broken limb/infection/name your health problem would easily become fatal without treatment.
Whatever your age.
We are still too deep into the reality of the negative to paint pretty pictures.
1) not everybody who gets it badly is old
2) the potential for these martyrs to the economy to be super-spreaders and thus make the problem much worse.
My understanding is that they are mostly separate issues. Although it does have a cost. Part of the reasons having lots of antibiotics, phages and a healthy environment is important is that a bacterium can't optimise for everything. So widespread MResistantSA (with or) without antibiotics would be less deadly than just SA without antibiotics, you might need to only have one spare child rather than two :rollseyes:
That said, some diseases are similar, useful antibodies in general target elements that are found in many antigens (while hopefully avoiding targeting features of their own body-the way they do this is pre-natal experiment, everything about the immune system is fascinating)
And if the lack of immunity is from another cause (at the extreme end AIDS, but I'm sure there are milder reasons) then that will apply across the board.
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The other thing with Engineer pronouncements in this case, is that an error of 3 days makes an error of 100%
*Which you reference here.
Also, I don't think they quite get the idea of exponential growth, so you can restrict it to certain demographics. Surely, white people don't get it?
Manu Dbango dying of it has probably done more to dispel this notion than all hard data combined.
(the unsentimental worth of celebrities going down with a bad case of it)
Edited: fixed link.