Coronavirus

[TLS Guy]

Some encouraging news. A Lab in Melbourne has replicated the Wuhan Coronavirus. This was reported two days ago. Hong Kong has shared the RNA genome. This breakthrough will help develop antibody tests to more quickly identify cases. In addition it will help develop vaccines.

China, if their data is reliable, report 7711 cases and 170 deaths. That is a case fatality rate of 2.2% So in a city as large as Wuhan the case incidence by now is not as high as might have been feared. Although one has to be cautious as we now know the incubation period with viral shedding can be at least 10 days and may be 14. So this would tend to delay peaking.

There is one nightmare in Italy, where a 6000 passenger cruise ship has two Chinese residents who are ill with respiratory difficulties and very likely have the Virus. The ship is now in the port of Savona. The ship has visited The liner has visited Marseilles in France, and the Spanish ports of Barcelona and Palma de Mallorca this week before docking on Thursday at Civitavecchia, north of Rome.

The increasing embargo and virtual quarantine of China is starting to have repercussions on the flow of parts and goods.

 

[TLS Guy]

WHO now declares a world health emergency. Cases increasing in China more rapidly.

 

[Gmoney]

So this is how it begins

 

[Swerd]

The Coronavirus outbreak is still growing exponentially as of 30 Jan 2020. The numbers I used to make this semi-log plot are taken directly from the Case statistics table in this link. It is usually updated each night.

@RedCharles – I understand someone predicted the number of cases would begin to taper off by the first week in February, maybe between Feb 4-7. I'm as eager as anyone is for this epidemic to peak soon, but as of 30 Jan, there is no sign of this.

 

[TLS Guy]

The Coronavirus outbreak is still growing exponentially as of 30 Jan 2020. The numbers I used to make this semi-log plot are taken directly from the Case statistics table in this link. It is usually updated each night.

@RedCharles – I understand someone predicted the number of cases would begin to taper off by the first week in February, maybe between Feb 4-7. I'm as eager as anyone is for this epidemic to peak soon, but as of 30 Jan, there is no sign of this.
View attachment 33734

I agree with you. What has confounded it, is that originally we did no realize the incubation period was so long at 14 days, and that period was likely largely an infectious period. So from what we know now I don't think we can expect peaking until the March/April period and may be later.

The death rate is so far holding steady at just over 2%. However I don't think any of us really have a handle on the clinical course of this and the variation in the clinical course. China is admitting today a 20% rate for serious illness from the virus. However I have no idea what that means as it is so ill defined.

What I would really like to know is the proportion if cases needing ICU and especially the clinical course of those requiring mechanical ventilation, and the range of days they require it.

I suspect that there may be a significant number of cases who are now seriously ill that will ultimately be fatalities.

We need honest answers from China about these cases. Otherwise the rest of the world can not make any sensible game plans.

As you know my biggest concern is the number of people who need respiratory support not having the resources available to them.

I just have no idea how many patients have been intubated in Wuhan because of this epidemic. It is these sort of numbers that senior physicians, nurses, respiratory therapists, and hospital administrators need to know if the cat should get out of the bag so to speak. China needs to be pushed hard to release at least preliminary data on these issues.

 

[Alex2507]

Steel toe Redwings?

Triple memory foam Sketchers. They may as well have puppy ears on the sides. Night work sees a relaxed safety atmosphere so I switch up the foot wear.

Love the smurf booties. Fortunately for me, most of my customers are commercial and I just drop my product off at their loading dock. I don't have to install those. But I should get some of the smurf booties for my next install next week. So thanks for the reminder!!

This job has an automated booty dispenser so you don't even have to bend over to put 'em on. I never imagined this kind of nonsense would impact me but bad ideas are like wildfire.

Don't get me started on the walls. Ugh...at 34 inches up from the floor, the wall is vertically out of square by 1-1/4".

Eyeball Drywall !!!

 

[Swerd]

This job has an automated booty dispenser so you don't even have to bend over to put 'em on. I never imagined this kind of nonsense would impact me but bad ideas are like wildfire

We all want one of those automated booty dispensers!

 

[Pogre]

One of the 5 cases that popped up here in the states is in Maricopa County, Arizona. Guess what county I live in...

 

[Trell]

One of the 5 cases that popped up here in the states is in Maricopa County, Arizona. Guess what county I live in...

Maricorona County?

 

[TLS Guy]

One of the 5 cases that popped up here in the states is in Maricopa County, Arizona. Guess what county I live in...

 

[RedCharles]

@Swerd It appears that the growth curve may be leveling off. We were on track for a million deaths by the 21st, but praise Jesus, things are looking better. As long as we stay well under 24k confirmed cases today, we're not on the road to hell.

Also note that Hubei, which is the province that Wuhan is located in, has 7153 of the confirmed cases, or 59 percent of all cases worldwide. However, 249 people have died in Hubei, or 96 percent of deaths. Two reasons for this might be, overwhelmed hospitals and death lag.

I looked at the data for the first forty deaths. It took an average of 12.5 days to die from the point of seeking medical care. I'm assuming it takes a few days to confirm, so we're probably looking at a nine day lag between a confirmed case and a death. There are currently 200 some cases in critical condition. There are 1200 ish cases in severe condition. I assume that means there are 1500ish people on oxygen. Many of those in critical condition will die, and therefore the death toll per 12000 is probably more like 500ish, or 3-4 percent. However, there are those whose symptoms are mild and do not seek help at all and are therefore never confirmed. But there are also people who sought help, but died and were never confirmed (WSJ article). And on top of that, we're getting our numbers from a commie government, so the totals are probably understated. With all of these issues, it's hard to say what's really true.

But I do believe that the Chinese are getting the infection under control; besides pouncing on this earlier, I don't see how much more they could be doing.

They're arresting people who don't wear masks in public.
They're checking people's temperatures everywhere.
They've got drones running around checking people.
They're building several hospitals just for this disease.
They've quarantined 55 million or so people.
They've canceled school. Work. People are staying home.
Regular people are doing everything they can, such as wearing water jugs on their heads.

If China's all of the above strategy doesn't work, I will be surprised at this point.

 

[RedCharles]

This disease appears to hit Chinese males particularly hard because of the concentration of the ACE2 receptor in the lungs. Not enough data yet to be conclusive. Here's a link: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.26.919985v1.full

I would like to remind everyone that Race and Sex are not social constructs. They are a physical reality.

I am eager to read more about this; many researchers and doctors continue to remark that this virus is "clever" and "not fortuitous". Which is to say, NCoV may have been engineered. Some FNG at Peng's lab in Wuhan may have accidentally set it loose (ZeroHedge). Or it may be a race targeting virus engineered by some other power. Or it may just be from bat soup.

If this virus peaks next week, there will be some positive third order effects from this outbreak that benefit Washington. At the very least, this supply chain disruption will not go unnoticed by business leaders. I really do believe we are witnessing a world changing event on par with 9/11 or 2008.

 

[Swerd]

@RedCharles – thanks for the Zhao et al pre-print paper. I had heard of the link between the virus and expressed ACE2 in lung tissue, but I hadn't read the story as known so far. I'm a retired biochemist who worked on cancer research, so I'm no expert on viruses or viral diseases. But the paper and data look reasonable. The authors do recognize their statistics are weak because of the small sample numbers, but these results are significant enough for publication despite that.

I appreciate your input and I agree with most of what you say. But I do wonder about this:

I am eager to read more about this; many researchers and doctors continue to remark that this virus is "clever" and "not fortuitous". Which is to say, NCoV may have been engineered. Some FNG at Peng's lab in Wuhan may have accidentally set it loose (ZeroHedge). Or it may be a race targeting virus engineered by some other power. Or it may just be from bat soup.

Infectious viruses all appear to be wickedly clever. Evolution works rapidly when the error rate of their genome replication enzymes is so very high. In normal mammallian cells, errors in gene sequences occur roughly once in a billion replications (1/10^9). These cells divide no faster than roughly once every 24 hours, and each cell divides to produce two progeny – binary division. In many bacteria, errors occur a thousand times more frequently, one in a million (1/10^6). Bacteria also reproduce with binary division. Cancer cells grown in the lab have also been known to lose genome error correction mechanisms, resulting in similar high 1/10^6 error rates. In some infectious viruses, these error rates are much higher, as high as one in a hundred thousand (1/10^5). I don't know what the error rate is for Coronaviruses, but it also could be very high.

Uncorrected errors in the genome allow for rapid accumulation of mutations. In typical lab bacteria, the 1/10^6 error rate is enough to allow the bugs resulting from an overnight liquid culture (as opposed to colonies growing on agar plates) to become genetically different from the starting bugs. And bacteria reproduce by binary fission – one bug divides to become two. One infectious virus particle reproduces by producing many hundreds of progeny.

So it isn't necessary to invoke anything more than "just bat soup" to explain what's happened with the 2019 NCov. Do you know of any references to human engineered viruses that have run amok in China? I'd be interested in seeing them. Engineering targeted viruses by humans with evil intent may sell well on the internet. Those unsubstantiated rumors have been around as long as HIV, and probably before that. But in my experience, no humans are that smart or that good at virus engineering.

Here's my semi-log plot with the data as of 1 Feb 2020. This data is still very early. Notice how the blue trendline takes an odd looking downward swing between 16 and 18 Jan. The algorithm I chose to make the best looking curve fit (6th order polynomial in MS Excel) still doesn't fit the early data very well. After 26 or 27 Jan the curves seem to level out a bit. I think this is the real rate of disease appearance. Earlier than that on the curve is a result of the confusion that comes with very early data.

Here is the same data with 5th order polynomial curve fitting.

 

[TLS Guy]

@Swerd It appears that the growth curve may be leveling off. We were on track for a million deaths by the 21st, but praise Jesus, things are looking better. As long as we stay well under 24k confirmed cases today, we're not on the road to hell.
View attachment 33785

Also note that Hubei, which is the province that Wuhan is located in, has 7153 of the confirmed cases, or 59 percent of all cases worldwide. However, 249 people have died in Hubei, or 96 percent of deaths. Two reasons for this might be, overwhelmed hospitals and death lag.

I looked at the data for the first forty deaths. It took an average of 12.5 days to die from the point of seeking medical care. I'm assuming it takes a few days to confirm, so we're probably looking at a nine day lag between a confirmed case and a death. There are currently 200 some cases in critical condition. There are 1200 ish cases in severe condition. I assume that means there are 1500ish people on oxygen. Many of those in critical condition will die, and therefore the death toll per 12000 is probably more like 500ish, or 3-4 percent. However, there are those whose symptoms are mild and do not seek help at all and are therefore never confirmed. But there are also people who sought help, but died and were never confirmed (WSJ article). And on top of that, we're getting our numbers from a commie government, so the totals are probably understated. With all of these issues, it's hard to say what's really true.

But I do believe that the Chinese are getting the infection under control; besides pouncing on this earlier, I don't see how much more they could be doing.

They're arresting people who don't wear masks in public.
They're checking people's temperatures everywhere.
They've got drones running around checking people.
They're building several hospitals just for this disease.
They've quarantined 55 million or so people.
They've canceled school. Work. People are staying home.
Regular people are doing everything they can, such as wearing water jugs on their heads.

If China's all of the above strategy doesn't work, I will be surprised at this point.

The news media are full of doom. However I agree with you the cases in China seem to be falling of the expected curve. I have to say the most likely explanation are the measures they have and are taking now. The questions about the accuracy of their data remain though. The next week will show if this can be sustained.

 

[RedCharles]

Scapegoating gives us a sense of control; conspiracy theories give people a sense of order. And I am not above the pull of either them.

@Swerd I'm going to have to closely read your post again.

The Chinese government took down this article.

统计数字之外的人：他们死于“普通肺炎”？

archived 2 Feb 2020 01:17:34 UTC

archive.is

 

[CB22]

Good news, I made it back to the US without getting "Wuhaned" or so I think. I wore a mask for 20hrs while flying not fun at all. When I was in the Hong Kong airport they seemed very serious about the virus. Literally everyone in the airport was wearing masks. They had temperature monitors in place when I got off the plane from Bangkok. Security asked where I had traveled to before boarding the plane and then grilled me with questions about my Thailand holiday. When I got back to the US, no temperature monitors, no one was wearing masks who worked at the airport, and I got the sense no one made a big deal about the virus. No questions were asked by CBP after I told them I was traveling from Thailand.

 

[RedCharles]

What the freak? Nothing at US airports?

 

[Swerd]

Scapegoating gives us a sense of control; conspiracy theories give people a sense of order. And I am not above the pull of either them.

I like the way you said that.

@Swerd I'm going to have to closely read your post again.

All I meant is that infectious viruses have the ability to rapidly mutate. This has been known to science for many years. As soon as a virus changes it's host animal, as happened with NCov (snake, bat, or whatever to human) it's living & growth conditions change. Changes in living & growth conditions lead to rapid mutations. A virus that grows & replicates rapidly is a successful virus, but not if it kills it's host animal. Even 2% killed is bad for the virus. In whatever animal NCov infected before humans, it probably wasn't nearly so lethal as it now is in humans. The virus always mutated fast, but now that it's living & growth conditions have changed, new mutations are essentially experiments at adapting to those new conditions. As a result, I'm not surprised that the virus can change very quickly.

I couldn't get anything from your link, I don't speak or read Chinese.

 

[KEW]

I couldn't get anything from your link, I don't speak or read Chinese.

See if this is in English when you open it:

统计数字之外的人：他们死于“普通肺炎”？

archived 2 Feb 2020 01:17:34 UTC

archive.is

I use Chrome and cannot speak to other browsers, but in Chrome, if you right click in the text body, "translate to English" is an option. It is a software driven translation, so there will be glitches, but it is usually reasonably usable!

 

[Swerd]

See if this is in English when you open it:

统计数字之外的人：他们死于“普通肺炎”？

archived 2 Feb 2020 01:17:34 UTC

archive.is

I use Chrome and cannot speak to other browsers, but in Chrome, if you right click in the text body, "translate to English" is an option. It is a software driven translation, so there will be glitches, but it is usually reasonably usable!

I opened an English translation in Chrome (thanks for the tip @KEW).

It sounds like criticism of the Chinese system of dispensing medical care. And it was later censored by Chinese government. In the USA we are familiar with medical insurance horror stories that somewhat resemble that.

But I didn't see anything that I might say as a scientist interested in debunking conspiracy theories. The only thing I could comment on was the very small number of cases (5 or 10?) that were cited as possible mistaken cause-of-death attributions. If you use the latest number of deaths as of 1 Feb 2020, 304, that's 1.6% to 3.3% error. Statistically, that's meaningless.

But I also understand the article's implication that the number of NCov-related deaths might be much higher if more viral pneumonia patient deaths were actually diagnosed with NCov. Chalk it up to the kind of unreliable early data that comes with outbreaks of new, previously unidentified, diseases.