Coronavirus

[ryanosaur]

I may have to re-evaluate my atheism.

This is unnecessary. Just revel in the irony.

 

[JerryLove]

I'd say it is 3%. I am someone besides you but hey, I am not important.

LOL. I appreciate your support

Perhaps John Hopkin's is important though:
"Early Wuhan experience suggested a case fatality rate as high as 4.3%, but likely 2% elsewhere in China."

"The case fatality rate is probably higher than seasonal influenza (≤0.1%) but lower than initially reported (~ 2-4%)."

There's three references to early estimates of 2% or higher. Please note: I'm not attempting to assert what the final value will be; but it's crazy that someone has asserted (repeatedly) that 2% was never put forward by a credible source (https://www.hopkinsguides.com/hopkins/view/Johns_Hopkins_ABX_Guide/540747/all/Coronavirus_COVID_19__SARS_CoV_2_)

 

[mtrycrafts]

...

That said: If Trump gets taken out by a virus from China with a Mexican name, I may have to re-evaluate my atheism.

If you wished for it and came true, it would be pure luck, not divine intervention.

So, don't be so hard on yourself.

 

[JerryLove]

If you wished for it and came true, it would be pure luck, not divine intervention.

I fear that even my worst enemies I mostly wish things like "may you always get the wobbly table".

I might be able to actively hope for something like that "for the greater good", but I'm not sure how that actually plays out here. So while I'd have more than a little shadenfreude, I'm not proud of that.

 

[ryanosaur]

Well, that changed pretty quickly.
I got an email earlier this afternoon saying that the coffee shop (mentioned above was staying open) decided to close. Then I got the expected word that the Pool was closing...
And finally, the Shelter In Place order came down about an hour ago.
Wheeee!

 

[TLS Guy]

The free democratic nations are not China.

Italy has changed everything. What is happening in the rest of Europe is sobering.

Now modelling from Imperial college has caused a rapid change in policy for the UK.

My brother who was here just over two weeks ago was fairly unconcerned. He has just stepped down as chairman of the Kent County council, the UKs most populous county, but is still on the KCC.

Now he is very worried as he sees events start to unfold in the UK. He thinks the UK will soon be forced into lock down. It is close as I write this.

The choice is now pretty stark. Do we want a lot more deaths and a shorter period of disruption or do we want less deaths and longer severe disruption?

So the argument is now mitigation versus suppression.

So now the issue of herd immunity comes into play. Mitigation will get us though this may be in three to four months. Suppression will last until we have and effective vaccine. That likely means a year to eighteen months time frame. Roughly speaking the modelling shows that suppression will save about ten times more lives than mitigation.

As far as our plans. My wife had to go and have the stitches taken out of her foot today following her reconstruction two weeks ago. At this time we have decided on "house arrest" and will have food delivered from now on, and see how events unfold.

We have had few cases here in Minnesota and yet the state is pretty much shut down. The Mall of America decided to shut abruptly at 5:00 PM this evening, putting 1,100 people out of work.

My brother's worry, and I agree, that the economic damage will be severe but recoverable for mitigation, but lasting may be generations for suppression.

If you look at the graphs in the article, you can also see there is a set up for generational conflict. Having said that though the number of children and younger adults that will require ICU services is sobering. I have to make the point again, that mitigation will exhaust ICU services quickly. We will do better in the US not by the amount required. Once out of ICU capacity then those needing but not receiving ICU care will all go into the mortality side.

I don't know the best approach here, but I do know that politicians are highly adverse to high body count numbers.

I think governor Cuomo is correct that we have to consider the rapid building of large temporary hospitals. The Chinese did it, so they have proved this is possible. It was that action that really turned their mortality round and saved a lot of lives. This is not the case in Italy and Spain where there are gut wrenching scenes and the modelling shows why.

I just don't know if you can keep a whole nation under "house arrest" for 18 months. I doubt you can. Now China is loosening restrictions we will see if there is another exponential uptick in cases. So I suppose suppression is warranted at least until we have a definitive answer to that question.

 

[Ponzio]

I fear that even my worst enemies I mostly wish things like "may you always get the wobbly table".

I might be able to actively hope for something like that "for the greater good", but I'm not sure how that actually plays out here. So while I'd have more than a little shadenfreude, I'm not proud of that.

Speaking of 'shadenfreude', I read this with a guilty pleasure.
https://news.yahoo.com/saturday-night-florida-presidential-party-154756361.html

I'm a terrible person, I am surely going to Hades.

 

[Ponzio]

Current stats, per Washington Post, as of 3/18/2020.

 

[Irvrobinson]

My brother's worry, and I agree, that the economic damage will be severe but recoverable for mitigation, but lasting may be generations for suppression.

A generation is generally considered 20 or 30 years, depending on whose definition you're going with. Your use of the plural means at least 40-60 years. Even if there were one hundred million deaths the economic damage would be unlikely to span "generations".

To put this into perspective, the high end of WWII death projections due to the war was 85 million people, out of an estimated population of 2.3 billion. And much of the European and Asian economic infrastructure was lost, not to mention the turmoil of going from a wartime economy to a peacetime economy. With all of that the world economy still did not take even 20 years to fully recover.

Don't for a second think that I'm trying to dismiss or minimize the impact of COVID-19. Far from it. On the other hand, I don't think hyperbole is warranted.

 

[Jeff Taylor]

I’m glad to hear you are feeling better! I hope your tests come back negative and you are done with this nasty virus.

 

[Ponzio]

To put this into perspective, the high end of WWII death projections due to the war was 85 million people, out of an estimated population of 2.3 billion. And much of the European and Asian economic infrastructure was lost, not to mention the turmoil of going from a wartime economy to a peacetime economy. With all of that the world economy still did not take even 20 years to fully recover.

The Marshall Plan instituted by the US after the war didn't hurt either in facilitating the world's economy bouncing back. Otherwise those stats would have looked a hell of a lot different.

 

[Irvrobinson]

The Marshall Plan instituted by the US after the war didn't hurt either in facilitating the world's economy bouncing back. Otherwise those stats would have looked a hell of a lot different.

Agreed, but that didn't reduce the amount of rebuilding that was necessary a bit. The real hinderance was the Soviet Union, which kept numerous "satellite" countries from redeveloping to the degree that Western Europe, India Japan, and East Asia did. My point was simply that much more damage than will be inflicted by the worst case scenario of COVID-19 has been remedied and exceeded in less than 20 years. At least we better hope a vaccine is practical.

 

[Mr._Clark]

Testing and strict quarantines seems to have worked in one Italian town:

Coronavirus: Experiment in northern Italian town halts all new infections after trial

The experiment involved blanket testing of the town's entire population of 3,300 people.

news.sky.com

Of course, there does not seem to be a feasible way to do this on a large scale

 

[Matthew J Poes]

Agreed, but that didn't reduce the amount of rebuilding that was necessary a bit. The real hinderance was the Soviet Union, which kept numerous "satellite" countries from redeveloping to the degree that Western Europe, India Japan, and East Asia did. My point was simply that much more damage than will be inflicted by the worst case scenario of COVID-19 has been remedied and exceeded in less than 20 years. At least we better hope a vaccine is practical.

I think you could argue that the destruction provided opportunity. That such growth wasn't possible without the destruction and as such it even makes sense that the recovery was so quick.

In this case, I can say that from my research into the article I wrote, the audio and consumer electronics industry isn't expecting this to have lasting effects. While they are expecting major problems (and some companies may go bankrupt), as a whole, the majority of companies are expecting to recover within months or years, with no lasting effects. I think we might see some permanent changes to the face of audio. Some companies that have been around a long time might not exist or their name may be bought up. Disruptions in product launches might changes the cycle a little. We might see a delayed launch with a jump in generation. All of this will be resolved in a few years.

I've been told that countries that were trying to get into CE production might get a boost and so we might see a shift, but that shift will take decades and was inevitable anyway. Right now China has a huge monopoly on CE production. No other country compares and no other country can take over even a fraction of it as of right now. However, we are seeing that Vietnam and India both want to get in on the production. They are actively hiring consultants from China to help build the infrastructure and we are seeing more of it. What I've been told is that, even if the investment increased ten fold today, which it won't, it would still take 10 years before we saw those as true viable alternatives.

I think we will likely go into a recession, but it will be more like the late 1980's or early 2000's, not 1930's, if that. I could totally see us pulling out of this far quicker. The reality is, many of the fundamentals remains strong. The problem is that the virus is creating an unprecedented situation with our ability to carry out work. But only certain sectors are being impacted and many of them can easily adapt. Coffee shops and restaurants will impacted temporarily for sure, and it will be really bad. But they can still deliver food. That was an emerging market trend and I expect this to only strengthen it.

I was in the process of evaluating and developing a new method of service delivery for prevention services delivered via a tele-model. It was getting a lot of push-back and we saw it as a decade away. Well, now everyone wants it. It's becoming the new normal and I expect it to remain a viable alternative to in-person prevention services.

 

[Matthew J Poes]

Testing and strict quarantines seems to have worked in one Italian town:

Coronavirus: Experiment in northern Italian town halts all new infections after trial

The experiment involved blanket testing of the town's entire population of 3,300 people.

news.sky.com

Of course, there does not seem to be a feasible way to do this on a large scale

For a lot of reasons I don't think we can do that kind of lockdown, but I also think that as long as we dramatically reduce person to person exposure, the effect will be realized.

One of the concerns is that projections have suggested that we might see a peak in cases closer to May or June and that we won't get over the hump until around August. I talked to one of those teams that did the early projections a month ago and shared that with a number of decision makers. They didn't believe me then, now they do. The uncertainty right now is that we don't know if that projection holds true if we begin to shelter in place on a grand scale. If hand washing and social distancing become the norm for 4 weeks, would that stop the virus permanently in it's track, flatten the curve, and make this manageable? Or...would the virus just be circulating within small groups and as soon as everyone comes back together, explode all over again. If this is more like measles, that is what would happen. We would basically need to isolate enough to "flatten the curve" for now but ultimately we would need a vaccine and better treatment to get to a point where this isn't floating around.

 

[Matthew J Poes]

HIV has killed 32 million and counting.

I think that needs to be taken in context. AIDS has killed more people than COVID-19 and I don't think COVID-19 has a mortality rate the equal of AIDS when it first appeared. Today the mortality rate of AIDS is far below that of COVID-19, so COVID-19 is deadlier in the sense that it kills more people who get it and spreads far more readily. The mortality rate of AIDS as of 2016 is .26% and likely lower today. The R0 value is between 2 and 5. COVID-19's value keeps changing so its really uncertain and has ranged from as low as 1.4 (but it seems like today most people think that number can't be right) to as high as 5. I don't think we will know a better estimate for a few years.

So from that standpoint, just looking at how deadly and how rapidly it spreads, COVID-19 has the potential to be among the most deadly pandemics in decades. AIDS has been circulating for decades, so you can't really compare numbers. It gives a misleading perception. Antibiotics have killed more people than COVID-19 as well, that doesn't make antibiotics particularly deadly or dangerous.

The more data that comes in around how prevalent COVID-19 is, the more I think that the R0 value is probably on the high end of the estimates, but that the mortality rate is going to drop quite a bit. I'm still not comfortable making any guesses myself. None of the studies I've read or experts I've talked with are at a place to make such predictions. I think that the finding in South Korea, that a ton of young people have the virus but are largely asymptomatic is really important. The only problem with comparing that to other viruses is that there is evidence that is also true of the Flu. We don't screen for the flu very widely and when researchers do, they find it's far more prevalent, but the symptoms are minor. It would also suggest that the flu has a far lower mortality rate than current estimates suggest.

I was talking with a Epi team yesterday that told me they suspect that we can use the current total number of cases to estimate the true number as already being in the 100's of millions. During the H1N1 outbreak, we only confirmed 28,000 cases in the US, but that turned into millions of actual cases. We don't ever test all cases. If we have a number of countries who lack testing abilities so we know that what applied to the US doesn't apply to other countries, the number of unaccounted for cases is higher for example in poorer nations. We also know that certain countries are very likely intentionally under-reporting cases. It is widely believed that China, Russia, and Iran are all under-reporting cases for political reasons. I've heard some argue that it may not be intentional, it may be lack of testing, but others believe its intentional non-testing.

 

[Irvrobinson]

I think you could argue that the destruction provided opportunity. That such growth wasn't possible without the destruction and as such it even makes sense that the recovery was so quick.

For physical infrastructure I agree. (A friend who had his house burn to the ground in one of the California fires years ago said it was one of the best things that ever happened to him.) On the other hand, I was really referring to the impact of the loss of human life, and I would argue that the majority loss of life in WWII, young healthy males, would have had a greater negative economy impact than the primary high-risk groups for COVID-19.

In this case, I can say that from my research into the article I wrote, the audio and consumer electronics industry isn't expecting this to have lasting effects. While they are expecting major problems (and some companies may go bankrupt), as a whole, the majority of companies are expecting to recover within months or years, with no lasting effects. I think we might see some permanent changes to the face of audio. Some companies that have been around a long time might not exist or their name may be bought up. Disruptions in product launches might changes the cycle a little. We might see a delayed launch with a jump in generation. All of this will be resolved in a few years.

I'm seeing this expectation in several industries. Consumer staples companies are issuing statements saying that they're not expecting demand to continue at high levels for more than one calendar quarter, which implies a return to the institutional bulk products they sell to restaurants and schools. The same with supermarkets like Krogers; they think the current bump in sales is temporary. The consumer electronics industry is projecting a turn-around in the third quarter, so are various sports and competitive organizations. I've heard of one organization which hired a team of MD specialists to project when the infection rate would subside in the US, and they supposedly said June. I have no idea what their methodology was. I hope they're correct, but it is difficult to be optimistic right now.

With the exception of companies like Harman, I suspect that many companies in the audio industry are in a constant state of shaky finances. Projecting that many will go out of business wouldn't surprise me at all.

I think we will likely go into a recession, but it will be more like the late 1980's or early 2000's, not 1930's, if that. I could totally see us pulling out of this far quicker. The reality is, many of the fundamentals remains strong. The problem is that the virus is creating an unprecedented situation with our ability to carry out work. But only certain sectors are being impacted and many of them can easily adapt. Coffee shops and restaurants will impacted temporarily for sure, and it will be really bad. But they can still deliver food. That was an emerging market trend and I expect this to only strengthen it.

I think we're already well into a recession. The entire travel and transportation industries are in the tank, and some companies are drowning. I expect the airlines to be in deep trouble, and given their customer-unfriendly policies for the past several years I doubt they'll get much sympathy in Congress. They're asking for $50B in assistance, and I doubt that's happening without becoming virtual wards of the state. The cruise ship industry is probably a near write-off. The restaurant industry will have winners and losers, but doesn't it always? Uber, Lyft, and taxi companies have seen business plummet. The automobile industry is seeing a big demand fall-off. It's not clear how many jobs will be created by online grocery and food ordering and delivery demand, but I would be surprised if national unemployment doesn't rise dramatically this quarter. I think it's going to get ugly. Millions are also watching their retirement account balances plummet, which puts a damper on the "wealth effect" we've had from the equities markets for the past four years, which tends to increase near-term spending in good times and dampen it more in bad times.

 

[Matthew J Poes]

With the exception of companies like Harman, I suspect that many companies in the audio industry are in a constant state of shaky finances. Projecting that many will go out of business wouldn't surprise me at all.

I think we're already well into a recession. The entire travel and transportation industries are in the tank, and some companies are drowning. I expect the airlines to be in deep trouble, and given their customer-unfriendly policies for the past several years I doubt they'll get much sympathy in Congress. They're asking for $50B in assistance, and I doubt that's happening without becoming virtual wards of the state. The cruise ship industry is probably a near write-off. The restaurant industry will have winners and losers, but doesn't it always? Uber, Lyft, and taxi companies have seen business plummet. The automobile industry is seeing a big demand fall-off. It's not clear how many jobs will be created by online grocery and food ordering and delivery demand, but I would be surprised if national unemployment doesn't rise dramatically this quarter. I think it's going to get ugly. Millions are also watching their retirement account balances plummet, which puts a damper on the "wealth effect" we've had from the equities markets for the past four years, which tends to increase near-term spending in good times and dampen it more in bad times.

I agree with both above. I think that Sound United and Yamaha are also doing fine financially and will weather this ok. Everyone is re-allocating funds right now towards addressing the problems. Everyone is having parts shortages and paying more for parts. Landing costs have gone up considerably for a variety of reasons. But this is all temporary. I think a year at most to resolve it. I suspect smaller companies will have longer impacts, but only because it might take more than a year to fully restore manufacturing capacity across all sectors and catch-up on production.

As for the recession, for sure. I am guessing that once data comes in for March they will say the recession started in February/March. Who knows when the true bottom will happen, but my guess is not yet. The sectors you mentioned, in particular, will be hit really hard. But...people still need groceries and food, so i suspect they will start ordering more. Amazon has mentioned needing to hire way more people and we are finding deliveries are routinely delayed now. I'm sure some of this is temporary, but I really think this might be the kick in the pants needed for that business model to take off. Maybe I'm just lazy, but I really thought it was a great idea when it first started to emerge. It was just too expensive. It's becoming a lot more reasonable now and has the advantage of being a safer way to shop during a pandemic.

 

[panteragstk]

A lot of companies around here are waiving delivery fees for food and groceries. So far it's been working well.

 

[JerryLove]

I think that needs to be taken in context. AIDS has killed more people than COVID-19 and I don't think COVID-19 has a mortality rate the equal of AIDS when it first appeared. Today the mortality rate of AIDS is far below that of COVID-19, so COVID-19 is deadlier in the sense that it kills more people who get it and spreads far more readily.

Speaking of context: You are ignoring the claim I was responding to:
"What we do know is that this pandemic is at least 10 times deadlier than any other pandemic certainly in all our life times. "

HIV is a pandemic within my lifetime. It started within my lifetime. It's killed 32 million. Coronavirus seems unlikely to kill 320,000,000 people... though I suppose time will tell. Then again, HIV isn't done either.

Context sorted out, let me respond to your claims.
Overall, 75 million have been infected and 32 million have died. That's about 45% mortality (SARS-COV-2 is <4%). But to your point, that's since the beginning.

770,000 died worldwide in 2018. There appear to be about 5 million new infections per year; so mortality as of two years ago is about 15%. That's still higher than 4%.

So Corona virus is likely to kill more people this year. To kill as many as HIV overall, at 2% mortality, ti would need to infect 1,600,000,000 (that number increases as mortality estimates go down). To be "10x as deadly", it would need to infect everyone in the world and have about a 5% mortality (or half the world at 10%).