COVID-19 thread

[Moose-tache]

nearly every country on https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps ... 7b48e9ecf6 now has a flattening curve, when looking at the logarithmic graph. i think that although the worst of this is still ahead, the end is in sight and we can plan for a return to normal life soon.

If we go by daily new cases, the situation isn't great. Most countries in Europe have seen daily new cases stop growing, or even slightly decrease. But there are major exceptions, like France and the UK. Meanwhile in the Americas the situation is still getting worse. The US, Canada, Chile, and Brazil all have plenty of cases with the number continuing to grow. Others, like Mexico, have a small but growing number of cases. Some of these countries have already passed the point at which their European counterparts "flattened the curve," so it's not clear when the curve will flatten. As I've pointed out, the quarantine in New York was "supposed" to show a drop in the rate of spread by the first few days of April, and so far that still hasn't happened. That's a problem that's not as simple as just clearing out the Republican plutocrats; New York has a Democratic governor and NYC has a Democratic mayor, both of whom are going bananas trying every trick in the book to stop the virus, and it's just not working.

[Raphael]

A German article about the impact of Covid-19 on the flower industry, mainly in the Netherlands, but also elsewhere...

https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/niede ... a-101.html

...quotes a pro-flower ad campaign as saying "Buy flowers, not toilet paper!" Um, I don't really think flowers make a good replacement for toilet paper...

[Raphael]

Screenshots of two tweets by Twitter-famous pro-Trump grifter Bill Mitchell (not to be confused with the fictional US President from the movie Dave):

March 18th:



("I don't care if I'm the last pundit on Earth saying the wild over-reaction to #COVID-19 is bullsh*t, it's bullsh*t.

100%, pure grade A, solid gold bullsh*t.

History will agree with me.")


April 4th:



("While death is sad for the living left behind, for the dying, it is merely a passage out of this physical body to a spiritual existence, free of this mortal coil. If one turns off the radio, the music is still there. For all we know, the dead weep for us.")

[Moose-tache]

OK, a linguistic question for you: what will be the impact of Covid-19 on native languages in the United States? For many languages, most speakers are over 45, and the Indian population generally suffers from a higher rate of diabetes, asthma, and other factors which increase the mortality rate. At one point the virus was wiping out nearly half the elderly that were infected in Italy (though globally only 1-20% of elderly patients die). There are languages with tenuous speech communities that could lose a large fraction of their speakers in a matter of weeks. Will this virus actually pull the plug on any still-living languages?

[Raphael]

Somebody engineer a virus that only attacks piles of rectangular green paper. Anti-disease measures will be sacred gospel.

Would have worked out 50 years ago, but with physical cash gradually disappearing from society - a process probably sped up by Covid-19 - I'm not sure it would still work today. The rich don't really need physical green rectangular pieces of paper any more.

Also, if this outbreak happened five or ten years ago, today the internet would be inundated with cries of "IT'S OVER NINE THOUSAND!!!!"

Not sure I'm following you - seems to be some in-joke I'm not in on.

[linguistcat]

Also, if this outbreak happened five or ten years ago, today the internet would be inundated with cries of "IT'S OVER NINE THOUSAND!!!!"

Not sure I'm following you - seems to be some in-joke I'm not in on.

Popular long running meme that came out of the anime Dragon Ball Z.

[Raphael]

Popular long running meme that came out of the anime Dragon Ball Z.

Ah, thank you!

[chris_notts]

Apparently a significant minority of Covid patients are having heart problems as well:

https://khn.org/news/mysterious-heart-d ... -patients/

The article suggests that this may cause long term problems for some survivors.

[MacAnDàil]

@akam chinjir: You're lucky. Here in Réunion, with 4% of the population of Taiwan, there were 17 new cases yesterday.

Definitely, I'm in maybe the only country in the world where the people in charge immediately listened to doctors in Wuhan and not to Chinese officials or the WHO.

That's good, but listening to the WHO would be a vast improvement for many countries' governments (e.g. US, Brazil) and listening sooner (e.g. France, UK).

--
I still expect the death rate to rise although not necessarily to 20%. Maybe 10%.

Will the US reach 500,000 by Easter?

[Moose-tache]

So we had a nice run there where we could say "The disease response in the US is not good enough; if we just implement stronger measures like other countries, we will succeed." That's gone now. In the most affected areas, quarantine measures are on par with European ones, and have been for over two weeks now. Even in red states like Oklahoma police are handing out citations to people making non-essential trips. If all we needed to do was take the virus as seriously as other countries, then we would have flattened the curve by now. Instead yesterday saw a 48% increase in deaths over the previous one day record.

I'm not saying we should stop blaming Republicans; I mean, what would we do for entertainment? But the situation now shows that our problem in the US is about more than right-wing obstructionism, since we do have full quarantine in some areas with no effect. I would have thought America would be amazing at social distancing. We don't talk to our neighbors; we don't visit our neighbors; we don't even live within 500m of our neighbors if we can afford not to. And most Americans carry a bubble of personal space the size of an igloo everywhere they go. But here we are, dying in spite of strict orders not to go to work, not to go shopping except when absolutely necessary, not to congregate in groups, not do anything that facilitates contact with another human being. People are refusing to stay in the same building as their elderly loved ones, refusing to touch grocery carts and door knobs, refusing to even go outside. Why is it not working?

EDIT: Another fun wrinkle: now that the health care system of New York is strained to the limit, they can no longer afford to do posthumous tests on corpses. This means that nearly everyone who dies of Coronavirus at home, who didn't get tested while they were alive, cannot be counted among the official fatalities. The city's health committee chair estimates that this adds an additional ~190 daily deaths for NYC alone, above the official figure.

[zompist]

Look at the Financial Times site, which now has charts of the growth in cases/deaths rather than absolute numbers. There's a lot going on there, but from today's charts:

-- the curve is already flattening in the US for cases
-- the death curve lags the cases curve
-- no nation has flattened the death curve in 14 days

And because the US federal government is AWOL, we are hardly a single country right now, we have 50 separate stories. Time.com has a nice chart where you can see each state's case rate.

Raw numbers can be misleading; what we really want to look at is cases or deaths per 100,000 residents. This article gives projections of the maximum rate for each state. New York's death rate per 100,000 is expected to be twenty times what California's is. (4.5 versus 0.2.)

Some of this is undoubtedly pure bad luck-- the East Coast is the hardest hit, and I don't think anyone exactly knows why. But a lot of it is governance: California moved a lot faster than New York toward lockdown. And back at the country level, the US is doing badly because Trump bungled the crisis and the GOP propaganda machine covered for him rather than serving the public.

[zompist]

Oh, and on "official fatalities": deaths are kinda hard to hide. The number to look at will be excess fatalities: i.e., how many more people die each month than are expected to. That's easily done by comparing deaths to previous years.

[Whimemsz]

To add to that, even ignoring all the other stuff, I'm not sure why you would expect deaths to significantly decrease two or even three weeks after implementing lockdowns? The disease has an incubation period of several days and sometimes considerably more, and it's not like people who do get it and die, die immediately. They die after, usually, several weeks of being ill. Case numbers will lag the actual infection date by like two weeks (factor in the length of time it takes to present symptoms, get access to/permission to get a test, get a test, get the test result, and get the result reported; but also the case numbers will be useless because no one is doing enough tests and lots of people are asymptomatic anyway), and then deaths will lag that by an additional period of time--up to several weeks. The death numbers you're seeing now reflect infections that occurred up to a month or more ago. In another few weeks if deaths have not plateaued or begun decreasing that will be concerning, but as zomp says the number of reported CASES already seems to be, despite a big increase in testing capability, so deaths hopefully will as well.

[alynnidalar]

An interesting further wrinkle into case data. My state (Michigan) is currently only considering someone "recovered" if they a) had a laboratory-confirmed case of COVID-19, b) are 30 days out from their onset of illness (which in most cases is surely only an estimate), and c) haven't died yet. Given that apparently some people are recovering after just 2 weeks, there could be a number of people still counted among the cases who have actually recovered... although given that some people take 6 weeks to recover, there could also be a (probably small) number of people counted among the recovered who aren't yet. (I'm assuming the reason they're using the 30-days-and-not-dead-yet estimate is because they're reserving testing capacity for new cases, and thus aren't actually retesting people)

Of course, these numbers are massively outweighed by the number of people who have it and are asymptomatic/weren't tested... but it's another way the data can be misleading. I've been tracking my state's numbers for some time now (it feels morbid, but also anxiety-reducing to see straightforward numbers instead of panicked news articles) and I try to keep that in mind and not get too worked up over minor fluctuations.

[Ahzoh]

Apparently “coronavirus truthers” are a thing now. Trying to say that the virus is just an excuse to limit our freedoms or whatever permanently.

Also I see a lot of morons saying that carrying on business as usual is better than trying to flatten the curve because something something economic health more important than physical health. As if we should have to choose.

They’re looking to Sweden who apparently has put down zero quarantining measures as an example of a country doing better than countries that do lockdown and that they’re “going after herd immunity”. People really don’t get what herd immunity means or requires.

[linguistcat]

Apparently “coronavirus truthers” are a thing now. Trying to say that the virus is just an excuse to limit our freedoms or whatever permanently.

I've heard some people worried that governments could use the virus as an excuse to limit freedoms, but not that the virus is fake or not a concern or something like that. And I definitely haven't heard people on my side of the internet suggesting not trying to flatten the curve, only that we should be careful once the pandemic is passed that governments doesn't keep measures in place just to control the population.

I don't know if they're being overly cautious, but I also don't quite trust governments have the best intentions anymore, at least not the US gov ...

[Pabappa]

e.g. https://grrrgraphics.com/wp-content/upl ... yranny.jpg

that's bill gates, even if it doesnt look like him ...

[Ahzoh]

Oh, Ben Garrison

[Ahzoh]

I've heard some people worried that governments could use the virus as an excuse to limit freedoms, but not that the virus is fake or not a concern or something like that. And I definitely haven't heard people on my side of the internet suggesting not trying to flatten the curve, only that we should be careful once the pandemic is passed that governments doesn't keep measures in place just to control the population.

Well, see it’s like this:
https://thebulwark.com/newsletter-issue ... st-expert/

I don't know if they're being overly cautious, but I also don't quite trust governments have the best intentions anymore, at least not the US gov ...

It is good to have a healthy distrust of the government but I think people distrust it for the wrong things for the wrong reasons.

[Moose-tache]

The government is like the co-op down the road: full of well-meaning idiots who just can't seem to do jack shit. You would never trust them with your money if you could avoid it, and maybe don't give them your phone number when they ask if you want to sign up for updates. But their record consists of 90% benign failure and 10% actual good produce at competitive prices.

When people talk about mistrusting the government, they usually act like it's some competent agency that's out to get them for some reason, and really good at getting them for some reason. In reality, you shouldn't trust the government for the same reason you don't trust "Seven Moon Tranquility" with your email when she tries to sign you up for the co-op newsletter and Marxist coupon book.