COVID-19 exposes EU's inept & clueless leadership

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How exactly do you know the US is doing well? North America is further behind the curve than Europe. It’s a wee bit early to be declaring victory. Wait a couple of weeks until hospitals in active areas are overwhelmed.
 
niceatheist . . .
How exactly do you know the US is doing well?
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Of course that’s not what I said is it niceatheist.

You changed my premise.
 
dvdjs said:
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HarryStotle:
9.8% or 3.9% which is more disconcerting?
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We are very familiar with the overall lethality of seasonal influenza. It about 0.1% of illnesses.

How CDC Estimates the Burden of Seasonal Influenza in the U.S. | CDC
Disease Burden of Influenza | CDC

For the new virus the situation is less clear, as we are not entirely sure of the denominator. But the estimates from the available data are in the range of 1-4%.

These are the data of interest.
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The estimates are just that, estimates.

Given that the unknowns with coronavirus are unknown, the fact that the mortality rate is 2.5 times less than the seasonal flu based upon actual tests is promising. After all, when all the data is in, it may very well be that there are tens or hundreds of thousands walking around without symptoms who nevertheless have it.

If the death rate of corona virus were up at 10% — en par with the actual death rate of season flu — then the “unknowns” would be more concerning.

I still think this is a hopeful sign that corona isn’t going to be as bad as we’re being led to believe.

The other issue, though, is that this is on top of the seasonal flu so medical facilities will be challenged to cope with the added cases.
 
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niceatheist . . .
all health care systems either become universal or crisis turns to catastrophe.
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I’ll explain that to Italy so they can be reassured that with their centralized socialized medicine, they will not have catastrophe.
 
I think I posted this elsewhere, but it goes just as well with the current discussion. This is a link from the study that was done about the closed environment that was the Grand Princess cruise ship that was anchored off Yokohama, Japan a month ago.
https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2020.25.10.2000180

Basically what it comes down to is that on board the Grand Princess, nearly everyone was tested. Of those who tested positive, slightly more than half were asymptomatic. This while the population onboard skewed heavily toward older people as compared to a normal population. So for a general population, we may be able to infer that at least half and maybe even two thirds of those infected are asymptomatic. In other words, a lot of people are walking around who don’t have any idea that they’re infected. But people are not getting tested unless they show symptoms so we won’t know this until we can get blanket testing of everyone in a given population.

The study does say in its summary that they can’t predict the degree of transmission on the part of the infected but asymptomatic crowd. As in what is their R0 as compared to the symptomatic? I think that is the biggest unknown at this time.
 
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Here’s a thought regarding the predictions (both rosy and dire)

Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.
 
HarryStotle said:
coronavirus are unknown, the fact that the mortality rate is 2.5 times less than the seasonal flu based upon actual tests is promising.
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I already pointed you to the pages at the CDC that correct your 100x overestimate of the influenza lethality. Please, be more careful about posting misinformation
 
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niceatheist said:
How exactly do you know the US is doing well? North America is further behind the curve than Europe. It’s a wee bit early to be declaring victory. Wait a couple of weeks until hospitals in active areas are overwhelmed.
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Why do you say we are further behind, when the facts indicate we actually have a different curve?

The virus was in the US at the same time, we even had cases before Italy. By this measure we were equal to or ahead of the European countries on the ‘curve’.

Yet now several months have passed and we have fewer cases and deaths than Italy, Spain, Germany, or France in spite of each having a far smaller population. If you combine their countries to get a similar base population, the differences are staggering.

All the available data indicates we have a flatter curve than the countries in Europe.

I expect why our curve is flatter will be long debated. Is it because of the early travel ban, or because of population density (complicated since US also has many high density regions, like Europe). Or it could come down to increased social distancing and cultural differences. Certainly France and Italy are much more into touching than your ave US citizen.
 
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dvdjs said:
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HarryStotle:
coronavirus are unknown, the fact that the mortality rate is 2.5 times less than the seasonal flu based upon actual tests is promising.
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I already pointed you to the pages at the CDC that correct your 100x overestimate of the influenza lethality. Please, be more careful about posting misinformation
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I don’t see the 100X overestimate unless you want to compare oranges to apples.

Actual data isn’t “misinformation.” The conclusions drawn from it may or may not be misinformed, but the data is what it is.

The misinformation may just as well be from those pushing coronavirus lethality when the data doesn’t get us there, just yet.

The problem, as I stated, is that we can’t do the estimates currently for coronavirus that are done for the seasonal flu, so conclusions that don’t account for that lack in comparable data might also be misinformed. Apples to oranges.

Comparing apples to apples, we do have the actual data comparing deaths to positive test numbers for both.

That is apples to apples.

Comparing estimates for seasonal flu to a more restricted positive test cases dataset for coronavirus is definitely NOT apples to apples, no matter what you say about misinformation.
 
Theo520 said:
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niceatheist:
How exactly do you know the US is doing well? North America is further behind the curve than Europe. It’s a wee bit early to be declaring victory. Wait a couple of weeks until hospitals in active areas are overwhelmed.
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Why do you say we are further behind, when the facts indicate we have a different curve?

The virus was in the US at the same time, we even had cases before Italy.
We have fewer cases and deaths than Italy, Spain, Germany, or France as in spite of each having a far smaller population. If you combine their countries to get a similar base population, the differences are staggering.

All the available data indicates we have a flatter curve than the countries in Europe.
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Population density would be a factor here, especially where cases were first reported. Also explains why urban areas and denser living conditions are epicentres.

US = 87 pop./mi2 Cases / million = 17.8
Iran = 131 pop./mi2 Cases /million = 192.5
Italy = 518 pop./mi2 Cases / million = N/A
China = 377 pop./mi2 Cases / million = 56.2

On the other hand, there is …

Hong Kong = 17,565 pop./mi2 Cases / million = 22.4
Japan = 862 pop./mi2 Cases / million = 6.9
 
HarryStotle said:
Comparing estimates for seasonal flu to a more restricted positive test cases dataset for coronavirus is definitely NOT apples to apples, no matter what you say about misinformation.
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This right here. +1000

At the moment, tests here in the US are restricted to those showing symptoms and not even all of those have been tested. So we’re restricted in drawing any realistic mortality conclusion because we haven’t been able to test across the population.

The study that I linked upthread to the Grand Princess paper gives a bigger picture of what we might expect: that the infected but asymptomatic outnumber the infected and symptomatic. Perhaps by a lot given how skewed toward the old folks that study population was.

In South Korea, they tested well over 200,000 people who were showing respiratory symptoms and less than 4% of those tested positive and less than 1% of those who tested positive died. Granted that South Korean test population skewed younger. But still, that ought to give one pause.

The biggest question at the moment is: since we know there must be a fair number of infected but asymptomatic people walking around and no one knows who they are, what is their R0? If it’s less than 1, we have a chance to get out from under this. If it’s the same as the symptomatic, we are most likely screwed. What is that number? We don’t know. My best guess is that it’s closer to 1 than 3. But that is just a guess. Your guess is as good as mine.
 
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HarryStotle said:
I don’t see the 100X overestimate unless you want to compare oranges to apples.
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The pages that I linked give the lethality seasonal influenza as ~0.01% of illnesses.
That is the important number.
Zzyzx_Road said:
At the moment, tests here in the US are restricted to those showing symptoms and not even all of those have been tested. So we’re restricted in drawing any realistic mortality conclusion because we haven’t been able to test across the population.
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Of course. I already noted in my first post in this sub-thread about the problem of the denominator.
The best estimates, in the absence of perfect data, is that the lethality of COVID-19 is about 1-3%.
No one in the business is suggesting that it is at the 0.1% influenza level. And no one should be suggesting that we act as though it were. Even Trump has been disabused of this dangerous notion.
 
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I don’t see how real comparisons can be made since a huge number of Americans get flu shots; some of which seem to work and some of which seem not to work. I don’t see how that could fail to skew statistics.
 
dvdjs said:
The pages that I linked give the lethality seasonal influenza as ~0.01% of illnesses.
That is the important number.

Of course. I already noted in my first post in this sub-thread about the problem of the denominator.
The best estimates, in the absence of perfect data, is that the lethality of COVID-19 is about 1-3%.
No one in the business is suggesting that it is at the 0.1% influenza level. And no one should be suggesting that we act as though it were. Even Trump has been disabused of this dangerous notion.
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Let’s go back to the articles I posted a week ago in another thread regarding South Korea. I don’t know how to link a post but it’s post 478 in a Catholic Living thread titled “The new coronavirus Covid-19 and its spread globally”.

As of March 10, the South Koreans had done 214,000 tests. These were tests of people showing at least some respiratory symptoms so presumably they were at least somewhat ill enough to report symptoms. The results: 7755 positive. 60 dead. That is 0.028% of everyone they tested who had some symptoms. So if we accept your 0.01% number, then at 2.8X, we’re not that far off of what @HarryStotle states.

At the very least, the South Korean data doesn’t get us there for those who are pushing vastly higher mortality of Covid-19.
Theo520 said:
They discovered that 50-75% of COVID-19 cases are completely asymptomatic but contagious.
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I must caution that we do not have a good idea just how contagious the infected but asymptotic population is. No one has really answered that question to our satisfaction.
 
Ridgerunner said:
I don’t see how real comparisons can be made since a huge number of Americans get flu shots; some of which seem to work and some of which seem not to work. I don’t see how that could fail to skew statistics.
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There are multi-year statistics on how effective flu vaccines are for different age groups.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/effectivenessqa.htm

36% to 58% in those over 65 years
16% to 75% in adults
59% to 91% in children

The reason for the wide range depends upon the prevalence of the flu in any given year, and when vaccines and circulating viruses are not well matched due to serology miscalculations or genetic mutations/new forms coming into play after vaccines were finalized.

I would guess that mortality rates would be somewhat higher absent vaccines for seasonal flus.
 
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