Coronavirus (way, way, off topic)

[NeverDie]

Which sources of information about coronavirus have you all found to be the best? I've read CDC, WHO, and FDA, but the best source I've found so far has been Harvard: https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/coronavirus-resource-center

Useful info reported there:

1. advised to take acetaminophen instead of ibuprofen if you have a fever.
2. an experiment where a nebulizer was used to send coronavirus into the air shows that infectuous virus laden droplets can remain airborn for up to 3 hours. So, this idea that you see everywhere in the press that the particles can travel only up to 6 feet before they simply drop to the floor just isn't so, and plainly droplets can travel quite some distance in three hours.
3. Coronavirus tests are prone to false negatives, and it's not even known yet at what stage of the disease a test might indicate positive.
4. Cancel your kid's play dates.
5. The incubation period is thought to be anywhere from 3 days to 13 days. The 5 days you commonly read about is just the average (presumably, the median).

What I like about Harvard is that it's fairly frank about what still isn't known, as compared to, say, the FDA, which makes pronouncements like "there's no evidence that coronavirus can be transmitted by food", which may be literally true, but which probably misleads some people into thinking that such a grand pronouncement is being broadcast because it means food poses zero threat from coronavirus, which isn't what a more careful, literal reading actually implies. It would have been more honest to say that there "isn't yet any evidence." As my high school English teacher was fond of saying, "Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence." Not surprisingly, fresh produce companies are quick to quote the FDA and reference the FDA as the source. Harvard is more clear that the matter isn't settled, and that the risk may depend a lot on the health of who may have touched the food (and their personal hygiene) before it gets to you. We know that the virus dies in 3 days on plastic or stainless steel, but what about on butter lettuce? That doesn't lend itself well to pealing off of layers, and sanitizing it with common sanitizers... yuck. So, here we won't be buying certain kinds of produce until more is definitely known about this.

[Nca78]

@skywatch you're missing the point of the mask. Here it's not worn to protect you, but to protect others if you are infected. So you don't need to have an efficient/medical one, a cloth mask is enough to block saliva spray if you cough or just when you speak. I everyone is wearing a mask, you don't need glasses because no one can project the virus in your face.

@NeverDie most people starting to put food aside in February here, because with China next door people were afraid it would spread. It's the case for us we had plenty of food in stock and my wife was outside when the quarantine was enabled so she boughts fruits and other fresh food.
But we can also get deliveries at the entrance of the building and guards will give us so we are not in direct contact with delivery people.

[Nca78]

@NeverDie for point 2) it's not comparable to someone coughing, nebulizer makes really tiny droplet that can stay in suspension, when you cough/spit the droplets are much bigger and don't stay airborne for long. But still, I think wearing tissue or even paper masks can limit the spread by blocking the saliva droplets.

For 3) it happened in Vietnam, a flight attendant was tested negative 4 times before testing positive. Some people have a long incubation period and it seems during part of this incubation period the test fails to detect the virus :(

For the FDA unfortunately at some point they have to give recommendations to people, as raw scientific data "It might, it might not" is not enough for people&companies to take a decision. So they have to opt for the most probable situation, and take into account the price and feasibility of things too I guess. If transmission rate is possible but likely extremely low with food, it's not worth spending huge amounts of money to avoid the few cases that it will cause.

[Omemanti]

Here in the Netherlands, schools and daycares are closed for a week now, and stays so at least until the 6th of April. Only people with vital occupations can drop their kids off (hospital personal, and people who work for food companies etc. )

For the rest, they advise to stay at home and if you need to go out, stay at least 1,5m away from one another. No lockdown yet, they hope these measures will help flatten the curve.

But people are so very stupid atm. "hey its sunny, let's all go to the park/beach/(fill in crowded place)". I fear that for this reason, they will have a lockdown anytime soon.

[NeverDie]

[mntlvr]

@zboblamont You know the test will only tell you if you have at time of test not if you will not get it in the future so not sure why all of the belief that testing is going to stop you from getting it if you are in contact with people who have it

[zboblamont]

@mntlvr Sorry, obviously I didn't explain that clearly enough.
There were two strands to testing the Chinese, South Korean etc authorities successfully deployed, and bear in mind these are in communities where voluntary precautions limited the spread, control on movement, distancing, isolation, sterilisation, etc..
The first strand was a rolling programme of mass checking to identify those with potential symptoms, typically temperature, but there were reports of the Chinese deploying portable scanners to check for lung damage (a much earlier flag) but found no further info on that.
Only those identified as suspicious went on to specific virus testing, while they traced and checked contacts. Where positive the contacts were advised to be aware and were more rigorously checked.

Edit - A further complication is that some who recovered fully were infected a second time. This raises questions over immunity, but pretty sure the specialists are trying to figure that out.
The Vo project/experiment in Italy was an interesting project on global virus testing... As a non-infected city, it's only danger now is inward carriers, but lockdown prevents it...

[zboblamont]

@NeverDie Thought you might find this informative https://www.livescience.com/how-long-coronavirus-last-surfaces.html

[NeverDie]

@zboblamont said in Coronavirus (way, way, off topic):

Edit - A further complication is that some who recovered fully were infected a second time. This raises questions over immunity, but pretty sure the specialists are trying to figure that out.

Here's a list of the different theories put forth to explain the double positive test. In classic news style, they're presented with almost equal weight. As a result, the TL;DR is: who knows? :shrug:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/covid-19-reinfection/
My guess: since the stakes are high, you probably want a test that's biased toward false positives over false negatives, and so you would actually expect some double positives from that alone. Whether statistics alone accounts for all of it or not... well, that's what bio statisticians are good for, to tease apart the raw data and figure that out. They should have interviewed one!

[zboblamont]

@NeverDie said in Coronavirus (way, way, off topic):

They should have interviewed one

Not sure what US media is like, but in the UK it is expert and eminent virologists such as Pierce Morgan, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson's father they select to interview.... :eyes:

Considering the speed at which this has unfolded the knowledge gleaned has been remarkable, much more to come I suspect.

UK now has finally gone into lockdown and I believe the US, but there is still considerable disinformation circulating which is not helping, such as Dan Patrick's idiocy on Fox News, reported in the UK along the lines of "WTF... and we thought Boris Hohnson was mad".
Will leave you with this reality check from Ireland, where numbers are still mercifully low... https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/stay-indoors-im-young-sporty-and-fit-i-never-would-have-thought-id-catch-coronavirus-39070693.html
Good luck to all, stay safe...

[Nca78]

@zboblamont said in Coronavirus (way, way, off topic):

Not sure what US media is like, but in the UK it is expert and eminent virologists such as Pierce Morgan, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson's father they select to interview....

I believe this is some kind of worldwide trend :face_palm:

[NeverDie]

@zboblamont According to an op-ed piece in the New York Times, as of yesterday "the United States has tested approximately 313,000 people for the coronavirus, and more than 270,000 have tested negative." i.e. only 13.7% of those who were tested actually tested positive. Given how pre-screened most of those 313,000 had to be in order to even get the test, that 13.7% figure seems a lot lower than I would have expected a priori. Unless the test itself is pretty much garbage, that suggests there must be some other flu with remarkably similar symptoms that's attacking in parallel at the same time. A one-two punch perhaps?

[Nca78]

@NeverDie said in Coronavirus (way, way, off topic):

the United States has tested approximately 313,000 people for the coronavirus

A lot of tests return negative while people are still in incubation period, but also after symptoms, they seems to be far from 100% reliable. Yesterday they stated that a case currently treated at hospital was tested negative 3 times already, but she is still not considered "cured" in the official statistics.
My building is still in quarantine, we were supposed to be released from quarantine if all direct contacts tested negative. They tested them all, twice, all negative, but they still maintain the quarantine until the end of the 14 days, and tested all the building yesterday.
I think it shows how much they trust the tests...

If you look at the study from Pr Raoult in France who claims chloroquine is an incredible cure, you can see the same patient can be positive one day, negative the next, and positive again on third day. And that's probably the best hospital in France, with the best equipment and very experienced doctors.

[zboblamont]

@NeverDie There do appear to be conflicting reports of test results, but what is not clear in some cases is what the test actually was.
What IS however very clear is that different strategies of identification, distancing, isolating, quarantine are having various profoundly differing impacts on the spread of the virus, but doing nothing is catastrophic.
A collaborative article drawing together various aspects of this I'll attach here, a long but illuminating read, and we all have plenty of time of late... The projections for the US were eye-popping, even if the orange faced idiot thinks you'll all be at Easter church services..
https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-the-dance-be9337092b56

[NeverDie]

@zboblamont Surely by now everyone realizes that mitigation will help save lives. So, what's holding it back? In the US forward thinkers are starting to question whether a proper prolonged mitigation is even possible without the economic wheels exploding and an altogether different, possibly worse disaster happening, leading to who knows what. It's hard to know what the shape of that might be, but look at how quickly Iraq went barbaric after the US invaded as one possible model of the fallout, and, well, it's not unimaginable. We're all built from the same DNA as those Iraqi's. Mass looting? Definitely, and in poorer cities pretty fast once the groceries run out. And the chaos just gets worse from there. Take existing crime and multiply by 100x. We're just not staffed to control for that. I think we're looking at government rationing and martial law, at a minimum, just to try to keep a lid on things and prevent a boilover.

So, on the one hand, we think we know the huge cost in lives of not mitigating, but on the other hand, we have little idea of what a prolonged mitigation could lead to, because there's just too many unknowns. Save lives or save society as we know it? And then you look at just whose lives are being saved, and it's mostly a lot of very old people, so you're saving years at end of life rather than saving entire lives. Thus, I can see an argument in favor of letting the chips fall where they may on the virus front but otherwise keeping the world as we know it more or less in tact. Ultimately, I think that's the sort of trade-off that's being debated behind closed doors. If not already, then pretty soon.

[scalz]

@NeverDie depends on who's old. Here in FR, yesterday, 38% of people in reanimation are <60years old. Being in reanimation, means people may also have future health consequences=money cost too.
Sadly, there are also doctors who died, infected nurses and firemen.. each day seems worse. with confinement, peak is coming very soon here I think.
Citing a french doctor: "when there is fire, you shouldn't look at the water bill"

[NeverDie]

@scalz said in Coronavirus (way, way, off topic):

38% of people in reanimation are <60years old

They may be in re-animation, but are they dying? So far, US death rate seems governed by age:

[zboblamont]

@NeverDie As @scalz aptly quoted, "when there is fire, you shouldn't look at the water bill", unfortunately many of our politicians obsess over little else.
Frequently ignored on stats relating to age range of fatalities is the realities faced where COVID overwhelms, such as Italy. Those >60 are more likely to have medical complications which increase chances of pneumonia. When numbers attending hospital exceed resources, prioritising WHO gets ventilation kicks in. Over 60s are not priority but are given "assistance" to suffer less, hence inflating fatalities in that age range. A dreadful but necessary choice for doctors typical of a war zone.
China went on a war footing rapidly, field hospitals, roving screening, contact tracing, they wrote the book. Korea and Singapore refined the techniques successfully, look at their numbers and condition now...

It is too early to assess the long term damage to health for survivors, but lung damage is fully expected, hence the desperate search for drugs which can have beneficial effect BEFORE infection becomes destructive.

Finally, the front line as @scalz highlighted. It is crucial medics etc are given all the PPE and kit they need, without it their numbers will deplete, and fatalities will increase... No healthcare system can handle this, again highlighting the importance of strategy deployed by Singapore/Korea etc, screen, test, trace, isolate.

Watch London in the next 10 days for a textbook example of bean-counter mentality on the health of a populace, it will eclipse Lombardy...

[NeverDie]

@zboblamont Yes, in an ideal world, I'm all for that. But realistically, for how long can it be maintained? At the moment, we're teetering on recession/depression. As you may have heard, in the US the politicians just recently authorized $2 Trillion direct cash injection to individuals and businesses, and supposedly that means most people will get a roughly $2,000 check. Wonderful. Just how long will that $2,000 last you before it runs out? A week? Two weeks? And then what? Another $2 Trillion? For argument's sake, let's say $4 Trillion/month. Times what? 12 months? 24 months? That would be a range of $48 Trillion to $96 Trillion dollars. Who's going to lend the US that kind of money, especially in an environment where other countries will be needing to borrow similar amounts? Even if everyone got behind that, is it even possible? I just don't see how. In the near term the treasury could print money, but there are limits to even that before dollars lose much of their value to inflation, and if that's the only plan then dollars will become devalued even sooner. US GDP is roughly $20 Trillion. Total existing national debt is $22 Trillion. If there's some way it's possible, I'm just wondering how.

And I don't mean this to be about the US. The same thing in will probably happen in many if not most other countries.

My earlier point was simply this: in the US the average life expectancy is 78.6 years. For simplicity, let's set aside the nuances of what that means and take that number at face value. Suppose that by whatever means and at whatever cost you could save a large chunk of the 85+ year olds. Just how much longer do you suppose they would live, even before coronavirus? Maybe a couple more years, on average? And yet, because I doubt the US will triage like the Italians are doing, they'll probably be occupying most of the hospital beds and respirators, because they'll become the sickest in the biggest numbers.

[giangired]

Hi guys from Italy. I live in one of the most interested areas by the Virus and I can say that the situation is very bad. I read some of you refer to older people as the main group touched by the virus. That's obviously true but our doctors start to say that the last days people around 50 years old are now increasing in the intensive care units. So, since you all have more time than us, please stay at home and avoid any possible contact with others because this virus is very aggressive. Take care!