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stakkur

[EDIT] I greatly misjudged this audience. Fear is everywhere, but (at least) so is data.

WHO 10 March report: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...

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This comment is a great example of the ignorance we face.

"It's mostly in China" = I don't understand exponential growth.

"the flu" = I don't understand that there's a 10-30x higher mortality rate and hospital bed availability is vital to lowering it.

https://www.flattenthecurve.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth

> and hospital bed availability is vital to lowering it.

This. Plus, any disease that has very good chances of putting a young, healthy person in some ICU is not "the flu".

> In the US, you have a significantly higher chance of dying from the flu than from covid-19.

In the instantaneous moment, yes.

But there's a reason one measures derivatives, and that's why people are concerned.

>80% of all cases are still in China.

That's impossible to know. We have no idea how many cases there are in the US, because we're not doing a significant amount of testing here, because our government is incompetent and unprepared for this.

And it should be very obvious from the fact that the rate of positives relative to the number of tests is enormously higher in the US than elsewhere that the number of infected are much higher than believed. Alongside this, cost prevents many from seeking care for things like respiratory illnesses, and in the case of one that actually requires care would probably do so until it is severely progressed.

True. And we don't care about the number of cases anyway. We care about the growth. Assuming China has been ramping up its testing efforts, that gives us a clear picture of the spread in China. Especially compared to countries with slow-to-start, spotty testing.

It seems to me that the U.S. government would prefer for cases to not be tested. Whatever medical competence there is appears to be sidelined by other interests.

That's what skeptics in Italy were originally saying. Now people in Lombardy are dying from strokes because hospitals can't admit them because ICU is overrun by Covid-19 patients. Sure, if you break your leg and die from bleeding out because all local hospitals are busy treating bilateral pneumonia patients you technically didn't die from Covid-19, but ....

> Now people in Lombardy are dying from strokes because hospitals can't admit them

Now wait a minute. If you have a source on that, please do provide it. Because I am from Italy and I have never heard of such things. (There were cases of people who died from a stroke and tested positive to COVID-19, but that's all I know)

Part 5 of this thread: https://twitter.com/jasonvanschoor/status/123714289107769753...

Perhaps it's an issue with translation, but then I'm entirely unsure what he means by "Arrest".

I think it's pretty clear that he means cardiac arrest.

That was my interpretation too.

Thank you, even though I am honestly not sure if I can trust a Twitter thread. For instance, this article [1] (in Italian) says that "up until now [yesterday], no patient who could have benefited from intensive care has been excluded". BUT it also says Lombardy might be headed that way if the virus keeps spreading at this rate.

Just to be clear, I do not want to downplay what is happening in any way. But I feel it is better if we stick to verifiable info.

[1] https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2020/03/10/coronavirus-il-c...

Fair point, thank you.

This is where I'm currently battling my south-Denver community. They're all up in arms reciting the GP's facts-in-a-vaccuum. They honestly don't give a rip about the extreme pressure it's put on healthcare systems in Italy (let alone Seattle). They're mad at the local government for "bordering on hysteria" because they're following the South Korean model for management.

Once it's fully spread through our community because the've decided they're entitled to be carriers (because, hey, you're more likely to die of the flu), they'll blame that same government for failing to provide the requisite care in the community.

Given what I know about the nature of this disease, and the american response thus far, I don’t think this is true. It is looking very likely that the health system is going to be overloaded in the US. This is what people working in hospitals are telling me and it makes sense to me given the information that’s out there.

>In the US, you have a significantly higher chance of dying from the flu than from covid-19.

Today, but the thing about time is that before long next month will be today.

According to this dashboard, there are 40k infected outside of China vs 80k inside, and the 40k number is still growing exponentially. It’s just a matter of days until we have more cases outside of China.

https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...

It is too early in the course of the disease in the US to make that assertion.

That will depend quite a bit on how overwhelmed the hospitals become.

SARS-CoV-2 has significantly higher mortality than the flu even with top treatment.

This. Last month all of the analysis pointed to the fact that the mortality rate was being severely misrepresented, either through intent or ignorance.

For now. It's still expanding rapidly. A lot of countries, including the US, don't exactly give the impression they've got a good handle on this.

If left to expand, this is going to turn into another unavoidable seasonal flu, except more contagious, more severe, and more deadly. And for now, with no vaccine.

A couple of important reasons to try to slow this thing down are:

* Hospitals don't have the capacity to deal with the number of severe COVID-19 patients they're likely to get. There's a good reason China built a new hospital in a week. Severe cases end up on the ICU, and we could end up with hundreds of thousands severe cases.

* Slowing it down gives scientists more time to find a vaccine.

If you wait for it to get worse than the flu, it will be too late.

Today's XKCD is a direct response to this line of thinking: https://xkcd.com/2278/

Just because something hasn't happened yet does not mean it's completely unpredictable. COVID-19 is coming, and if we don't put significant preventative measures in place, many more people will die from it in 2020 than the yearly flu.

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