FWIW this is not uncommon with pandemics. For example, WHO[0] says "During the post-peak period, pandemic disease levels in most countries with adequate surveillance will have dropped below peak observed levels. The post-peak period signifies that pandemic activity appears to be decreasing; however, it is uncertain if additional waves will occur and countries will need to be prepared for a second wave."
For example, during the spanish flu, the second wave was far deadlier than the first. But there were additional factors (WWI and a mutation that made it more dangerous to the young).
This can continue until enough of the population has been infected that we have herd immunity. This is why there's long-term estimates of 20-60% of population being infected[1][2]
So here’s my question. China seems to have done a good job locking down Beijing and preventing an outbreak there. They did not do a good job in Wuhan. Per what you have described above, doesn’t it seem probable that Beijing will see a resurfacing given that relatively few people were exposed to it in the first bout?
Seems likely to me personally but only time will tell. In any case it probably won't be until after the initial panic & quarantine, when regular flights and travel and economic activity resume
Nobody knows if the virus will resurface or not, but China has no motivation to lie and just let people to have the disease since it's very costy to cure people.
However, China is motivated to resume society of other cities otherwise more people will get into economical troubles and it spirals.
President Xi's job (and possible life) is on the line if he fails. The CCP MUST be seen as perfect and Uncle Xi will ensure it is perfect by lying to anyone and everyone.
They’re not lying. I live in Shanghai. Things are kind of going back to normal. The rumor mill says schools may open up again in April. If the coronavirus wasn’t under control it would be impossible to hide. Without public health measures it has a doubling time of four to five days. The health system here would be overwhelmed and it would be obvious to all that it was. I’m not saying the numbers the CPC are publishing are entirely accurate but the trend in cases definitely is. Given strong enough public health measures this can be brought under control. It’s now in over a hundred countries so there will be further outbreaks but with sufficient measures we can limit the deaths until a vaccine is developed.
This is likely going to happen; right now things are shutting down, people are paying more attention to personal hygiene, etc. But once this settles down again, people will go back to their old habits. Come fall, it'll probably rise again fast.
There’s not much right vs left yet. It’s just the Democrats figuring out who their candidate will be. The pandemic has a very small effect on the US right now. Things are closing but mostly in anticipation of the near future. Almost none of it is in the middle where the right lives.
There’s been some yelling at trump over his poor handling but it’s mostly just virtue signaling at this point. When the elections come around for real we will probably see something of this if/when it has evolved into something more serious here.
I say this in Boston, just a few degrees of separation from some of the COVID confirmed individuals.
That's why I mentioned beacons for collision avoidance. They wouldn't be expensive. If we're about to build this industry from the ground up I would expect to see something like that done anyway.
Interesting point, but the Spanish-American War was only 20 years before that. Attitudes in the US toward Spain were probably much different then than they are now.
It’s a stupid concern. The reason the government is incompetent is that the government is incompetent. That’s not uniquely American, and there’s no evidence that race has played into any of this. We didn’t exactly change our tune when Italy freaked out. Does that mean we’re racist against Italians?
There’s an important bit in this that depends on age. If you’re young and healthy, in addition to being less likely to die from the disease, you’re also less likely to acquire the disease (exposure level being held equal). If you’re older, you’re more likely to acquire the disease.
This implies the disease will spread much faster in areas with more old people, because more people are vulnerable to it and they are more likely to become infectious themselves. A similar statement could be made for how well integrated the older generations are in a given society.
I don’t live there and have no particular horse in this race, but I would predict the Bay Area will not look like Italy right now for this reason.
Edit: do be careful though. The takeaway is not that young people can ignore this.
What do the healthcare workers actually do while caring for these people? Is this something that actually requires significant medical knowledge?
What does arrest mean? Is that cardiac arrest? Is that how people are dying? If they’re dying and people aren’t attending, should they even be there at all?
Most severe cases require trained medical staff. Since ~20% of infections requires hospitalization, no healthcare system is prepared for an exponential rise in SARS-CoV-2 infections.
Most fatalities are from pneumonia. Lots of details are available all over. You may want to read up.
There is plenty of evidence that many cases are asymptomatic or mild which means the true infection numbers for most countries are likely understated. So the true number of infected individuals in Italy is likely much higher than the reported number of cases.
The other thing to consider, is that with more comprehensive testing, quarantines become more targeted and effective. So South Korea might be having better success in keeping the virus away from at risk populations.
The SK death rate of 0.7% assumes that all 98% of the cases with outcome currently classified as "unknown" will recover. That isn't rational! You need to do proper survival analysis to account for the growth in cases.
I think the real takeaway is from all this is that death rate is a pointless metric. It is highly dependent on the local demographics, it requires precise information which is rarely available, it is biased by the level of care available, it has numerous ways to estimate it all of which are hard to explain and not actual estimates but upper or lower bounds, it tends to naturally decrease over time, etc.
The death rate is lower in China than Italy, but the death rate is lower within each age group in Italy vs China. Most people are too innumerate to understand this statement.
As an aside, I REALLY hate how this guy on twitter says “it could be 5.0%, look at this spreadsheet that assumes 5.0%!” Then refers to a paper as a good analysis which claims 1.6% and a set of facts which differ greatly from all of his assumptions.
SK have tested 5 times more people than anywhere else so are picking up more mild cases that other countries are not detecting. So I'm hoping the SK numbers are closer to 'real'
> The numbers out of Korea are nowhere near 20%. About 0.8% of cases are considered severe.
0.7% have died, and even that's gone up in the last few days as more cases progress. I don't know the specific stats of how many were severe/critical but it's probably much higher than the mortality rate. If you take a look at the age breakdown of the infected it seems they've been good about keeping it away from the elderly, <2000 out of 7000+ cases have been 60+ years old: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_outbreak_in_S...
There’s a link, right there in my post, with more recent and relevant data than you’re citing, and it is directly from the Korean health services: 59 / 6767 confirmed cases were severe or critical in Korea at the time of the report. That’s a rate of 0.89%
The error bars on that estimate certainly encompass 1-2%, but they don’t span to 20%. Either Korea is doing something fundamentally different, or the 20% number is wrong.
I strongly suspect that OP simply took the “80% of cases are minor” stat, subtracted from 100%, and concluded that 20% are therefore hospitalized. This method is wrong.
The numbers part is where people are confused. Becase the baseline is scetchy, depends on testing (so you risk measruing your tsting at least as much as the spreading itself) and moving. Add to that a methodology that requires a lot of domain knowledge to properly understand these numbers, and this reaction is kind of expected. Which is basically the only point I have to call the WHO, CDC and other, similar bodies out on. Explain what you are doing, why and how these things work! Especially the numbers part, I have the impression most of the panic comes from not understanding the nmbers and less the disease itself. Then people toy around with incomplete sets of these figures, usually out of date as well, and come up with stuff like 20%.
> "23 people in severe stage and 36 people in serious stage".
Which is a current snapshot, not a total of the cases that have been severe/serious. It seems like they've done pretty well at keeping it away from the elderely where the fatality rate increases dramatically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_outbreak_in_S...
98% of cases in S Korea are classified as "no outcome" at this stage - that is, it's too early to make a call. It takes 11 days on average for the disease to get really severe, so we won't see the deaths for a while. With exponential growth the pct will consistently under report the severity.
Note also that S Korea has 3x the beds of the US, and covid-19 requires very high hospitalization rates and oxygen for weeks.
Tldr: don't expect US or Europe final stats to look anything like S Korea"s current stats.
My point is that medical staff are trained to respond to many things. Training newbies to respond to one thing would probably be easy and fast. Especially if most people just need fluids, oxygen, and aspirin. Burning out doctors to maximize survival rates up front is... bad
It isn’t that easy to train someone to handle medical emergencies. They don’t typically fall into the same “path”.
As well there’s a technical skill component that takes a while to master due to variations in person-to-person anatomy. Took me about 8-10 real live intubations in life or death emergency situations (not training where I had all the time in the world) to feel comfortable enough to be unsupervised.
