COVID-19 (2): Turns out it's going to be pretty bad actually

“cubic” is more precise.

I was just telling my wife tonight that our failings are almost completely because of politics (with a heaping teaspoon of incompetence mixed in).

Noah’s ark was built on a cubic model. That’s just science!

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Something that’s never quite sat right with me is the idea that it’s really contagious, has an R0 of 3-5, and people can infect others for like a whole three weeks. That R0 and the long window for infection kinda implies that it’s not exactly all that contagious to me, which would also explain why we find cases from January and even December outside of Wuhan. It takes a long time for each person to infect their average of three other people, so I’d expect it to take like 6 months for an outbreak to go from 50 people to a million.

I don’t know anything about anything, but the numbers just don’t seem to match up to me.

R0 doesn’t actually tell you intrinsically about the speed of spread or the ease of transmission though. The flu and HIV can have a R0 of 2 (totally made up, no idea what either is), but all that means is that each person with the virus ends up infecting two more. Could be in days or could be years.

We did that in 6 weeks with the country shut down. It’s contagious.

Has anyone that tested positive for COVID, then recovered, and then tested positive for COVID subsequently actually exhibited symptoms?

I read a few days ago that the subsequent positives were from harmless “dead” virus.

This hits so many different points I’m not really sure which thread is the best one for it.

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Correct. But not before adding insult to injury.

Levi Tappan, who is mayor of nearby Page, Ariz., and isn’t Native American, posted a comment online over the weekend that said, “I wish he would battle alcoholism as hard as COVID19.” It came after Tappan wrote a letter to Nez asking if he would consider reopening some popular recreation areas on the reservation.

The mayor apologized, but not really.

Pretty sure (but not 100% certain) the answer to this is, yes. I think I’ve read where there have been cases of people getting the virus again

No, we don’t know this at all. The general consensus is that this is due to incorrect testing.

Well, false positives are innate to testing rather than necessarily being due to tests being administered incorrectly, but false positives are the dominant but not necessarily exclusive explanation for covid-19 victims testing positive after recovering.

We’re 4+ months into this thing we still don’t really know anything about anything. It’s kind of amazing that there are no conclusive answers at all to any questions that might reasonably be asked.

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This virus will keep scientist busy for a long time. There is so much unexpected about it. Are there different strains that cause different issues. Why do children not get infected as much and if they get it why don’t they spread it as much. How did it spread across the world and when were the first cases. Where did it come from as the bat version had to move to another animal first.

I agree they know very little so far and imo, are taking huge risks by trying to re-open what is in all likelihood prematurely. We don’t know for example, if it causes permanent lung damage, or lays dormant for a period only to resurface as another unwanted disease such as the shingles with chickenpox

I know that one reason viruses mutate to less deadly forms is that if they kill people off too quickly, they don’t have the time to replicate and spread. COVID19 does not have this incentive to weaken because it remains asymptomatic for so long giving it time to spread. Hopefully, after the 2nd, 3rd waves it does become less deadly as it reaches saturation and runs out of hosts. But yeah, this is one scary circumstance we humans have found ourselves in and unfortunately, the majority of people like just plain too dumb to understand how bad it can get

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And on the 15th Day, the venomous Caravan arrives to strike against our border. But they shall be met by a majestic, transparent WALL, erected by the heroic first responders who have been nourished by their triumphant battle with the Invisible Enemy.

And by these signs ye shall know that Infrastructure Week hath commenced.

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This is what I’m wondering. It could just be that portion of the graph before the exponential growth really starts to take off, plus there’s TONS of variance at that point. To illustrate, let’s say that we know that one person brought it from Wuhan to California in January, and infected four people. Bad luck already - the actual R0 is lower than four.

Okay, who did they get? Was it a retired widower who lives alone, a techie who works from home, an author who works from home, and someone on a 1-week staycation? You might see it go from 4 to 0. On the other hand, if they got a Starbucks barista who rides public transit to work, a taxi driver, a poker dealer who went to a Warriors game while asymptomatic, and a nurse in a nursing home, it might get really bad really fast.

It stands to reason that embers would fall in all sorts of communities and not really take off, until it hits a super spreader and then it really gets going. Meanwhile, there are a lot of people who can die from it while passing under the radar - like our retired widower… Even a handful of young deaths will just look random if you aren’t looking for it and there aren’t a ton of them in one place.

It’ll be interesting to see whether we got “lucky” to have it hit a nursing home in Washington earlier in the curve or unlucky to avoid it until we did, if it was here a lot earlier. I hesitate to even use the word lucky, cause we’re talking about dozens of deaths, but it was also a canary in the coal mine that may have saved hundreds or thousands of other lives.

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Indonesia Update:

Left my house today for the first time in about 2 weeks to do some unavoidable errands. Saw a mask compliance rate of 100% here in my city. Local community police will turn you away if you’re not wearing one. Most usually air-conditioned spaces were opened as best as they could, although more than not it just means opening the front doors.

Testing is still very bad, only about 5,000 test are performed per day. Several noteworthy clusters include a cigarette factory, where about 10% of 600 employees tested positive. Another one is a religious school with 22,000 students, about 1,600 of whom are from abroad. The cluster was found only when those foreign students returned home and were tested in their home country. So yeah, testing still sucks, and it’s not going to get better.

In other news, an Indonesian research paper (yes, I was surprised there even was such a thing) concluded that Vit D deficiency leads to bad outcomes.

The odds of death was higher in cases with insufficient Vitamin D status (OR=7.63; p<0.001). When compared to cases with normal Vitamin D status, death was approximately 10.12 times more likely for Vitamin D deficient cases (OR=10.12; p<0.001).

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3585561

This has also been concluded by several other studies around the world. So another score for team sunshine, I guess.

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Please don’t do that.

I get that it’s fun sometimes to mischaracterise people’s views and posts for dramatic/humorous effect, but after I engaged in good faith your deplorable-adjacent position re. the big pharma you’re still backing (because despite having misgivings about their grotesquely high profits they pay you enough for you to have zero conscience about Africans who can’t afford their drugs), you should stop doing this now.

And as for the more full-on deplorable you cited - he actively abets the imprisonment of a disproportionate number of African Americans innocent of the crimes he prosecutes them for. But it does pay for some lame luxury cruises.