Yeah, I agree with the bolded, as I’m sure 99.9% of people here do. Possible exceptions being Inso0 and Keeed.
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Where it comes from no longer matters. It’s simply a diversion from how badly the Trump administration fucked this up.
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For the people hiring them, the fraud is a feature not a bug
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No. The doubling figure is the total number of infections at that point in time (the 3 days is obviously a best guess - it could be 2 or 4 but 3 seemed to tally with the fatalities data I was looking at daily when this thing was spreading from China and had some predictive value). Of course, this assumes there’s hospital capacity and no quarantine too.
The problem is that if you roll this model forward to late February, when people started thinking about serious containment measures, you have a billion cases, which didn’t happen.
True, because each increase in the number of infections per radius of each spreader decreases the number of potential targets.
The observable doubling every 3 days seemed pretty good for a number of weeks per country, though.
One other thing that could affect the spread is just the variability of R0 from city to city. A Seattle or LA is going to have a lower R0 than New York. And most other cities even lower still. So some/many branches of the reproduction tree of this get stunted when someone gets it on a day trip to LA and then heads back home to Bakersfield or whatever. That event on the surface would seem to accelerate the spread but it probably actually slows it.
Certainly true that Chinese bioweapons labs have safety issues. One was even shut down as recently as last August because of safety fears. Here’s a description of one of the safety lapses.
Severity level: Serious
The CDC reported that an individual partially entered a room multiple times without the required respiratory protection while other people in that room were performing procedures with a non-human primate on a necropsy table.
“This deviation from entity procedures resulted in a respiratory occupational exposure to select agent aerosols,” the CDC wrote.
Sounds bad.
Oh, wait, that’s a US lab. Imagine it’s fine.
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Also there’s not a billion people in North America to be infected. But the highest estimate for %age infected in California is 5%, which would have been hit late January/early February with those numbers, and you’ve still got a month to go before a shutdown!
I posted this earlier in the thread with the caveat that it hasn’t been peer reviewed yet. It might be pertinent to cities like NY and London that have been particularly badly hit:
Cases in Germany likely to be 10 times higher than official number, researchers conclude
More than 10 times as many people in Germany have probably been infected with the coronavirus than the number of confirmed cases, researchers from the University of Bonn have concluded from a field trial in one of the worst hit towns.
The preliminary study results, which have yet to be peer reviewed for publication in a scientific journal, serve as a reminder of the dangers of infection by unidentified carriers of the virus, some of whom show no symptoms, the researchers said.
The readings come as Germany took further steps on Monday to ease restrictions, with museums, hairdressers, churches and more car factories reopening under strict conditions.
About 1.8 million people living in Germany must have been infected, more than 10 times the number of about 160,000 confirmed cases so far, the team led by medical researchers Hendrik Streeck and Gunther Hartmann concluded.
“The results can help to further improve the models to calculate how the virus spreads. So far the underlying data has been relatively weak,” Hartmann said in a statement.
The team analysed blood and nasal swabs from a random sample of 919 people living in a town in the municipality of Heinsberg on the Dutch border, which had among the highest death tolls in Germany.
To arrive at their estimate, the researchers put the town’s number of known deaths from Covid-19 relative to the larger estimate of local people with a prior infection – as indicated by antibody blood test readings – and applied the rate of 0.37% to country-wide deaths.
They also found that about one in five of those infected showed no symptoms.
Certainly this, but in addition in the Ionger term I also think Republicans broadly don’t want to come out of this acknowledging that public expenditure is necessary to prepare America for future pandemics. Making the conversation about foreign policy (“it’s China’s fault”) allows them to propose a “solution” that involves more military spending
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Given how efficient the military is at getting funded, I would have very little problem with making pandemic response a mission of the Department of Defense. If there’s anything that’s become painfully clear through this entire thing it’s that our pandemic response operations budget was always at least 50b a year light.
Seriously this was a way bigger risk than anything the military was preparing for outside nuclear weapons. Lol terrorism… we’re going to be at 20+ 9/11’s by the end of this week, and the economic damage is probably on the same order of magnitude as a single nuclear attack on a major US city.
They’re almost certainly lying, the numbers coming from China make no sense.
This conversation was started by France saying it was there in December. I’m not arguing that China aren’t lying, but the same question can be posed about France and they probably aren’t lying significantly.
You’re right about the figures being downplayed, and that in Shanghai there was no enforced explicit quarantine of workplaces, but restaurants (by far the main places for social gatherings) were all shut and other people and employees were told to stay at home and work from home if possible.
Typically for a new Chinese city most people live in modern apartment blocks with 24/7 security guards at the street entrance barrier who are a deterrent to strangers from entering.
Most Shanghai residents have been wearing face masks when outside (this is a cultural phenomenon too).
All schools/colleges were closed in the beginning of February.
Applying factors of importance to each of these is difficult, but Shanghai is a long, long way off being a city with unrestricted freedom now.
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Yes at this point. I still contend that we should have all shut down as a nation together for about 6 weeks. But I don’t think it’s feasible to ask people to stay on total shutdown if there area is not out of control. Opening is still pretty conservative. Work shopping maybe restaurants at low capacity or outdoor seating. Masks mandatory everywhere. Temp checks for indoor spaces. Minimal cross area travel
But now we should be at least at state level if not county. It’s all for naught without massive testing however. Waiting for a flare up to announce itself by hospital admits and dead bodies means it’s way too late.
The rural areas are really so random. Shame to keep many of them shut down.
Special special care for meat plants prisons nursing homes. Emergency production of filtered air systems to get good turnover.
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The Czech Republic ran a similar countrywide test of 27,000 people from all over that was to serve as a representative sample of all those who did not test positive and exhibited no symptoms since March 1st (the day of the first positive test in the country).
Results haven’t been released yet as far as I know. I’m really curious about this.
Exactly. What’s the evidence that it started in the wet market? And how many wet markets are there in China. Hundreds? So if it started in a wet market there’s probably a roughly equal chance it starts in any given market. How many are within a mile of a level four lab doing research on bat coronaviruses? A lot fewer, one or two.
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