Not sure about the article you’re all talking about but excess deaths seems a decent check on reported numbers. It’s available reliably in at least some places. Someone posted earlier about Canada, I think, and I know people are tracking across multiple countries (the FT?). France’s data is available reported every two weeks and it gets talked about in France a decent amount.
Since they started making a proper effort here to track deaths in care homes the COVID deaths seem probably roughly accurate—up to the 4th of May the number of deaths attributed to COVID added to the figures from 2019 (which 2020 was tracking closely until mid March) is slightly higher (3%) than the actual deaths recorded this year in France.
What’s the latest on NSAIDs? Is there any more clarity on whether they exacerbate things? I’ve got arthritis in my hip and Tylenol just isn’t cutting it lately.
The open for business spike in cases is 7-10 days but that one is only visible with enough testing. Deaths will also spike again but that could take 3 weeks or more as dying takes time. That lag and asymptomatic cases is going to kill a lot of people and not only in the USA.
South Carolina leaning heavily on seasonality. Even if they’re right about Covid, I’d hate to see the data on STD rates among college students arriving back on campus after 6 months of quarantine w/ their parents.
What do we know about what other species can contract it? Spread species to species? Human to animal or animal to human? I’m going to try to answer my own questions by saying “not enough.”
Ok after googling, CDC seems to say that animals can get it but it’s not likely. Basically what I’m getting from these links is that we don’t know that much, so use common sense precautions. I’m going to make a wild guess that testing pets and wild animals isn’t the most robust.
This is a really long twitter thread but it covers the details of a story the Miami Herald ran about the Cruise Ship Industry.
Over 100,000 crew members are stuck on boats, unable to go home and many not being paid. One cruise line was charging stuck crew members for water and soap until recently. There are suck people on these boats and the people stuck are freaking out.
Not exactly sure who the cruise industry thinks is going to work on their boats. I know these crews are mostly from poor countries but they are going to lose a massive amount of experience whenever they do reopen due to how they have handled this.
Don’t even want to see it. I’m already mad. Every cruise ship worker should be free to get off in the US and get the same treatment that anyone born here would get and anyone who disagrees with me on that sucks hard and might as well be a Trumpkin.
I think this is just the US picking up on stuff we already knew. I remember a study estimating it at 5.7 a little while ago.
One thing that I think is worth pointing out is that a lot of people feel like it can’t be that contagious or there would be way more cases. But a higher R0 doesn’t mean that you can catch it from someone looking at you the wrong way, it just means there is a lot of spread - the fact that it’s asymptomatic for so long is a huge part of it.
The good news is that if the R0 is 5.7, but it’s mostly due to asymptomatic spread, those taking precautions can significantly reduce their risk… The bad news is, the US is never going to do enough testing to effectively combat that asymptomatic spread.
Yeah that was my ballpark number on what % of viral particles it would stop if both people (infected and healthy) wore masks, so it’s good to see that it also translates to a similar reduction in infection. In other words, it’s good to see that 5% getting through isn’t enough to infect 100% of the time or whatever…
They also tested it both in terms of just one or just the other wearing them, and there’s a reduction if just the healthy person wears them but it’s not as significant - looks like about 50%, which was also my guess before :).
Yesterday, the government announced that if the Covid-19 vaccine candidate developed by Oxford University proves successful in human trials then up to 30 million doses for the UK could be available by September.
Not so fast, idiots:
Prof Robin Shattock , head of mucosal infection and immunity at Imperial College London, said he thought a vaccine was not likely to be widely available until next year. He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:
I think we have a very high chance of seeing a number of vaccines that work because we know a lot about this target and I think there’s good scientific rationale to say it’s not such a hard target as others.
My gut feeling is that we will start to see a number of candidates coming through with good evidence early towards next year - possibly something this year - but they won’t be readily available for wide scale use into the beginning of next year as the kind of most optimistic estimation.
It’s going to tilt the shit out of me when the UK gives the US like 25 doses of that vaccine, and they go to Trump and Melania, Trump’s kids, Pence and his wife, McConnell, McCarthy, Pompeo, and the five conservative SCOTUS justices.
