COVID-19: Chapter 6 - ThanksGRAVING

I’d just dump on them at this point. “You love your petty conveniences more than us and your grandkids”

You are a better man than me.

Kim’s already apologised for this. NK have a shoot-to-kill policy at borders to prevent Covid entering

North Korea admits to ‘faults’ in virus prevention

North Korea - one of the most secretive countries in the world - has not confirmed any Covid-19 cases, although observers doubt it could have escaped the pandemic entirely.

Pyongyang closed its border with China in January, and the country is thought to be operating a shoot-to-kill policy at its borders to prevent the virus entering the country.

But North Korea’s approach has come under scrutiny in recent days because of the shocking way it shot dead a South Korean official who was found floating in the North’s waters.

On Wednesday, the official KCNA news agency reported that “some faults” had been discovered in North Korea’s efforts to prevent an outbreak, during a recent meeting of the ruling Workers’ Party – attended by leader Kim Jong-un.

The report did not state what those faults were but the meeting “stressed the need to strictly guard against self-complacency, carelessness, irresponsibility and slackness”.

Kim Jong-un issued a rare personal apology to the South last week, over the killing of the South Korean official.

I haven’t bothered to look at this for a while but decided to see if Florida was actually doing any better. The answer seems to be a resounding no. Florida rocking a nearly 20% pozz rate still.

Disney CEO says they’re about to lay off another 28,000 workers, including some at Disney World, despite the fact that Disney World can open at full capacity now. But he blames California’s refusal to reopen for the layoffs :man_shrugging:

(Disney has earned roughly $50 billion in profits over the past five years)

Florida is apparently reporting only newly tested people in the denominator. It makes the pozz rate look artificially high.

https://twitter.com/TheLawyerCraig/status/1310270673235980288?s=19

This guy explains it, seems to apply to lots of states.

At least they were honest about not isolating and capable of deciding to pass on visiting.

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If Trump wins I could easily see this at our southern border.

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Hang in there, you’re doing the right thing.

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Nah, I don’t think the Mexican government would shoot us.

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By now many people have heard about R0—the basic reproductive number of a pathogen, a measure of its contagiousness on average. But unless you’ve been reading scientific journals, you’re less likely to have encountered k , the measure of its dispersion. The definition of k is a mouthful, but it’s simply a way of asking whether a virus spreads in a steady manner or in big bursts, whereby one person infects many, all at once. After nine months of collecting epidemiological data, we know this is an overdispersed pathogen, meaning that it tends to spread in clusters, but this knowledge has not yet fully entered our way of thinking about the pandemic—or, our preventive practices.

Unfortunately, averages aren’t always useful to understand the distribution of a phenomenon, especially if it has widely varying behavior. If Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos walks into a bar with 100 regular people in it, the average wealth in that bar suddenly exceeds $1 billion dollars. If I also walk into that bar, not much will change. Clearly, the average is not that useful a number to understand the distribution of wealth in that bar, or how to change it. Sometimes, the mean is not the message. Meanwhile, if the bar has a person infected with COVID-19, and if it is also poorly ventilated and loud, causing people to speak loudly at close range, almost everyone in the room could potentially be infected—a pattern that’s been observed many times since the pandemic begin, and that is similarly not captured by R. That’s where the dispersion comes in.

There are COVID-19 incidents in which a single person likely infected 80 percent or more of the people in the room in just a few hours. But, at other times, COVID-19 can be surprisingly much less contagious. Overdispersion and super-spreading of this virus is found in research across the globe. A growing number of studies estimate that a majority of infected people may not infect a single other person. A recent paper found that in Hong Kong, which had extensive testing and contact tracing, about 19 percent of cases were responsible for 80 percent of transmission, while 69 percent of cases did not infect another person. This finding is not rare: Multiple studies from the beginning have suggested that as few as 10 to 20 percent of infected people may be responsible for as much as 80 to 90 percent of transmission, and that many people barely transmit it.

This highly-skewed, imbalanced distribution means that having an early run of bad luck with a few super-spreading events, or clusters, can produce dramatically different outcomes even for otherwise similar countries. Scientists looked globally at known early-introduction events, in which an infected person comes into a country and found that in some places, such imported cases led to no deaths or known infections, while in others, they sparked sizable outbreaks. Using genomic analysis, researchers in New Zealand looked at more than half the confirmed cases in the country and found a staggering 277 separate introductions in the early months, but also that only 19 percent of introductions led to more than one additional case. A recent review shows that this may even be true in congregate living spaces, such as nursing homes, and that multiple introductions may be necessary before an outbreak takes off. Meanwhile, in striking contrast, in Daegu, South Korea, just one woman, dubbed Patient 31, generated more than 5,000 known cases in a megachurch cluster.

We can think of disease patterns as leaning deterministic or stochastic: In the former, an outbreak’s distribution is more linear and predictable; in the latter, randomness plays a much larger role and predictions are hard, if not impossible, to make. In deterministic trajectories, we expect what happened yesterday to give us a good sense of what to expect tomorrow. Stochastic phenomena, however, don’t operate like that—the same inputs don’t always produce the same outputs, and things can tip over quickly from one state to the other. As Scarpino told me, “Diseases like the flu are pretty nearly deterministic and R0 (while flawed) paints about the right picture (nearly impossible to stop until there’s a vaccine).” That’s not necessarily the case with super-spreading diseases.

In study after study, we see that super-spreading clusters of COVID-19 almost overwhelmingly occur in poorly ventilated indoor environments where many people congregate over time— weddings, churches, choirs, gyms, funerals, restaurants, and such—especially when there is loud talking or singing without masks. For super-spreading events to occur, multiple things have to be happening at the same time, and the risk is not equal in every setting and activity, Muge Cevik, a clinical lecturer in infectious diseases and medical virology at the University of St. Andrews and a co-author of a recent extensive review of transmission conditions for COVID-19, told me.

A potential whole new aspect of this to think about.

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It’s crazy how often the 80/20 rule hits in nature.

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It’s really freakish seriously. It applies to basically every organization bigger than 20 people wrt value created. Part of that is just what you’re measuring, and sometimes people move from the 80 to the 20 and back again when you measure different stuff, but it’s insanely consistent give or take 10% either way on almost anything you measure.

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This article is a good one to send to mask skeptics, or to get refreshed on the basics. It’s in plain language without being too dumbed down and covers a lot of the “what abouts” that seem to always come up when masks are talked about.

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For anyone caring for a 65+yr old, ( @StimAbuser ) this made interesting reading and worth keeping on the look out for…

Philippa Roxby, Health reporter, BBC News…

Delirium a ‘key symptom’ of Covid in frail older people

There are three main symptoms of a coronavirus infection, but research suggests frail, older people can also experience delirium or confusion.

Scientists don’t know why vulnerable over-65s, who are more likely to have falls and be in poor health, are more likely to have this symptom.

But they are warning doctors and carers to look out for signs of confusion, drowsiness or strange behaviour in this age group because it could be an early sign of Covid-19.

In the study of 800 people, one in five patients in hospital with Covid had delirium as their only symptom.

Among people who recorded their symptoms on an app, a third who experienced delirium did not have the classic symptoms of a cough or fever.

Read more here.

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Yikes. I hope Biden didn’t catch it on stage last night.

If only we could all be Pareto efficient

Uh, ever heard of Zorro?

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delirium is a common symptom of every infection in older people. It’s not something particularly suggestive of covid.

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Under the category of ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS?!? — the no-sail order on cruise ships isn’t being extended past October 3, thanks to Florida Man.

https://www.axios.com/scoop-white-house-overruled-cdc-cruise-ships-florida-91442136-1b8e-442e-a2a1-0b24e9a39fb6.html

Welp… Mrs. Tilted’s step dads mom officially has it. She was going to church every Sunday without masks. She’s 88 years old. The other half of the family are Trumpers that think it’s all a hoax. Wife’s step dad was the one to take her into the hospital and now is quarantining in his aunts house while my MIL is quarantining in her house. My MIL has taken it all so serious so it sucks she has to go through this now.

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