Tracking the COVID-19-Virus in Germany, the USA, Italy and other hot spots in the world

It’s all going to be different. Don’t ask me how but I don’t think we can go back to how it was.
We might be looking at a boom, as in after WW2.

 

Not really.
I would credit it to one guy, very controversial person, but extremely pragmatic person, Graf Bismarck.
A lot of the stuff Germany depends on today in this crisis was initiated by him. Not only did he unite Germany, but he reformed it and created the health and social system and this government machine, which is often so hated, with rules and regulations and its cumbersomeness and so on. But when it goes in overdrive like in a crisis like this, it saves the nation.
My brother told me, you can call the unemployment offices from 6 am to 12 pm right now. They will process claims 18 hours a day, that's overdrive. Same thing happened naturally with all other essential government services.
But the most important thing, everybody in government, from Feds to State to local, threw their grievance over board and are working together.

Even the so called MSN has shut up. 3 month ago all were yelling, especially the more left, Merkel has to go.
Now they support the efforts of the government.
After Merkel gave her speech to the country and explained in her so frisking boring style in what danger the country will be, everybody shut up and pulled together.
Never seen that in my over 60 years, nearly 70 years.

Completely the opposite from the US, were bitching, finger pointing, credit taking, this infringes on my rights and what ever is the game of the day.
Daily we have this dog and pony show, the briefing, were one says this and one says that. Merkel gave 1 speech, boring as it could be, as usual and things got done and everybody shut up and got to work.
Besides Germanies abilities, it is the leadership, from Fed to the local levels, uniting and managing the crisis.
Never seen that in Germany before, without the need of emergency laws, or dictatorship.

Amazing.

 

What Vice-President Pence is saying right now about isolation in order to flatten the curve is absolutely spot-on. This is the right kind of stuff that we need at this time.

 

Just to give my two american cents floating in a german fishbowl: Angie was anything but boring. Frankly, for a German she was a live-wire!!

 

Nothing personal but I hope you are wrong. We will know in real time as Dr. Birx stated because the daily data will inform the model assumptions. We will be able to track that daily.

 

Del.

 

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Sir Bismarck is definitely one of the giants of German History, and European History as well. Not only was he an excellent tactician who won many victories for the young Germany, but as you noted he greatly advanced the reforms for the German nation, leading to the wonderous land of Germany that she is today.

You're right also, in that for the US, our individualism(and individual rights) are/have been very important to us. And so the desire to preserve those rights, has definitely motivated our actions from the start. It's certainly motivated in part my argument as well. But we could take an example from Germany and from South Korea. The way we beat this virus right now is if we sacrifice our individuality for the greater good of all.

Because for community to thrive, individuals need to survive. And for individuals to survive, they need a strong community.

 

What do you do about the asymptomatic people who are infectious?

 

Mrs Merkel is one cool lady. A worthwhile leader.

 

They too must be quarantined, until they are no longer infectious(and we'll need a test to determine at what level of the virus a person is infectious.). If we got that kind of test, we would have even more information. We will beat this virus by being more knowledgable about it then anything.

 

I listen to that speech, too. Nearly fell asleep, if the facts she provided were not so shocking. For Mutti it was a lively speech, but did she hit jackpot.
Probably because of her matter of fact dullness of speech and the first time she spoke to the country, besides the new year eves show.

 

They've been saying the same thing for weeks. The problem is....how many people are sitting at home right now watching Disney Plus, or pretend fishing in their aquarium for a streaming vanity post on social media, and have no idea that the government has an important message for them?

Much of society has become woefully dull.

 

No one will know they are infected- they probably won’t either. If no cough, fever, lassitude, runny nose etc, they won’t appear to be sick.
Do we need to test everyone?

 

Quite possibly. But then they will likely get caught up in the maelstrom.

 

Mutti! Haha. Hadn’t heard that before.

 

Well, if we are all isolating, then at that point in time it makes no difference if someone is asymptomatic or not, because if we ALL stay in isolation, the virus will run it's course in the hosts it has infect but yet die all over surfaces on the outside world.

 

I don't see a "best-case" scenario happening with so many people still going to work. Not unless everybody that goes to work strips off, showers and changes clothes before touching anything/anyone on their house, just as health care workers are doing.

 

Yes, the model is dynamic. They are updating with new data. I took a screenshot of where it started, so I can compare whether we're moving in a good or bad direction every few days.

I do think the model is realistic though, and they just told us that 100,000 deaths is the best case scenario. These people on the task force aren't idiots. This is a team of real experts and I don't think they are just pulling our leg and shutting down the country just to see how we react.

Oh, and don't worry about me taking things personally. I don't get offended easily....perhaps even when I should.

 

You have information to share? Have you found something we have missed?

We have discussed earlier in this thread which is a better metric and it is in my opinion both are inaccurate, but raw mortality rate is more accurate (just an underestimation). I am attaching a screenshot from where I've tracked South Korea mortality rates - both raw deaths divided by total cases (Mortality Rate) and deaths divided by total cases (Mortality Closed):



You will notice that over time, Mortality Rates go up, and Mortality Closed starts very high and goes down over time. This is fairly logical - the total number of cases initially dwarfs any deaths by far as so many are still pending. Likewise, recoveries + deaths (or all closed cases) are far smaller early on than total cases. As time goes on and closed cases make a larger and larger % of the total, each number converges with Morality Rates going up, and Morality Closed going down (at a much faster rate).

From this I would say that probably the overall Mortality Rate is going to be the closest to something correct if you are just looking for what the function of mortality is vs officially confirmed / reported cases, but you can assume it will go up over time until closed cases start making up a significant % of the total cases. For a nation like South Korea that is so far along, you can at a minimum use the Mortality Closed as an upper bound that you should not expect the overall Mortality Rate to exceed.

 

It is very realistic without causing panic. But no doubt this model is very conservative in the sense that it factors out the elements of human behavior that we all know are going to happen, some of which must happen as people in essential-for-living industries are still working. If your lights are still working at home, then someone is still working at the power plant. If your water is still running, then someone is still working at the water plant. If the trash can you brought to the edge of the driveway are now empty, then someone is still working in the waste industry.

The good thing with starting with a conservative estimate is that you can ramp the numbers up if the social distancing is not really taken seriously by all.

 

I agree , but I was responding to the poster who suggested that all confirmed cases be quarantined.

 

The initial Murray model I saw yesterday had a lower limit of 40,000.

And again there is nothing in the model to account for the meds which will save lives and could hopefully be a significant game changer.

We shall see. Pray for the meds.

 

Until today's press briefing, I thought they were presenting the "realistic" model based on the partial shut down of non-necessary workers and businesses. Dr. Birx made it fairly clear today that the projected 100,000 deaths is if everyone absolutely does not break any of the rules outside of the current partial restrictions. Too many people do not have that kind of self-discipline or simply do not understand what's going on.

You've also got young people in their young rebellious years who "know", but just don't care because their odds of surviving are almost 100%.

 

If efforts had not began early like they did, we'd be looking at 1.8-2 million deaths.

Cutting down the fatalities to 1/10th of the projections would be a massive win.

 

Yes, you and I have had some good conversations about it, and indeed, all three (or maybe, 4) metrics can be useful.

The metric against the entire world's population is useful once the disease has run it's course and we wish to compare it to the numbers from other, perhaps similar, diseases. But while the disease is raging, this metric imo serves little real purpose.

The metric against closed cases can be very useful if you are also considering the time-frame from detection to close of case (either by resolution, continued illness or death). A marked rise in the % over a day span of say, from day 15- to day 17, could be helpful and this metric is probably best used regionally, and not worldwide. But, this metric is in no way predictive, because we cannot know in advance how many cases are going to resolve in death, or perhaps remain permanently ill.

But if you want to have a pretty accurate predictive tool to look into the near future, then the mortality rate based on the official number of COVID-positives is without a doubt the best way to go. It's incredibly simple math. Since I began tracking on 02/27, the mortality rate based on deaths / official positives, has slowly moved from 3.41% to 4.92% on a gentle, consistent slope. The mean is just above 4%. So, if you extapolate how many days or weeks it will take for us to get to 50,000,000 official cases, then the probabilty is EXTREMELY high that we need to get ready for 2,000,000 total deaths as of that point in time. Also, this metric takes away the uncertainty of "well, a metric is useless since we don't really know all of the cases and many are asymptomatic" because this metric is very, very stabile.

Nice to hear from you and thanks again for the good work.