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

Here is a report from the Wall Street Journal arguing for the opposite 'reclassification' for Italy that one of the posters here is suggesting.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/italys-coronavirus-death-toll-is-far-higher-than-reported-11585767179
Italy’s Coronavirus Death Toll Is Far Higher Than Reported
Many are dying uncounted as nation’s stretched health-care system struggles to save the living and accurately gauge human cost

 

And this report should underscore the 'bipartisan' nature of the virus.

https://news.yahoo.com/israels-health-minister-virus-top-050206144.html
Iran parliament speaker, Israeli health minister have virus

 

I noticed that too about current smokers! Maybe the tobacco residues in the lungs are acting as some kind of "disinfectant"? Pure SPECULATION on my part and I am NOT recommending that anyone COMPROMISE their lung functionality by smoking any tobacco product. What is far more likely is that it is just a DATA anomaly that will correct itself when there is a larger sample size.

 

By all means look at Sweden. As of the time of this post, their death rate is 30 per million. I predict it will more than double in a week. What will you say then?

 

Six months after passing her annual physical with flying colors my wife was admitted to the hospital with renal failure. Subsequent testing established that she had cancer and as soon as the chemo started her kidneys regained all of their normal function. While that is anecdotal it highlights the role that our kidney's play in keeping us healthy. They are the primary filters for out bodies and when they start failing they allow all kinds to crap to build up in our systems.

What the chart is telling us is that some chronic conditions are more serious than others when it comes to dealing with viral infections.

 

Good morning, PFers.

I ended the day yesterday, April 2nd, 2020, reporting THESE COVID-19 numbers.

Now, as of 09:04 GMT +2, the current numbers, without comment:

 

Excellent article.

It explained a lot about how the models predict outcomes depending upon actions.

The fact that on 1/20/20 the FIRST cases were detected in the USA and SK the two OUTCOMES were accurately PREDICTED because of the ACTIONS taken by SK and those NOT taken here in the US.

Had we been as PROACTIVE as SK back then we would NOT be in our current DIRE and WORSENING predicament NOW!

 

I disagree entirely with your mischaracterization of going "full Soviet".

If anything the exact OPPOSITE happened here in the USA. It was SK that went "full Soviet" and contained their initial infection and are keeping it under control.

Here we are IGNORING the CONTAINMENT advice and allowing it to spread nationwide. Because of the FAILURE to go "full Soviet" you currently find yourself in the 3rd hotspot in the nation, unfortunately. That could have been AVOIDED had the nation gone "full Soviet" back in January when our first case was detected.

 

The problem is that ANYONE who goes to church now runs the risk of being infected and then SPREADING their infection to others. In essence you have no way of knowing if the person who used the card reader ahead of you at the supermarket checkout attended one of those church services. That means that the infection is still being spread when there were perfectly reasonable and sane alternatives to PREVENT that infection spread.

 

It is not going to be a wave. It is going to be a ****ing tsunami that will hold a peak for a long time, because the misery will keep shifting from hot-spot to hot-spot, and not just in the USA. I hate to sound negative and dystopian but I wrote around 10 days ago that it's over, that the curve cannot be flattened to the point where we as a world will not be overwhelmed, the disease is going to run it's full course and our efforts will have made a well-intended dent into it, but that's it.

Why? Because too many nations with huge populations are either not testing or not really being honest with the numbers. India is by far the worst case, for the simple reason that India is almost identical to China in population (with 1.38 BILLION, it has grown enormously in population over the last 10 years, pretty much unnoticed by most people), it's landmass is smaller than China's, it has a caste-system where the poor are squeezed together like tuna-fish in a metal can and they are not testing. Similar story for Pakistan (220.9 million), plus the two nations hate each other because of the islamic/hindu religious-sectarian divide. Indian PM Narendra Modi hates muslims and would rather saw off his right arm than admit to Pakistan that India's is being weakened by COVID-19. Exact same story in reverse colors for Pakistani PM Imram Khan. So, we are looking at 1.6 BILLION people essentially unprotected in any way from the virus because a.) their leaders are hateful autocrats, b) it's mostly a wet climate there and .c) the poor live far closer together than anywhere else in the world, by far and will spread the infection at light speed. So, let's assume that the current 5% death rate among all reported cases stays constant. And let's assume that, just as all experts are saying, that 70-80% of the world's population will be infected. Let's go with 70%. Let's assume that 65% of those cases will go undetected due to asymptomatism or simply lack of testing. But let's say that 35% are in the group that will officially, when all is said and done, be recorded as COVID-19 positive.

OK. 1,600,000,000 * .70 = 1,120,000,000. 1,120,000,000 * .35 = 392,000,000. 5% of 392,000,000 = 19.6 MILLION dead alone in India and Pakistan.

Let's take a look at South America, where that autocratic assholian idiot in Brasil is still saying that COVID-19 is just "the flu".

Population of the entire continent: 429.9 million.

OK. 429.9 million *.70 = 300,930,000 infected. 300,930,000 *.35 = 105,325,500 confirmed. 5% of 105,325,500 = 5,266,275 dead

Ok, let's take a look at North America + Mexico (because of trade agreements): 497.3 million. Let's assume that because the USA and Mexico are both handling this very badly, that the rate of confirmed where a % will die goes up from 35% to 40%, which is probably more likely, anyway.

OK. 497.3 million *.70 = 348,110,000 infected. 348,110,000 *.40 = 139,244,000 confirmed. 5% of 139,244,000 = 6,962,200 dead in North America + Mexico.

(Stats for the USA alone come later in this posting)

This does not even account for the BILLIONS of people who will recover, but who will not completely heal and will live the rest of their lives with internal organ damage to some degree.

Measuring mortality, and how does that help, if at all:​

The February 18, 2020 China CDC Weekly extraploated the mortality rate of COVID-19, when you stretch it out from Hunan Province to all of the country had it broken out all over the country, to 2.3%. In Hubei, at ground-zero of the virus, it has been calculated at 2.9%. Were we to experience an ongoing 2.9% death rate in NYC (18,804,000, all 5 boroughs plus environs) then that would mean 545,000+ dead in NYC alone, when all is said and done. Just to keep these numbers in perspective.

Ten days later, on February 28, 2020 in the New England Journal of Medicine, a study of China's COVID-19 breakout posited the death rate at 1.4% for all of China. That's a pretty big difference and I do not know which one is correct. However, what is glaringly obvious to all is that the mortality rate of COVID-19 is considerably, by a number of factors, higher than the normal flu, which is estimated at stabile 0.1% of the US population. However, if you go to the CDC website about the normal flu, you will see that their estimates for this flu-season are fluctuating wildly, 100% guaranteed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The CDC is now estimating that between the beginning of October, 2019 and March 21, 2020 (5 months and 3 weeks) that between 24,000-62,000 Americans have died from the normal flu.

So, let's look at the mortality rate based on the US population of 331,002,000 as of today:

24,000 dead = 0.007%
62,000 dead = 0.019%
in other words, 0.1% (one tenth of one percent) of the US population would be 310,002 people. 0.1% is the usual estimate for flu deaths in the USA. I think they really mean 0.01% but simply never take the time to write it. At any rate, the number of dead in the USA due to the normal flu is an extremely small percentage of the total population, which makes COVID-19 all the scarier.

Back to those two studies: their estimates are based on total population. Since COVID-19 (with only a smalle number of exceptions to date) seems to attack only adults, we may have to adjust our thinking about how to measure and produce statistics on infection diseases.

What I know for sure, can write of as truth and can prove it since I have been literally logging it many times a day since 02/27, is that the death rate among officially confirmed COVID-19 cases has moved from 3.73% late in the evening on 02/27 to 5.23% late in the evening on 04/02, a verifiable upward movement in the death rate according to this metric. Now, that can mean that the testing has become more pinpoint, per hotspot, which in the case of the USA is likely very true. Or it can mean that the disease is becoming deadlier as more viral load is being released since more and more human hosts are being infected. It can also be both at once. However, no matter how you look at it, when you consider that there is a goodly % of people walking around who are asymptomatic but would test positive were they to be tested, but we are not testing them because a.) they look and feel fine and b.) there aren't enough ****ing tests, we can unscientifically yet very safely assume that at least 5 times as many people as are being officially reported as positive are indeed positive, right here, right now. So, last night's 1,000,000 marker likely means that at least 5,000,000 people (that would be the entire population of South Carolina, btw) are infected and 4,000,000 of them are likely infecting others....

Were that the case, then the mortality rate that I record: 5.23% based on exact number of deaths / exact number of confirmed positives, would be reduced 5 fold, to 1.04% of the population, pretty much in line with the New Englad JOM study.

So, here is the death total in the USA alone, based on %. If ____ % then this means ________ American deaths.

0.03% = 100,000 deaths (the underside of the estimate that Fauci and Birx gave)
0.072% = 240,000 deaths (the overside of the estimate that Fauci and Birx gave)
0.1% = 331,002 deaths (the general claim for the normal flu, at least on most websites, obviously, this is not reality)
0.5% = 1,655,010 deaths (that would be almost the entire population of West Virginia)
1.0% = 3,310,020 deaths (that would be a little more than the entire population of Utah)
1.4% = 4,632,028 death (New England Journal study from 02/28, that would be a little more than the entire population of Louisiana)
1.5% = 4,965,030 deaths (that would be a little more than the entire population of Alabama)
2.0% = 6,620,040 deaths (that would be a little less than the entire population of Indiana)
2.3% = 7,613,046 deaths (China CDC Weekly from 02/18, that would be a little less than the entire population of Washington State)
2.9% = 9,599,058 deaths (China estimates for the flashpoint in Hubei, that would be between the populations of New Jersey and Michigan)
3.0% = 9,930,060 deaths (that would be a little less than the entire population of Michigan)
3.5% = 11,585,070 deaths (that would be the entire population of Ohio)

Now, how does this square with my calculated death rate? Let's assume that 70% of the USA alone will get infected, that 65% will go undetected, 35% will be detected and just 4% (instead of the current 5.23%) of that group will die:

OK. 331,002,000 *.70 = 231,701,400 infected. 231,701,400 *.35 = 81,095,490 detected. 4% of 81,095,490 = 3,234,820 deaths, which is almost exactly equal to saying 1.0% of the entire population of the USA.

This is actually a tad under the New England study, but also proves beyond a shadow of the doubt that Fauci and Birx's claims, although I wish they were too generous, are actually too stingy. For 100,000 deaths corresponds to 3-one-hundreths-of-one-percent and is technically BELOW the generally assumed claim of 0.1% for the normal flu.

Were we to assume that every single American (except health care and PD/FD) were to go into hiding and not touch anything for 30 days, I still don't see how we stay under at least 0.5% mortality rate based on US population, when you look at the calculated mortality rate based on cases.

I am 100% sure that Fauci and Birx presented Pres. Trump with ALL of the numbers and he essentially ordered them to give the very lowest possible number they could find from any possible extrapolation. Now, he may have done this with the very best intent, namely, to be positive. But it was a massive mistake, for as we all see, 19 states still have no restrictions and Florida's restrictions are essentially worthless since church groups are still allowed to meet. FAR, FAR better would have been for Trump himself to have said that the projections could go upwards of 10,000,000 dead and if we really want to re-start the US economy before it dies forever, then everyone needs to get their ass indoors. And then, if we walk away with "only" a black-eye, which would mean 1,000,000 deaths, still way under any reasonable estimate, he could have been celebrated as a hero for getting people to hunker down. But now, because of the way it has been rolled out, certain people are threatening Dr. Fauci's life (Dr. Fauci, who received the Presidential medal of honor from George H. W. Bush, a Republican president) and when the deaths roll way over 100,000 and people start to get nervous and then the deaths move toward 1,000,000 and then people get mad and then the deaths go over 2,000,000 and people are ****ing furious, then just remember that I wrote this information at the beginning of April, 2020.

I wish to G-d that everything I just wrote would be totally false. I wish to G-d that everyone will be able to laugh at me and call me a fool. I really do. But, barring an unforseen development (a vaccine that can developed right now, tested in one month instead of 18 and then mass-produced in the billions overnight), some unholy variation of these numbers are going to happen. ALL. OVER. THE. WORLD.

-Stat

 

I was not aware of that and thank you very much for that information. That was indeed helpful. THAT'S the kind of exchange that all people of good will want in any forum.

 

There is no real way to break such a bottleneck. We have to take the numbers at face-value and add a good portion of common sense.

The covidtracking.com site is doing phenomenal work in hard times. Kudos, Kudos, Kudos to them.

 

If only it was always like this.

Sorry to hear about your friend Stat. It does put into perspective the difference between the inconvenience some are experiencing and the outright tragedy others are facing. Hope you are OK.

BF.

 

Ok, ok, ok. Dein Humor ist unnachahmlich. Herrlich!!

I think the mods will allow me this moment of German comraderie. Also, Google Translator is our best friend, nööööö

 

My eyes adore your postings. Know the series Numb3rs??? Well, I am that dude. Only a little cuter and well, yeah, considerably older. Ok, maybe not so cute, but not in a contest with Quasimodo quite yet.

 

Good work, Dude

 

A zillion new posts since I was last here, so I will just ask rather than go the long way around: Any new data re those infected but remain asymptomatic yet, such as having anything in common with each other? How about re-infections among those 'recovered'? Hopefully we can find out such info sooner than later. Usually we find out many months later in these types of situations.

 

I need to correct that. It was a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

 

I think that is a brilliant question. G-d bless you for asking it.

I am not seeing any such data yet. And only anecdotal data on purported cases of re-infection.

And I agree, we will likely see this data at the end of the tunnel.

The conventional wisdom would be that asymptomatic people may tend to be people without pre-existing medical conditions, also people who are not in the A-blood group (A-pos, A-neg), although that with the A-blood group has not been proven yet.

Also is the question whether people who hitherto have been asymptomatic suddenly get truly infected because they may have been once again subjected to a viral load that is this time much larger.

I am bookmarking your posting and if I come across anything, I promise to respond again.

Good that you are here. Stay healthy, stay safe.

 

DeSantis did take care of the people on board ship see article below.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/tourism-cruises/article241707936.html

 

Thank you for the update.

 

of course he did. if there is a need to throw anyone under the bus, Florida is last on the list.

 

Not all those young kids who went on spring break in groups are partisan and neither were the million people who attended Mardi Gras, though I'm sure some percentage are.

The partisanship in Coronavirus is the Apathy Party versus the Action Party.

 

Yeah, those darned rebellious "invincible" college kids and other extroverts who are defiant or terrified at the thought of what staying home for a month will do to their social lives. The Apathy Party will never see the consequences of their actions.

 

A much bigger problem in Australia has been rich old people. There was a group of about 8-10 who got infected skiing at Aspen. When they returned home a number of them refused to self quarantine despite having tested positive already. As a result two of the biggest clusters in Melbourne are in a couple of places where rich people congregate.

Another even larger cluster has come from just one cruise ship. Part of the issue there was a failure of government at several levels, but as with the skiers there is an entitlement issue with some of the infected/exposed. There are some groups of people who don't think rules apply to them or assume they can bargain or buy themselves out of any problem they encounter.