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Rational CoViD-19 Discussion Thread: Science vs. Politics

Could you please cite your sources when quoting blocks of text? That way, others can check the source, check its veracity, and see if the source provides other relevant info, or not. This is usually most easily achieved by posting a link to the source, either before, or after, the quoted text. Thank you.

It was google headliner links. I saw the same stuff browsing a day or two ago.
 
What the fu is happening in this thread? Craziness.

home-brewed clique attempting just dominate the webz.

you know, the thing about partisan politics is that the influenced base of fans on whatever side is just small enough no one really cares what anyone does or says. The number of gung-ho activists who do their little victory jig over every opponent that walks away in disgust is usually single-digit, like their IQs.

So I ask for science, and they come in to just wreck the thread. They own the place, and they can do it. They think.
 
This thing has gone globally super crazy at all possible levels/aspects of life.
Mortality rates are not nice at all at certain ages, virus contagiousness timeframe appears to be longer than originaly reported... the whole friggin' package is becoming kind of nuts.
Just take care of yourselves and your people and be safe wherever you are.
 
Chloroquine....

https://www.unboundmedicine.com/medline/citation/32074550/full_citation

China has been using this...… wants it approved for use elsewhere. Another positive indicator for China and Xi in willingness to help out.

Here's a good link

https://www.deseret.com/u-s-world/2...rus-covid19-drugs-malaria-research-treatments

Chloroquine has long been used as an antimalarial, and more recently in autoimmune diseases. It works as an antiviral, it is thought, by changing the pH within the cell where the virus is trying to replicate, preventing assembly of new virus.

Other antivirals are specific enzyme blockers that prevent specific steps in viral replication.

Choroquine, especially in long-term uses, has some problems in use. Dosage levels have been lowered in the view of reducing side effects which can be permanent, and long-delayed in showing up.

still better than dead,.
 
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@Red Here's a Google headliner site with some numbers....

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Just a bit of reasoning..... some "death" cases are people who died before any tests were done, but the remains on evaluation showed the diagnostic. Some "death" results may not even be based on an actual viral specific test, just a guess. We don't know how these numbers are checked or reported....

I suspect a lot of "cleared" results..... survivor data.... suffer from the same issues mathematically.

"confirmed" active cases may have the same "errors" as well.

10k deaths in 90k closed cases would figure 11% mortality, but no one..... not even the worst fearmongers I can find..... are saying THAT.

I see estimates of infective periods for carriers run out as long as 30d, and we just have not got good tests enough out there to get that measure.

But a 140k "active case" inventory is matched by a 7k "serious case figure". 5%, not 11%, on the "denominator" that is likely only 5% of the real denominator.... meaning over a million people exposed, mostly active spreaders right now.

So we've lost 10K, and have 7k in intensive care world-wide, as of today...… and probably 2 million unknowing/unknowable "carriers" out on the streets, infecting up to 3 people each within a few days' time.

The logic for restricted travel and social distance is that is how we can make these "carriers" dead-end infectives who transmit to no one. In 30 d they'll all be has-beens. mostly living "has-beens" who are no longer a danger, and no longer possible new cases.

Another just conversational observation here, is that the same guesses would mean that non-vulnerable antibody-competent stats only lag the disease by a month...., if no efforts to slow it down were made, and in that scenario we have only about 20k mortality in around 3M cases.....which would untreated, unmanagaed, result in a mortal rate of 0.15&

Of course, such an optimistic rate requires we don't overwhelm our health care infrastructure and careworkers like some initial outbreaks have done.....
 
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The Worldometer today, Saturday March 21st:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

300 k "active cases", 106k "closed cases", 13K dead, 94 k "recovered".

An interesting line is the incidence line on the far right, second from the right edge.... cases per M population. The worst is Iceland, with most of the European countries up there as well, and China only has 56/M reported, with the usual caveat "if you can believe the Chinese", which no one objects to as a racist slur because it is referring not to race but to the managed press, which is also true of ours because the same mentality has infected our own "free" press. I hear along "Conservative" talk shows continued references of the fearmonger class that we may not be getting the truth, and by God as my witness, its the Preppers and extreme skeptic right that are now doing the worst fearmongering.

Honestly, which is really the worst, a managerial Establishment trying to calm the Public, or their antithetical rabid critics who really have practically no ethics or facts or intelligence. OK, so bros, just so you know where I'm coming from, back to the Science.

What I see in the Worldometer stats is practically no exponential growth in the stats, anywhere. And no real serious outbreaks coming from the Tropics. We must thank the travel restrictions first of all for an apparent leveling of the curve in the areas which were not early centers of the outbreak.

And for @Wes Mantooth down under, where plausibly the viral season is just getting started, it has not gotten serious and appears to be stopping already.
 
Here is one of the most authoritative reports, done in Feb.,

https://annals.org/aim/fullarticle/...-disease-2019-covid-19-from-publicly-reported

What I see here is that nearing the first day of March, the total cases known/reported was in the 80k area. Todays stats would add up to about 400k. The incubation time frame is stated here to be about 5d (median) or 2-10d for almost all cases. I'm trying to infer an effective infective carrier efficiency.... if that stat is above 1 we will have increasing incidence over time, if it is above 2 is will take on a sort of exponential growth pattern. 3 would be wildly exponential. The 80k going to 400 k in four (median) incubation time frames would indicate a 1.5 stat for our spread rate, and would not yet reflect the internal US travel restriction effects, just measure in place in early March. 1.5 supports my statement above that we are not seeing "exponential" spread now.

We are not yet at a stage where the new "infectives" could be arguably declining in numbers.
 
My next task is to estimate the unknown/unknowing infectives or "spreaders" walking around on the streets exposing others and the numbers of people they are infecting. Since this population includes p3eople who are undiagnosed, and not appearing in our statistics, it must be deduced somehow.

rationally, we have two stats here we must deduce, for lack of actual counts or measurements. The number of unknown infectives, and their incidence of contact/infective events, their "efficiency" so to speak.

A few days ago I made the rather wild guess that we have maybe 2M unknown/unknowing infectives out and about world-wide. I think that is seriously over-estimated, maybe even "fearmonger" class inaccuracy/exaggeration. I want to do some better work here, in the next few posts.
 
A lockdown/shutdown/social distancing/stay-at-home/travel ban scenario will rationally be expected to stop a lot of "infectives" cold, and reduce dramatically the "efficiency" of spreaders still out and about as well. A very good shutdown, on a virus with a 5d incubation, can be expected to show it's effectiveness within 10d. And if the active spreading capacity lasts 30d---an unlikely long time--- a general shutdown of longer than 30d would be totally unjustified. If that infective time is 14 d, a shutdown of 21d would be unjustified. Over and done.
 
Here's a pretty good report directly relevant to the questions raised above:

http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/03/study-highlights-ease-spread-covid-19-viruses

These researchers found that for infected persons, a two-week quarantine after diagnosis is likely all that is needed, that infective spread after two weeks is unlikely.

Combine that with a 5d (2-10) incubation period, and you can expect a 21d travel ban/stay-at-home policy to virtually end the outbreak.
 
Other factors, however, must be considered. If the spread has vectors such as birds or rats, we really have a totally different public health problem.....Gotta end sanctuary cities and homeless camps.

Gotta do serious extermination programs in LA and SF to kill the rats..... that sort of thing.

Here's a report that states rats can be carriers..... supporting the China government ban on animal foods people are using....

https://www.thestar.com.my/news/regional/2020/03/11/rat-farmers-hit-by-covid-19-crisis

There are some studies on contact spread via animals that do not support the fear that animals will be a primary infective vector.

I guess the lesson here would be "keep your social distance from pigs, etc" or "don't eat raw rats". lol
 
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