***NON-POLITICAL COVID-19 Discussion Thread***

[JakeF]

A couple of reminders...

Originally Posted by Bwana

Once again, don't come in this thread with some kind of political agenda, or you will be shown the door. If you want to go that route, there is a thread about this in DC.

Originally Posted by Dartgod

People, there is a lot of good information in this thread, let's try to keep the petty bickering to a minimum.

We all have varying opinions about the impact of this, the numbers, etc. We will all never agree with each other. But we can all keep it civil.

Thanks!

Click here for the original OP:

Spoiler!

Apparently the CoronaVirus can survive on a inanimate objects, such as door knobs, for 9 days.

California coronavirus case could be first spread within U.S. community, CDC says
By SOUMYA KARLAMANGLA, JACLYN COSGROVE
FEB. 26, 2020 8:04 PM

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is investigating what could be the first case of novel coronavirus in the United States involving a patient in California who neither recently traveled out of the country nor was in contact with someone who did.

“At this time, the patient’s exposure is unknown. It’s possible this could be an instance of community spread of COVID-19, which would be the first time this has happened in the United States,” the CDC said in a statement. “Community spread means spread of an illness for which the source of infection is unknown. It’s also possible, however, that the patient may have been exposed to a returned traveler who was infected.”

The individual is a resident of Solano County and is receiving medical care in Sacramento County, according to the state Department of Public Health.

The CDC said the “case was detected through the U.S. public health system — picked up by astute clinicians.”

Officials at UC Davis Medical Center expanded on what the federal agency might have meant by that in an email sent Wednesday, as reported by the Davis Enterprise newspaper.

The patient arrived at UC Davis Medical Center from another hospital Feb. 19 and “had already been intubated, was on a ventilator, and given droplet protection orders because of an undiagnosed and suspected viral condition,” according to an email sent by UC Davis officials that was obtained by the Davis Enterprise.

The staff at UC Davis requested COVID-19 testing by the CDC, but because the patient didn’t fit the CDC’s existing criteria for the virus, a test wasn’t immediately administered, according to the email. The CDC then ordered the test Sunday, and results were announced Wednesday. Hospital administrators reportedly said in the email that despite these issues, there has been minimal exposure at the hospital because of safety protocols they have in place.

A UC Davis Health spokesperson declined Wednesday evening to share the email with The Times.

Since Feb. 2, more than 8,400 returning travelers from China have entered California, according to the state health department. They have been advised to self-quarantine for 14 days and limit interactions with others as much as possible, officials said.

“This is a new virus, and while we are still learning about it, there is a lot we already know,” Dr. Sonia Angell, director of the California Department of Public Health, said in a statement. “We have been anticipating the potential for such a case in the U.S., and given our close familial, social and business relationships with China, it is not unexpected that the first case in the U.S. would be in California.”

It is not clear how the person became infected, but public health workers could not identify any contacts with people who had traveled to China or other areas where the virus is widespread. That raises concern that the virus is spreading in the United States, creating a challenge for public health officials, experts say.

“It’s the first signal that we could be having silent transmission in the community,” said Lawrence Gostin, director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law. “It probably means there are many more cases out there, and it probably means this individual has infected others, and now it’s a race to try to find out who that person has infected.”

On Tuesday, the CDC offered its most serious warning to date that the United States should expect and prepare for the coronavirus to become a more widespread health issue.

“Ultimately, we expect we will see coronavirus spread in this country,” said Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. “It’s not so much a question of if, but a question of when.”

According to the CDC’s latest count Wednesday morning, 59 U.S. residents have tested positive for the new strain of coronavirus — 42 of whom are repatriated citizens from a Diamond Princess cruise. That number has grown by two since Messonnier’s last count Tuesday, although the CDC was not immediately available to offer details on the additional cases.

More than 82,000 cases of coronavirus have been reported globally, and more than 2,700 people have died, with the majority in mainland China, the epicenter of the outbreak.

But public health leaders have repeatedly reminded residents that the health risk from the novel coronavirus to the general public remains low.

“While COVID-19 has a high transmission rate, it has a low mortality rate,” the state Department of Public Health said in a statement Wednesday. “From the international data we have, of those who have tested positive for COVID-19, approximately 80% do not exhibit symptoms that would require hospitalization. There have been no confirmed deaths related to COVID-19 in the United States to date.”

CDC officials have also warned that although the virus is likely to spread in U.S. communities, the flu still poses a greater risk.

Gostin said the news of potential silent transmission does not eliminate the possibility of containing the virus in the U.S. and preventing an outbreak.

“There are few enough cases that we should at least try,” he said. “Most of us are not optimistic that that will be successful, but we’re still in the position to try.”

[Marcellus]

Originally Posted by Donger

I'm giving you facts. It's up to you to acknowledge them, or not.

Ah yes "Donger's facts" = any info he can find to back his opinion.

[Marcellus]

Originally Posted by Bugeater

Either the masks aren't working...or something is going on that we're not being told.

Bingo.

[Marcellus]

Originally Posted by Monticore

And yes yes not just deaths should count for both yet you bring up deaths percentage in here pretty often.

I was trying to argue your reasoning for fearing one thing over the other , gun was the only one I could think of I wasn’t trying to argue guns themselves and it shouldn’t have taken me this many posts for you to get the point.

Ok then lets talk statistics -

6,359,868
Currently Infected Patients

6,295,317 (99%)
in Mild Condition

64,551 (1%)
Serious or Critical


.08% of the global population is infected and 1% of that number or .00008% are severe.

There are the "facts".

[dirk digler]

Originally Posted by petegz28

The one consistent throughout all of this is the excuses for various states and their reporting one way or the other. Just sayin.....

Not saying you are making excuses for the states but rather repeating them

I don't view it as excuses it is just reality. CA had IT issues and we know about those and here in MO they have had alot of issues for the past month, TLO can vouch for that. FL of course had a hurricane and said they were stopping testing.

[Donger]

Originally Posted by Marcellus

Ah yes "Donger's facts" = any info he can find to back his opinion.

Facts aren't opinions. Feel free to dispute any of the facts that I listed.

[petegz28]

Originally Posted by dirk digler

I don't view it as excuses it is just reality. CA had IT issues and we know about those and here in MO they have had alot of issues for the past month, TLO can vouch for that. FL of course had a hurricane and said they were stopping testing.

Of course you don't, Dirk. Because the excuses always seem to lend themselves towards the narrative of "things are a lot worse than we think".

[TLO]

Early Spread of COVID-19 Appears Far Greater Than Initially Reported

Featured Wednesday, 12 August 2020 Esther R Robards-Forbes Statistics Integrative Biology

Patients with undiagnosed flu symptoms who actually had COVID-19 last winter were among thousands of undetected early cases of the disease at the beginning of this year. In a new paper in The Lancet's open-access journal EClinicalMedicine, epidemiological researchers from The University of Texas at Austin estimated COVID-19 to be far more widespread in Wuhan, China, and Seattle, Washington, weeks ahead of lockdown measures in each city.

In the U.S., about a third of the estimated undiagnosed cases were among children. The researchers also concluded that the first case of COVID-19 in Seattle may have arrived as far back as Christmas or New Year's Day.

Lauren Ancel Meyers, a professor of integrative biology and statistics and data sciences who leads the UT Austin COVID-19 Modeling Consortium, worked with her team of researchers to extrapolate the extent of the COVID-19 epidemic in Wuhan and Seattle based on retested throat swabs taken from patients who were suffering from influenza-like illnesses during January in Wuhan and during late February and early March in Seattle. When the samples were analyzed later in each city, most turned out to be flu, but some turned out to be positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

"Even before we realized that COVID-19 was spreading, the data imply that there was at least one case of COVID-19 for every two cases of flu," Meyers said. "Since we knew how widespread flu was at that time, we could reasonably determine the prevalence of COVID-19."

When the Chinese government locked down Wuhan on Jan. 22, there were 422 known cases. But, extrapolating the throat-swab data across the city using a new epidemiological model, Meyers and her team found that there could have been more than 12,000 undetected symptomatic cases of COVID-19. On March 9, the week when Seattle schools closed due to the virus, researchers estimate that more than 9,000 people with flu-like symptoms had COVID-19 and that about a third of that total were children. The data do not imply that health authorities were aware of these infections, rather that they may have gone unseen during the early and uncertain stages of the pandemic.

"Given that COVID-19 appears to be overwhelmingly mild in children, our high estimate for symptomatic pediatric cases in Seattle suggests that there may have been thousands more mild cases at the time," wrote Zhanwei Du, a postdoctoral researcher in Meyers' lab and first author on the study.

According to several other studies, about half of COVID-19 cases are asymptomatic, leading researchers to believe that there may have been thousands more infected people in Wuhan and Seattle before each city's respective lockdown measures went into effect.

"We can go back and piece together the history of this pandemic using a combination of investigative techniques and modeling," Meyers said. "This helps us understand how the pandemic spread so quickly around the globe and provides insight into what we may see in the coming weeks and months."

The new technique for estimating the amount of unseen COVID-19 based on the ratio of influenza cases to COVID-19 cases has also been used to determine how many children were actually infected in each city and the pace of the early pandemic in the U.S., Meyers said.

The finding in the new paper is consistent with work that Meyers and her team have done on the virus's early spread. Using travel data, she and her team estimated how far the virus had spread and concluded that there were as many as 12,000 cases of COVID-19 in Wuhan before the lockdown.

In addition to Meyers and Du, graduate students Emily Javan and Ciara Nugent at The University of Texas at Austin and professor Benjamin J. Cowling of the University of Hong Kong contributed to the research. The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health

[petegz28]

Originally Posted by TLO

Early Spread of COVID-19 Appears Far Greater Than Initially Reported

Featured Wednesday, 12 August 2020 Esther R Robards-Forbes Statistics Integrative Biology

Patients with undiagnosed flu symptoms who actually had COVID-19 last winter were among thousands of undetected early cases of the disease at the beginning of this year. In a new paper in The Lancet's open-access journal EClinicalMedicine, epidemiological researchers from The University of Texas at Austin estimated COVID-19 to be far more widespread in Wuhan, China, and Seattle, Washington, weeks ahead of lockdown measures in each city.

In the U.S., about a third of the estimated undiagnosed cases were among children. The researchers also concluded that the first case of COVID-19 in Seattle may have arrived as far back as Christmas or New Year's Day.

Lauren Ancel Meyers, a professor of integrative biology and statistics and data sciences who leads the UT Austin COVID-19 Modeling Consortium, worked with her team of researchers to extrapolate the extent of the COVID-19 epidemic in Wuhan and Seattle based on retested throat swabs taken from patients who were suffering from influenza-like illnesses during January in Wuhan and during late February and early March in Seattle. When the samples were analyzed later in each city, most turned out to be flu, but some turned out to be positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

"Even before we realized that COVID-19 was spreading, the data imply that there was at least one case of COVID-19 for every two cases of flu," Meyers said. "Since we knew how widespread flu was at that time, we could reasonably determine the prevalence of COVID-19."

When the Chinese government locked down Wuhan on Jan. 22, there were 422 known cases. But, extrapolating the throat-swab data across the city using a new epidemiological model, Meyers and her team found that there could have been more than 12,000 undetected symptomatic cases of COVID-19. On March 9, the week when Seattle schools closed due to the virus, researchers estimate that more than 9,000 people with flu-like symptoms had COVID-19 and that about a third of that total were children. The data do not imply that health authorities were aware of these infections, rather that they may have gone unseen during the early and uncertain stages of the pandemic.

"Given that COVID-19 appears to be overwhelmingly mild in children, our high estimate for symptomatic pediatric cases in Seattle suggests that there may have been thousands more mild cases at the time," wrote Zhanwei Du, a postdoctoral researcher in Meyers' lab and first author on the study.

According to several other studies, about half of COVID-19 cases are asymptomatic, leading researchers to believe that there may have been thousands more infected people in Wuhan and Seattle before each city's respective lockdown measures went into effect.

"We can go back and piece together the history of this pandemic using a combination of investigative techniques and modeling," Meyers said. "This helps us understand how the pandemic spread so quickly around the globe and provides insight into what we may see in the coming weeks and months."

The new technique for estimating the amount of unseen COVID-19 based on the ratio of influenza cases to COVID-19 cases has also been used to determine how many children were actually infected in each city and the pace of the early pandemic in the U.S., Meyers said.

The finding in the new paper is consistent with work that Meyers and her team have done on the virus's early spread. Using travel data, she and her team estimated how far the virus had spread and concluded that there were as many as 12,000 cases of COVID-19 in Wuhan before the lockdown.

In addition to Meyers and Du, graduate students Emily Javan and Ciara Nugent at The University of Texas at Austin and professor Benjamin J. Cowling of the University of Hong Kong contributed to the research. The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health

I stated such way back when only to be told there was absolutely, positively no way it could have been Covid. When I was sick as hell in February with "the flu" I was told there was no way it could have been Covid.

I did test negative for antibodies but we know how shitty those tests have been and we also know a lot of individuals are capable of fighting off Covid without generating antibodies.

[Marcellus]

Originally Posted by Donger

Facts aren't opinions. Feel free to dispute any of the facts that I listed.

https://www.businessinsider.com/who-...e-masks-2020-4

The use of face masks on healthy people during the coronavirus pandemic has been a major point of contention and confusion among scientists and the public.

On Friday, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that all Americans wear face masks when they are in public.

But new guidance from the World Health Organization released on Monday says healthy people don't need to wear face masks and that doing so won't provide added protection from the coronavirus.

There's some evidence that caretakers of infected people can protect their health by wearing masks, the WHO guidance said, but "there is currently no evidence that wearing a mask (whether medical or other types) by healthy persons in the wider community setting, including universal community masking, can prevent them from infection with respiratory viruses, including COVID-19."

This article does not support your claims that they lied initially to protect the number of masks available and there is no proof to support that theory except you being told that by people who changed their story multiple time.

The WHO was not concerned about the US mask supply and apparently neither was the CDC in April when this article was published.

Bugeater is 100% correct.

[O.city]

Originally Posted by petegz28

Of course you don't, Dirk. Because the excuses always seem to lend themselves towards the narrative of "things are a lot worse than we think".

Well, for the most part thats been the case in th end. Shits off the rails.

[petegz28]

Originally Posted by Marcellus

https://www.businessinsider.com/who-...e-masks-2020-4



This article does not support your claims that they lied initially to protect the number of masks available and there is no proof to support that theory except you being told that by people who changed their story multiple time.

The WHO was not concerned about the US mask supply and apparently neither was the CDC in April when this article was published.

Bugeater is 100% correct.

Admittedly Fauci and others "admitted" they lied about masks to prevent a run on them. Alliteration aside, take that for what it's worth.

That being said we know masks do jack shit to protect you from getting the virus for the most part and are largely being worn to prevent you from spreading the virus just in case you have it. Donger and some others tried to argue masks protect both but I think we know now from many experts along with those same people that masks are worn to help prevent spread not contraction.

The thing is they are finding out more and more if they don't even know flat out already that this thing is airborne and masks do little against that. N95 masks will help prevent you from contracting but are terrible for not spreading we are seeing.

Surgical masks may help diffuse your exhalation but it obviously doesn't prevent it and they certainly do not help preventing contraction.

The math is all there.....masks can help some but they are far from the holy grail that people seem to think they are.

[Donger]

Originally Posted by Marcellus

https://www.businessinsider.com/who-...e-masks-2020-4



This article does not support your claims that they lied initially to protect the number of masks available and there is no proof to support that theory except you being told that by people who changed their story multiple time.

The WHO was not concerned about the US mask supply and apparently neither was the CDC in April when this article was published.

Bugeater is 100% correct.

I realize that you don't understand what facts are, but here are some examples of them:

Our experts didn't recommend wearing masks at the start, because there was concern about the paucity of PPE for our medical professionals.

I don't recall them saying that they didn't help. Yes, they recommended them around the start of April, IIRC.

Everything in that is a fact. There was concern about it.

The linked article doesn't mention our paucity of PPE at all, so I don't see why you posted it.

[O.city]

Well, thats good news if it was that many kids then. That many had it and we haven't had that many severe illnesses and deaths.

[O.city]

Originally Posted by petegz28

Admittedly Fauci and others "admitted" they lied about masks to prevent a run on them. Alliteration aside, take that for what it's worth.

That being said we know masks do jack shit to protect you from getting the virus for the most part and are largely being worn to prevent you from spreading the virus just in case you have it. Donger and some others tried to argue masks protect both but I think we know now from many experts along with those same people that masks are worn to help prevent spread not contraction.

The thing is they are finding out more and more if they don't even know flat out already that this thing is airborne and masks do little against that. N95 masks will help prevent you from contracting but are terrible for not spreading we are seeing.

Surgical masks may help diffuse your exhalation but it obviously doesn't prevent it and they certainly do not help preventing contraction.

The math is all there.....masks can help some but they are far from the holy grail that people seem to think they are.

A well fitting n95 is gonna keep you from getting or giving. If worn right.

[petegz28]

Originally Posted by O.city

Well, for the most part thats been the case in th end. Shits off the rails.

Has it though? We keep hearing there are more and more and exponentially more cases than we knew\know of yet the death tolls are what they are. We can't assume someone died, right? They died or didn't. So really is it worse than we think if exponentially more people have or had the virus but the death tolls have stayed where they are for the most part?

That seems to me that is not as deadly as we thought though it can still be deadly.