Covid-19 Discussion (moderated)

Access to testing is limited in many parts of the world, so not everyone with COVID-19 symptoms is confirmed and counted.

Same with the deaths!

Total deaths

What it tells us: How many people have died with the official cause of death listed as "COVID-19" — excluding those who died of the disease but were not identified as COVID-19 casualties. These numbers generally represent a conservative count of deaths and will likely be revised upward on review. .  says Sen Pei, a public health research scientist at Columbia University.

Many deaths had been missed in the official count because of patients dying at home, medical staff too busy to fill out paperwork at the time and incomplete reporting from field hospitals.

If you were to assume that in reality there have been twice as many cases and twice as many deaths as the official figures:

14 million cases - 0.2% of the world population.

800,000 deaths - 0.01% of the world population. 

800,000 deaths due to the virus out of the approximate 27 million deaths to occur worldwide in the last 6 months - about 3%. 

Anyone who has died or lost a loved one to the virus has my sympathy, but death is a part of life. Something will kill us, and in almost all cases it won't be this virus. 

Amen! Praise the Lord!

Ok, hopefully this is winding down now?  Strangemover is entitled to post the numbers he did without being personally attacked.  Disputed and arguments taken to task is another story.

The thing is that without any measures taken and even as low as 1% death rate, there would be 70 million dead by the end of this, not under half a million.  There's no point in posting the mitigated numbers at this point and if one is trying to show that this means that the outbreak was never a big deal. 

About 7 million people will die of cancer this year...which is only blah blah blah percent of the world's population, so why bother with cancer research?  11 million people died in the holocaust...which is only blah blah blah percent of the world's population, so why all the hoopla and the memorials?  Only 318 execution sites have been identified in North Korea, and worldwide only blah blah blah percent of people are executed, less than are struck by lightning ...etc.

It's a specious argument.  Don't fall into it.

Roughly 4 million people die each year from all respiratory and diarrhoeal diseases, so at this point in the outbreak, Covid-19 would be the cause of a 10% (and still growing) increase in the number of deaths due to communicable diseases/viruses worldwide. 

Oh! Well i m 21+ and my locality is in red zone!!

@btickler the difference between this and cancer, the holocaust, execution sites etc is that our way of life has been significantly altered, and I feel it is extremely damaging and will have long term damaging consequences. Of course this virus should be studied, every effort made to cure/prevent, no deaths should be dismissed (as with all the other things you mention). Bluntly, and anyone reading this may infer that I am a heartless b*****d, the numbers suggest to me that the overwhelming majority of people are not at risk of catching the virus. Of those who do, the overwhelming majority are not at risk of death. I understand that we may be talking about the number of deaths being in the millions in any case, but there are billions of people on this planet. Yet most of the world has gone into lockdown, we cannot live as normal. My opinion is that we should crack on with living and take our chances. Otherwise what are we doing alive, cowering in our houses, afraid to make close contact with anyone, putting on masks each time we go to a public area?

OK so nerves are frayed then I guess in the red zone. I hope that in due course we can return to viewing each other as people rather than as potential disease spreaders. The best to you. 

The red zones with healthcare peoples working 20+ hours a day 7 days a week is the part that was the concern of the EXPERTS  that demanded a lock down!

It was terrible for millions and it's far from over.

No lock down it would have been 10 times worst.

You cannot have no lock down and no consequences!!

Do you really think that with no lock down the economy will  not suffer greatly?

Of course, the economy will be hit either way. It always lurches back and forth in any case, I'm sure when this is over it will recover in due course. The impact on the economy is not my primary concern, more the impact on how we live and interact as human beings. That and the underlying fear of this virus and by extention each other as potential carriers and infection spreaders. 

With no lock-down measures other than the quarantine of suspected cases, the government believes 68% of people would contract the virus. Our estimates suggest this would result in more than 3,660,000 deaths from COVID-19 as the health system could not cope with the volume.

We assume this would produce a recession lasting five years, with 10% initial unemployment and an associated 7053 extra deaths from suicide.

This refers to Canada right? 7053 associated suicides...a bizarrely exact number. The WHO estimates that there are 1 million suicides globally each year, just chucking that horrific stat in. This is a government whom you also believe to be downplaying/flat out concealing the number of deaths and cases? Or you trust your own government but not the governments of China, Brazil etc? I think nobody knew and still nobody knows the impact. This is unprecedented, even the smartest experts are making mildly educated guesses. 

Sure. In Vietnam 40.000 American or so died. Not a big deal, according to you. Then, why do they make so many movies about it?

I did not say it was not a big deal. I simply say that death is part of life. 

To date, there's at least one species that has been called 'biologically immortal': the jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii. These small, transparent animals hang out in oceans around the world and can turn back time by reverting to an earlier stage of their life cycle.

Their claim to immortality? It seems as though they don’t go through senescence at all. Instead of gradually deteriorating over time, a Hydra’s stem cells have the capacity for infinite self-renewal. This seems to be thanks to a particular set of genes called FoxO genes, which are found in animals from worms to humans and play a role in regulating how long cells will live for.

In the case of Hydra’s stem cells, there seems to be an overabundance of FoxO gene expression. When researchers prevented FoxO genes from functioning, they found that Hydra’s cells began to show signs of ageing and would no longer regenerate as they did before. We still don’t know exactly how it all works, but we do know that these genes clearly play an important role in maintaining Hydra’s endless youthfulness.

Yes I have heard about these jellyfish. Sadly we don't have such a capacity and must make good use of our time. 

Lobsters also do not experience senescence. Unlike Hydra’s reliance on particular genes, however, their longevity is thanks to them being able to endlessly repair their DNA.

Normally, during the process of DNA copying and cell division, the protective end-caps on chromosomes, called telomeres, slowly get shorter and shorter, and when they are too short, a cell enters senescence and can no longer keep dividing.

Lobsters don’t have this problem thanks to a never-ending supply of an enzyme called telomerase, which works to keep regenerating telomeres. They produce lots of this enzyme in all of their cells throughout their adult lives, allowing them to maintain youthful DNA indefinitely.

Telomerase is not unique to lobsters. It is present in most other animals, including humans, but after passing the embryonic life stage, levels of telomerase in most other cells decline and are not sufficient for constantly re-building telomeres.

There are many other animal (and non-animal!) species that offer tantalising glimpses into an ageless existence: the risk of dying for naked mole rats appears to not increase as they get older; the world’s oldest known non-colonial animal, a remarkably stress-resistant ocean-dwelling quahog clam named Ming, only died (accidentally) after a good 500 years when researchers dredged it up out of the ocean and wanted to find out how old it was; incredibly ancient bristlecone pines seem to function just as smoothly as much younger trees do; a particular colony of quaking aspens is considered to be about 80,000 years old … and there are plenty of other unusually long-lived species that seem to defy the passing of time.

The difference is that cancer, the holocaust, executions, etc. have perhaps not directly affected you and your circle of friends/family.  That argument is the same one put forth by people from rural Oregon who have no cases in their area and thus feel that the measures are useless.  It's the same type of argument that people who dump mattresses on the freeway make to rationalize their behavior.  

The outbreak measures are temporary...and you are right, economies will recover.  I think that people have a strange idea about the world economy...as if the world would cease to exist if economic systems failed.  You know, if every bank in the world collapsed tomorrow and money ceased to be worth anything at all, people would have to wake up the next day and figure out how to barter and trade again...but the world would keep on spinning.

You're in England...so historically you should know what entire countries can endure in terms of societal disruptions without people caving in.  So, it's just a matter of how much you (or anyone) cares about stopping the spread of the virus vs. your own creature comforts.  You're not in danger of dying...not from the economic disruptions, I mean.  Those that are truly in danger of dying from economic dynamics from the outbreak are not the ones we see/hear complaining about it ...the people complaining are the ones that are worried about scraping together rent and having to eat canned soup and watch TV indoors for a month or two (i.e. people with adequate shelter, food, and access to services online), not the people actually starving because shipments/imports to their country have stopped entirely.

People can eat soup for a while.  It's not going to destroy humanity.  We are lucky to live in a time when a very large number people do not face any real kind of hardship in their lives, and that's a great thing, but it does mean people take their basic security/support for granted.  Tomorrow, a massive solar flare could wipe out 95% of communications/electronics on the planet and send us halfway back to the stone age.  People should appreciate that humanity is in a position where the world can handle an outbreak like this without Black Plague level results.