Covid-19 Discussion (moderated)

testing is limited in the uk at present , there is no bringing together of info on how many might have the virus 

this is in the process of change as the govt have announced a target of 100,00 tests a day a goal i hope they acheive 

but whilst most are not being tested and may possibly have died alone in their homes unrecorded then its difficult to see govt released figures as being good enough to tell us how bad things really are 

yes the govt do not seem suited to the task but it is their task , and no clapping will not solve things , that i did find strange though that a box in your home tells you to go outside and clap and many went oh ok that sounds like it will save the nhs when everyone knows that it needs investment not cuts to fulfill its role as our crown jewel ,but hopefully in future we will learn just how precious our health service is and look after it better 

perhaps if im in the mood to talk politics or religion i might pop by 

Age old case of someone with a little knowledge fooling someone with no knowledge.

I watched a chunk of this video.  A few things jump out...

- Dr Kaufman's background (mostly psychiatry with some smattering of generalized medicine) makes him a layperson in terms of microbiology.  You might as well as ask a bat boy at Yankee Stadium to tell you the best way to pitch a 90-mph fastball.  Wrong background.  The holistic stuff does not improve that opinion .

- His pitch about the RNA strand testing is true, from a simplistic point of view, but testing for markers is a quite common method to use for virus testing, so presenting it like it's a mistake or an oversight in test designer's logic is misleading.  Sometimes you can test more directly, sometimes testing for markers is best you have.  He also likens testing an RNA strand to putting a unique looking baseball cap on someone in a crowded baseball stadium and then trying to find them, and how false positives can result.  I guess he hasn't done his homework, though.  I can only speak to the Cepheid Covid-19 test, but their test is looking for 2 unique RNA markers, so, it's less like "find this baseball cap...oops, wrong guy" and more like "find this guy in the stadium, he's wearing a black and white checker Dale Earnhardt cowboy hat and a red leather jacket that says 'I love Guy Fieri'...oh, and by the way, those articles of clothing are superglued to his skin...".

It's a 38 min video, so 10 min or so of skimming through and spot checking was enough for me to determine I don't care to watch the whole thing ...

I will assume that's a joke .  Feel free to keep posting on outbreak-related topics.

There is sign that an anti viral drug combined with a certain drug could overcome mild symptoms. And self immune is the great factor against virus. Mostly young age will be healed.

It is still dangerous for older people and having low immune system.

What I got back from somebody who knows significantly more about this test than I do:

Exosomes *can* theoretically lead to false positives if not taken into account.  There were some issues with one of the CDC primers (which I take to mean that there might have been an issue with what the CDC decided represents a unique RNA marker initially, but I'm not positive), but that was resolved.  That's why it's important to have redundancy (the 2 unique RNA strand markers).

[Edit:  got more feedback later]

The virus has been sequenced plenty of times and from a number of patients.  Primers and probes for PCR are based on a full sequence of the virus itself and then validated against everything else that is published and real samples.  And even beyond what WHO and CDC have done, lots of labs have sequenced the virus, in fact an organization has even mapped the sequences and come up with a virus tracking.  Everything is peer-reviewed and public these days.

I file this along with the predictions of thousands and thousands of suicides.  People --> economy.  Lifting restrictions early --> lots more dead people --> worse economy. 

Now I am talking about actual goods and services when I say "economy".  The valuation laid on top of the "real" economy will suffer more.  You know who will take the brunt of that?  The top 1% of individuals that own 40% of that "valuation".  When all stock markets go down at once, it stands to stay pretty even in the end for average people's day to day existence.  Life goes on and things recovery from the blip, just like in the early 1900s. 

The people that lose a disproportionate amount are those who had a disproportionate amount to begin with.  Not that I don't have sympathy for someone's 401K hit (I can definitely sympathize), but that speaks more to the need to correct the issue of 401Ks replacing pensions et al and allowing institutionalized theft in the form of percentage-based fees for money management.  

It's an inane comparison in any case because dying of poverty isn't contagious. If one person dying of poverty meant next week 2, then next week 4, 8, and so on, then you could make a comparison.

I wrote on the precedent thread before it was locked down for being too political. 

Mostly I was explaining Why people should stop believing that China's infected people number is not 10 times higher than reported.

Before I argue Why, Please let me tell You that as a chinese interpreting student I know the language and culture very well, moreover I have been staying here long enough to devellop an insider kind of point of view, and as part of my studies curriculum I have had the opportunity to read many newspaper articles, foreign and chinese, about the present situation.

Now, why is not possible that the numbers are 10 times higher than reported?

- Factories, commerces have been reopening the last few weeks, also Schools are scheduled to be open this month, and universities probably in May. Now, do You really believe that the government would allow such things to happen If the numbers were 10 times higher, so about 800 000 people being infected? That Seems very unlikely.

-Chinese government acts swiftly. It is not a democracy, thus drawing many foreigners contempt, but it also allows the government to make unilateral and swift decisions. While many countries displayed how dangerous the virus was, China (even though there might have been some covering up job at first) reacted on the spot, locking down cities, building makeshift hospitals (we have all Seen the story of this makeshift hospital beimg built in 20 days) and ramping up the production of facemask. 

-It happened During Chinese new year, When the virus became a thing, most of the chinese people were staying in their hometowns in the countryside. And those people had to wait a very long time before being able to Go back to cities. This for Sure hindered the progression of the virus as the flow of people in the countryside is nowhere near the one inside cities. Moreover the lockdown in some villages was even tougher than in.some cities, some friends told me they couldn't even Go to the market Because it was canceled, and that people going outside without masks Could be reported to the local police. 

-China is now providing many face masks as well as doctors to help countries in need. It Seems very unlikely that the country would lend such help If was still struggling with a huge number of infected people. If we were actually talking about 800 000 infected people (as some people are arguing), You can be Sure the Chinese government would care about its people than overseas'.

 I believe I provided enough reasons for You to change your mind about the real number of infected people here. I do agree that it might have been Under reported, but it appears that many countries actually do so. And, Yes, the idea that the USA brought the virus to China is wrong, but the war on words has been lasting for a long time between the USA and China, we are all used to it by now.

Also I have Seen people arguing that China killed millions of its people. But that was before, I mean Americans killed each others During the civil war, and native Americans got erased During the earlier phase of the building of the USA, but Just like in China, those are things of the past. The Chineae government is not a bloodthirsty entity, and China is completely different from what it was 30 years ago. But I guess this is easier to acknowledge that by witnessing it from one own eyes.

And one last point, Yes media coverage is China is mediocre at best, it is If You want objective news, but after reading so many foreign news outlets, I also realized that our Medias are sadly very subjective too.

Anyway, we are all in this fight together, blaming and fearmongering does not help, right now solidarity is the key to our Issue. 

Thanks, good stuff.

I heard some outrageous conspiracy theory on NextDoor today that tried to claim that *21 million* people in China have "disappeared" since the outbreak began, as evidenced by some secret surveillance of cell phone usage.

People have to get real and think things through.  If you're been reading crap like that, then you've also been reading that US intelligence services have been working to verify numbers coming out of China.  This includes usage of satellite surveillance.  Now how the hell do you hide the disappearance of 21 million people from orbit?  Hand puppets making each person look like 3 people?  It's ridiculous.

Agreed, but people can individually choose to elevate themselves above the inexorably slow decades long process of changing a nation's reputation as it changes on the ground.  I'd rather see the real Russia and India infection numbers than China's at this point.  But ideally every nation would just pony up real numbers...the whole "we will show ourselves to be better/stronger" is just fearful BS.

I don't want to start a subthread here, but if anyone wants to post another thread that has on the ground info specifically about how absorbing Hong Kong is changing China overall, I'm very interested in a firsthand perspective on this...

   That 21 million figure comes from the cell phones in China. The gov shut down the cell phone towers so naturally 21 million phones went off-line. People are assuming the're dead.

   Yahoo says we lost 1500 Americans yesterday due to the virus. Large spikes in L.A.  https://www.yahoo.com/news/coronavirus-cases-increase-dramatically-l-192537932.html

I re-read what I wrote and realized I made some typo mistakes, Sorry for that, writing on my phone isn't exactly practical.

Anyway, Just like btickler said, it is very difficult for a country to change people's opinion about it. If You ask people to tell 3 words to describe China they would probably say Mao, Tian anmen and communism. They would be right If we were talking about China before the Reform and Opening up Policy was created by Deng xiaoping, but China's change has come so fast that almost nobody living outside the country has had the time to See it.

Indeed, and You are right, the government lied in the past, Because that's what governments do. Well, maybe China's one did it on a larger scale, but now everyone can access information online, use vpns, education is also better than it was, and Because of the huge number of foreigners that arrived in China those last few years, people have started to grasp concepts of the "West" and understand the outside world better. The government is aware of that, and Just like let's say.. the church.. it is adapting to new times, and that is for the best. 

I Don't want to Go too far off topic so I'll stop there.I'll stay around  If You want any factual facts about the situation here. 

It's pretty hard to keep 21 million dead people a secret, even without factoring in US satellite surveillance.

Good info about states with higher percentage rates of infection:

https://news.yahoo.com/birx-warns-of-coming-coronavirus-hotspots-across-the-us-002828481.html

Louisiana is poised to become the next epicenter of the coronavirus crisis, White House officials said Thursday, citing new data that shows that 26 percent of the tests for COVID-19 in that state in recent days have come back positive. That is the second-highest rate of infection in the United States, behind New York and New Jersey, where 35 percent of coronavirus tests have been positive.
The New York area remains a “very clear and important hot zone,” Dr. Deborah Birx said at Thursday’s briefing of the White House coronavirus task force as she revealed testing statistics on specific states.
“What we’re seeing finally is testing improving,” said Birx, a renowned veteran of the HIV/AIDS fight who is now serving as the response coordinator for the coronavirus task force. She added that the increased testing capacity has allowed states with a low number of confirmed cases to conduct “surveillance and containment” of sickened individuals.
But Birx also sounded a warning about states where more than 10 percent of those tested for COVID-19 are still being diagnosed with the disease.
“Michigan, Connecticut, Indiana, Georgia, Illinois, so that should tell you where the next hot spots are coming, are at 15 percent of their tests positive, and then Colorado, D.C., Rhode Island and Massachusetts are at 13 percent,” she said.
According to the COVID Tracking Project, which aggregates publicly available data from all 50 states, 1,267,658 COVID-19 tests had been conducted in the United States as of Thursday afternoon (that does not mean that 1,267,658 have been tested, as most sickened people need to be tested several times).
That statistic represents a drastic escalation of testing across the nation in the last several days, giving epidemiologists the clarity they have desperately needed in the fight against the coronavirus, which has killed nearly 6,000 Americans.
Still, Birx conceded Thursday that her findings about the overall number of cases of COVID-19 remain incomplete.
“I’m still missing 50 percent of the data,” she said.
The Democratic governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, feuded with President Trump last week, accusing him of not doing enough to help her state, where a coronavirus cluster has erupted in Detroit.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, meanwhile, admitted on Wednesday that he had only recently learned that people who weren’t showing symptoms could transmit the coronavirus. That led to questions about what had guided him in his decision making up to that point.
Encouragingly, Birx said that California and Washington state, which saw the first outbreaks of the coronavirus in the U.S., “remain steady at an 8 percent rate” of new positive test results. That suggests that lockdown measures instituted by Govs. Gavin Newsom and Jay Inslee, respectively, had their intended effect.
But Birx cautioned that the country was still in danger and that the new potential hot spots showed that social distancing guidelines remained the best defense against the virus.
“We have to change the logarithmic curve that we’re on. We see country after country having done that,” Birx said. “What it means in the United States is that not everyone is doing [social distancing],” she said, adding, “I can tell by the curve and as it is today that not every American is following it.”