Pandemics and Epidemiology (COVID-19, monkeypox, etc.)

The two new fatalities (bringing Taiwan up to five) were a woman in her fifties who was part of a hospital cluster who had a history of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other chronic diseases, and a man in his sixties who recently traveled to Spain.

A friend-of-friend who caught the roni on a flight back from Spain just recovered. He said that the daily nasopharyngeal swabs weren't fun at all.

Also TIL that Li Zehua, a former CCTV host who travelled to Wuhan as a citizen journalist, apparently got harmonised by two plainclothed men mid-livestream last month.

Edit: Ah, here's a Guardian article.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Mar 30th 2020 at 1:06:26 AM

Not surprised with how far they have to stick them up someone's nose, I'd imagine it's extremely unpleasant.

129 new cases, 8 new deaths and 11 new recoveries in Indonesia. Total: 1411 confirmed, 122 dead and 75 recovered.

The raging debate in the country is whether the government will enforce a nationwide lockdown or not by declaring "civil emergency", and how it will be enforced. Some people criticized Jokowi's cabinet by saying they've been too slow to respond properly in the past month. Furthermore, there's been huge confusion over how essential businesses should coordinate with the government in this so-called "civil emergency" situation.

Edited by Lazlo74 on Mar 30th 2020 at 2:01:51 AM

I can imagine. I've had an endoscopy before, which amounts to having a camera on a tube shoved through your throat and into your stomach. Not fun, especially since I wasn't put under and instead only had local anesthetic for my mouth.

Having something similar pushed up your nostril is probably as bad.

Edited by M84 on Mar 30th 2020 at 5:07:30 PM

Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro's recklessness on Twitter became so bad that Twitter deleted it - apparently it were videos of him violating social distancing guidelines.

In New York (state) the number of fatalities has probably exceeded 1000. A number of temporary hospitals are under construction there to manage the flood of coronavirus cases.

Also, since this issue hasn't been discussed much, this article raises some questions about what the indirect mortality of coronavirus - say, through patients with other illnesses who cannot get treatment because hospitals are deluged with COVID-19 cases - will be.

You think the Germanophone countries can get through this better off than most of western Europe?

Not a biologist, so I know zilch about codons, but I took a look at the genetic sequence again and realised that it ends with "aaa aaa aaa aaa aaa aaa aaa aaa aaa aaa", and honestly... same.

That's just the poly-adenine tail (adenine is coded as "a") that a RNA has to bear before the ribosome (the machine that makes proteins out of RNA) will process it. Since incoming coronavirus RNA is immediately targeted to the ribosome, it needs that appendage.

Ah, TIL.

I'd say Vietnam is one of the unexpected standout countries in handling this outbreak. They only have around 194 cases so far, and their aggressive, uncompromising methods to track, isolate and quarantine clusters and imported cases have paid off well.

Edited by Lazlo74 on Mar 30th 2020 at 3:42:18 AM

We still don't know how many cases are in Russia, they've been extremely quiet on this.

According to Worldometer, the official tally is at around 1.800 as of now. But Putin is most likely massaging the figures like Iran and China did for political reasons.

Edited by Lazlo74 on Mar 30th 2020 at 4:49:15 AM

Russian here, we have 1836 cases, +302 today, 66 recovered, 9 deaths. I'm more than certain the official numbers are lower than they are in reality, but since I don't have more reliable sources than "a friend of a friend" that's all I'm going to say on the matter.

About same levels as Greece huh.

Boris Johnson is claiming that China is hiding the virus results from 15 to 40 times their numbers.

https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-boris-johnsons-government-reportedly-furious-with-china-2020-3

But...not exactly trustworthy is he?

NHK World reports Japan stopping more foreign nationals from going to travel there:

I'd say the numbers might be twice or thrice as much, since they did quarantine pretty earnestly. Now when they end the quarantine, then they might jump to those supposed amounts.

Actually, is there any calculations to determine the actual amount of infections compared to the ones tested?

Edited by alekos23 on Mar 30th 2020 at 3:40:20 PM

A few things that I think are true re: China's count:

• The numbers are fake. But there's a limit on how much they could keep hidden, though I don't know how much that is.
  • This SCMP report indicates that asymptomatic cases (which are left out of the statistics, as per the official guideline) number 43,000 to the total 80,000 confirmed - which, if true, suggests that the limit is quite high indeed.
• The trend is real. The rest of China evidently didn't fall to a Wuhan-scale outbreak, and though the official numbers are suspiciously low, by mid-February the other provinces were confident enough to send large numbers of personnel and equipment into Hubei, which they wouldn't have done if things weren't under control.
  • That doesn't mean that it's permanent, and I do worry that the CCP's eagerness to declare victory is going to lead to a lapse in vigilance and future outbreaks. And there have been anonymous testimonies of new cases that the authorities aren't reporting.
• Every country undercounts, both due to resource limitations and faulty methodology. China obviously didn't count most of the cases from December and early January, and we know from the early days of the outbreak that a large number of victims simply didn't make it to a hospital or complete their tests before dying - something we now see repeated in care homes in Italy and Spain.
  • Think of it this way: you're a neighbourhood association volunteer doing a welfare check on the seniors on your floor, and one old lady isn't answering your knock. You call the paramedics, they arrive after a long delay and break down the door, and she's lying dead on the floor. Everyone is tired and you know the hospitals are overflowing. Are you going to ask them to give her a post-mortem test? Do you think they'd give her one? Lines of information start to break down when the whole system is under stress.
• People still die from other causes in the meantime, and the strain on the health care system led to more deaths that would've otherwise been preventable.
  • On one hand, it means that we shouldn't attribute any abnormal increase in the statistics to the virus itself - but on the other, it would also theoretically allow the Chinese authorities to use things like pollution and other respiratory diseases to launder COVID-19 deaths. They have a long track record of doing the same with the flu in the past.
• The urban-rural health infrastructure gap means that we don't have a very good idea of what's happening in rural Hubei, and the carceral system (including the concentration camps in Xinjiang/East Turkestan) is completely opaque.

I don't think that debating the numbers is a productive thing to do right now. Everyone is working on incomplete data. The trends are visible enough, and you can base future actions on them, even if the numbers are gamed around the edges. There's a lot more less-than-amiable stuff that the Chinese leadership is doing to global geopolitics while the rest of the world is in chaos, but that's something we'll have to deal with later. Boris and his fellow brain parasite demagogues will simply have to stop blaming China for their own failures and start working on the mitigation effort so we can all move on.

None that I know of. There have been many projections using multiple models, but we won't know for sure until we get everyone tested.

Best take it to the UK Politics thread, but it is telling that the article immediately makes a connection to Huawei. Long story short, Huawei is helping set up the UK 5G network. Trump is against this (problems therefore for a post Brexit UK-US trade deal) but moreover so are vast swathes of Johnson's own party. There was a pretty sizeable rebellion on a bill that was only tangentially connected to Huawei - it wouldn't take many more MPs for him to lose any future vote and thus defaulting on the Huawei deal from the UK end.

Covid-19 might therefore give the excuse Johnson needs to reset his position on China into a more hostile position and therefore make it China's fault "for being untrustworthy" that the Huawei deal fails.

So, TLDR - Johnson voicing suspicions that are already out there in the world, there may be some scientific finger waving behind those numbers but it's pretty clear there are some ulterior motives that have to be considered as well. Telling that no one is putting a name to their claims - it's all sources and unnamed persons.

Also worth considering the original source here - it's the Mail on Sunday. Not quite as terrible as it's stablemate the Daily Mail but that's only because these reporters have a whole week to refine their toxic sludge into something slightly more palatable.

Edited by singularityshot on Mar 30th 2020 at 5:57:25 AM

"Seems like the Indian government didn't properly prepare for that step."

I don't even need to know what you're talking about to know this statement is correct.

South African. We have 1,280 cases with 2 deaths and 31 recoveries.

The government has cracked down hard with people only allowed out of their homes to buy groceries, medicine or collect social security grants.

Anyone outside of that is arrested.

Stuff's been getting weird around here. The biggest food delivery app just started offering medical consultations with every order.

News from Peru, we had 181 new cases and the city of Loreto in the rainforest part of the country is in emergency, mostly due to the population there not taking the lockdown seriously.

Aside from that, there’s a debate going on over a new law approved in light of the crisis that protects cops from any demand if their actions follow protocol.

In the United Kingdom, leak reveals shortage of coronavirus PPE in Northern Ireland. And in Wales, senior nurse says some healthcare workers are writing letters in case they die.

Miscellanea from here. In Italy, the number of cases appears to be decreasing. In Spain, cases are slowing down too but ICUs are still overloaded and there are a number of infections among physicians.