COVID-19 Coronavirus current events

12% of Covid-19 tests in California have come back positive, California has about a population of about 40 million, that means that 12% of all Californians are positive
I've wanted to make a graphic for this fallacy for a while, and your post pushed me to actually do it. I'd appreciate any feedback on which size works best on your device, and what I should change to make the message more clear. I felt I ought to maybe add percentages but I'm not sure if they don't require tot much explanation. (I've also thought about making a smartphone-compatible vertical 1x4 strip.)
I'm happy to take feedback via PM if you don't want to clog up this thread.
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I've wanted to make a graphic for this fallacy for a while, and your post pushed me to actually do it. I'd appreciate any feedback on which size works best on your device, and what I should change to make the message more clear.
I don't think I can PM here yet, but I think a legend for the colors used for the people in your graphic might be useful....
 
I should change to make the message more clear
it's pretty.
but, it took me a while to piece together what i was probably looking at.

the bottom left is contact tracing with undertesting? i think "sample" is too confusing, maybe just write "contact tracing" since i believe the average person understands that term.

i also dont think your random survey would find that many pink and orange guys. it kinda sounds like you are saying there are more than 12% of all Californians infected.? (or is that just an accident you quoted Dan?)

your little men under the graphic dont match in count. i get the pink guy is "patient zero" and orange is who they infected, so that's ok not explaining colors. but i dont get what the line of men under the graphic is telling me.

if you get rid of the line of men you can condense everything and maybe put an explanation ex:
(forgive my bottom right text, im not sure what your graphic is showing me) and now that i see it uploaded my labels could be smaller still!

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I've been reviewing the FDA's Emergency Use Authorizations again, and some new items stood out.

Protective Barrier Enclosures
Article:
Clinicians with inadequate access to standard personal protective equipment (PPE) have been compelled to improvise protective barrier enclosures for use during endotracheal intubation. We describe one such barrier that is easily fabricated and may help protect clinicians during this procedure. The barrier studied was an “aerosol box,” which consists of a transparent plastic cube designed to cover a patient’s head and that incorporates two circular ports through which the clinician’s hands are passed to perform the airway procedure.
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The image is a screenshot from the enclosed video. The "box" only has 4 sides, it is open at the bottom and towards the torso of the patient.

Respiratory Muscle Stimulator
Article:
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I've previously talked about a similar device that helps patients re-learn how to breathe after they've been intubated for weeks. That one delivers an electric shock via an electrode that is pushed through a blood vessel to be near the nerves that stimulate the diaphragm. This one is delivering the shock from outside and monitors the breath rhythm as it does so.

VitalPatch remote patient monitor
Article:
The VitalPatch device is a wireless remote monitoring system intended for use by healthcare professionals for continuous collection of physiological data in healthcare settings. This can include heart rate, electrocardiography (ECG), heart rate variability, R-R interval, respiratory rate, body temperature, skin temperature, activity (including step count), and posture (body position relative to gravity including fall). The device can perform analysis of arrhythmia events including detection of ventricular ectopic beats, pause, atrial fibrillation or flutter, sinus rhythms (normal sinus rhythm, sinus bradycardia, sinus tachycardia), second degree AV block, supraventricular tachycardia, idioventricular rhythm, ventricular bigeminy, and ventricular trigeminy, and measurement of heart rate, PR interval, QT interval, corrected QT intervals (Bazett formula and Fridericia formula), and QRS duration for each rhythm. The analysis of arrhythmia events is performed on the device.

The VitalPatch device is intended to be integrated with a patient monitoring platform. Data are transmitted wirelessly [via Bluetooth] from the device to the patient monitoring platform for storage and analysis.
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This is basically a deluxe fitbit that contains a single-lead ECG. You stick it on your skin with adhesive for 5-7 days (it's waterproof, but not rechargeable), calibrate for posture, and then your health can be monitored remotely. Here's why this is useful:
Article:
Proposed treatments for COVID-19 include the use of drugs that can prolong QT intervals and may cause life threatening arrhythmias (e.g., hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine, especially when used in combination with azithromycin). Common methods to identify those patients rely on monitoring the QT interval of an ECG during drug administration. The QT interval is usually measured on a 12-lead ECG at various timepoints during drug exposures. However, the use of 12-lead ECG recorders on patients that are being treated for COVID-19 is burdensome and may present additional risk to patients and HCPs due to the need for in-person consultations, as well as the need to sanitize the equipment between patients and additional personal protective equipment usage.

Based on bench testing and reported clinical experience, FDA has concluded that the VitalPatch may be effective for remotely monitoring and detecting the QT interval of an ECG in patients who are undergoing treatment in a hospital setting for COVID-19 with drugs that can prolong QT intervals and may cause life threatening arrhythmias (e.g., hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine, especially when used in combination with azithromycin). In addition, remote monitoring may reduce the HCP risk of exposure to SARS-CoV-2 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
 
Article:
MADISON, Wis. (AP) - More than 70 people who tested positive for the coronavirus since an April 24 rally at the Wisconsin state Capitol indicated they had attended a large gathering, but the state Department of Health Services cant' say if they were at the rally because it is not tracking specific events.
[..]
The rally was organized and attended by people who oppose the state's “Safer at Home” order and want to allow more businesses to reopen sooner than would be currently allowed. The order expires on May 26.
 
Germany is opening up, with a 7-day incidence of 50 new cases per 100 000 inhabitants being the warning sign for each county (but most counties are now below 25, see the map below). The counties above 50 have outbreaks in care homes, or outbreaks in abbatoirs, because the workers are cheap foreigners living in communal housing. Some states are now testing all of their meat workers living in these kind of accomodations.
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Oh, and R exceeded 1 yesterday; but hopefully it's just a statistical fluctuation.

Our nominal standard is a 5-person contact tracer team per 20 000 inhabitants (with a task force of 1000 mobile tracers that can be used to support hot spots), but not all counties seem to have that yet.
 
Melbourne Australia covid19 anti lock down protest that drew fringe CT dwellers of about 100 crowd


Melbourne protests: Violent scenes in Melbourne’s CBD as coronavirus protesters are detained


https://7news.com.au/travel/coronav...s-as-coronavirus-protest-turns-ugly-c-1028418


Police have arrested 10 protesters after a violent clash in Melbourne’s city centre.

Protesters defied orders to stay home this Mother’s Day and were met with a significant police request.
Melbourne’s Parliament House has been swarmed with protesters on Sunday picketing against vaccinations and a 5G network.
In a statement, Victoria Police said that while they respect the public’s right to protest, their top priority is community safety.
“Victoria Police made it very clear that if a planned protest was to proceed today, it would be in direct contravention of the Chief Health Officer’s current directives.”


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Article:
The United States blocked agreement Friday on a UN Security Council resolution that called for a global ceasefire aimed at collectively addressing the coronavirus pandemic ravaging the globe, after China pushed for the resolution to mention the World Health Organization.

The US rejected any reference to the WHO in the text of the resolution, and also turned down an alternative that didn't explicitly name the organization -- and instead cited the UN's "specialized health agencies," two diplomatic sources told CNN. UN diplomats were surprised by the US move to block the vote Friday. The effort they had been working on for more than six weeks came to a screeching halt, and they fear it will not be revived.

That's awful.
 
Peter M. Sandman on Outrage Management (excerpts):
Article:
Like most crises, the COVID-19 pandemic requires three kinds of risk communication.

Before the crisis, the task is “precaution advocacy” – warning a complacent public. The U.S. pretty much failed at that one.

During the crisis, the task is “crisis communication” – guiding a frightened public. As the report Jody and I are writing for CIDRAP points out, the U.S. isn’t doing such a great job of that one either.

After the crisis or between waves of the crisis, the task is “outrage management” – addressing recriminations about what went wrong. That’s the one that’s on deck right now, as officials face outraged criticism from all sides, much of it justified.

As I said in an earlier email, that’s the normal natural history of a crisis: precaution advocacy, then crisis communication, then outrage management. Mid-crisis, people are mostly frightened and miserable; they’re upset about the situation, and reluctant to launch aggressive attacks on the people they’re counting on to protect them.

When recriminations start to become paramount – as is happening right now vis-à-vis COVID-19 – that’s a watershed, signaling that we’re entering a “post-crisis” period. In the case of COVID-19, however, it’s almost certainly a temporary “post-crisis” period; we’ll be back in crisis mode if/when a significant increase in infections yields a lot of deaths, or overwhelmed hospitals, or a return to lockdown (or worse, an unsuccessful effort by authorities to return to lockdown).

Article:
Sandman began by saying he understood the protests around the country about the lockdown. “It’s very hard to warn people to abide by social-distancing measures when they’re so outraged that they want to kill somebody and trust absolutely nothing people say,” he told me. “COVID-19 outrage taps into preexisting grievances and ideologies. It’s not just about COVID-19 policies. It’s about freedom, equality, too much or too little government. It’s about the arrogance of egghead experts, left versus right, globalism versus nationalism versus federalism. And it’s endlessly, pointlessly about Donald Trump.”

Since the crisis began, Sandman has isolated three categories of grievance. He spelled them out for me, assuming the voices of the outraged:

• “In parts of the country, the response to COVID-19 was delayed and weak; officials unwisely prioritized ‘allaying panic’ instead of allaying the spread of the virus; lockdown then became necessary, not because it was inevitable but because our leaders had screwed up; and now we’re very worried about coming out of lockdown prematurely or chaotically, mishandling the next phase of the pandemic as badly as we handled the first phase.”

• “In parts of the country, the response to COVID-19 was excessive—as if the big cities on the two coasts were the whole country and flyover America didn’t need or didn’t deserve a separate set of policies. There are countless rural counties with zero confirmed cases. Much of the U.S. public-health profession assumes and even asserts without building an evidence-based case that these places, too, needed to be locked down and now need to reopen carefully, cautiously, slowly, and not until they have lots of testing and contact-tracing capacity. How dare they destroy our economy (too) just because of their mishandled outbreak!”

• “Once again the powers-that-be have done more to protect other people’s health than to protect my health. And once again the powers-that-be have done more to protect other people’s economic welfare than to protect my economic welfare!” (These claims can be made with considerable truth by healthcare workers; essential workers in low-income, high-touch occupations; residents of nursing homes; African-Americans; renters who risk eviction; the retired whose savings are threatened; and others.)

In their article for the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, Sandman and Lanard point out that coping with a pandemic requires a thorough plan of communication. This is particularly important as the crisis is likely to enter a second wave of infection, when it could be more devastating. The plan starts with six core principles: 1) Don’t over-reassure, 2) Proclaim uncertainty, 3) Validate emotions—your audience’s and your own, 4) Give people things to do, 5) Admit and apologize for errors, and 6) Share dilemmas. To achieve the first three core principles, officials must immediately share what they know, even if the information may be incomplete. If officials share good news, they must be careful not to make it too hopeful. Over-reassurance is one of the biggest dangers in crisis communication. Sandman and Lanard suggest officials say things like, “Even though the number of new confirmed cases went down yesterday, I don’t want to put too much faith in one day’s good news.”

Sandman and Lanard say a big part of maintaining credibility is to admit to uncertainty—something politicians are loath to do. They caution against invoking “science” as a sole reason for action, as science in the midst of a crisis is “incremental, fallible, and still in its infancy.” Expressing empathy, provided it’s genuine, is important, Sandman and Lanard say. It makes the bearer more human and believable. A major tool of empathy is to acknowledge the public’s fear as well as your own. There is good reason to be terrified about this virus and its consequences on society. It’s not something to hide.

Sandman and Lanard say current grievances with politicians, health officials, and the media, about how the crisis has been portrayed, have indeed been contradictory. But that makes them no less valid. Denying the contradictions only amplifies divisions in the public and accelerates the outrage, possibly beyond control. They strongly emphasize one piece of advice. “Before we can share the dilemma of how best to manage any loosening of the lockdown, we must decisively—and apologetically—disabuse the public of the myth that, barring a miracle, the COVID-19 pandemic can possibly be nearing its end in the next few months.”
 
Covid-19 in a rural town (excerpt)
Article:
But Fire Chief Burns said that in those first few days, he still saw "a lot of big gatherings".

He felt that many residents believed they would not be affected by the outbreak

"Another problem with all this is that if somebody gets it, they're kind of being told, 'don't tell nobody. Don't let your family know'."

He described one family that didn't tell the funeral home the death was caused by COVID-19. It was early on in the outbreak, and the family was worried they might lose their jobs if anyone found out.

The funeral proceeded and the wake, held at the family's home, drew a crowd.

"I think after the 20-plus funerals, they all get it now. There's a little more on the 'wake up' side," Mr Burns said.

One of the first WHO press conferences I saw back in March talked about the dangers of stigmatising people with the virus. I was remainded of AIDS in Africa and elsewhere, and how the stigmatising makes life harder for those affected and makes combating the spread more difficult. This report just drives that lesson home.
 
the dangers of stigmatising people with the virus. I was remainded of AIDS in Africa and elsewhere, and how the stigmatising makes life harder for those affected and makes combating the spread more difficult. This report just drives that lesson home.

so.. if you don't 'stigmatise' people they throw large funeral wakes and continue to go into work. ? that doesn't work so well either.
 
If they'd been able to be open about it, maybe the funeral would have been handled differently? If you stigmatise the diagnosis into hiding, if you are afraid of getting diagnosed, or telling people about it, these things happen, Deirdre. If you can talk without fear, people are cautious around you for two weeks, then things go back to normal.
 
people are cautious around you for two weeks, then things go back to normal.
isn't that what stigmatizing is? people avoid you for [back then we were told 2 weeks] and you can't go to work. I'm just honestly not really seeing the difference.
 
isn't that what stigmatizing is? people avoid you for [back then we were told 2 weeks] and you can't go to work. I'm just honestly not really seeing the difference.
If people don't shame you, there is no stigma.
Article:
Stigma can manifest itself in many ways. It can be something very direct, like when a person with a disease or known to have had a disease experiences discrimination. Stigma can lead to continued fear as people with a disease anticipate discrimination. Experiencing a disease can also lead to self-stigma, associated with the feelings of guilt and shame of having a disease that you may have unwittingly passed on to loved ones, along with fears of how other people will perceive that.

This last one is very important in a pandemic like this one, where the disease in question is both highly contagious and sometimes asymptomatic. It’s good to be conscientious of others and to try as hard as possible to keep yourself and everyone around you safe. But given the rates of infection, it’s also possible many people have already infected others inadvertently through no fault of their own.

The way that society views a disease affects how a person with that illness feels and behaves. When an illness is viewed as something shameful or somehow “your fault,” then the risk of self-stigmatization is considerably higher.

How do we gauge how supportive our society is to various illnesses?

The first place to start is the language used. Think about the language that we use for people with cancer. We say they are “fighting cancer.” When they survive, they “beat cancer.” These words are positive and empowering and designed to show people affected by cancer that society has their back.

We are still in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and so language is still evolving. But it is disappointing to already hear and see the media, politicians, news outlets and even some health professionals casually using terms such as ”the Chinese virus,” “COVID suspect,” or, perhaps worst of all, “a super-spreader.” These words dehumanize and isolate particular groups in society, and they tell people affected by this new illness that society, rather than supporting them, actually blames them for a larger crisis. Even some of the memes circulating on social media can carry the pernicious effect of appearing to be judgmental about people being placed in isolation because they've been sneezing, or coughing.

When it comes to the fight to eliminate tuberculosis and HIV, we know that stigma reduces the likelihood that people with symptoms will seek care, drives vulnerable groups underground, reduces the impact of prevention measures, and ultimately increases transmission rates.
 
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Here's a daft question: if everyone's been in lockdown the last 4-6 weeks, where have all the hundreds of thousands of new cases come from?

I question the assumption that everybody has actually been locked down in any meaningful way.
 
If people don't shame you, there is no stigma.
I agree with all that, of course. but your original article wasn't talking about shame. it was talking about people afraid to lose their jobs. which is a major, major problem as well. because the choice is tell people and you have to go into quarantine and you can't feed your kids/pay the mortgage, -or you don't tell and go into work anyway and possibly infect a lot of people.
 
Infections are also taking off in the Persian Gulf area: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, and Bahrain are all showing large daily increases in cases within the last week. This hasn't yet translated into huge numbers of deaths, but there is bound to be a time lag of a few weeks.
 
Infections are also taking off in the Persian Gulf area: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, and Bahrain are all showing large daily increases in cases within the last week. This hasn't yet translated into huge numbers of deaths, but there is bound to be a time lag of a few weeks.

So much for the heat stopping it.
 
So much for the heat stopping it.
yea but if its really hot and muggy, then people spend most of their time indoors and maybe in air conditioning. where we are, we get those 2-3 months between dry winter air and too muggy july/aug when we flip on the ac and redry out the air. (<this is mostly wishfill thinking, but it might be real).
 
I agree with all that, of course. but your original article wasn't talking about shame. it was talking about people afraid to lose their jobs. which is a major, major problem as well. because the choice is tell people and you have to go into quarantine and you can't feed your kids/pay the mortgage, -or you don't tell and go into work anyway and possibly infect a lot of people.
I'm sorry, my bad. It just seems bizarre that somebody would fear losing their job over 2 weeks of sick leave.
 
Infections are also taking off in the Persian Gulf area: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, and Bahrain are all showing large daily increases in cases within the last week. This hasn't yet translated into huge numbers of deaths, but there is bound to be a time lag of a few weeks.

On the Gulf States situation, I should probably have noticed that they have been doing a huge number of tests. The UAE and Bahrain, notably, have actually tested more than 10% of their populations. So they may just be discovering a lot of mild or asymptomatic cases that won't necessarily convert into a lot of deaths. Let us hope so.
 
I'm sorry, my bad. It just seems bizarre that somebody would fear losing their job over 2 weeks of sick leave.


I think that's kind of at the core of a lot of anti-lockdown protests, rather than just conspiracy thinking or anti-government thinking. People are afraid of losing their jobs and income and starving. But if they don't want to admit that their financial situation is precarious - to others or to themselves - then they'll justify it another way i.e. 'the fear is overblown'.

No data to back that up of course, just throwing out opinion.
 
Poeple have been arguingt that "more testing causes more cases to show up", suggesting that tests actually don't reflect the true situation. That is true if a region is undertesting and can't test all people that have a high risk of being infected, because then more tests means you can discover cases you would have otherwise missed. But once a region has good coverage (which, by rule of thumb, is achieved when the rate of positive tests vs all tests drops below 10%), the number of cases is independent of the number of tests done.

Proof is current data from Germany: in the past two weeks, the number of tests carried out has increased, but the number of positive tests has decreased.
Testing KW20.png
https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ...chte/2020-05-20-en.pdf?__blob=publicationFile
 
I think that's kind of at the core of a lot of anti-lockdown protests, rather than just conspiracy thinking or anti-government thinking. People are afraid of losing their jobs and income and starving.

I thought it was more (in the US, at least) because people don't like being told what to do, have this strange notion of "freedom", and want to be able to "party" (or go to bars, restaurants, or coffee shops, etc).

That's an interesting chart, Mendel. I will look for something similar for the US. This website - https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-testing#united-states - has the number of tests done, which is now around 12.5 million, and downloadable daily data.

A quick off-the-cuff check shows the same thing, though - testing has markedly increased, and number of cases has stayed steady or slightly fallen:

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https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-testing#united-states

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https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/cases-in-us.html
 
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Excerpted:
Article:
Carnegie Mellon University researchers have discovered that much of the discussion around the pandemic and stay-at-home orders is being fueled by misinformation campaigns that use convincing bots.

To analyze bot activity around the pandemic, CMU researchers since January have collected more than 200 million tweets discussing coronavirus or COVID-19. Of the top 50 influential retweeters, 82% are bots, they found. Of the top 1,000 retweeters, 62% are bots.

More than 100 types of inaccurate COVID-19 stories have been identified, such as those about potential cures. But bots are also dominating conversations about ending stay-at-home orders and "reopening America."

Many factors of the online discussions about “reopening America” suggest that bot activity is orchestrated. One indicator is the large number of bots, many of which are accounts that were recently created. Accounts that are possibly humans with bot assistants generate 66% of the tweets. Accounts that are definitely bots generate 34% of the tweets.

A subset of tweets about "reopening America" reference conspiracy theories, such as hospitals being filled with mannequins or the coronavirus being linked to 5G towers.

"Conspiracy theories increase polarization in groups. It’s what many misinformation campaigns aim to do," Carley said. "People have real concerns about health and the economy, and people are preying on that to create divides."

Carley said that spreading conspiracy theories leads to more extreme opinions, which can in turn lead to more extreme behavior and less rational thinking.

"Increased polarization will have a variety of real-world consequences, and play out in things like voting behavior and hostility towards ethnic groups," Carley said.
 
Excerpted:

or appearing to be in one country and then another a few hours later is indicative of a bot," Carley said.
Content from External Source
question: my internet virus software recently gave me free VPN, it seems to turn itself on whenever it wants. Does using a VPN mean i will look like a bot?
 
Obviously, all the countries that don't like America, and there are many, are rooting for premature US reopening and Trump's reelection. So this is to be expected :( .
 
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question: my internet virus software recently gave me free VPN, it seems to turn itself on whenever it wants. Does using a VPN mean i will look like a bot?

Interesting question.

Only Twitter itself has access to that information (VPN), so when one reads up on Twitter-bot detection, this issue is not discussed.

Informative perhaps, is the following from the recent Updates to the Twitter Developer Policy.

Bot Accounts** - Not all bots are bad. In fact, high-quality bots can enhance everyone’s experience on Twitter. Our new policy asks that developers clearly indicate (in their account bio or profile) if they are operating a bot account, what the account is, and who the person behind it is, so it’s easier for everyone on Twitter to know what’s a bot - and what’s not.

My educated guess is that no, Twitter is not currently using VPN information to aid Twitter-bot detection.

The following article shows how to set up fake twitter accounts over the TOR VPN. How to Run a Rogue Government Twitter Account With an Anonymous Email Address and a Burner Phone

Also note that there are official things called Twitter-bots, and then there are fake Twitter accounts that can be automated by software running on my computers. These are most certainly robots, but are not official Twitter-bots.
 
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question: my internet virus software recently gave me free VPN, it seems to turn itself on whenever it wants. Does using a VPN mean i will look like a bot?
I might depend on which VPN. There's lots of quite reputable companies running them. I use Cloudflare's free 1.1.1.1 VPN+optimization service on my phone - and they will soon be rolling that out for desktops. I suspect it will become increasingly common over the next few years - similar to the gradual adoption of HTTPS.

It might be hard to tell though - they could just be doing partial shadow-blocks on Tor accounts, or similar.
 
Obviously, all the countries that don't like America, and there are many, are rooting for premature US reopening and Trump's reelection. So this is to be expected :(.

Maybe the first part is true, but I'd be surprised if the second part (Trump's re-election) was.
 
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