COVID-19 Coronavirus current events

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.

I would -guess- that currently it's based on a number of factors with different weighting. So an account that uses a VPN will get a certain amount of weight in the algorithm - possibly depending on whether it's a reputable VPN or not - but its not the sole factor. More important would be frequency of original content vs. comments and retweets, presence of repeated memes, times active (24 hour posting schedule likely a bot), speed of reaction when retweeting/commenting (consistently very rapid replies), and association with flagged bot accounts (part of the same net).

Each box that it ticks contributes a certain amount of points, and once it hits a determined level you say it's a bot - possibly with a grey-area section where it's flagged for deeper manual review.

I'm not a tech guy but it's how -I'd- tackle the issue if you asked me to detect bots.
 
I'm not a tech guy but it's how -I'd- tackle the issue if you asked me to detect bots.

@Dingo, I am a tech guy and that's essentially how it works. In it's simplest form, you assign scores to each data element and run the suspect data through the scoring system to determine the total score for the specific datum (Twitter account). The scores provide weighting such that using an RT.com email address might score 70 points (I'm making this up for illustration purposes), and using a commercial VPN might score 3, whereas a less public VPN might score a 10. After scoring another 10, 20, or 30 criteria, you come up with thresholds for "Most Likely a Bot" which will be auto-banned, "Could be a Bot", which you send back to your programmers to see if you can do a better job of scoring, and "Probably Not a Bot", which you ignore.

More complex methodologies are used by companies like Twitter & Google to perform sophisticated math on large data sets to identify the characteristics that should be included in the scoring. Adjustments to the scoring system results in headlines around mass-bannings that occurred overnight. The statistical analysis turns up criteria that adjust the scoring, which identifies more bots, which moves more accounts into the "Ban" category. They test these thoroughly by running samples and analyzing the effects before they put them into production, but it's not perfect.
 
@Dingo, I am a tech guy and that's essentially how it works.

Glad I got it right, then!
I imagine that most companies have it weighted slightly more towards not-a-bot due to not wanting the PR issues that would come from false positives if it was tightly locked down.

Interestingly, I actually had my twitter account briefly suspended in record time.
I registered it, tweeted something along the lines of 'Well, decided to make one of these things', and subsequently had it blocked for a bit.

I -believe- it's using character recognition for avatars - because there was nothing about the account creation or first tweet that should throw up red flags - however my twitter picture is a rather immature image macro of a dingo advising you to 'do meth, eat babies'. So I believe it was flagged for 'meth' and briefly suspended until someone reviewed and went 'eh, dumb joke, I'll allow it'.

Only thing I can think of, since my wife did pretty much the exact same thing with no account suspension!
 
Article:
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Data gathered by Opportunity Insights, a research institution based at Harvard University, confirm that the pandemic has affected workers and companies more severely in blue (Democratic) states than in red (Republican) ones. Between January 15th and April 9th, the number of weekly unemployment claims per 100 workers in Trump-supporting states increased from 1.1 to 12.7. That is a big rise, but smaller than that in Clinton-supporting states, where the number jumped from 1.9 to 16. The divergence in consumer spending is even starker. Figures from Affinity Solutions, a company that tracks credit-card transactions, show that people in red states were shelling out 11% less in mid-May than in January. The reduction was nearly twice as great in blue states, at 21%.

Republican governors can point to lower death rates and less economic damage as proof that they have handled covid-19 more effectively than their Democratic peers. Yet a better explanation might be that their regions were less susceptible to contagious disease from the outset. So far, a state’s population density—measured by the share of residents living within five miles (8km) of each other—has been a stronger predictor of its covid-19 death rate than the presidential vote in 2016. And red states tend to be more sparsely inhabited than blue ones, which might hamper the transmission of the virus.

(excerpted)
 
It is reported today (in the Times of London and elsewhere) that over the year before the outbreak of COVID-19 the French government ordered the destruction of a large stockpile of medical face masks, believing that they were no longer needed, partly because previous epidemics like bird flu had turned out to be less dangerous than feared. The destruction continued even after the first reports of COVID-19 began to emerge. This is considered deeply damaging to the reputation of President Macron.
An implication of this is that if the pandemic were the result of a grand international conspiracy, whether as a hoax (COVID-19 doesn't exist), as a pretext for extending the powers of the state, or for any other reason, part of the conspiracy would have to involve government leaders like Macron (and we can all think of other examples) deliberately exposing themselves to ridicule and electoral damage. I suppose this implication could be avoided by supposing that the leaders themselves are not part of the conspiracy, but merely dupes of the true puppet-masters. But at least the conspiracy theorists could be pressed to give their own explanation.
 
believing that they were no longer needed
Well, that's half the truth.
Article:
At the height of its pandemic preparedness, France deployed a veritable arsenal of vaccines, anti-viral drugs and 2.2 billion surgical face masks.

That was during the H1N1 flu scare at the end of 2009. Roselyne Bachelot, the health minister who oversaw preparations, was right, but a decade early. That epidemic fizzled out quickly, after killing ‘only’ 342 French people. Bachelot’s political career was destroyed and politicians became wary of overreacting to health disasters.

The High Council for Public Health (HCSP) confirmed in 2011 that face masks were still indispensable in combating a pandemic. But three documents, from the HCSP itself, Xavier Bertrand, Bachelot’s replacement as health minister, and finally the SGDSN, the defence secretariat which co-ordinates the emergency response to a pandemic, outlined a new doctrine.

The state was no longer responsible for stocking FFP2 masks for medical personnel. The task would be left instead to hospitals and nursing homes. But in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, medical establishments were ordered to control their budgets. Hospitals and nursing homes were not about to engage in the time-consuming process of issuing bids for tender for large stocks of face masks they might never use. Procurement of all masks was allowed to fall into the proverbial administrative cracks.

The state’s stock of masks evaporated, from 2.2 billion in 2009 to 1.4 billion in 2011 to 714 million in 2017. Successive health ministers now blame each other for the debacle.

Yet the number of surgical masks in France has diminished six-fold since Macron took office, to just 117 million. About 600 million masks were destroyed because they had expired. Benoît Vallet, who preceded Salomon as director general of health, says he believes many of the masks could have been used regardless.

These excerpts show that the masks stockpiled for the swine flu epidemic and never used simply expired. 10-year-old rubber bands aren't reliable.

And let's put the number in context: France has 65 million inhabitants, which means they still had ~2 masks per person in the stockpile. The US has 330 million inhabitants:
Article:
In total, the federal government sent the following supplies to U.S. states and territories between mid-March and early April:

11.7 million N95 masks
26.5 million surgical masks
5.3 million face shields
4.4 million surgical gowns
22.6 million gloves
7,920 ventilators

The distributions depleted about 90% of the stockpile’s supplies of personal protective equipment. The remaining 10% is reserved for the protection of federal workers.
That's 0.1 masks per person. Compared to the US (and probably other countries as well), France still had a wealth of masks in their stockpile.

Article:
“There is never enough money there for everything,” said Deborah Levy, chair of epidemiology at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, who oversaw the stockpile as acting division director under the CDC in 2013-2014, in an interview with the USA TODAY Network last week.

“You need to decide what the threat is, what the cost is, what can be negotiated with companies,” Levy said at the time.
 
Article:
New Zealand is on the brink of being declared completely free of COVID-19.

New Zealand's COVID-19 eradication efforts have been so successful, there is now just one active case in the whole country.

Health officials announced the startling result on Friday as they also confirmed a seventh consecutive day without a positive test. Australia, by comparison, has 467 active cases although none in the ACT or NT.

The last remaining Kiwi with COVID-19 is an Auckland resident aged in their 50s, whose recovery will allow New Zealand to become the first country since the onset of the global pandemic to declare itself free of the disease.

Germany had 104/401 counties with 7 days of no cases yesterday, we're still a long way from NZ, and can probably only get there (if at all) if the EU as a whole achieves that.
 
Anti-vax and 5G protesters defy restrictions in Australian cities


https://www.9news.com.au/national/c...arden-5g/a83b295c-f46a-4c61-b5d4-ff83b836e54d



Hundreds of anti-vaccination protesters have defied social-distancing measures at rallies across Australia.
Protesters claiming the COVID-19 pandemic was a "scam" gathered at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne on Saturday, and carried signs declaring they were against vaccines and 5G technology.
Their placards stated "5G = communism", "COVID 1984" and "our ignorance is their strength
Content from External Source
 
Article:
Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the most prominent members of the White House coronavirus task force, said on Monday that he has not spoken to or met with President Donald Trump in two weeks.

Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, added that that his contact with the President has become much less frequent.
Their last interaction was May 18, when Trump invited Fauci to provide medical context during a teleconference with the nation's governors. The Task Force last met on May 28 and last held a White House press briefing on May 22.

The Senate testimony was on May 12th.
 
There's currently ongoing discussion on whether Hydroxychloroquine is use- or harmful in the treatment of COVID-19; and recently in particular there was one retrospective study published in The Lancet that boasted having used data on 96032 patients from 671 participating hospitals.

Now, the medical/mathematical side of things is so far out my range of expertise that I can't really comment on it, but the company Surgisphere that provided the data for this study seems to be a tiny 5-man startup that is about a year old, which makes their claim to have sold and integrated software into the medical health records (MHR) systems of 671 hospitals very, very doubtful:

Article:
Surgisphere, a tiny startup that claims to be providing large real world data for scientific health studies, is probably fabricating data at scale.
[...]
But hang on, you might say, this data (which remember, I think doesn’t exist but let’s pretend it does for the sake of argument) isn’t going to a shady outfit like Cambridge Analytica, it’s going to the “global healthcare data collaborative” Surgisphere.

Right, let’s look at Surgisphere. Surgisphere has five employees with LinkedIn accounts. Other than the CE and co-author of the Lancet paper, these are a VP of Business Development and Strategy, a Vice President of Sales and Marketing, and two Science Editors (actually, one Science Editor and one Scoence Editor, which does not inspire confidence in their attention to detail while editing). LinkedIn also records one employee of QuartzClinical - a director of sales marketing.


Now, I don't have an account on LinkedIn and don't want to create one , but also looking at their website that says "Copyright © 2007 - 2020 Surgisphere Corporation", but only has an archive of 24 articles that go back to April 2019 doesn't look very convincing.

The two tools linked on their COVID-19 Response Center page (as well as two others only found in the navigation of the tools' pages) are basically a lot of (somewhat) impressive looking widgets that in the end either calculate a simple result value by multiplying weights, or report an outcome based on a cascade of (what according to the JavaScript source looks to be) handmade if-then decisions - nothing to do with advanced machine learning, harnessing a wealth of data or anything cloud based, as the tools all run client side and don't post anything back to the server.

The page on the product they allegedly sell, QuartzClinical, is mostly a network of bulletpoints and mockups strewn across 3 pages, a phone number, and a "Login" button that does nothing - and a blog that mainly consists of general marketing blather and general knowledge type stuff that looks like it was ripped out of Wikipedia ("3 Types of Databases and How They’re Structured" and similar stuff - looking at the 11 posts from 2020 not one includes the name of their own product).

This agrees with what the article on Free Range Statistics found:

Article:
I can’t say more than that because the QuartzClinical site is very light on details. It doesn’t have any customer testimonials. It doesn’t talk about what’s under the hood. It doesn’t have any information on versions or history or the forward roadmap.


In the article, there's also mention of several proclaimed awards that in reality weren't theirs, but I can't seem to find them anymore on the site - it wouldn't suprise me if they have since been removed. Further on in the article it mentions the following about their CEO Sapan Desai:

Article:
Then I came across this piece claiming a “top quality award” at that 2015 IHF 39th congress. Despite the headline, the text actually reports Desai was given “first prize for the best presentation”, for his “Improving the Success of Strategic Management Using Big Data”. There’s no record of this award on the IHF site, although he definitely did give that presentation. It is plausible he got an award for best presentation. I now think that at some point in subsequent CV-garnishing, this evolved into the claimed “Grand Prize in Healthcare Quality”.


Anyhow, as far as I'm concerned I as a software developer only have experience with handling the EHR data from one local hospital that I used to work for, and that was mainly to keep patient entries in the internal phone directory current, but implementing that showed me that parsing the data that gets exported from SAP in the HL7v2 format (German wiki, description on Wikipedia) is highly complicated, and tracking the location of the patient in the facility while correctly associating procedures, admissions and operations alone takes a lot of work - and a company of 5 (none of which are actual software developers) purporting to have integrated data from not one, but 671 hospitals systems seems highly implausible to me.

EDIT: Just found another mention of this company that claims Rapid Diagnostic Test for Coronavirus COVID-19 Now Available from Surgisphere (from March) and seems to be another can of worms entirely, as I think if there really was such a test it would have been all over the news by now... :confused:
 
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This article talks about protests potentially spreading COVID-19, and also addresses the risk of outdoor spread.

Article:
Will Protests Set Off a Second Viral Wave?

Mass protests against police brutality that have brought thousands of people out of their homes and onto the streets in cities across America are raising the specter of new coronavirus outbreaks, prompting political leaders, physicians and public health experts to warn that the crowds could cause a surge in cases.
...
In Los Angeles, where demonstrations led to the closing of virus testing sites Saturday, Mayor Eric Garcetti warned that the protests could become “super-spreader events,” referring to the types of gatherings, usually held in indoor settings, that can lead to an explosion of secondary infections.
Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, a Republican, expressed concern that his state would see a spike in cases in about two weeks, which is about how long it takes for symptoms to emerge after someone is infected, while Atlanta’s mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, advised people who were out protesting “to go get a COVID test this week.”
...
“The outdoor air dilutes the virus and reduces the infectious dose that might be out there, and if there are breezes blowing, that further dilutes the virus in the air,” said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University. “There was literally a lot of running around, which means they’re exhaling more profoundly, but also passing each other very quickly.”
The crowds tended to be on the younger side, he noted, and younger adults generally have better outcomes if they become ill, though there is a risk they could transmit the virus to relatives and household members who may be older and more susceptible.
But others were more concerned about the risk posed by the marches. Dr. Howard Markel, a medical historian who studies pandemics, likened the protest crowds to the bond parades held in American cities like Philadelphia and Detroit in the midst of the 1918 influenza pandemic, which were often followed by spikes in influenza cases.
“Yes, the protests are outside, but they are all really close to each other, and in those cases, being outside doesn’t protect you nearly as much,” Markel said. “Public gatherings are public gatherings — it doesn’t matter what you’re protesting or cheering. That’s one reason we’re not having large baseball games and may not have college football this fall.”
Though many protesters were wearing masks, others were not. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the COVID-19 disease, is mainly transmitted through respiratory droplets spread when people talk, cough or sneeze; screaming and shouting slogans during a protest can accelerate the spread, Markel said.
Tear gas and pepper spray, which police have used to disperse crowds, cause people to tear up and cough, and increase respiratory secretions from the eyes, nose and mouth, further enhancing the possibility of transmission. Police efforts to move crowds through tight urban areas can result in corralling people closer together, or end up penning people into tight spaces.
...
Dr. Ashish Jha, a professor and director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, said more than half of coronavirus infections are spread by people who are asymptomatic, including some who are infected but never go on to develop symptoms and others who do not yet know they are sick.
Arresting, transporting or jailing protesters increases the potential for spreading the virus. Jha called on protesters to refrain from violence, and urged police to exercise restraint.
 
Article:
Tear gas and pepper spray, which police have used to disperse crowds, cause people to tear up and cough, and increase respiratory secretions from the eyes, nose and mouth, further enhancing the possibility of transmission.
I hadn't considered that.
 
The RKI (something like the German CDC) published this in their daily report today:
Article:
A third, ICD-10 code based system, monitors severe acute respiratory illness (SARI) in hospitalized patients (ICD-10 codes J09 to J22: primary diagnoses of influenza, pneumonia or other acute infections of the lower respiratory tract). In week 21, 2020, the total number of SARI cases remained stable at an unusually low level. Of all reported SARI cases in week 21, 2020, 5% were diagnosed with COVID-19 (ICD-10 code U07.1!). The proportion of COVID-19 cases has been decreasing since week 14, 2020 (Figure 5). Please note that only patients with an ICD-10 Code for SARI as the main diagnosis and hospitalisation duration of up to one week were included in this analysis.
image.jpeg

This data illustrates the following facts:
a) SARS-CoV-2 wasn't "already there" and only became noticed through testing: it spread independently of other respiratory infections.
b) Contact tracing and isolation caused Covid-19 cases to decline more than other types of infection.

The claim that respiratory infections are at an "unusually low level" shows that social distancing measures, masks, hygiene etc. (NPIs) are effective at preventing respiratory infections of many types.
 
New Zealand has 0 active cases.

Germany is reopening as cases continue to decline country-wide; as of yesterday, 123/401 counties had no new cases over the past 7 days, and we're down to the levels we had at the beginning of March. We still have strong regulations on public gatherings, with at most two households being allowed to meet, distancing measures, and masks mandatory in stores and public transport; schools have been opening partially with mostly no repercussions, this is being continued.

I personally live in the German state with the second highest incidence of new cases, and we haven't been mirroring the overall decline:
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But ~1 case/day/100,000 inhabitants is apparently a low enough level to be controlled. Religious gatherings and/or close contact within religious communities has been the most recent cause of big outbreaks.

The world according to ECDC:
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Note that "America" includes Brasil, which has ~1/3 the numbers of the US, and that the US has only recently dropped below 100/100000 level that gives it its lighter color. In the EU, Sweden is still the country with the high numbers. The situation in Africa is slowly getting worse, but we don't see exponential growth yet.
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Why is the US rate not declining so much? Because of states like these (worldometer data):
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The situation in the US remains interesting.
 
could some one explain why this news would be championed by the C19 deniers as a twist and therefore support this sides claims that C19 lockdown was a waste of energy effort and even driven by hidden agendas.

I do & suspect others get confused with all the terms asymptomatic, atypical symptoms pre-symptomatic etc and i think this is used to push the head line and narrative


Coronavirus spread by people with no symptoms ‘appears to be rare,’ WHO official says

https://fox8.com/news/coronavirus/c...ymptoms-appears-to-be-rare-who-official-says/


(CNN) — The spread of Covid-19 by someone who is not showing symptoms appears to be rare, Maria Van Kerkhove, the World Health Organization’s technical lead for coronavirus response and head of the emerging diseases and zoonoses unit, said during a media briefing in Geneva on Monday.

“From the data we have, it still seems to be rare that an asymptomatic person actually transmits onward to a secondary individual,” Van Kerkhove said on Monday.

“We have a number of reports from countries who are doing very detailed contact tracing. They’re following asymptomatic cases, they’re following contacts and they’re not finding secondary transmission onward. It is very rare — and much of that is not published in the literature,” she said. “We are constantly looking at this data and we’re trying to get more information from countries to truly answer this question. It still appears to be rare that an asymptomatic individual actually transmits onward.”

Van Kerkhove went on to describe how the novel coronavirus, a respiratory pathogen, spreads through droplets, which can be released when someone coughs or sneezes.

“It passes from an individual through infectious droplets. If we actually followed all of the symptomatic cases, isolated those cases, followed the contacts and quarantined those cases, we would drastically reduce — I would love to be able to give a proportion of how much transmission we would actually stop — but it would be a drastic reduction in transmission,” she said.
Content from External Source
claims akin to this

In stunning news, after five months of claiming the coronavirus could spread via "asymptomatic carriers," necessitating the lockdowns, the mask policies and mandatory vaccines, the WHO has now declared there is virtually no spread at all through asymptomatic carriers.
All at once, the WHO just obliterated any last shred of any argument in favor of mandatory vaccines, masks, lockdowns, quarantines or contact tracing.
This announcement should end all lockdowns and terminate vaccine research. It's all pointless now, since the WHO says covid-19 can only be spread by people with obvious symptoms who are very easy to spot (and avoid).
Content from External Source

My best understanding is regardless of C19 vector ISO lockdown saved lives and restricted peak curve & the spread. And lockdowns vs economies still win on social and monetary balance over the journey of pandemic fundamentals.
 
do & suspect others get confused with all the terms asymptomatic, atypical symptoms pre-symptomatic etc and i think this is used to push the head line and narrative
Coronavirus spread by people with no symptoms ‘appears to be rare,’ WHO official says
asymptomatic means a person who is infected but feels no symptoms. That person will at some point have a testable virus concentration in the throat and nasal cavity, and can spread that via droplets. About half of the people on the Diamond Princess who were tested positive had no symptoms at the time of testing. This also depends on which symptoms you watch out for; symptoms like fever or cough are each reported by fewer than half of the cases in Germany.
An "asymptomatic case" is a person who tests positive for the virus, but never reports symptoms.

pre-symptomatic is a person who is infected and later has symptoms; obviously, this can only be determined in hindsight. Studies have shown that the virus concentration in the throat and nasal cavity is decreasing from the first symptomatic day on, so researchers assume the peak of infectiousness is actually close to onset of symptoms, or shortly before; and that individuals are infectious 1-2 days before the onset of symptoms. Every symptomatic case has a pre-symptomatic period.

Common sense says that if you have the virus in your throat and nasal cavity, you will emit droplets/aerosols while breathing or speaking (or singing), so you can potentially infect people near you. That's why public health response adresses asymptomatic and presymptomatic transmission. For example, in the CDC's "best estimate" scenario for (hypothetical) unmitigated spread, 35% of the infected are asymptomatic, and ~60% of individual transmissions occur from asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic individuals; we have discussed this at https://www.metabunk.org/threads/coronavirus-statistics-cases-mortality-vs-flu.11154/post-239340 .

Now let's look at the WHO quote in context; the WHO streams all of their press briefings on youtube and publishes transcripts the next day.

Source: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dZoIOyiZnt8&t=31m47s

Article:
00:31:47
TJ Thank you. Now we will go to Emma Farge from Reuters. Hello, Emma.
EM Yes, good afternoon. It's a question about asymptomatic transmission, if I may. I know that the WHO's previously said there're no documented cases of this. We had a story out of Singapore today saying that at least half of the new cases they're seeing have no symptoms and I'm wondering whether it's possible that this has a bigger role than the WHO initially thought in propagating the pandemic and what the policy implications of that might be.

MK [Maria van Kerkhove] I could start and then perhaps Mike would like to supplement. There're a couple of things in the question that you just asked. One is the number of cases that are being reported as asymptomatic. We hear from a number of countries that x number or x percentage of them are reported as not having symptoms or that they are in their pre-symptomatic phase which means it's a few days before they actually develop severe symptoms.
00:32:53
In a number of countries when we go back and we discuss with them, one, how are these asymptomatic cases being identified, many of them are being identified through contact tracing, which is what we want to see, that you have a known case, you find your contacts, they're already in quarantine hopefully and some of them are tested. Then you pick up people who may have asymptomatic or no symptoms or even mild symptoms.

The other thing we're finding is that when we go back and say, how many of them were truly asymptomatic we find out that many have really mild disease, they're not - quote, unquote - COVID symptoms meaning they may not have developed fever yet, they may not have had a significant cough or they may not have shortness of breath but some may have mild disease.
Having said that, we do know that there can be people that are truly asymptomatic and PCR-positive.

The second part of your question is what proportion of asymptomatic individuals actually transmit.
The way that we look at that is we look at - these individuals need to be followed carefully over the course of when they're detected and looking at secondary transmission.
00:34:04
We have a number of reports from countries who are doing very detailed contact tracing. They're following asymptomatic cases, they're following contacts and they're not finding secondary transmission onward. It's very rare and much of that is not published in the literature.
From the papers that are published there's one that came out from Singapore looking at a long-term care facility. There are some household transmission studies where you follow individuals over time and you look at the proportion of those that transmit onwards.
We are constantly looking at this data and we're trying to get more information from countries to truly answer this question. It still appears to be rare that an asymptomatic individual actually transmits onward.
00:34:48
What we really want to be focused on is following the symptomatic cases. If we followed all of the symptomatic cases - because we know that this is a respiratory pathogen, it passes from an individual through infectious droplets - if we followed all of the symptomatic cases, isolated those cases, followed the contacts and quarantined those contacts we would drastically reduce...
I would love to be able to give a proportion of how much transmission we would actually stop but it would be a drastic reduction in transmission. If we could focus on that I think we would do very, very well in terms of suppressing transmission.

But from the data we have it still seems to be rare that an asymptomatic actually transmits onward to a secondary individual.

The first consideration is, where does the data come from and what does it mean? Asymptomatic cases are mainly found through contact tracing; these people are typically asked to self-isolate, and so they will not usually pass the disease on.
Contact tracing also involves investigating how an individual got infected, finding an epidemiological link. If someone in a care home develops Covid-19, you need to find out who they got it from, because that determines who else might be infected. In these types of investigations, asymptomatic cases rarely turn up.

It also depends on where you draw the line: if you only accept fever, cough, shortness of breath as symptoms, you're going to label more cases as asymptomatic than if you also look at minor symptoms, e.g. soreness of throat or loss of taste or smell.

The second consideration (and the basis for the reporter's question) is, how many asymptomatic cases do we have in the population, and what role do they play epidemiologically? Some studies have suggested huge numbers of undetected (and presumably asymptomatic) infections.

The problem with that is that the WHO have advocated contact tracing and isolation as a containment strategy from the start. If 80% of the infections was asymptomatic, then you could only ever stop 20% of the spread by tracing individuals with symptoms. The only way to stop the rest would be social/physical distancing. But that's not what happens.

I live in Germany, and our county health offices always do contact tracing in epidemics (unless overwhelmed by big outbreaks, but we have a federal task force of contact tracers now that can help out). We have been re-opening the country last month, and in all states case numbers are still steady or declining. This indicates that contact tracing is working, and that we don't have widespread asymptomatic transmission.

This indicates that asymptomatic transmission plays a minor role, not a major role, in spreading the epidemic, and that the public health advice to invest in contact tracing still holds up. Note that pre-symptomatic infections still get traced; if an individual develops symptoms, they get asked who they were in contact with before they developed symptoms, and these contacts get notified, asked to self-isolate, and tested (depending on capacity).

Is this a "twist"? No.

WHO advice has always been to trace contacts. China has done that in Wuhan, deploying 1800 contact tracers (or 1800 teams, I've heard both), and deployed a restrictive app to automatically isolate contacts and monitor compliance.

But if you have a region with no contact tracing capability, or if the existing contact tracers are overwhelmed due to widespread community transmission, lockdown is your only option to stop the spread. Having sufficient contact tracing available (plenty enough personnel and few enough cases) is one of the criteria for re-opening, e.g. in New York state. Germany assumes a county will fail to trace effectively with >50 cases per week per 100 000 inhabitants. (I have been asssuming that a region with >10% positive tests is failing to test enough contacts.)

So, the worse prepared you are, the more you need to lock down. This is the reason why lockdowns are frequently the measure of first resort, and once the population has learned to distance, and testing and tracing capabilities have been built up, lockdowns can be lifted. IF you had a country that taught its population distancing early in their spread, and was well-prepared to trace contacts, it might mitigate the epidemic without lockdowns (Sweden!); that doesn't mean all countries were in a situation to do that. It all depends on how well a country was prepared for a pandemic in general, and how well it used the warning time (most countries had at least a month from the WHO's declaration of a "public health emergency of international concern" in late January) to ramp up testing capacity, organize contact tracing, and manage hospital capacity. Politics and government decide this.

So, the actual twist is: if a country was well prepared for a pandemic, executed its pandemic plans flawlessly, and had a population that took the pandemic seriously and followed distancing recommendations, it could avoid the lockdowns. On the other hand, Covid-19-denial causes lockdowns.


The conspiracy theory is that infections are everywhere and either are normal ("just a common cold that we notice because we can test for it") or will go away on their own ("we already have herd immunity"); both has been disproven by the mortality data and the serological surveys. Reports of large numbers of asymptomatic cases support the CT view, the WHO statement does not, therefore, the WHO statement needs to be discredited by the conspiracy theorists, therefore "twist"!
But there is no twist, it's all consistent with past communications.

P.S.: New Zealand did eliminate the virus (for now) without vaccines (and so did Wuhan). Stopping vaccine research assumes that all countries can pull this off, but data shows not all regions do as well as New Zealand; and it assumes the virus will not re-emerge from its animal reservoir that we still haven't found.
 
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A preliminary, non-peer-reviewed study in Hong Kong analyzed 350 cases, and found that most were caused by superspreading.

Article:
70% of people infected with the coronavirus did not pass it to anyone, preliminary research shows. Superspreading events account for most transmission.

A group of epidemiologists in Hong Kong found that just 20% of cases studied there were responsible for 80% of all coronavirus transmissions. The researchers also found 70% of people infected with the coronavirus didn’t pass it to anyone else and that all superspreading events involved indoor social gatherings.
...
Ben Cowling, one of the study coauthors, told Business Insider. “Superspreading events are happening more than we expected, more than what could be explained by chance. The frequency of superspreading is beyond what we could have imagined.”
...
Cowling and his colleagues examined more than 1,000 coronavirus cases in Hong Kong between January 23 and April 28.
They found that superspreading was the primary means of transmission in the city. About 350 of the cases analysed were a result of community spread, while the rest were imported from other countries. Within the community-spread cases, more than half were connected to six superspreading events.
...
In fact, 20% of cases caused 80% of transmissions, a majority of which were linked to superspreading events at a wedding, temple, and multiple bars in the city’s Lan Kwai Fong district.
The remaining 20% of transmissions were result of another just 10% of cases, when infected patients passed along the virus to one, or at most two, other people – generally someone in their households.
“Social exposures produced a greater number of secondary cases compared to family or work exposures,” the study authors wrote, adding that reducing superspreading events could have a considerable effect in lowering the virus’ R0.
...
In a New York Times article about his team’s study, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, Cowling wrote: “You might be wondering if our study, or the experience of Hong Kong, with its small number of total infections, is more broadly representative. We think so.”
...
Preliminary research that examined more than 200 coronavirus cases in Israel found that between 1 and 10% of cases were linked to 80% of transmissions. Another study from Shenzhen, China, yielded a similar conclusion: Between 8 and 9% of cases caused 80% of transmissions.
...
It’s not that certain individual people are more contagious than others or shed more virus. Instead, there’s a type of activity that gives people access to a greater number of people in areas conducive to the virus’ spread, Cowling said.
...
Going forward, Cowling thinks other countries could benefit from instituting rules that target the source of most transmissions (in addition to continued contact tracing and testing), rather than blanket shelter-in-place orders.
“Anything outdoors is fine. I’m less concerned about protests,” he said, adding that restaurants and bars could also probably operate at 50% capacity, with empty tables between diners.
 
A preliminary, non-peer-reviewed study in Hong Kong analyzed 350 cases, and found that most were caused by superspreading.
Superspreading is an issue that needs to be taken with several grains of salt. It's interesting and important to learn about, though.

First, some background:
Article:
Most of the discussion around the spread of SARS-CoV-2 has concentrated on the average number of new infections caused by each patient. Without social distancing, this reproduction number (R) is about three. But in real life, some people infect many others and others don’t spread the disease at all. In fact, the latter is the norm, Lloyd-Smith says: “The consistent pattern is that the most common number is zero. Most people do not transmit.”

That’s why in addition to R, scientists use a value called the dispersion factor (k), which describes how much a disease clusters. The lower k is, the more transmission comes from a small number of people. In a seminal 2005 Nature paper, Lloyd-Smith and co-authors estimated that SARS—in which superspreading played a major role—had a k of 0.16. The estimated k for MERS, which emerged in 2012, is about 0.25. In the flu pandemic of 1918, in contrast, the value was about one, indicating that clusters played less of a role.

Estimates of k for SARS-CoV-2 vary. In January, Julien Riou and Christian Althaus at the University of Bern simulated the epidemic in China for different combinations of R and k and compared the outcomes with what had actually taken place. They concluded that k for COVID-19 is somewhat higher than for SARS and MERS. That seems about right, says Gabriel Leung, a modeler at the University of Hong Kong. “I don’t think this is quite like SARS or MERS, where we observed very large superspreading clusters,” Leung says. “But we are certainly seeing a lot of concentrated clusters where a small proportion of people are responsible for a large proportion of infections.” But in a recent preprint, Adam Kucharski of LSHTM estimated that k for COVID-19 is as low as 0.1. “Probably about 10% of cases lead to 80% of the spread,” Kucharski says.

Why coronaviruses cluster so much more than other pathogens is “a really interesting open scientific question,” says Christophe Fraser of the University of Oxford, who has studied superspreading in Ebola and HIV. Their mode of transmission may be one factor. SARS-CoV-2 appears to transmit mostly through droplets, but it does occasionally spread through finer aerosols that can stay suspended in the air, enabling one person to infect many. Most published large transmission clusters “seem to implicate aerosol transmission,” Fraser says.

Individual patients’ characteristics play a role as well. Some people shed far more virus, and for a longer period of time, than others, perhaps because of differences in their immune system or the distribution of virus receptors in their body. A 2019 study of healthy people showed some breathe out many more particles than others when they talk. (The volume at which they spoke explained some of the variation.) Singing may release more virus than speaking, which could help explain the choir outbreaks. People’s behavior also plays a role. Having many social contacts or not washing your hands makes you more likely to pass on the virus.

“Maybe slow, gentle breathing is not a risk factor, but heavy, deep, or rapid breathing and shouting is.”

First grain of salt: the dispersion factor k for SARS-CoV-2 is not well known: different studies arrive at different results, and it may in fact depend on societal factors: societies with larger household sizes, for example, might see more small clusters than a society where more people live alone or in small household groups. Active interventions during the data gathering phase also play a role, which means that results from one country with a certain set of regulations, testing and tracing capability etc. may not apply to another country or to a different set of measures.

The obvious correct conclusion is that superspreading situations are the most risky, can cause the epidemic to grow the most, and should be most strongly regulated: large gatherings indoors (concerts, religious gatherings), or situations where a group of people work closely together in small spaces (meat packing plants, crews on cruise ships), public transport/airplane travel (wear a mask!), fitness studios/groups and choirs (heavy breathing).

The obvious wrong conclusion is that "normal" infections don't matter. If most people in most situations transfer the virus to at most 1 other person, then these situations don't cause the epidemic to grow, and these chains often end by themselves. But we need to remember that this observation may have been made in a population that observes social distancing, wears masks in public spaces habitually (Hong Kong!), etc.; we can't say "with large events regulated, we can otherwise go back to normal because that's going to be fine" because the data doesn't support that (yet?).

The nonobvious conclusion is that superspreading events need to be controlled quickly. The prevalence of superspreading means that the growth of the epidemic is fueled by superspreading events being chained. You only get to exponential growth if an infection chain from event A runs into a second event B that results in further magnification. That means all of the infection chains from event A need to be halted before event B can occur.
If we find a patient who has been in such an event potentially (e.g. a choir member who attended a practice 1-2 days before the onset of symptoms), we need to quarantine their contacts immediately because we might be looking at a superspreading event; we can't wait for the test results to come in and have those people potentially infect others in the meantime. We need to stomp on that potential superspreading event as quickly and as hard as we can.
Japan has been doing that as part of its coronavirus strategy (in addition to other factors, such as mask wearing), and that has probably contributed to its slow rate of spread and its decline in cases now.

(Obvious conclusion for nerds: SIR or SEIR models oversimplify epidemics.)

A group of epidemiologists in Hong Kong found that just 20% of cases studied there were responsible for 80% of all coronavirus transmissions.
Let's look at that study in detail (heavily excerpted):
Article:
As of 28 April 2020, there have been a total of 1,037 laboratory-confirmed cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection in Hong Kong, and one probable case based on clinical and epidemiological features.

Overall the majority (51.9%; 539/1,038) of SARS-CoV-2 infections in Hong Kong have 81 been associated with at least one of 135 known clusters.

From the 539 infections that occurred in clusters, all 210 solely imported cases (210/539; 38.9%) were excluded from subsequent analysis due to uncertainties concerning transmission within each cluster whilst overseas. Within the remaining 53 clusters initiated by a local or imported infection, 245 (245/329; 74.5%) could be linked resulting in 171 unique infector-infectee transmission pairs with 94 unique infectors.

We observed at least eight instances of likely pre-symptomatic transmission where symptom onset of the infectee preceded that of the infector by one day (N=2) or occurred on the same day (N=6). Thirty-four unique infectors (35/94; 37.2%) were linked to two or more secondary cases, and the largest number of individual secondary cases was 11. From the empirical offspring distribution and fitted negative binomial distribution shown in Figure 2B, we estimated an observed reproductive number (R) of 0.58 (95% CI: 0.45 – 0.71) and dispersion parameter (k) of 0.45 (95% CI: 0.31 – 0.76).

The largest local cluster was 106 cases and was traced back to multiple social exposures among a collection of bars across Hong Kong (Figure 3A). Evidence suggested this “bar and band” cluster originated in Lan Kwai Fong among a few staff and customers before being spread to additional venues by a number of musicians, however the source and chains of transmission between many bar cases could not be determined from epidemiological data.

Figure 3B describes a cluster of 21 cases linked to a wedding. Ten cases resulted from a previous social exposure (SSE), of which four cases subsequently attended the wedding. Individual transmission pairs within the wedding could not be determined, however there were at least seven secondary infections, and therefore another potential SSE, and an additional two tertiary cases among family members of the wedding guests. A final potential SSE of undetermined origin was associated with religious activities at a local temple and resulted in 11 primary cases and 18 recorded cases total (Figure 3C). Cases reported multiple exposures over a number of days such that a single point source exposure was unlikely. Six secondary cases were linked via family exposures. The last case who worked at the temple was also infected however remained asymptomatic. It is unknown if this case was the source of the temple exposures or was infected by the undetermined source/s.

Public health measures have successfully suppressed transmission of SARS-CoV-2 196 infections in Hong Kong with an estimated reproductive number below 1 (Table 1; 197 R=0.58, 95%: 0.45 – 0.71) compared to estimates of the basic reproductive number R0 of 2-3.

Indeed, we estimated that approximately 20% of cases were responsible for 80% of all SARS-CoV-2 transmission in Hong Kong (Table 1). These results however should be interpreted in the context of constrained community transmission given moderate levels of physical distancing currently practiced in Hong Kong, including school closures, some adults working at home, cancellation of mass gatherings, as well as improved hygiene and universal mask wearing.

Note: I haven't been able to access the tables and figures from that source, nor from https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-29548/v1 .

Observations:

a) The overall situation was near-lockdown with R=0.58. This limits how many non-superspreading infections occur.

b) k is estimated at a relatively high 0.45
Article:
41586_2005_Article_BFnature04153_Fig1_HTML.jpg

Figure c indicates that for k=0.45, less than 40% of infections should be due to the 20% most infectious cases, not 80% as the study reports.
The difference may be due to the nature article counting only direct infections, while the HongKong study counts the whole cluster including secondaries.

c) Superspreading event clusters in this study don't result from single events alone, there are knock-on effects; none of them were the kind of big events I think of as typical for German spread such as the bars in Ischgl, Austria, the carnival in Gangelt, or the recent church service in Frankfurt.
The occurrence of the secondary infections in these big clusters emphasizes that isolating contacts quickly is important to controlling these clusters.

d) The researchers eliminated a lot of data from consideration because they couldn't track them, ending up with only 245 linked cases out of 1038; we don't know that the proportion of "normal" infections to superspreading infections holds for this data. It seems reasonable that large spreading events allow for easier linking, skewing the data.

So, lots of grains of salt to pour on the "let's just outlaw big events and go back to normal" theory; this data does not support the conclusion that that'll work. Good detection of cases and quick quarantine of contacts is good, we know that.
 
Does anyone understand the mortality figures for Spain? The Worldometers table doesn't seem to show a single new death from Covid-19 since June 7. This is hardly credible. Spain has one of the highest infection and death rates in Europe. All other countries in western Europe - even Germany - are still showing at least a trickle of new deaths. For example yesterday Italy, whose experience resembles Spain in many respects, reported 44 new deaths.
There is probably some technical explanation for the Spanish figures. On May 25 the cumulative death total was revised downwards by about 2000 due to some reconciliation process between local and central records. The notes in English on the Worldometers page for Spain refer to a 'new surveillance strategy' which may lead to some 'discrepancies'. I have looked at the original Spanish reports in the Worldometers links but unfortunately my Spanish is not up to the task. Do any of the polyglot readers here understand what is going on?
 
Does anyone understand the mortality figures for Spain?
I had a look at the ECDC data, they show a negative 1918 deaths correction on May 25th, single digit deaths from May 27th, and no deaths from June 8th.

Wikipedia has some clues, but the sources are spanish or paywalled:
Article:
From 2020-05-31 deaths only include people whose death was registered within 24 hours of the death taking place. [...]

From 2020-05-25, this corresponds to daily deaths registered where death occurred in the past 7 days.
SpainCovidDeathsJun8.png

I'm a bit at a loss what to make of that. Clearly, they used to have delays in reporting deaths; either they're all caught up now (good!) or they're ignoring the delayed reports (bad). By comparison, Germany has similar case numbers and a similar deaths curve except for the recent past, so it looks like Spain's reporting rules are omitting deaths in the recent weeks -- either that or they've become really, really good at protecting their vulnerable demographic (unlikely).
ECDC Spain Germany Italy.png
Data source: https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/publi...graphic-distribution-covid-19-cases-worldwide
 
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I had a look at the ECDC data, they show a negative 1918 deaths correction on May 25th, single digit deaths from May 27th, and no deaths from June 8th…..

I'm a bit at a loss what to make of that. Clearly, they used to have delays in reporting deaths; either they're all caught up now (good!) or they're ignoring the delayed reports (bad). By comparison, Germany has similar case numbers and a similar deaths curve except for the recent past, so it looks like Spain's reporting rules are omitting deaths in the recent weeks -- either that or they've become really, really good at protecting their vulnerable demographic (unlikely).

Data source: https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/publi...graphic-distribution-covid-19-cases-worldwide

Thanks. The cynic in me notes that Spain is just re-opening to tourism from EU countries, a week or two earlier than expected. It reminds me of the civic authorities in Death in Venice: 'Sickness? What sickness?' But there may after all be some legitimate explanation. On looking again at the Spanish sources, I realized that 'fallecidos' means 'deceased', and the tables do continue to show a rolling total of 'fallecidos' for the last 7 days, which is not zero (but still surprisingly low, at only 26 in the last 7 days). It just doesn't seem to be adding to the cumulative figure on Worldometers. Possibly the compilers of the table decided it was too complicated to explain.
 
Hi, I‘ve been lurking a while and the above posts kicked me into registering As I live in Barcelona. The Spanish numbers are pretty much bunk, yes our lockdown was very strict compared to elsewhere in Europe, eg a couple of months ago I looked wistfully at ppl in Germany, the Uk etc where ppl complained about the restrictions yet there one could leave the house to walk in a park etc where here that was a big no no and from my observations ppl were pretty much obeying the rules. But even with this obedience it’s illogical that they managed to eliminate it. Why I believe it’s bunk? Well a couple of weeks ago on the local Catalonian news they reported the daily death toll, IIRC that day Catalonia the number of deaths was about 10, yet on that same day the official death toll for the whole of Spain was zero!
why?
I assume tourism, as tourism is a massive part of the countries GDP esp July-September it’s vital for the economy that we get the tourist dollars during these months. A bit of number massaging never hurt noone. ;)

Here’s some numbers (in the Catalan language) morts = deaths
https://interactius.ara.cat/coronavirus/dades
As you can see the numbers have not been zero here in Catalonia
 
a rolling total of 'fallecidos' for the last 7 days, which is not zero (but still surprisingly low, at only 26 in the last 7 days). It just doesn't seem to be adding to the cumulative figure on Worldometers. Possibly the compilers of the table decided it was too complicated to explain.

I'm not familiar with this source so i'm not suggesting accuracy, but it is quoting several officials and gives their names. explains what has been happening. you kind of have to read the whole article as there isn't a good bit to quote here, but it sounds like a bit of a mess and that they know the numbers are not zero.

June 13

For days now, Spain’s daily coronavirus death toll has been on hold, generating widespread uncertainty about the real state of the epidemic that has claimed more than 27,000 lives.
The health ministry’s emergencies coordinator Fernando Simon, who for months has given a daily briefing on the pandemic’s evolution, acknowledged the “astonishment” and “confusion” generated by the figures.
Content from External Source
https://www.scmp.com/news/world/europe/article/3088943/why-spains-coronavirus-death-toll-stuck-27136
 
Article:
Dexamethasone reduced deaths by one-third in ventilated patients (rate ratio 0.65 [95% confidence interval 0.48 to 0.88]; p=0.0003) and by one fifth in other patients receiving oxygen only (0.80 [0.67 to 0.96]; p=0.0021). There was no benefit among those patients who did not require respiratory support (1.22 [0.86 to 1.75]; p=0.14).

Based on these results, 1 death would be prevented by treatment of around 8 ventilated patients or around 25 patients requiring oxygen alone.

That's a good result that maybe can be built upon to find more effective drugs, r a more effective treatment plan. It's not a "cure" per se, and in fact the 1.22 ratio for patients not on oxygen suggests this medication harms more than it helps when your immune system is not yet trying to kill yourself.
 
Article:
Dexamethasone reduced deaths by one-third in ventilated patients (rate ratio 0.65 [95% confidence interval 0.48 to 0.88]; p=0.0003) and by one fifth in other patients receiving oxygen only (0.80 [0.67 to 0.96]; p=0.0021). There was no benefit among those patients who did not require respiratory support (1.22 [0.86 to 1.75]; p=0.14).

Based on these results, 1 death would be prevented by treatment of around 8 ventilated patients or around 25 patients requiring oxygen alone.

That's a good result that maybe can be built upon to find more effective drugs, or a more effective treatment plan. It's not a "cure" per se, and in fact the 1.22 ratio for patients not on oxygen suggests this medication harms more than it helps when your immune system is not yet trying to kill yourself.

It's an old, cheap steroid.
Article:
The first drug proven to cut deaths from Covid-19 is not some new, expensive medicine but an old, cheap-as-chips steroid.

The low-dose steroid treatment dexamethasone is a major breakthrough in the fight against the deadly virus, UK experts say...
For patients on ventilators, it cut the risk of death from 40% to 28%.
For patients needing oxygen, it cut the risk of death from 25% to 20%.
Lead researcher Prof Martin Landray said... "The treatment is up to 10 days of dexamethasone and it costs about £5 per patient. So essentially it costs £35 to save a life. This is a drug that is globally available."

So far, the only other drug proven to benefit Covid patients is remdesivir, which has been used for Ebola. That has been shown to reduce the duration of coronavirus symptoms from 15 days to 11.
But the evidence was not strong enough to show whether it reduced mortality. Unlike dexamethasone, remdesivir is a new drug with limited supplies and a price has yet to be announced.

The Recovery Trial, running since March, also looked at the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, which has subsequently been ditched amid concerns it increases fatalities and heart problems.

It's strange that COVID-19 tends to kill the elderly by causing a cytokine storm. I've read that the 1918 flu and the 2009 H1N1 flu tended to kill young people by causing their strong immune systems to overreact, so I associated cytokine storms with young patients, not the elderly.
 
We have official data from Germany on how many patients presented at emergency rooms compared to the same time last year (10 ERs with ~6000 patients weekly combined). Obviously the big jump downwards coincides with the public measures, and we're still at -15%. These data do not tell us what the conditions are that make up the shortfall, or why it happens.
Anecdotally: We have been more reluctant to send our senior residents to a hospital for check-ups, for example after falls or when they had unclear symptoms related to perhaps inflammations or cardio-vascular. I imagine that old people are overrepresented in ERs, so this hesitance by senior citizen residences may explain part of the decrease. (We were more worried about the strain of the 14 days of mandatory isolation required after return from hospital than the prospect of missing an injury)
 
Does anyone understand the mortality figures for Spain? The Worldometers table doesn't seem to show a single new death from Covid-19 since June 7. ...
Yesterday, the Worldometers death count for Spain jumped from 27,136 to 28,315, with no explanation.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/spain/
If you scroll down to "Latest News", you will find that they report single digit deaths every day in the last week, and up to 30 in the week before that. But those numbers did not show in the big table of all countries in the last couple of weeks.
I think Worldometers is struggling to keep their numbers for Spain consistent as offial numbers get adjusted.
 
Australia state Victoria the lifting of some restriction has been delayed due to spike in cases last week some suspected vector is international traveler returns & their hotel quarantine security guards one is an Irish footballer from my own supporter team :(

New Victoria COVID cases delay easing
Victoria will hold off on easing COVID-19 restrictions after the state again recorded new cases in the double digits, most from family-to-family transmission.


https://www.news.com.au/national/br...e/news-story/5649469bdb2350b6ab4d6d07cb352c02

Victoria will tighten coronavirus restrictions following another double-digit spike in cases and amid fears of a second wave.

The government revealed on Saturday 25 new cases had been recorded across the state, following 13 on Friday, 18 on Thursday and 21 on Wednesday.
Premier Daniel Andrews has slammed the brakes on plans to ease COVID-19 restrictions further and said some Victorians clearly weren't taking the virus seriously.
From midnight on Sunday to July 12, Victorians will only be able to have five people at their homes. Outdoor gatherings will be restricted to 10. Cafes, restaurants and pubs had been set to be allowed 50 patrons at one time on Monday, up from 20 currently. That will also be put on hold until July 12. Gyms, cinemas, indoor sports centres and concert venues will be allowed to reopen as promised but with a 20-person limit.
Victoria's virus case numbers are the highest they've been in more than two months.
More than half of the new cases since the end of April have come from family members spreading it to their relatives. "It is unacceptable that families anywhere in our state can, just because they want this to be over, pretend that it is," Mr Andrews said. "It is pretty clear that behind closed doors they are not practising social distancing."
Content from External Source
 
Article:
For patients on ventilators, it [dexamethasone] cut the risk of death from 40% to 28%.
For patients needing oxygen, it cut the risk of death from 25% to 20%.

The 40% death rate for patients on ventilators seemed lower than what's been reported previously, but I missed this report from May 15.
Article:
New Evidence Suggests COVID-19 Patients On Ventilators Usually Survive
COVID-19 has given ventilators an undeservedly bad reputation, says Dr. Colin Cooke, an associate professor of medicine in the division of pulmonary and critical care at the University of Michigan.
Early reports from China, the United Kingdom and Seattle found mortality rates as high as 90% among patients on ventilators. And more recently, a study of some New York hospitals seemed to show a mortality rate of 88%.
But Cooke and others say the New York figure was misleading because the analysis included only patients who had either died or been discharged. "So folks who were actually in the midst of fighting their illness were not being included in the statistic of patients who were still alive," he says.
Those patients made up more than half of all the people in the study.
And Cooke suspects that many of them will survive.
"We think that mortality for folks that end up on the ventilator with [COVID-19] is going to end up being somewhere between probably 25% up to maybe 50%," Cooke says.
...
So far, Vanderbilt has been able to keep COVID-19 patients on ventilators in existing ICUs with experienced intensive care teams, Rice says. And the mortality rate "is in the mid-to-high 20% range," he says.
That's only a bit higher than the death rate for patients placed on ventilators with severe lung infections unrelated to the coronavirus. And, like many other intensive care specialists, Rice says he thinks COVID-19 will turn out to be less deadly than the early numbers suggested...
Preliminary data from Emory University in Atlanta support that prediction. The mortality rate among 165 COVID-19 patients placed on a ventilator at Emory was just under 30%. And unlike the New York study, only a few patients were still on a ventilator when the data were collected.

Did the mortality rate in New York fall since then?
 
a flare up of cases compels my state government to reintroduce stage 3 lock down to certain city postcodes
The rest of Aus seems be be faring much better.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06...hotspot-local-lockdowns-in-melbourne/12407138


Victoria has reintroduced stay-at-home orders for a series of coronavirus hotspot suburbs in a bid to contain an "unacceptably high" number of new cases detected in the past few days.

Key points:
  • There will only be four reasons for people in the 10 postcodes under lockdown to leave the house
  • An inquiry will be launched into Victoria's hotel quarantine program after significant infection control breaches were found
  • Premier Daniel Andrews has asked for international flights to Melbourne to be diverted for the next fortnight
From 11:59pm on Wednesday, residents in the following 10 postcodes will be restricted from leaving the house except for essential purposes: 3012, 3021, 3032, 3038, 3042, 3046, 3047, 3055, 3060, 3064.
Content from External Source
 
My state Victoria city Melbourne just locked down again its main metropolitan regions as a spike in cases began to double each day

gggrrr great back to house hostage husband for 6 weeks no weekend trips fishing shooting skiing etc dear swmbo getting my honey do chores list KPI ISO 9000 itemized

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07...-lockdowns-as-coronavirus-cases-rise/12429990



Victoria will reimpose stage three restrictions for six weeks in metropolitan Melbourne and the Mitchell Shire in a bid to slow a rapid spread of coronavirus.

Key points:
  • Premier Daniel Andrews says the state is on the cusp of something "very, very bad"
  • There were 191 new cases confirmed today, including 154 which are under investigation
  • VCE and specialist school students will return to classrooms next week, while all other students in the restricted areas will get another week of holidays
Premier Daniel Andrews announced the stay-at-home orders would be reimposed from midnight tomorrow night.

There were 191 new confirmed cases announced today, with 37 linked to known outbreaks and the remaining 154 under investigation.

Mr Andrews said the new restrictions were the result of the "unacceptably" high number of new cases.

"It is simply impossible, with case rates at these levels, to have enough contract tracing staff to have enough physical resources … in order to suppress and contain this virus without taking significant steps," he said.

Mr Andrews said complacency with some of the restrictions had taken hold.
Content from External Source
 
In the UK, good news about Coronavirus tends to be ignored or buried by the media, largely for political reasons. So I draw attention to the latest weekly data from the Office of National Statistics on overall death rates, based on collated death registrations. The latest bulletin, for deaths registered in the week ended 26 June, shows an overall figure for deaths for all causes at 3.5% below the average for this time of year. (The figures are actually for England and Wales, not the UK as a whole, but E&W account for about 90% of the UK's population.) The previous week also showed a figure slightly below average. The decline may be partly due to a low rate of seasonal flu, and to a reduction in accidents during the lockdown, but I suspect it is also due to the previous death toll of Covid-19 among the very elderly in care homes, many of whom would have been expected to die relatively soon in the normal course of events. In support of this it may be noted that deaths in care homes specifically are also below the average for this period, despite continuing outbreaks of Coronavirus. The ONS bulletin is here: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopula...nalfiguresondeathsregisteredinenglandandwales
 
July is not March.

This is not the second wave in Melbourne. It’s the first wave. What occurred during the months of March and April was actually minor compared to what we are facing now.

During those months, the vast majority of infections were mostly from overseas. That was not a wave but rather a plane load of people who arrived here infected. The countries where the were flying from were so riddled with COVID that the probability of infection for all overseas arrivals was around 7 percent.

Right now, we are actually experiencing a real full blown pandemic. Locally transmitted cases are arising randomly right across Melbourne. Schools are not just being closed because of one child testing positive but rather several cases. One school currently has a cluster of 90, with all 2000 students and 300 teachers in isolation.

Infection is so widespread in Melbourne that we are now seeing positive cases in other states start to pop up because someone from this city travelled to that state. We are to other states what the U.S was to us when plane loads of travellers were arriving here during March and April.

A day does not pass without medical staff testing positive. This is a serious problem because you just cant instantly replace a nurse or doctor who spent years crafting their profession.

To use an iceberg analogy. March and April was akin to an iceberg with a small mass concealed underwater. Today, that iceberg conceals a massive unknown mass. We don’t know how deep it runs. The full and true extent of how much COVID is in our community is unknown and based on what the medical experts are suggesting, it’s significant and worrying.

This lockdown will not be like the first. The danger won’t be the same. If you live in Melbourne, you now stand a much greater chance of getting COVID. If you suffer from an underlying health condition or carrying some weight, or over 60 years of age, this will be an extremely dangerous period for you. Apologies, for being that blunt but whilst some in the media cover news about how a lockdown will impact our lives, the real problem is how the virus may kill some of us.

This graph, by the Grattan institute paints a great picture of our situation and why July is not March


https://grattan.edu.au/




EcdUPZaVAAAn4Ke.png
 
The latest bulletin, for deaths registered in the week ended 26 June, shows an overall figure for deaths for all causes at 3.5% below the average for this time of year.

it is best if you quote directly from the page you are reading (below) . and also include that summary link (below) as that link will disappear next week from the main page and will be harder for readers to find.

In Week 26, the number of deaths registered was 3.4% below the five-year average (314 deaths fewer), this is the second consecutive week that deaths have been below the five-year average; the numbers of deaths in care homes and hospitals were also fewer than the five-year average (103 and 815 deaths lower respectively), while the number of deaths in private homes was 745 higher than the five-year average.
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https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopula...eredweeklyinenglandandwalesprovisional/latest
 
COVID-19 antibodies might not last for long, which could be bad news for a vaccine

If you’re one of the fortunate ones who have had COVID-19 and fully recovered, it’s comforting to think that the worst is over and done with and you’re now immune—free to carry on your life without having to worry about getting sick from the virus. The thing is, that might not be the reality, and you might be able to catch COVID-19 again, reports Business Insider.

That’s according to a small, new study published yesterday in the journal Nature Medicine. In the study, the researchers found that people infected with COVID-19 quickly developed antibodies but that these antibodies declined as time went on. The study found that this was true for people who experienced COVID-19 symptoms and for people who were asymptomatic.

By just eight weeks after recovering from COVID-19, 40% of asymptomatic people saw their antibodies drop to undetectable levels. And for 13% of people who showed symptoms of COVID-19, the antibodies in their blood dropped to undetectable levels within eight weeks as well.

If it turns out to be true that COVID-19 antibodies don't last, does that mean that the only people that will survive this pandemic are those who do not die when they catch Covid-19? Those of us who would die now of Covid-19, will die shortly?

[... I suppose an alternative is that we reach 0 new infections world wide, but I don't see how that can happen ...]
 
If it turns out to be true that COVID-19 antibodies don't last, does that mean that the only people that will survive this pandemic are those who do not die when they catch Covid-19? Those of us who would die now of Covid-19, will die shortly?
60% coverage is still better than flu vaccine rates, in America at least. and flu vaccines need to be got every year, which is what your article says regarding covid vaccine. that's maybe just as well anyway as it might mutate from year to year.

and 37 patients (asymptomatic) isnt that many.
In America about 50% of the pop gets the flu shot (mostly old people) and on a GOOD year the vaccine is 60% effective. It isnt that easy to get the flu these days, so i think any antibody covid immunity would be comparable to the flu stuff.

(ps i read people with type O blood have lower chances of severe covid as well. just dont let it progress to pneumonia and you might live. )
 
In my home town Melbourne Victoria Australia due to consistent rise in cases we are now compelled to wear masks. All citizens if venture out of home are to have face covering scarf bandanna surgical to cover you mouth and nose .


$200 fine for non compliance has been set but none issued that im aware of day one & there are some rules and exceptions


The take up day one from my travel perspective was high if not 100% compliance. There are a handful of reports of naysayers for various reasons but they seem to be treated with strong disrespect by the greater collective.


Melbourne masks up as coronavirus face covering order comes into force

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07...bourne-as-covid-19-fight-intensifies/12484876


Whether they're blue surgical masks, patterned cloth masks or a scarf, Melburnians have headed outside with a new look.
Almost everyone in metropolitan Melbourne and the Mitchell Shire now needs to wear a face covering when in public, or face a $200 fine.
Premier Daniel Andrews on Thursday said he was "deeply grateful" to Victorians who were wearing masks, staying at home and "making sacrifices" to stop the spread of coronavirus.
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