**Official** COVID-19 Discussion

[_Ed_]

Bloody hell. NZ will be very, very lucky if we get away with the current four weeks or so.

 

[Flem274*]

4-6 months isn't possible. some people will lose their **** and just go out to town regardless with a 'cops can arrest me if they want' attitude

 

[Gnske]

To me locking down is just proof that fascism is very real and very frightening.

Rage against the machine mofos.

 

[Spark]

4-6 months isn't possible. some people will lose their **** and just go out to town regardless with a 'cops can arrest me if they want' attitude

Yeah people are already starting to go stir-crazy after a week. Idk how a chunk of the population will even get to a month absent, like, bodies on the streets and everyone being literally too scared to move.

 

[Gnske]

You would think it would be easier with social media and the fact that talking in person is a 20th century fad.

 

[Burgey]

Bloody hell. NZ will be very, very lucky if we get away with the current four weeks or so.

That's probably true, but it seems logical to me that the sooner you do it the shorter the timeframe you have to do it for once you've bitten the bullet.

 

[Spark]

Australia's outbreak may be slowing down - the # of new cases has levelled off a bit in the last three or four days. Very early signs ofc and from a policy front, probably should mean they double down on the self-isolation measures and other restrictions even more.

 

[Spark]

So the travel ban and associated port-of-entry restriction has created an absolutely ungodly bottleneck at O'Hare.

Great job guys.

We're almost two weeks from this btw. Guess where people are now warning that a new hotspot is emerging.

 

[GIMH]

Spark, you say you've already explained Germany but this thread moves fast and posts are often longer than I have time for at the point I open, so would you be so kind to explain again (or just quote that mother****er if you can find it easy enough)? Pretty plz

 

[Burgey]

Australia's outbreak may be slowing down - the # of new cases has levelled off a bit in the last three or four days. Very early signs ofc and from a policy front, probably should mean they double down on the self-isolation measures and other restrictions even more.

Govt here has done a deal with Ramsey to use their private hospitals right across the country apparently

 

[Redbacks]

Ze germans didn’t have a whole bunch faulty test kits is one factor. It was reported on the news here that Italy got a bad batch at some point which has proved diabolical. They are claiming better laboratory testing helped them identify cases early. Ominous news for thee rest of the world me thinks...

 

[Spark]

Spark, you say you've already explained Germany but this thread moves fast and posts are often longer than I have time for at the point I open, so would you be so kind to explain again (or just quote that mother****er if you can find it easy enough)? Pretty plz

Sure - basically, people are looking at Germany and noticing that it has a case fatality rate (CFR) of well under 1%. It's more like 0.6% at the moment (281 deaths, 47278 confirmed cases) which is around the same as what South Korea's was a few weeks back in the early stages of its outbreak. This is being cited as evidence that the true mortality of this disease is well below the oft-cited 1%.

In fact this is entirely consistent with a 1% CFR, i.e. 1 person dying out of every 100 who catches the disease. The problem is that, well, not all of those 47000 cases will survive, and even if no new cases appeared (obvs not going to happen), people are still going to die. So the mortality rate goes up. This is entirely because that a person who is sick may have been sick for a few weeks, or one week, or one day, but usually a person who dies has been sick for a few weeks. So deaths will "lag" case numbers by a few weeks typically. This is exactly what has happened in South Korea - over the last two weeks, the number of new cases has fallen away completely, but some of the existing cases unfortunately passed away, so its CFR has steadily ticked up and is now ~1.5%.

This video from Khan Academy actually explains it pretty well:

Given that Germany's outbreak still appears to be uncontained, that means that given a 1% mortality rate, then you would expect to see many hundreds of cases for every death, not 100 cases for a single death. But as the outbreak slowly moves out of its explosive exponential growth and the number of new cases subsides, the CFR you measure will steadily tick up as some of the thousands of sick people you already have die. It's a mistake a hell of a lot of people are making and it's leading them to faulty conclusions such as in that article FBU posted. Basically, the fact that Germany "seems" to have so few deaths is probably mostly a reflection of Germany having an excellent testing regime. Same with Iceland, which has done an incredible job with testing.

 

[ankitj]

Thanks everyone. Hopefully it's nothing. Biggest challenge has been to keep the little one away.

All the best. Hope it is nothing serious.

Trying to keep little one away is futile

 

[Spark]

That video, incidentally, explains why it is absolutely vital to shut down the moment you start noticing community transmission (i.e. cases where you have no idea where or who they got it from). Wuhan had 444 "confirmed" cases when it was shut down but probably something on the order of 12000 actual infections even by the official figures.

 

[D/L]

...The US now officially has the highest number of cases

So far as we know. Do we trust every nations' official figures?

 

[sledger]

There are already examples of the police over here acting in a really dire way (i.e. trying to make out like the law now criminalises anything but "essential" travel, when it fact it does nothing of the sort).

 

[hendrix]

So far as we know. Do we trust every nations' official figures?

Why don't you just tell us whose figures you don't trust?

 

[_Ed_]

Our neighbourhood Facebook group has turned into a deranged bunch of vigilantes obsessing over what others are doing and threatening to report everyone to the police. This is going to be an interesting few weeks.

 

[Spark]

Why don't you just tell us whose figures you don't trust?

I mean it's very very likely that China is hugely undercounting its cases. But so is the US! The fact that it's for different reasons doesn't change that.

 

[Flem274*]

Our neighbourhood Facebook group has turned into a deranged bunch of vigilantes obsessing over what others are doing and threatening to report everyone to the police. This is going to be an interesting few weeks.

where is this? i'll give them something to gossip about by waltzing through with a corona in hand at 1am