Infection Summary as of 6am GMT on February 15th, 2020:
-66,887 Confirmed Cases
-1,523 Deaths
-10,757 in Serious/Critical Condition
-7,720 Recovered
-29 Territories #coronavirus #COVID19 #COVID-19 pic.twitter.com/diOUSXLDi2— CoronaVirus News (@COVID19__News) February 15, 2020
A few longer reads and explainers, for the weekend…
Good summary of the questions that we're still asking about #COVID19. https://t.co/C75oA4YXFx
— Dr. Tara C. Smith (@aetiology) February 15, 2020
For a few weeks, some of the most distinctive voices out of Wuhan came from two video bloggers, Chen Qiushi and Fang Bin, who shared on-the-ground footage of pain, grief and terror caused by the coronavirus.
Now, they're both missing. https://t.co/I1y26aBGeP
— Vivian Wang (@vwang3) February 14, 2020
… [U]nlike the torrent of grief and anger online in response to the death of Dr. Li, news of Mr. Chen’s and Mr. Fang’s disappearances has been swiftly stamped out on Chinese social media. Their names returned almost no results on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform, on Friday.
Still, Ms. Cook said the power of Mr. Chen’s and Mr. Fang’s videos, as well as the reporting done by professional journalists in Wuhan, should not be underestimated.
She pointed to the Chinese authorities’ decision this week to loosen diagnostic requirements for coronavirus cases, leading to a significant jump in reported infections, as evidence of their impact.
Mr. Fang, in one of his last videos, seemed struck by a similar sentiment. He thanked his viewers, who he said had been calling him nonstop to send support.
“A person, just an ordinary person, a silly person,” he said of himself, “who lifted the lid for a second.”
I talked to Amy McKeever @natgeo about #SARSCoV2 #COVID19 #coronavirus pathogenesis. Always up to drop a little host response knowledge about how things like cytokine storms can make you sick!https://t.co/77clvaR8ft
— Dr. Angela Rasmussen (@angie_rasmussen) February 14, 2020
Followup to a story I linked here yesterday. Click on the first tweet, or on the ‘unroll’ below, to read the whole thread:
I did actually say the quote that is going around, but the article contained vital context — we don't know what proportion are symptomatic. Also we have only a rough estimate of what proportion of symptomatic people will have severe outcomes. pic.twitter.com/cWzvINSZBm
— Marc Lipsitch (@mlipsitch) February 14, 2020
Hola, the unroll you asked for: Thread by @mlipsitch: I did actually say the quote that is going around, but the article contained vital context — we… https://t.co/oNc18vbjIX. Share this if you think it's interesting. ?
— Thread Reader App (@threadreaderapp) February 14, 2020
In which the brilliant @sxbegle opens up the black box of infectious diseases modeling. #COVID19 https://t.co/3Lgo0XK8Oa
— Helen Branswell (@HelenBranswell) February 14, 2020
The @US_FDA on the potential impact of the #COVID19 outbreak on the availability of drugs and medical equipment. https://t.co/cgMZwELeL5
— Helen Branswell (@HelenBranswell) February 14, 2020
Due to coronavirus, millions across Asia are participating in what may be the world's biggest work-from-home experiment. For some, it's a nightmare. But it's been so well received in some sectors that employers are considering adopting it more permanently. https://t.co/4RrQJKXXd9
— CNN (@CNN) February 15, 2020
It appears 7 international flights have been held on the hthrow tarmac by British authorities under COVID19 suspicion, one from SF.
Hopefully this "abundance of caution".
https://t.co/TyMIVyLHzs— Laurie Garrett (@Laurie_Garrett) February 14, 2020
Following up on this as I’m hearing reports that US citizens will soon be evacuated off the #DiamondPrincess, which has been quarantined off the coast of Japan due to #nCoV2019 (#COVID19) transmission for 10 (!!!) days now. I’m surprised that this action wasn’t taken sooner tbh. https://t.co/sl8tL6XxYU
— Dr. Maia Majumder (@maiamajumder) February 15, 2020
eclare
I guess that I don’t understand one of the statistics. About 67,000 have been infected, and only about 7,700 recovered. How long does this disease last, and how are people judged to have recovered? This seems like a very small number. But I am not a dr nor do I work in public health.
Mel
@eclare: I’m not sure how long the active infection lasts – not a medical person either, but I’m on soe heavy duty immunosuppressive meds and have a history of developing pneumonia, so I’m also trying to make sense of the bits and pieces of info starting to trickle out from the CDC, WHO, etc.
There was a bit of info in an interview this past week with someone from the WHO, saying that if acute respiratory distress is going to develop, it often develops after about five days in to the course of the illness.
It seems like that fact could lend itself to a pretty wide-ranging window of time for recovery, from the mild cases starting to slowly improve after five days or so, to the opposite end of the spectrum where things take a turn for the worse at that point, with pneumonia developing and being followed by acute respiratory distress and possible secondary bacterial infections, esp. in elderly or immunosuppressed patients, or i patients who already have a serious health condition (emphysema, COPD, asthma, diabetes, etc.)
Cermet
Since there is very little knowledge about how many people got Corona-V and fully recovered with no ill effects nor got worse symptoms than the normal flu the numbers posted are simply based only on know illnesses. So, highly likely not accurate nor what a recovery profile/statistics can be drawn in general – even for China.
What is known is that some older people tend to develop serious secondary infections and/or strong response that leads to respiratory issues. Children do not tend to develop along this profile indicating this is nothing like the 1918 flu nor most flu’s in general (confusing to the medical experts.)
However, these results in China are in a population that is certainly not as healthy as the average western person (even poor) so is not necessarily indictative of what will occur in say, Amerika.
Bottomline: to date, except for younger people (which appear very safe), this flu is not following typical patterns seen in any previous flu considering its high death rate amoung older people but possibly mild symptoms in younger people. Also, it doesn’t last any longer than a typical flu (for those that recover) – about two weeks worse case.
eclare
@Mel: That makes sense.
Jay
I survived drinking Everclear as a teenager,
dammed if I am going to die of a virus named after a crappy beer.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Jay: One tech Youtuber is calling it “the beer flu” since Youtube is demonetizing any video that uses the word Coronavirus.
Barbara
@Cermet: It is not an influenza virus at all, like H1N1, so it is not necessarily surprising that it doesn’t act like a flu virus. It does seem to spread like flu, through coughing.
Princess
The number that concerns me in today’s report (and thanks again to Annie Laurie for doing this) is the 11K in serious/critical condition out of 67K total. That seems really high.
Another Scott
Thanks for these updates, AL.
@Cermet: The anecdotal reports I’ve seen about deaths from this virus include a young physician who raised the alarm in December. It’s not clear to me that the young and seemingly healthy are better protected than normal oldsters.
I admit that I haven’t been following this story closely, but I’ve been surprised that the reporting I have seen concentrates on the OMG-WE’RE-ALL-GOING-TO-DIE numbers rather than putting them in context. Do we know yet how much worse this is than the flu??
CDC:
The flu is bad. COVID-19 is bad. Is shutting down cities and closing borders doing anything except making people fearful and feeding dangerous xenophobia (and hurting the economy and people’s livelihoods)? How long will it be until we really know how dangerous COVID-19 is in comparison with a bad flu outbreak?
Here’s hoping we have more real information and less fear-mongering soon.
My J is working on preparing a plenary talk for a conference in the US in late April. A large fraction of the attendees are going to be from China. The conference organizers are wondering if they’ll have to cancel the meeting (because of lack of attendance). Here’s hoping that COVID-19 dies down well before then, for her, them, and everyone else affected by this virus and the reactions to it…
Cheers,
Scott.
Hob
@Princess: The 67K number is not solid at all, for reasons that were explained at length in the previous post. It’s extremely likely that there are a lot more people than that who have had the disease, that we don’t know about because they weren’t sick enough to notice, or weren’t in a place where they’d be noticed, and because it doesn’t have very distinctive symptoms. Drawing any conclusions from the ratio of those two numbers at this point in the game is a bad idea.
Uncle Cosmo
@Cermet: “High death rate among older people” – hell, they oughta rechristen it the Old Farts Flu, OFF for short: Hey, didja hear the old coot in the corner house got OFFed last week?
@Jay: “dammed if I am going to die of a virus named after a crappy beer.” (Sadly, we note in passing your continuing spelling inadequacies – unless you’re a river you ain’t about to be “dammed”).
But I tell ya, Knuck, you ain’t seen nothin’ till you seen the Dos Equis pathogen (“Stay contagious, my frens!,” the spokesperson said with an infectious smile…) And when the Molson or Labatt flu hits Our Usually Decent But Occasionally Imbecile Neighbors To The North, watch the bobwire, guard towers & spotlights spring up all along the 49th parallel…. :^p