Archives for 2020

Coronavirus latest:
-China death toll at least 1,483; Hubei infections up by 4,823
-Japan confirms first death from the virus—third fatality outside mainland China
-China regrets Australia's ban on mainland Chinese citizens until at least Feb. 22https://t.co/UBMQ65KPSe

— Bloomberg (@business) February 14, 2020

2. #Covid19: Most of the illness/deaths are in Hubei province still, with 4823 cases & 116 deaths. pic.twitter.com/iXKE50ihNy

— Helen Branswell (@HelenBranswell) February 14, 2020

Bit early tonight, because the site keeps going down for me, too.

Coverage of the epidemic seems to have reached a new phase. It’s shifted from ‘encapsulated foreign novelty lede / local coverups / random conspiracy theories from the predictable sources’ to ‘ongoing nightly tv news updates / major political actors start experimenting with using the outbreak for their own ends’. And while I’m no expert, I get the feeling Twitter, at least, has started patrolling for random paranoia-cum-grifters; on a raw google within the site, I’m getting a lot fewer ‘God’s plan’ and ‘X has the only guaranteed cure’ tweets. (I’ve seen multiple news sites, however, pushing back on Jim Bakker’s attempt to sell colloidal solution to his flock. Bet you didn’t even know that creep was still alive.)

Important background on the massive jump in confirmed cases. Key thing to also remember – the true number of cases (including asymptomatics) is going to be *much* higher than the confirmed number (currently ~60,000). https://t.co/BoOX6tzit1

— Kristian G. Andersen (@K_G_Andersen) February 13, 2020

Very good explainer @latimes @Emily_Baum https://t.co/VLYuJ7b8CO

— Marc Lipsitch (@mlipsitch) February 13, 2020

… The iceberg’s tip — the part you see — is the patients who die. This is the easiest number to assess for the simple reason that deaths are hard to miss.

All the other infected people are the part of the iceberg that’s underwater. Epidemiologists divide them into tiers.

Just below the surface are the patients who get sick enough to be hospitalized. Below them are patients who seek basic medical attention. The next tier is made up of people who nurse their illnesses at home, and the last is the people who have no symptoms.

In 2009, when Lipsitch was helping the CDC determine the severity of the H1N1 flu, he and his fellow researchers recognized that no single data source could capture all five tiers. So they gathered surveillance data from various parts of the U.S. health system and pieced them together to generate their iceberg model….

In any outbreak, disease severity data tend to skew high at first, for the simple reason that the sickest patients are most noticeable…

In the early days of the H1N1 influenza pandemic, which was traced to pigs in Mexico, it looked like 10% of people infected there were dying of the flu. Then health workers identified a slew of infections so mild that people didn’t even see a doctor. Once those cases were taken into account, the death rate plunged below 0.1%, Lipsitch said.

“In the end, that flu was no more deadly than regular seasonal flu,” Michaud said…

At this point, the new coronavirus seems to have more in common with the regular flu than with exotic diseases like Ebola or Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), both of which had fatality rates around 40%. Among a group of 17,000 people with confirmed coronavirus infections, 3% were classified as critical, 15% had severe infections and 82% were mild, said Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s acting head of emerging diseases. Of the 2% who died, many were elderly with underlying health issues that made them more vulnerable.

“We can say pretty confidently that this isn’t killing people left and right,” Del Rio said…

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COVID-19 Update: Thursday / FridayPost + Comments (15)