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Just curious, anyone have a plan, or preps for global pandemic?


Gordo

Covid-19 Vaccine Survey  

30 members have voted

  1. 1. Your Vaccine Status is:

    • Fully vaccinated
      24
    • Partially vaccinated
      0
    • Not Vaccinated
      6
  2. 2. If not (fully) vaccinated, your reason(s) for your decision (check all that apply):

    • Not Applicable - I'm vaccinated
      23
    • The rapid vaccine development process makes me distrust them
      4
    • I'm worried about vaccine side effects
      5
    • I don't think I'm at much risk of getting a covid infection
      3
    • I don't believe a covid infection is a serious risk for someone like me
      5
    • I'm waiting until the vaccines receive final approval
      0
    • Fear of needles
      0
    • A medical condition prevents me from getting vaccines
      0
    • Bad reaction to the first dose of the covid vaccine
      0
    • I already had COVID-19 and don't think I need the vaccine for protection
      3
    • Vaccine not available where I live
      0
  3. 3. Are you OK with having your CR forum name included on a list of members who have/haven't chosen to be vaccinated?

    • Yes
      26
    • No
      4


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7 hours ago, KHashmi317 said:

Very interesting .... but you'll have to watch the whole 2hr "movie" to absorb  ... in the age of short attn spans, 140 characters, single -page blogs and 7min videos, that ain't no easy task.

She is a hack as a scientist and an anti-vaccine quack.

https://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/11/23/compare-and-contrast#more

I don't know why I wasted any time watching that, but my favorite part was when she said wearing masks would "wake up" latent viruses in people and kill them.  The worst thing you can do is to wear a mask.  😉 She also thinks people are trying to kill her, and seems mentally ill.

 

Edited by Gordo
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Another contrarian look at Sweden (analysis coming from Sweden's own central bank):

Sweden had no lockdown but its economy is expected to suffer just as badly as its European neighbors

The grim data from Sweden’s central bank has been reinforced by a respected think tank this week. The National Institute for Economic Research (NIER) said in a statement Wednesday that it believed that Sweden’s economy is set to shrink 7% this year and unemployment to rise to 10.2%.

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2 hours ago, Gordo said:

"Sweden had no lockdown but its economy is expected to suffer just as badly as its European neighbors..."

That prognosis is not new.  Sweden's "flatten the curve" strategy  via voluntary social distancing etc. was never expected to produce superior economic results.

April 15, 2020:

Quote

Although the longer-term impact is obviously unknown, Sweden’s strategy is not expected to preserve the country’s economy this year any more than those of countries imposing stricter lockdowns: Magdalena Andersson, the finance minister, said on Wednesday GDP could shrink by 10% this year and unemployment rise to 13.5%.

 

 

Edited by Sibiriak
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13 hours ago, Gordo said:

Of course, WHO is focused on the spread of the disease, not on economic issues and their impact! They view the situation from a medical perspective as is their duty. What will be of interest is in the coming months wrt the herd immunity claims and outcomes going forward. Again lots of guess work is flying about.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/22/no-lockdown-in-sweden-but-stockholm-could-see-herd-immunity-in-weeks.html

Edited by Mike41
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Yeah, Sweden is far too small and globally interdependent to not any experience economic shock from this regardless of what they did wrt. CV-19. 

As to a higher death rate, the ultimate test is whether the final death rate number will be equivalent to their neighbors in the long run - it's not surprising given the strategy that the number is higher right now, at the beginning. Will it be redeemed in the long run? Although it seems they do acknowledge they messed up with the old folks homes due to underestimating the asymptomatic spread.  

Meanwhile, regardless of what the oil price futures are doing at the moment, here in LA gas prices have not budged one penny. 

Those who go on ventilators tend to do poorly. But what if the ventilators themselves were killing machines:

British doctors warn some Chinese ventilators could kill if used in hospitals

Entire UK order of 250 Chinese ventilators ditched over danger to lives

Shoddy quality Chinese goods have come home to roost. I've long been fascinated by how the Chinese manage to fake goods and folks are so slow to catch on. The items LOOK the part, but are non-functional. I've seen countless examples from every sector. Sewing threads that look fine, but when you use them they fall apart. Clothing that falls apart after a couple of uses or laundry. Tools that look fine, but pulverize on the first use. I have a Japanese Zojirushi hot water dispenser that's about $300 on Amazon, and just last week a friend bought an identical looking Chinese copy for $60 and while it did look almost the same, it was like night and day in functioning and broke after being used twice. The examples are endless. Why did people think it would be any different with medical equipment?

Now, clothes and tools and such don't matter in the big scheme of things, but when it comes to medical equipment, medication, supplements and food - that's a different matter, those can actually hurt you. I have zero faith in Chinese made goods, and avoid food from China like the plague. Unfortunately, you can't always tell, because manufacturers will use ingredients sourced in China and not disclose it.

One can only hope that one day China will move up the economic ladder and the quality of their goods will pick up. Back in the 60's and early 70's Japanese made cheap plastic junk, and their goods were a global joke. In time, they progressed and now stand for quality. Will the same happen for China? One can hope so, but the cultures are different and the regulatory regimen is very corrupt in China, so who knows.

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This new paper [1] describes just the impressive testing, contract tracing and isolation that South Korea has implemented to squash the virus in their country. It describes the government's response to an outbreak in a 19-story building. 

The day after the outbreak was detected, they shut down the entire building and over the next 24 hours tested all 1143 people who either worked in or lived in the building. Here are the other steps they took:

Building X was closed on March 9, 2020, immediately after the outbreak was reported [one person tested positive]. We offered testing to all occupants (office workers and apartment residents) during March 9–12. We collected nasopharyngeal and oropharyngeal swab specimens from PUIs for immediate real-time reverse transcription PCR testing; the average turnaround time was 12–24 hours. Confirmed case-patients [n=97] were isolated, and negative case-patients [ n=1046] were mandated to stay quarantined for 14 days. We followed and retested all test-negative case-patients until the end of quarantine. We also investigated, tested, and monitored household contacts [n=225] of all confirmed case-patients for 14 days after discovery, regardless of symptoms [34 tested positive - 16.2%]. During March 13–16, we sent a total of 16,628 text messages to persons who stayed >5 minutes near the building X; we tracked these persons by using cell phone location data. The messages instructed the recipients to avoid contact with others and go to the nearest COVID-19 screening center to get tested.

The 97 people who tested positive in the building were almost all were female employees in a call center in one wing of the 11th floor of the building. Here is a graph of the symptom onset of people who tested positive:

Screenshot_20200430-184555_Chrome.jpg

There was very little interaction between people on different floors except presumably on the elevators. The graph shows that on Feb 25th the first woman on the 11th floor tested positive and by two weeks later she has spread it to almost 100 other people on her floor. Below is a floorplan of the 11th floor showing where people those who were infected were seated:

Screenshot_20200430-185036_Chrome.jpg

Clearly they were seated pretty close together and one wonders how much difference more widely spaced seating would have made. 

For me the takeaway message of the paper is how quickly the virus can spread in an enclose building and how impressive the South Korean efforts to contract trace and isolate those who are infected or have potentially been exposed.

From a single positive case, they tested and isolated for 14-days over 1000 people who worked or lived in the impacted building. They tested all the household contacts of the infected people, plus they determined every person who was in or near the building in the previous week for more than five minutes via cell phone location data and asked all ~17K of them to immediately get tested and to isolate themselves until their test results come back negative.

it seems inconceivable to me that the US would or could do anything close to this in terms of contact tracing, especially now that the virus is infecting >100k new people each day (given we're detecting 30k symptomatic people).

--Dean

---------

[1] Park SY, Kim YM, Yi S, Lee S, Na BJ, Kim CB, et al. Coronavirus disease outbreak in call center, South Korea. Emerg Infect Dis. 2020 Aug [date cited]. https://doi.org/10.3201/eid2608.201274

Abstract

We describe the epidemiology of a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in a call center in South Korea. We obtained information on demographic characteristics by using standardized epidemiologic investigation forms. We performed descriptive analyses and reported the results as frequencies and proportions for categoric variables. Of 1,143 persons who were tested for COVID-19, a total of 97 (8.5%, 95% CI 7.0%–10.3%) had confirmed cases. Of these, 94 were working in an 11th-floor call center with 216 employees, translating to an attack rate of 43.5% (95% CI 36.9%–50.4%). The household secondary attack rate among symptomatic case-patients was 16.2% (95% CI 11.6%– 22.0%). Of the 97 persons with confirmed COVID-19, only 4 (1.9%) remained asymptomatic within 14 days of quarantine, and none of their household contacts acquired secondary infections. Extensive contact tracing, testing all contacts, and early quarantine blocked further transmission and might be effective for containing rapid outbreaks in crowded work settings.

 

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I am starting to get nervous about the rushed process to develop a vaccine. Obviously if we can get a safe vaccine ASAP that would be better, and I am in no way shape or form anti-vaccine. I get vaccinated and will get vaccinated and will encourage everyone else to get vaccinated.

My worry is in the pressure to cut corners on the way there. It seems we should be at least discussing critically the risks to accelerating the process, and what the risks might be to vaccinate essentially most of the planet with a vaccine that hasn't gone through the normal research, rigor and regulation. But I'm not sure how to responsibly raise these questions without playing into the hands of anti-vaxxers.

Given how unregulated certain aspects of our economy are (I've been doing a lot of reading about the horrors of the water crisis in Flint lately, but the entire supplements market also comes to mind) I might prefer a slightly less rushed vaccine process. How do we weigh the costs/benefits to getting a vaccine quickly vs. making sure it is doesn't have it's own problems? One huge danger I see, is that if we all rush out to get a vaccine that does have unintended side effects, the anti-vaxx movement would explode, which would compound the dangers.

Given how badly various agencies have screwed up other aspects of this pandemic, I am not exactly filled with confidence that their couldn't be corners cut or risks left unanalyzed when it comes to the vaccine development process under the current pressures. If any of you have reason to be reassured about all of this, I would love to have that reassurance!

Edited by Thomas G
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The Economist has a chart estimating years of life lost by age groups 50 and up.  https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/05/02/would-most-covid-19-victims-have-died-soon-without-the-virus?cid1=cust/ednew/n/bl/n/2020/04/30n/owned/n/n/nwl/n/n/NA/463610/n

They found that the years of life lost (ylls) for the average Briton or Italian who passed away was probably around 11, meaning that few of covid-19’s victims would have died soon otherwise.

 the authors accounted for other illnesses the victims had, in case they were unusually frail for their age. For 710 Italians, they could see how many had a specific long-term condition, such as hypertension or cancer. The authors used a smaller Scottish sample to estimate how often each combination of diseases occurs among covid-19 victims.

image.png.303fc0296497226feb4f6764e24e85a6.png

image.png.fd13d08efedcbc726771804eb51044c9.pngimage.png.fd13d08efedcbc726771804eb51044c9.png

>>>the available evidence suggests that many covid-19 victims were far from death’s door previously, and cut down at least a decade before their time. Allowing the virus to spread freely would sacrifice the strong as well as the weak.

 

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https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/comparing-covid-19-deaths-to-flu-deaths-is-like-comparing-apples-to-oranges/

The article if accurate is quite a shock considering the point some are making wrt influenza death rates compared to covid 19 death rates.

From the article: 

To do this, we have to compare counted deaths to counted deaths, not counted deaths to wildly inflated statistical estimates. If we compare, for instance, the number of people who died in the United States from COVID-19 in the second full week of April to the number of people who died from influenza during the worst week of the past seven flu seasons (as reported to the CDC), we find that the novel coronavirus killed between 9.5 and 44 times more people than seasonal flu. In other words, the coronavirus is not anything like the flu: It is much, much worse.

LIES, DAMN LIES AND STATISTICS, Mark Twain

Edited by Mike41
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On 4/21/2020 at 6:12 PM, TomBAvoider said:

As to co-infections and other health status factors: what we know about the CV virus is that it strikes the obese, the diabetic, the cardio-vascular and renal impaired - those are the prominent vulnerabilities, a profile that seems to fit the "affluent country morbidities". As developing countries have fewer of the "afluent morbidities", it should prove (in addition to age) a protective profile against CV. Wrt. co-infections, I have not seen the data, although it does make intuitive sense... however, I've been burned by "intuitive sense" often enough, that I prefer to rely on data. YMMV. 

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-brazil-poor/imported-by-the-rich-coronavirus-now-devastating-brazils-poor-idUSKBN22D549

Quote

Poor Brazilians are also more likely to die if infected, due to higher levels of pre-existing conditions and less access to healthcare.

In Leblon, for example, just 2.4% of confirmed cases have resulted in deaths - roughly in line with global trends and suggesting a relatively accurate picture of infection numbers. In Iraja, the death rate is 16%. In Sao Paulo’s Brasilandia, it is a staggering 52%.

There is less testing in the poor areas so data on case counts and deaths due to Covid-19 is even sketchier than what we have been looking at for wealthy places.   But considering there is also much less capacity to implement measures to slow the spread I expect the volume of coming data will compensate for its quality.

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10 hours ago, Mike41 said:

... we find that the novel coronavirus killed between 9.5 and 44 times more people than seasonal flu. In other words, the coronavirus is not anything like the flu: It is much, much worse....

LOL!  When someone reads this and then looks at the available data, it doesn't make any sense.  If the flu kills on average 50-60 thousand people in the US annually, the lower end of this "prediction" would be above the 500,000 deaths mark, almost rivaling CVD!  At the higher end, Manhattan real estate should be really cheap this year....

Much of the the media and the political establishment in the US and the UK are still promoting the "experts" who predicted 200,000 deaths in the UK and millions of dead in the US, and many still gobble it up. 

We won't have good data for at least a year, but currently mortality rates for the year are still likely to be in the upper range of average for Europe and the US, with the worst apparently over.  

Ignore the out of season spike which the media is screaming about and keep an eye on the whole year average, as this was also a less deadly than usual influenza season (which also accounts for the higher number of frail people who in an average year would have died from the flu, succumbing to Covid-19). 

Also ignore nonsense like  "34.5% increase in excess deaths this month compared to a 6.5% rise in Denmark" which based on the sample size is a blip and statistically insignificant -- over 90,000 people die in Sweden annually, including about 7,000 who die from respiratory diseases.  And if you compare Sweden to Denmark, you'll find large differences, such as Sweden having almost double the rate of coronary heart disease death than Denmark, or Denmark having almost double the lung cancer deaths of Sweden.  These are much larger differences than the Covid-19 deaths, yet I see no headlines screaming that Sweden's cardiologists are incompetent, or whatever....

Ironically, the line of reasoning above would lead us to also conclude that lock-downs cause enormous excess death toll, since the places with the strictest lock-downs, such as New York, Spain and Italy have by far the worst death rates, while places like Sweden, Byelarus, Brazil and Arkansas, which did not implement lock-downs, have relatively miniscule number of deaths.

Phew!

Edited by Ron Put
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From an evolutionary POV, the  Coronavirus is pretty tame . For example, say COVID19 struck a 100 years ago (1920) when:

  • Lifespan was shorter (fewer older/weaker people with co-morbidities)
  • Much less air pollution (unlike Wuhan and NYC)
  • Much less population (social and physical distaning was part and parcel)

... so, just a case of "the flu". In many ways, even in 2020,  despite all the media attention, incl  this very long, busy thread, CV is still seasonal "flu"-like.

Anyway ... 

Next time this happens... isolate the nursing homes; isolate the immune compromised. Smokers and obese should be aware of the risks they pose to THEMSELVES.  Eat right (and eat light, of course), get adequate exercise, and 7-8 hrs of sleep every night. The virus is JUST AS HAPPY to evolve asymptomatically. In fact, for the sake of all life and the biosphere,  I'm sure the virus mutates better in smart, healthy folks.

 

 

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13 hours ago, Ron Put said:

LOL!  When someone reads this and then looks at the available data, it doesn't make any sense.  If the flu kills on average 50-60 thousand people in the US annually, the lower end of this "prediction" would be above the 500,000 deaths mark, almost rivaling CVD!  At the higher end, Manhattan real estate should be really cheap this year....

Much of the the media and the political establishment in the US and the UK are still promoting the "experts" who predicted 200,000 deaths in the UK and millions of dead in the US, and many still gobble it up. 

We won't have good data for at least a year, but currently mortality rates for the year are still likely to be in the upper range of average for Europe and the US, with the worst apparently over.  

Ignore the out of season spike which the media is screaming about and keep an eye on the whole year average, as this was also a less deadly than usual influenza season (which also accounts for the higher number of frail people who in an average year would have died from the flu, succumbing to Covid-19). 

Also ignore nonsense like  "34.5% increase in excess deaths this month compared to a 6.5% rise in Denmark" which based on the sample size is a blip and statistically insignificant -- over 90,000 people die in Sweden annually, including about 7,000 who die from respiratory diseases.  And if you compare Sweden to Denmark, you'll find large differences, such as Sweden having almost double the rate of coronary heart disease death than Denmark, or Denmark having almost double the lung cancer deaths of Sweden.  These are much larger differences than the Covid-19 deaths, yet I see no headlines screaming that Sweden's cardiologists are incompetent, or whatever....

Ironically, the line of reasoning above would lead us to also conclude that lock-downs cause enormous excess death toll, since the places with the strictest lock-downs, such as New York, Spain and Italy have by far the worst death rates, while places like Sweden, Byelarus, Brazil and Arkansas, which did not implement lock-downs, have relatively miniscule number of deaths.

Phew!

Thanks Ron, I didn’t buy it either! So much for Scientific American ha ha! 

Lies, damn Lies and Statistics. Mark Twain

 

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If you enjoyed this previously posted Medcram lecture (with critical care specialist Roger Seheult, MD.) —

Coronavirus Pandemic Update 61: Blood Clots & Strokes in COVID-19; ACE-2 Receptor; Oxidative Stress

— then you’re also likely to enjoy the updates 63 and 65:

 

Update 63. This 26-minute lecture shows an hypothesis explaining increased cardiovascular complications with COVID-19.

Coronavirus Pandemic Update 63: Is COVID-19 a Disease of the Endothelium (Blood Vessels and Clots)?

 

Update 65.  This 20-minute lecture goes into further detail on how someone with existing oxidative stress can do poorly with COVID-19. It was at first thought that there would be an increase in hospitalizations of patients with existing lung conditions (asthma, COPD, Obstructive Sleep Apnea) and COVID-19. But that doesn’t appear to be the case so much as it is for patients with hypertension, CAD, CHF, or obesity — because of the pre-existing oxidative stress with those conditions.

Coronavirus Pandemic Update 65: COVID-19 and Oxidative Stress (Prevention & Risk Factors)

 

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The location company Foursquare has a nice set of graphs showing the change in foot traffic at various types businesses in four regions of US over the last couple months. Below are a few of the most interesting, with my comments.

First, fast food chains haven't seen too much drop in traffic, and is back close to normal across the country, perhaps in due to the fact that a large fraction of their visits (~80%) have always been for drive-thru and takeout:

Screenshot_20200502-152356_Chrome.jpg

But other restaurants are still down by 75% and haven't seen any uptick yet:

Screenshot_20200502-152441_Chrome.jpg

Same with clothing stores:Screenshot_20200502-152824_Chrome.jpg

and hair salons / barbershops:

Screenshot_20200502-152913_Chrome.jpg

Hardware stores and hiking trails are about the only venues that have seen an increase in traffic from pre-covid times (not shown). 

It will be interesting to see how quickly traffic to some of these businesses start to come back as states start to open up, particularly in the South and Midwest.

--Dean

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The CDC has updated its website of coronavirus forecasts. They entirely removed the IHME model from their ensemble of models, probably because it was doing such a poor job at predicting the actual number of deaths. The IHME is now predicting 72K US deaths by Aug 4th, when we'll hit that number by next week unless a miracle happens.

Most of the other models don't make predictions more than a few weeks out. The current consensus among the models is for the US to reach about 90K deaths in about three weeks (May 20th):

Screenshot_20200502-164412_Chrome.jpg

A newly added model from MIT isn't shown in the graph above, but predicts almost exactly 100K US deaths by May 20th and 125K deaths at its farthest out prediction (June 20th).

I need to make a correction from last time I did a model update. I mistakenly called the YYG model the "Columbia University" model. The Columbia model is actually labelled CU-40, CU-30 and CU-20 in the left graph above, depending on the level of social distancing. Their predictions vary from 100 to 120K deaths by May 20th.

The most accurate model over the last few weeks is still the one I highlighted last time (YYG) and it is predicting 94K deaths by May 20th (95% CI 82-107K). It has increased its Aug 4th projections from 153K deaths to 168K deaths (95% CI 89-268K) due to earlier and more widespread relaxation of social distancing measures. This models now projects there is a 96% chance of >100k deaths by Aug 1st, and a 55% chance of >150K deaths by then.

2 hours ago, KHashmi317 said:

PSSST: It's not that bad ...

As I've said before, I don't think an indefinite lockdown is sustainable or the best way to minimize overall harm going forward. We don't have a choice but to relax the restrictions and the extra infections (and deaths) that result over the next few months may even blunt an even bigger wave that could otherwise hit in the fall/winter.

But to suggest "it's not that bad" when it will almost certainly kill more than 100K people in the US in first wave and who knows how many more in the second (or third) seems more callous than I'd expect you to be. And do you really believe Dr.Nut Knut and his claim that the pandemic is (nearly) over when the best evidence from population serology testing suggests only a single digit percentage of people in the US have been exposed to the virus so far?

--Dean

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