Discussion thread III - Covid-19 (new coronavirus)

[JJackson]

I think it is just normal COVID but were slow at picking it up. My guess - it has been circulating for some time and the CFR is normal, or at least it will be once they have an accurate picture of how much community transmission there has been. The CFR probably will not come down to Chinese levels because they can not match their public health infrastructure and they do not have the experience yet. I would however like to see some sequences ASAP just to be sure there has not been a significant mutation.

 

[JimO]

I haven't seen this discussed, but with COVID-19 in the Middle East, what could happen if someone is co-infected with COVID and MERS?

 

[Shiloh]

I've been wondering about that as well, but haven't seen any discussion on the web.

 

[Shiloh]

See Post #63 above...given the numbers of exported cases, it has been circulating for some time. They've opted not to quarantine, so are treating it as they would the flu. Some of the cases could be co-infected since its still flu season there. Also, hospitals are short of supplies as described in the article. I really am hoping the WHO delegation will tell us the true story of what is going on there. One has to remember that its all highly politicized...everyone reporting on it has an agenda - the Iranian govt., the ex-pat community, the Sunni, the Shite believers.

 

[Emily]

They saw HIV-1 similarities in SARS back in 2003, but the new findings seem to be looking at another mechanism.

https://bmcmicrobiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2180-3-20
Cloaked similarity between HIV-1 and SARS-CoV suggests an anti-SARS strategy

 

[gsgs]

this forum is badly organised now for discussion, IMO . It's a pain to browse threads, find replies to your posts,
find this very thread in the big number of threads and recent activities.
It may have been good for disease-tracking in times of low-volume discussion,
but now it's bad (IMO)

DAX=12050 , dow=25588
I made a forum https://ncovinfo.createaforum.com/
but any other such forum would be fine. We can easily make
https://flutrackers-discussion.createaforum.com/
(with chat)
or such and link to it and take the same admins.moderators as here

11971,25435 , 11942,25370

--------------edit------------------
OK, it seems that in firefox I can type discussion-thread-iii in the URL-window and it finds this
thread from my browsing history

 

[Sharky]

I haven't seen a forum section for New Zealand, so I'll leave this here:

https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2020/02/suspected-case-of-coronavirus-in-new-zealand.html

There is a suspected case of coronavirus in New Zealand. "We have testing underway on a suspected case and we are expecting the final results of that testing this afternoon," Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield said.

More than 130 tests have been completed to date, all negative. Five tests are underway, with one of those being for the suspected case. The suspected case is a person who traveled to New Zealand earlier this week from Iran. They are currently being looked after at Auckland City Hospital.

(continues)

 

[Emily]

I haven't seen a forum section for New Zealand, so I'll leave this here:

https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2020/02/suspected-case-of-coronavirus-in-new-zealand.html

There is a suspected case of coronavirus in New Zealand. "We have testing underway on a suspected case and we are expecting the final results of that testing this afternoon," Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield said.

More than 130 tests have been completed to date, all negative. Five tests are underway, with one of those being for the suspected case. The suspected case is a person who traveled to New Zealand earlier this week from Iran. They are currently being looked after at Auckland City Hospital.

(continues)

Thanks for this, Sharky. I don't see a New Zealand section yet, either.
https://flutrackers.com/forum/forum/-2019-ncov-new-coronavirus

We'll have to get one now.

 

[sharon sanders]

Pretty obvious that this is a pandemic. New Zealand and Nigeria announce their first cases within hours of each other.

 

[gsgs]

Shiloh, JJackson wrt. CFR in Iran (I don't know how to add comments to a post, as you did)
I wrote that after reading the reports from the doctors in Iran. Before that I would just have argued as you did

 

[gsgs]

Pretty obvious that this is a pandemic. New Zealand and Nigeria announce their first cases within hours of each other.

a pandemic without China then, they got it down with lockdowns (and some others (Russia ?) may succeed in the same way)

 

[gsgs]

SARS+MERS ... if it gets the spike from MERS, we have a vaccine already ...
I think this is unlikely to produce a new strain,

 

[gsgs]

A senior official from
the World Health Organization said earlier this week: "At present we believe
that only one drug has a real effect, and this is remxivir."

 

[gsgs]

Chloroquine Phosphate, Favipiravir and Remdesivir,
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-02/15/c_138787189.htm

also plasma from recovered people

Aylward , Feb.24 : "There is only one drug right now that we think may have real efficacy and that's remdesivir,"

 

[Ronan Kelly]

a pandemic without China then, they got it down with lockdowns (and some others (Russia ?) may succeed in the same way)

I still think that you are putting too much faith in the Chinese numbers. For comparison the confirmed flu deaths in China for January 2016/17/18 were 56, 38 & 56 and they present these numbers as literal fact - there were no unmissed deaths according to them. That is a massive undercount for the height of flu season. This January, China reported 243 COVID19 fatalities. What makes you think that they are better at testing and reporting for a new disease than for an established one? Chances are that this years numbers are undercounts too. So we're looking at an outbreak wave of 6-10 weeks with pretty high mortality there. And you are assuming that there will be no wave 2. Too early to be that confident in my opinion.

 

[Shiloh]

I agree with Ronan.

 

[sharon sanders]

I agree with Ronan too. We do not post the monthly China disease report because it is fiction. A few years ago I did a calculation of new AIDS cases in China based on some other countries' averages of new cases count. The China numbers looked ridiculous in comparison.

 

[gsgs]

I don't know about the flu-deaths , however this COVID is different.

- undercounts do not change the trend.which is consistently down
- You cannot hide an epidemic in a whole country for weeks
- The numbers are very detailed by location etc. and explained and discussed in
the press conferences and no major errors have been found afaik
- WHo surveils the numbers, the Aylward-team confirmed them.
- China's new declared openness (at least wrt. epidemics)

 

[Shiloh]

I do not doubt that the numbers are down and they are "winning" the war. However, I do believe that there is an undercount of deaths in the country. I don't believe the people who died at home in the first few weeks of the epidemic or even earlier before the virus was identified were counted. I don't believe that they've counted people who may have died as a result of being transferred out of the hospitals to accommodate Covid patients. I think we'll have a better idea of #s/death rates outside of China, with Iran being a glaring exception.

 

[gsgs]

what's probably even larger is the indirect deaths from the measures, travel restrictions isolation economic problems.
But they stopped it, they prevented major outbreaks outside Wuhan (so far) . Which is a huge gain.. Worth to be repeated elsewhere.
Which other country will go full China ?