The Coronavirus Thread

I'll give you my opinion. In our country, all actions to prevent coronavirus seem to be very late.
My family had a strange flu back in January. I didn't get infected for some reason. This strange flu in our country appeared in November 2019, but was diagnosed as infectious pneumonia or in the case of my daughter, tracheitis. The symptoms of this strange flu are exactly the same as those of the coronavirus.
I didn't notice any abnormal mortality from this strange flu. In some areas, a local quarantine was declared, after which everything returned to normal.
It seems that in our country, many people got sick with this infection without knowing it, and safely recovered.

I am becoming more and more convinced that the coronavirus story is 20% tragedy and 80% farce.

 

So far almost everyone at my Bank is working from home except a few employees who work at the branches on a reduce level. Weather is nice before it gets too hot and humid in FL. I guess the FL Gov is taking this more seriously than before. Of course everyone is bitching about how terrible FL unemployment is, including those who voted for now Senator Rick Scott (back when he was Gov he made the Unemployment in the FL one of the lowest payout in the nation). I thought it was funny those who voted for Scott are pissed that they can't unemployment or it is taking forever to get the funds. Gotta know who you are voting for as always. Then again, with FL being Hyper-Parisian as always with people living in their own worlds most of the time they don't study anything, oh well.

After work time for some Pipe Tobacco to relaxxx.

 

That's not Parisians, that's all the migratory Quebeckers

 

Haha... too true. If I had a nickel for every time I heard someone say something along the lines of "When I don't know the candidates, I vote for the [party affiliation] candidate." Half of the time, I swear, people just vote for those that people they get along with say is a good vote. Most of the time, all they have had to say to me about any candidate in elections has been from literally 1 or 2 news articles... so I have to assume that's the extent of their knowledge. Sometimes I wonder if they've even read the articles, or if they're just playing telephone.

Glad to hear you're okay over there. We need you here, man!

On a real note, I would be very surprised if Russia didn't get it early, considering it was reported in China as early as November of last year. Interesting that it has been a quiet thing for you. In many places in America people have been getting really seriously ill, and even as a minority of cases, it's still a big, growing number. People are, I think understandably concerned about getting it, or spreading it to their elderly loved ones.

I found an interesting little visual today - I just wish they showed how they got their numbers. As of 4/4, it had COVID-19 in the top 3 causes of death in the US, only trailing behind cancer and heart disease. And of course it started at the bottom. You can watch how it jumps around from day to day.

https://public.flourish.studio/visu...eEtf375H_kU9_KS_o8aJ1lnRyLZw-Wp-F01LRFOsCVcqk

Big picture would obviously be different... it'd be nowhere near the top 3, probably. But to see there being days where it was is interesting. Kinda gives a different look at people's outlook on it over time, too. Same numbers people were getting day by day. Depending on the day, it looks a lot better, or a lot worse.

 

I will be cynical and operate only with numbers. I apologize in advance if I touch someone's feelings.

Currently, 4464 patients are registered in Moscow. For a city of 12 million, this is 0.0372%. I assume that the traditional falseness of the official media suggests a real number of patients 10 times more. Then the percentage of patients will increase to 0.372%. This is 37 times less than the epidemiologic threshold (5%)
Of course, the presence of this disease is a reason to take medical measures, but not a reason to paralyze the economic activity of the entire country, as is currently happening in our country. What is happening now in our country I can only call a coven of stupidity and cowardice.

As for the situation in the United States, I know that 10,000 people have already died from the disease in the United States. This is certainly a lot. But at the same time last year, the US lost 50,000 people from the common flu and this did not cause any panic.
But of course I can't know the full situation in a country I've never been to. I only use numbers that I know.

As for the official deaths from the coronavirus. Our media for a long time and with pleasure touched upon the first death from the coronavirus in Moscow. The meaning of all the messages was "horror-horror-horror" Then it turned out that this patient was 91 years old, and he died of diabetes during a coronavirus disease.

 

The concern for us is that this spreads much much faster than the flu, and that as healthcare becomes overloaded by the sudden influx in patients, deaths climb sharply. Once they can take no more patients, doctors then have to start choosing who gets the life-saving treatment and who dies. It's a position none of them like being in and many have spoken on with heavy eyes. Respirators are in too short of a supply.

The general consensus is that without any measures in place, the number of deaths would be staggeringly high, not just from COVID-19 itself, but the people with other problems falling by the wayside (as well as people treating them catching it and spreading it to high-risk patients hospitalized for other things, or being completely unable to help.) We have seen this happen already in other countries, so the US, with it's many dense population centers collectively holding 300 million people, we're no longer taking chances. We were slow to react, and then very quickly people started dropping off.

50k deaths from the flu is an estimate for the year. We're a 12k deaths in the past few months. And we won't know the actual rate until we can look back on it. Just based on how quickly that number climbed, it is possible to project a much higher death toll than the flu claims yearly, long before the year is up. In really just a couple of months, we're well on our way, doing much more to try and stop it than we do the flu, at that.

That's the thing, another way to think of those death rates is these are the numbers with places everywhere shutting down and people staying home. And they still continue to climb. Imagine if this was left treated like the flu and everyone went about their business. How might the numbers compare then? Nobody here seems willing to find out how many would be lost in that case.


You don't have to worry about hurting my feelings btw I too just look at the numbers and ponder the implications. Very tense times, all around. I think it is important to not be jumpy one way or the other. Nobody wants to be the one to make the wrong call and cross a point of no return with the spread. It's not just the deaths, but how contagious it is, especially when it hits population centers here.

Not to mention, money does nothing for a dead man. A lot of people didn't want things to come to this... a lot of people in America insisted the economy would take too big of a hit. It's not like that now. That speaks a lot to the situation here. Hospitals in NY don't even seem to know what to do with the bodies. The main focus is in having the treatment capacity - right now there are major concerns that some places will not have enough supplies to deal with the number of serious cases already seen.

 

What timeframe are you referring to? I keep hearing quotes like this but don’t know where to see these comparative stats over the same timeframe. Also, this disease is still on the rise - flu I assume peaks a lot earlier in the year and stays steadier over a longer period that this disease has been killing people in the US, which has only been for a very short time in any significant numbers.

 

I have some friends mocking concern for the economy as insignificant compared to lives lost over the virus itself. I think the number of lives ruined compared to the number of lives lost, by having a large chunk of the work force shelved for perhaps a quarter of the year, could be just as, if not even more impactful; they are both significant concerns.

 

Hush. I remember being a bus boy at a Cracker Barrel. This couple from Qubec were pissed at us because we didn't have anyone who spoke English. So these guys get pissed when we don't know French when going through Qubec, but when they don't know English (which is weird if you think about it) and go into the US they get pissed. So weird to me.

And you know why we have the people running Florida as is. Actually, this is true about voters in general. Most of them are so ignorant of stuff I'm like why you are still voting if you don't know what you are really voting for. Like why people focus on the Federal level stuff when the Local/State level stuff affects them a lot more than anything else. Oh well.....

This reminds me of this current picture meme that is using data from https://www.worldometers.info/. The meme picture is using data to show that Covid-19 is not even close to the leading cause of death. The meme picture states that the real cause of death is abortions. They used the picture meme to rally other people on the right to focus on getting rid of abortions altogether.

My big issue of the statistics from the Worldometers site is they are using an estimate guess of data from the WHO (@purr1n's favorite) to calculate abortions. They are most likely using a similar way to calculate other categories as well. However, the picture meme is becoming popular with my right-wing friends. Too bad they (and others on the other side of the political wing) don't actually do the research on where the numbers are coming from. I point out the flaw of the statistic of the abortion data to my right-wing friends, and they told me to f**k myself you are a baby killer. I'm like huh?

If you are curious, here's the picture meme so you guys know what I'm talking about. I'll call this possible misinformation that is all too common on the interwebs nowadays.

We need more @Zampotech in this thread. We need more data guys.

 

My personal take on that is that it should never be a choice between one or the other. "Make money needed to live, or less people die" is a losing proposition no matter how you shake it. I think if our economy is such that it cannot bear what ultimately has to be done to prevent increased loss of life, then it is already failing everyone in it and some intervention is necessary to level that out.

This is unfortunately going be a very hard lesson to learn, but the impact should be a surprise to nobody. A lot of it has to do with how we operate fundamentally. Our money flow has never been as secure as people often assume. That's just becoming more obvious now... just how quickly things can be completely disrupted. A debt-based economy is a precarious thing, to begin with. Can't entirely blame coronavirus for that. All of us have always walked that cliff's edge.

That was my question, too... just how they're compiling the information, knowing how statistics work. I do find those things interesting as a way of seeing how other people might see things, though. Because what I find happens is that people take what they want to see and immediately show it to everyone.

 

The first reported case of COVID-19 in China was on November 17, 2019. I doubt your "strange flu" was COVID-19.

 

This is important to consider, for sure. I think it highlights the importance of testing, because otherwise all we have is conjecture, which is to say it is hard to tell if there's a tangible problem at all, let alone where the biggest problems are.

You could say that cases here were very low, until we started testing specifically for it. And then we started realizing how many people already had it, how many people were turning up with it, and how many people were actually dying from it. Without those tests, nobody would know for sure if anything was happening at all. Now, it seems like the more testing is done, the worse things look. It has only been as that information came out that concerns have mounted in various places.

 

This version has the right to live.
Russia has the longest land border with China. Chinese citizens love to travel in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. A large cargo flow from China to Europe passes through Russia, both by road and by rail.
And most importantly, China has not identified "patient zero" it is not Known where the disease was born, in Siberia or in Chinese Wuhan. A huge number of Chinese people work in Siberia

 

I do not know the reliability of the coronnavirus test in the US, in Russia the reliability of the test is 28%
In fact, this means that you are twice as likely to make a mistake as you are to get the correct result.

Unfortunately, medicine has become a service sector in all countries. In the totalitarian USSR, medicine was a strategic direction and was always aimed at preventing epidemics and catastrophes. There were reserve areas for the deployment of hospitals, quarantine camps, strategic warehouses for medical equipment and medicines, and railway hospitals. Now it's all destroyed.

 

edit: when will Virginia get it's shit together and leg-ul-lize-zit...

 

I don't care where he lives. Living in Russia does not make his opinion extra valid. Look here:

https://www.livescience.com/first-case-coronavirus-found.html

November 17, 2019 was the first known case in China. It spread slowly at first. From the article:

"They found that following the Nov. 17 case, about one to five new cases were reported every day and by Dec. 15, the total infections reached 27. Daily cases seem to have increased after that, with the case count reaching 60 by Dec. 20, the SCMP reported."

It seems VERY unlikely that it made it to Russia in November.

 

Ahahaha, but you know as well as I that people's 'dry materials' are considered as essential as pharmacies. People gotta get their prescriptions filled, right? Maybe keeping that going gives people extra incentive to stay home. I'm sure business is very good for the dispensaries. Very important to all of Florida right now. Kinda joking, kinda not.

I would play the crap out of that. Strange times when just describing things taking place sounds like a really fascinating video game.