It’s fun to scroll through from the beginning to the end of this thread.
Back when Wuhan was beginning to be in the news, my husband bought two gallons of hand sanitizer and a blood oxygen tester (the finger thing). He said it was going to be much much worse than anyone was imagining, in the US. We thought he was being paranoid.
I was able to order a blood oxygen thing on-line yesterday. All the popular vendors still have them. (When I was unable to find hand sanitizer a week ago, I noticed a stack of them in the drug store, too, but didn’t think to buy one then.)
I kinda wish I’d bought that large bottle of 95% rubbing alcohol I put back on the shelves, but I don’t really use hand sanitizer at home. We have a lot of soap.
If the numbers are consistant, Italy will surpass China in total deaths tomorrow (19-Mar-2020)
In officially reported total deaths. Obviously in the real world they are still way behind China and Iran.
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Not really concerned now thanks to my Subaru first aid kit https://www.subarupartspros.com/sku/soa868v9501.html I feel like this would help me today as I step outside my house to get some supplies hahahaha
Also of course Korea is leading the world in terms of testing. If Covid has a large proportion of mild cases then they are best placed to detect that and have a corresponding low CFR.
You know that for a fact?
Let me tell you what it’s like living in China right now: moving back to normal every day. Most restaurants, bars and gyms have reopened (albeit with things like occupancy restrictions e.g. max 60 people in the gym at one time).
Even some state-owned public places like museums have reopened. The temporary hospitals have closed.
So what is the reality?
Is it that there are still lots of cases, but the government has suspended measures to contain the virus regardless? Or is it that it was much more severe than the official figures but had a cliff-face dropoff in cases?
The worry is what happens in 5 to 6 weeks.
Are higher risk individuals maintaining social distance protocols? Are people still vigilant about self quarantine if sick? The odds that it won’t come back as controls are eased are very low. Can they control the curve as it does?
Maybe move the sick to wherever the Uighar are these days?
Yes. A complete lockdown will stop transmission of the virus whether your baseline number of cases is 10,000 or 1 million. There are multiple reliable reports from China that the government was under counting cases and deaths in Wuhan. There are videos showing stacks of bodies being transported in minibuses at a time that the claimed death rate was several dozen per day, in a city of 10 million.
When Dr Li Wenliang died, the Chinese government (at whatever level) had the hospital make a statement saying he hadn’t died, which was itself reversed a few hours later. This was all reported on reliable international news sources such as the BBC, not conspiracy theory websites. I’m not sure why anyone would trust official figures coming from China.
As far as Iran goes, there is satellite evidence showing mass graves being dug in Qom around the time they reported their 1st two deaths.
What’s happening with the uighar is terrible, and I have said so here before. I’m not some apologist for the chinese government.
But it’s nothing to do with the topic at hand.
Let’s be clear: I don’t trust the Chinese government at all, especially when it comes to lies by omission.
However, it’s not possible to take the general observation that the government lies to make specific inferences. It’s not some riddle where China must answer every question with a lie; obviously the majority of the time, as a practical matter, the truth is necessary.
A lot of information is being shared on social media of who has been diagnosed, from what residential building and with photos of the people being tested and/or taken to hospital.
So…what is even the theory here? That they are allowing this information to only be shared for a subset of cases? And at the same time relaxing the containment rules? For what purpose? It doesn’t even make sense.
If China is saying deaths are X thousand, and someone wants to assert the true deaths are much more, I would want to see some supporting evidence or at least a good argument. “The Chinese government is not to be trusted” is insufficient in itself.
The theory is that things got a lot worse in Wuhan before they got better. The evidence is that there were videos showing mass disease and death at a time when the official numbers were not concordant with that, which imply the numbers were being greatly underreported.
Yeah, but even the Chinese government is admitting that the case count underestimates the severity of the disease, not for any malicious reason, but simply because it’s impossible to track every case in the middle of a pandemic. In China, there were stories of people dying suddenly and their bodies being burnt to prevent transmission where we’ll never know if they died of COVID 19 or a more mundane causes (remember, once you’re over 65, you have about a 2+% chance of dying every year and there’s 5.5 million people in Hubei over 65 so you’d expect 40+K old people dying anyway during the lockdown, many of them with generic pneumonia/flu like symptoms).
Italy is reporting the exact same thing and it’s rich hearing this accusation from the US where the defining feature of the pandemic response has been a lack of testing. If you go on American social media, all you hear are stories of people coming down with a mysterious flu like illness a month ago, being denied testing and now they’re better.
China doesn’t really lie for the outside world, it’s mainly lying to control the Chinese people. China needs to convince people to go back to work and not be afraid which means they need to be 100% sure the virus is eliminated before that happens because everyone is on edge and super jumpy about another outbreak forming. Part of why they’re sending so much aid overseas is to prove to the Chinese people that there are already enough masks/ventilators domestically to deal with the remaining cases that China truly can afford to give away supplies now.
Yeah, that was because the once the lockdown started, official policy was all bodies were to be burnt immediately to prevent risk of transmission. Traditional Chinese funeral rites calls for Shou Ling (守灵) which is somewhat akin to the Jewish tradition of sitting Shiva where someone is sitting beside the corpse 24 hours a day for 3 days. This is, understandably, not a great practice in the middle of a pandemic. China, like all countries, had a significant share of people who didn’t take the virus seriously in the early days and funeral rites are an important part of any culture so you had people lots of people practicing 守灵 in secret in defiance of the government and then getting sick. That’s why they had to crack down so hard and enforce the burning of all bodies, even if the deceased died of a broken leg or something.
Also, the early days of quarantine were a mess and so you had a spike in deaths from things like people not being able to get their cancer medicines or the elderly suffering a fall in their apartment alone and not having anyone to call for help. You also had a ton of homeless people which, to this day, we’re still not quite clear what happened to them since officially homelessness, is an uncomfortable topic that the Chinese Do Not Speak About in polite society.
None of this was hidden from the Chinese people, none of this was some huge revelation that happened after the lockdown was lifted. It’s just that selective images from China were taken by Western media and the context was carefully stripped to make it seem way more sensationalist than it was.
Korea’s CFR isn’t low, despite having a large percentage of twentysomethings from the Shincheonji cult in their infected population. Even though Korea’s outbreak has basically stabilized, the death toll continues to rise as it can take up to 6-8 weeks for COVID-19 to kill you. There have been more than 30 additional deaths in the past week, bringing the CFR to over 1.2%.
Based on this, it’s looking like the US CFR could end up being several percent.
I hope y’all are concerned enough to spare a couple of minutes to let your elected representatives and senators know how you think they’re doing.
A little more concerned, now that a friend of mine in the city is in the hospital. He’s tested positive for the virus and has pneumonia. First time this has affected me directly, and I expect I’ll hear of other stricken friends when this is over.
I expect the numbers are vastly underreported everywhere. In China the government could cook the books. In the US they simply aren’t testing people. It all results in an undercount.
I like it, Just add ppe and you’re all set.
On sale right now too 9.99!
Not so concerned personally.
I am single and naturally antisocial. But I am a 63 year old smoker. So if I do get it, I am likely dead. I can distance quite well at home and at work. I can do a lot to avoid it.
I am concerned for others that i know. They will have a harder time avoiding it.
It is also possible that if only 2 to 3 people where I work, were to die from this. The whole operation could end. They are key to the business being able to get contracts.