It seems they decreased the death and infection counts by a bit due to duplication.
From here. From what I remember of yesterday’s numbers, those are indeed reductions.
And then there’s this (same source):
I wonder if that guy is counted in the death total…
This seems bad from a transmission standpoint: two Tokyo taxi drivers test positive for COVID-19.
When the care is supportive care (oxygen as needed, IV fluids as needed, treating co-morbid bacterial infections as needed, so on) it does not (or rationally should not) matter if the cause is Covid-19 or an unidentified virus. Both should be treated the same. It does seem however that sick patients who needed that care were being turned away unless they had the diagnosis attached of Covid-19. A stupid way to ration care if that is what they were doing.
The data is sloppy and hard to interpret. Imperfect is a major understatement.
That said the accurate information is out there. This was a retrospective data dump of cases that had met that criteria.
After the first big number the next day’s new case number dropped significantly. As of this minute today’s is only 190 new cases reported, but I’d expect to see more added later on.
Alternatively, since we are still in the initial quarantine period (starting Feb 4, now Feb 16, only 12 days of quarantine so far), Japan gambled and won: there were cases of NC19 on board, and they were successfully quarantined.
I think my poor writing skills have resulted in a misunderstanding. I believe Japan should have moved the passengers to land based quarantine as soon as possible, not just released the the passengers and crew. Cruise ships are widely known to be one of the worst possible places to try and contain a viral outbreak.
If someone wants to argue that keeping the passengers on board the ship prevented the virus from spreading on land, then why transfer infected passengers to land? They effectively created 218 (at least) new reservoirs of disease to bring to land and try and contain there.
Land based quarantine would have kept the virus from spreading so widely. That ship is the second largest outbreak of the virus in the whole world. Bigger than any country outside of China.
This isn’t just my opinion.
“I think it’s been a bad decision from the start,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious-disease specialist and a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore. The quarantine was “cruel and inhumane” and “created a horror show on the ocean.” The ship quarantine, which has been going on for over a week, has already led to a major increase in the spread of the virus, even extending to a quarantine officer, he told Live Science. "The virus is being served up more and more victims by the Japanese government so long as this quarantine lasts," Adalja said.
I would say there are 2 wild cards in this.
One is the location of people who had the virus prior to initial reports. Have any of them traveled outside of china?
The other thing is the mutation rate. Are we going to get a more aggressive version of it down the line?
I am nervous the US is doing so little on this.
We still have planes arriving daily from China and people and luggage are not being checked.
Yes luggage. The luggage which gets handled by several people then sits in a hold touching other bags then gets handled by more people before it finally gets to the right person (maybe). And thing is nobody ever does any spot checking for disease.
Well, he’s the expert, but how could he possibly know? Given the long symptom-free period at the start of infection, after ‘more than a week’, the number of cases caused by quarantine would only know be becoming visible — and that doesn’t seem to be the case — and the cases now visible would have been contracted before quarantine measures started.
So how does one “spot check” luggage for “disease”?
Intuitively … this seems like an unlikely vector for the spread of COVID-19. I don’t think just touching things, or items being in the proximity of the things touched, etc. spreads this illness. The chain between an infectious person, with droplets on their hands or whatever, touching something that someone else touches that someone else touches that someone else touches … that someone finally handles luggage in a Chinese airport. Just seems too tenuous and drawn out. The viral load of the droplet gets attenuated, someone along the line washes their hands or handles something hot or something. If your luggage was being handled in Wuhan right now, right before you went to pick it up … I could see being concerned.
I liken it to when people worry about catching things from using a public toilet. For all intents and purposes, it virtually can’t happen … but some percentage of people do worry about it.
Accordingly … I don’t think Cambodia Prime Minister Hun Sen was doing anything particularly risky when he embraced passengers disembarking from the MS Westerdam cruise ship (article). The ship was denied entry to several ports after last being docked at Hong Kong on February 1st.
This is simply not true. Whether it’s a door handle or keyboard it is possible to transfer a virus from person to surface to person. The toilet seat meme is about transfer through skin contact only when the transmission avenue is from skin contact to something like eye contact. Once infected it’s spread faster through sneezing.
They don’t know the lifespan of this particular virus but in it’s family of viruses the upper lifespan can be up to 9 days.
for veterinary coronaviruses the lifespan can be longer than 28 days. This is why you hear of concern about such viruses mutating from animal susceptibility to human .
I think we agree. What I meant by “virtually can’t happen” was specifically the toilet seat meme – as distributed in the past regarding rumors of STDs caught from public restroom use.
Your point about viruses spreading from person to surface to person is granted. My doubts are about a virus spreading from infected person to surface to healthy person to healthy person to surface to healthy person to surface … and so on. After some number of exchanges, the virus is going to be washed away, killed by sanitizer, mechanically removed, or attenuated in some other way. So a healthy person at, say, 20 degrees of remove from the infected person and the objects that person touched … that healthy person is not at particular risk of contracting COVID-19. I admit this is my intuition about the matter – I will not be able to cite research.
I saw an “up to 9 days” study. In laboratory conditions, at a just-so temperature … seemed more like the virus “lucking out” environmentally than an absolutely certain number of days the virus would live on a surface.
Up to nine days in optimum conditions on a hard surface.
But in the real world conditions are seldom optimum.
Also, this family of viruses on hard surfaces can be rendered harmless by either household bleach or rubbing alcohol. Which, by the way, is one way hand sanitizers work - they use alcohol to kill various microscopic nasties.
I live in a climate controlled world from my house, to the car, to work, and back. So that’s 17 hrs a day.
Countries like India with densely populated cities have serious water quality issues from beginning to end. In the real world that 9 days is a continuously overlapping event operating in a petri dish.
for hand sanitizer to work you’d have to use it every time you touched something that is touched by someone else. We couldn’t even deal with HIV and that took almost no effort at all to protect ourselves from.
Barring that the likelihood of a government official entering your office in a bio suite and a spray fogger is zero.
I’d say we’re lucky it started in a country that has iron rule over it’s citizens and it currently isn’t a massively contagious disease. If China can contain it then it becomes another flu virus we can inoculate against going forward.
I hope your right.
I work for the post office and we get LOADS of mail which come directly from China. These are often small, plastic, airtight packages. And we get thousands if not millions of them.
Its starting to be a worry.
Germane to your concerns:
Optimum conditions for human beings is not optimum for survival outside a host for this virus, which prefers low humity, cool temperatures, and no sunlight (which I take to mean it doesn’t like UV).
A country like India - which tends to be hot and humid - would not be optimum for this virus. Nor would it be in the water supply, presumably.
It’s a virus, not a bacteria - it can’t reproduce outside a living body, unlike bacteria that can reproduce in water.
No, you have to use the hand sanitizer between touching other things and touching yourself (face, eyes, nose, mouth). Or touching other people.
It’s not a flu virus.
Prior attempts to make a vaccine against the coronavirus resulted in a vaccine more deadly than the SARS virus - which is not to say it’s impossible to develop a safe vaccine, just that it’s not as straightforward as you seem to think.
We still don’t have an effective vaccine against HIV
We know that Dengue is not well-addressed via vaccine.
We might get a vaccine for COVID-19, but I’m not betting on that. I am curious if there are effective vaccines against any other corona viruses, though.
Now China has gone back to reporting only cases that have been laboratory confirmed, instead of clinically detected. That’s most likely why the number of new cases there has decreased in the last couple-three days. This changing of the criteria is going to play havoc with the computation of statistics, such as the mortality rate.
I was wondering what was up with that. I was starting to get hopeful. Only 396 new cases from China today.