Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19)

[knapplc]

 

[RedDenver]

Research has shown that humans have difficulty with exponential increases and decreases and tend to think mostly in linear terms. Here's some data to help understand the exponential increase of the virus spread and why it's so important to help slow it down:

 

[Moiraine]

[Apathy]

1 hour ago, Scarlet said:

4. Bury your head in the sand

 

5. Stay uneducated

[Moiraine]

[suh_fan93]

 

[drfish]

If you want to understand exponential growth, do this little drill.  Let's say that I agree to work for you for 30 days.  For wages, you will pay me 1 cent on the first day and then double it each day thereafter.  Guess what the wage for day thirty is and then calculate it.  

 

NOW, the rate of infection is not doubling each day, but it is increasing.  yesterday about 700, today about 900.

 

China had 830 cases on the 23rd of January when they basically shut down Wuhan and banned travel everywhere.  One month later, they had 77,000 cases.  They started to deflect off of exponential growth on about the 7th of February.

 

Exponential growth is a b!^@h.  Don't panic, for certain, but PLEASE don't under-react either.  Rapid, aggressive action is the ONLY tool we have now and for the immediate future.  

[drfish]

Here is an interesting perspective from the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic.  It is even football related.

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[knapplc]

11 minutes ago, drfish said:

If you want to understand exponential growth, do this little drill.  Let's say that I agree to work for you for 30 days.  For wages, you will pay me 1 cent on the first day and then double it each day thereafter.  Guess what the wage for day thirty is and then calculate it.  

 

NOW, the rate of infection is not doubling each day, but it is increasing.  yesterday about 700, today about 900.

 

China had 830 cases on the 23rd of January when they basically shut down Wuhan and banned travel everywhere.  One month later, they had 77,000 cases.  They started to deflect off of exponential growth on about the 7th of February.

 

Exponential growth is a b!^@h.  Don't panic, for certain, but PLEASE don't under-react either.  Rapid, aggressive action is the ONLY tool we have now and for the immediate future.  

 

Yeah, but some rando doctor I saw on the twitter who lists Christian in his bio says this wasn't as bad as last year's rice & beans gas attack so PANIC PANIC PANIC PANIC LOL how bout dem speakers what wut!?!?!?

[drfish]

For those that don't want to do the math.  Day 30's wages are $5,368,709.12.

[teachercd]

12 minutes ago, drfish said:

For those that don't want to do the math.  Day 30's wages are $5,368,709.12.

Man, I was in 8th grade when that "riddle" was told my class...

[drfish]

Nothing like classics.

 

Further discussion on exponential growth.  Taking the growth from the 13th to the 14th and applying the average daily growth factor that China experienced, each day approximately 1.2 times the number of new cases from the day before and the 14 days approximately before the exponential growth stopped and we could expect about 9500 new cases on the 28th.  That would put us at about 56,000 cases.  We shall see

 

Edit: oops forgot to mention after exponential growth is reversed you still keep adding cases and you would usually end up with about twice as many as on the day the growth flips, so about 112,000 cases in a month.

[Toe]

5 hours ago, knapplc said:

 

"If you need to be right before you move, you will never win. Perfection is the enemy of the good, when it comes to emergency management. Speed trumps perfection."

 

Folks, I'd like you to pay close attention to this quote, because it explains perfectly why the US's response to this has been SO. f#&%ING. BROKEN. and why this s#!tshow is just getting started.

 

By mid-January, China had developed a coronavirus test, and another was developed in Germany. The German test became the standard test adopted by the World Health Organization.

 

But the CDC in the US? Oh no, they've got a bad case of Not Invented Here syndrome. Basically, their policy is that they are the One True Source of new diagnostic testing. In theory, this is supposed to ensure that the new test meets a high quality standard. (Remember that quote about perfection above? Yeeaahhh...) There's a dozen major drug companies in the US, and lots more research hospitals and universities that could have developed a test in parallel to the CDC's work, but they were essentially ordered to remain on the sideline.

 

The CDC's test was finally finished in late January, and started shipping in early February. Aaaand it was a failure. It produced inconsistent, confusing results. The CDC acknowledged the problem in mid-February. Over 160,000 of those tests were produced, but only about 200 were actually used, and the rest were deemed unusable. Finally, at the end of February, the CDC produced a revised test and the FDA loosened rules on who could develop tests. They still haven't actually said what went wrong with that first test, by the way. They just scrapped the part that was causing problems - the 'new' test is really more like a partial test.

 

Quote

James Lawler, director of the global center for health security and an epidemiologist at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, was one of the infectious disease specialists who flew out to meet the Diamond Princess cruise ship passengers in Japan and flew back with them to the United States. Lawler said the problem was not just in the manufacturing of the test but in the design.

In his view, the test has design problems that make it too difficult for many labs to make it work unless they have perfect conditions.

He said that even though the University of Nebraska Medical Center — a world renowned infectious disease institution that houses the state’s public health lab — was able to get the CDC version of the test to work, the Nebraska center developed its own test based on the German lab design published by the WHO.

“It’s very nuanced and complicated to make a diagnostic test,” Lawler said. "If you don’t go back and fix things ... and realize, ‘Hey, maybe I should try a different target,’ that’s when you can run into problems. ... Everything down to the details of the humidity and temperature in some people’s laboratories is going to be different. "

If the design of the test is flawed, he said, "all of those conditions may come into play. Some people have been able to get reproducibly good results and others haven’t.”

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/03/16/cdc-who-coronavirus-tests/

 

So here we are in mid-March. Efforts by other US researchers to produce a test has been hamstrung because they haven't been able to get samples of the virus to test against. From the sound of things, there's also been a lot more red tape around getting approval for these tests than there was for previous outbreaks like Zika. Updated CDC tests are slowly trickling out, but shortages are still widespread. And the test that is available? Most labs in the US can't actually use it on their own because they lack the equipment necessary, so it has to be sent off elsewhere. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/why-coronavirus-testing-us-so-delayed/607954/

 

The US is at least a good six weeks behind where we should be for getting people tested. That's six weeks of health officials largely flying blind they don't really know the full scale of the problem, and probably only know of a small percentage of the total number of Americans infected. And that's six weeks of exponential growth, because most of the people who are infected are still out there, potentially spreading it to others. You might as well not even pay attention when you hear about X new cases confirmed in your area - it's probably safe to assume that the real number is much higher.

 

This s#!tshow is just getting started...

[twofittyonred]

On 3/15/2020 at 11:29 PM, Mavric said:

 

That is not education.  

 

If someone from Australia traveled to China, contracted the virus and returned to Australia, that's proof that climate has nothing to do with it? 

 

That is the opposite of education.

https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/early-edition/audio/donna-demaio-australia-sees-record-surge-in-covid-19-cases/

[Apathy]

8 hours ago, knapplc said:

 

Yeah, but some rando doctor I saw on the twitter who lists Christian in his bio says this wasn't as bad as last year's rice & beans gas attack so PANIC PANIC PANIC PANIC LOL how bout dem speakers what wut!?!?!?

You get EASILY offended and it’s f%&king hilarious. I post one tweet not directed toward you and you lose your marbles over it especially since he has Christian in his bio than TRY to mocking me about my speakers. 
 

Maybe during this pandemic you could grow some thicker skin bud lol

 

Cheers!!!