Anyone have Coronavirus on the boards? If so fill us in on severity.

JesseIsGarbage wrote:

Your arguments are purposefully antagonizing and passive aggressive.

Someone needs to look into a mirror.

But you're right that I should work home where I can.

I'm home right now for the second half of the day.

I do have to deal with physical paper and the mail at work.

Going in is going in. Spending less time in the office doesn't change my risk much.

It's the hookers that I really need to cut down on.

Things people say about COVID-19 that are dumb:

1. Me and my buddies aren't sick, so it must not be that bad.

Reality: It won't be bad for 90% of people, maybe 95% or higher once we get better testing.

2. It's mild for 95% of people, why are we freaking out?

Reality: Even a 1% fatality rate would be catastrophic. Look at your Facebook friends list of 300 and imagine that 3 of them die. Humans suck at understanding the threat of small risks spread over huge populations. Diseases like COVID (and the flu) kill so many because their fatality rates aren't scary enough to prompt people to alter behavior. If this were Ebola, it would be contained quickly because of the high death rate. It's why SARS and MERS were contained quickly. It's the "Hey, this isn't a big deal" response that makes it a mass killer.

3. I think it's been around a long time because I got pretty sick last fall.

Reality: The majority of scientists studying this think it's novel. Your n=1 means nothing. This could turn out to be the case, but there is no solid evidence supporting this at the moment.

4. Only old people/smokers/immuno-compromised people get sick, so I don't have to worry.

Reality: First, 50% of ICU patients in France are under 50. Maybe there's a smoking co-morbidity factor at play there, but it's not a 1:1 that if you're young, you're safe. Second, this is an insanely selfish response. One day you'll be old, one day you might be immunocompromised and certainly you have friends, neighbors, relatives who are. If you have high blood pressure, you're at higher risk, ditto for any sort of heart or lung disease. Personally, I'd much rather get COVID-19 than spread it to someone who may end up in the ICU or dead.

5. The media (or anyone) invented this to damage the administration.

Reality: Dumb conspiracy theory land. It was the media that moved Trump from "this is a hoax" to "I always knew it was a dangerous pandemic". You think the stock market would react so violently to a hoax? No, because people would be rushing in to buy at false lows.

The bottom line is that we have incomplete information at the moment and the we need to err on the side of societal protection.

+100 STAY HOME people. Be safe.

Rational wrote:

Things people say about COVID-19 that are dumb:

1. Me and my buddies aren't sick, so it must not be that bad.

Reality: It won't be bad for 90% of people, maybe 95% or higher once we get better testing.

i.e., Reality: it's not that bad.

2. It's mild for 95% of people, why are we freaking out?

Reality: Even a 1% fatality rate

NO. Full stop. Put your imagination away. You are not talking about "reality." There is no data WHATSOEVER to support your wild speculation. Just stop.

Germany has already demonstrated the upper bound for fatality is likely well below 1%. 10,000 cases in and they're still at 0.3%. The more widely people are tested, the more likely this upper bound is to drop. Testing has been centered around severe cases to this point.

When the outbreak ends you should stay home a**hat. Self quarantine for the remainder of your days.

Bad Wigins wrote:

NO. Full stop. Put your imagination away. You are not talking about "reality." There is no data WHATSOEVER to support your wild speculation. Just stop.

Germany has already demonstrated the upper bound for fatality is likely well below 1%. 10,000 cases in and they're still at 0.3%. The more widely people are tested, the more likely this upper bound is to drop. Testing has been centered around severe cases to this point.

We have quite a lot of data indicating it is above 1% worldwide, and I am sure you are aware of this but you choose to continue ignoring it.

The fact that you continue to ignore this does not change any of our minds on the severity of this pandemic. It merely shows how idiotic and stubborn you continue to be.

STFU and hunker down. What I do with the end of my days is something I'll worry about when we're on the other side of this thing. Until then, STAY HOME.

a**hat wrote:

When the outbreak ends you should stay home a**hat. Self quarantine for the remainder of your days.

1) Rojo quotes, as "facts" (eyeroll): "In 2015, more than 50% of the men in China smoked (women are way down like 2.7%).. The fact that the death rate for men in china is 60+% higher than women is probably linked to this is my hunch."

--There is zero, i.e. (0), chance that the rate of smoking for women in China is as low as 2.7%. They're clearly just not reporting at the same rate. I'd also guess the men are not as high as 50%, but it's a reasonably macho thing to report. Maybe 1 in 3 women, 2 in 5 men or something like that is plausible.

2) I was living in Guangzhou until January of this year. I worked at a university. At the end of December, beginning of January, a flu-like thing ripped through campus--hundreds of people. A few folks went to the hospital, some got pretty sick, but most who went to the hospital (which is incredibly common in China, even for little things) just came back with diagnoses of "viral syndrome of unknown origin," or something like that. Some, I think, showed elevated white cell counts. Who knows whether it was COVID, but I assume it's a nontrivial possibility. I also assume there's a reasonable likelihood that happened elsewhere in China as well, without showing up in the news.

More to the point--I had it too. I was only really "down" for less than a day, in the sense that I had a ridiculously high fever then. After that, I had an irritation of the throat, but not much else, with the NOTABLE EXCEPTION that every run after that for several weeks was a bear. I can now (three months later?) do easy runs without heaving, but my tempos are still herculean efforts, and feel like I'm breathing through a straw. Maybe at some point I go get the lungs checked.

Some other folks in that population did some running, but those of you that have lived over there may have observed that most people who "run" over there jog very, very slowly, and many seem to make a point of trying not to breathe hard. So it's not clear to me whether we'd get reports from them about suffering--I'm not sure how they'd know.

Bad Wigins wrote:

[quote]Rational wrote:

Germany has already demonstrated the upper bound for fatality is likely well below 1%. 10,000 cases in and they're still at 0.3%. The more widely people are tested, the more likely this upper bound is to drop. Testing has been centered around severe cases to this point.

This is nonsense. You are saying since Germany has 28 deaths and over 10K confirmed cases at this moment, their fatality rate is below 0.3%. But on March 12 (6 days ago), Germany only had 2078 confirmed infections, which means the vast majority of their (now over 12K) confirmed infections have been identified in the last 6 or 7 days, with more than half coming in the last 3 days alone. The fact that all these recently diagnosed patients haven't died in 3 days doesn't mean they won't die (According to the recent study out of Imperial College, the average ICU stay from coronavirus is over 10 days).

Even if the average time between displaying symptoms to death is 6 days, you should be estimating Germany's fatality rate by looking at [current deaths]/[# of infections six days ago]. For Germany that's 28/2745, or about 1%.

6 weeks ago wrote:

Very similar timeline. I go to school at Stanford, so it fits the general area. Got sore throat, runny nose, and fever the day before the Super Bowl and then continued flu-like symptoms for 4 days. These stopped, but then had cough for 10 days after that. Toll on the respiratory system is large in my experience: pbs of 14:58, 8:34, and 1:08 half, running 90 mpw, and I could barely run for 5 min stretches without heart rate becoming unsustainable and having to stop. Even those stretches basically felt like race intensity at an easy pace.

There’s many, many more people that have had it before now, and many, many more people that have it now. Almost all statistics shouldn’t be considered gospel.

And what's your situation now? Back to normal? How's your breathing?

Someone may reply to my previous post saying that Germany may be missing tons of cases in their confirmed cases numbers by not testing. But Germany is apparently processing over 100K tests per week (according to this article

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/mass-testing-school-closings-lockdowns-countries-pick-tactics-war-against-coronavirus

).

So I don't know how reasonable that objection is for Germany.

Anyway, let me give my best guesstimate for Germany's death rate.

*I'll go with 8 days as a good guess for the time from onset of symptoms to death, if someone is going to die from their infection.

*8 days ago Germany had 1040 confirmed cases.

*I'll guess that Germany, with its high rate of testing, was detecting 1 out of every 3 actual infections 8 days ago.

This means Germany's fatality rate is roughly 28/(1040*3), which is .9%.

Of course, if Germany is only detecting say 1 out of every 9 actual infections, then the fatality rate there could be 0.3% right now.

Counterpoints to the previous sentence: *If hospitals get overwhelmed (and they appear well on their way in the US), the fatality rate will go way up compared to what we are seeing now.

*Even a fatality rate of 0.3% that infects 60% of people in the US will kill 600,000 people. Even if you totally ignore people in the US under the age of 55, a 0.3% fatality rate will still kill roughly 165,000 Americans, since nearly 95 million people in the US are 55 or older.

badrunner234 wrote:

Even if you totally ignore people in the US under the age of 55, a 0.3% fatality rate will still kill roughly 165,000 Americans, since nearly 95 million people in the US are 55 or older.

Sorry, 95,000,000*0.003=285K not 165K, I must have mistyped something into the google search bar the first time I tried.

Bad Wigins wrote:

+1

People need to stop gawping at Italy and Spain and have a look at northern continental Europe. German's death rate just ticked up very slightly to .25% out of 9257 cases. Norway has 3 deaths out of 1443 cases, only .20%. Austria, 3 dead out of 1332, .22%.

They're not going to end up with even a 1% death rate, or anywhere near it.

The fatalities curve lags the infection case curve because most of the news. The other day you used Belgium as an example of 'only' 0.4% case fatality rate and said it would go down. I said it would go up. Right now it is at 14 deaths for 1,486 cases (1%). The fatality rate from the cruise ship where everyone was tested was just over 1%. Unless treatment significantly improves it is just naive optimism to assume the fatality rate is much lower.

Rational wrote:

3. I think it's been around a long time because I got pretty sick last fall.

Reality: The majority of scientists studying this think it's novel. Your n=1 means nothing. This could turn out to be the case, but there is no solid evidence supporting this at the moment.

It's factually wrong. It has not been around since a long time and especially not in the fall in the US or elsewhere.

Coronavirus causes a huge number of pneumonia and is higly infectious. It would have been noticed very quickly and has been noticed in less than two months.

Ho Hum wrote:

I think it's important to point out that just because you were sick at some point in the past few months doesn't mean you had Coronavirus. So it's pretty goofy to say "I was sick in February with something that wasn't the flu, therefore Coronavirus is no big deal".

I agree with you. It's equally true that when you see 19 deaths at one nursing home you can't assume all those people wouldn't have died from something else within the next 90 days. That sounds callous, and I'm not intending to be - their deaths are individual tragedies for those families. However, that is the reality of nursing homes. Look up what happens to nursing homes when a flu outbreak hits them - it's horrendous.

Rational wrote:

Things people say about COVID-19 that are dumb:

You think the stock market would react so violently to a hoax? No, because people would be rushing in to buy at false lows.

The bottom line is that we have incomplete information at the moment and the we need to err on the side of societal protection.

I don't necessarily disagree with you, but to be clear: the market is reacting to the potential (which is daily becoming reality) that companies can't service their debt due to lost revenue in Q1-Q2 (and now maybe Q3?!) and are having trouble finding credit to extend the runway on their existing debt maturities due to that growing uncertainty surrounding future revenue flows. The market couldn't care less if a hoax, a truth, a clown, or a cosmic storm caused this situation.

Completely back to normal in terms of training and breathing. No lasting effects that I can see, but I’m distancing from all but family just in case.

Bad Wigins wrote:

Rational wrote:

Things people say about COVID-19 that are dumb:

1. Me and my buddies aren't sick, so it must not be that bad.

Reality: It won't be bad for 90% of people, maybe 95% or higher once we get better testing.

i.e., Reality: it's not that bad.

2. It's mild for 95% of people, why are we freaking out?

Reality: Even a 1% fatality rate

NO. Full stop. Put your imagination away. You are not talking about "reality." There is no data WHATSOEVER to support your wild speculation. Just stop.

Germany has already demonstrated the upper bound for fatality is likely well below 1%. 10,000 cases in and they're still at 0.3%. The more widely people are tested, the more likely this upper bound is to drop. Testing has been centered around severe cases to this point.

So, let’s take your argument apart a bit:

Germany shows lower fatality rate than 1% so it’s not bad and we should all calm down:

1. This may or may not be true. Given lagging mortality data from infection data, we won’t have a great grasp on this for awhile. There’s plenty of data to support a worldwide 1% average.

2. Let’s assume you’re right and it’s 0.2% in Germany. Germany is not representative of the world at large. You think it’s going to be 0.2% in the developing world? You think it’ll be that stable if you have large clusters that overwhelm local health center capacities? This is an embarrassingly Eurocentric view (that isn’t even valid I. Italy and Spain) and shows you either haven’t thought about how this plays out in developing countries or you don’t care. Either way, doesn’t reflect well on you.

3. 0.2% is objectively really bad if you think 40-70% of people will be infected. Remember when we all collectively crapped our pants over ISIS? Imagine ISIS cells launched attacks that killed like COVID-19. Even at your optimistic mortality rate, that’s an attack in NYC that would kill 10,000 people. That’s more than 3x September 11th (over which we fought 2 wars). And the same attack would take place with a proportional death rate in every city and town across the world. Do you think people would be scared? Do you think their fear would be justified? And if you say, “Well, the flu does that!” - you’re not too wrong. The flu is terrible! We’ve just normed to it like people once normed to 40 y.o. life expectancies. And it’s a virus we actually have some vaccination control over.

In short, your ethnocentric, misinformed, near-sighted response is why this disease is such a problem. Ironically, if people like you cared more and thought more, the body count might be as low as you imagine it to be.

Bob schul country wrote:

Just wondering how bad it is.

Silly question. I wish this thread were removed. For some odd reason covid has become political. And some folks think the Democrats are savvy enough to shut the borders in Europe and much more. So let’s look at a few simple numbers for you folks who don’t know why my friends who work in the medical fields want to “flatten the curve.” (As the flu shot helps do). Smallish town in Italy. Last year 120 died (2019). In 12 days of covid 70 died. Estimates if the US were not doing what it’s doing range from 400,000 deaths to 2+ million. Will you feel good that only older folks die, but you gave it to a grandparent and they passed away 10 years ahead of schedule? This is not CNN puff or anything similar. Trump is not now doing what he’s doing due to CNN, that’s for sure. Good luck and stay safe. And don’t accidentally kill anyone 60+ just because your symptoms are mild.