6 ms·

The other thing is the incubation period is around 5 days. So really the numbers are at least 5 days behind.

hermitdev 7y ago
What I've been seeing is the experts think an individual may be infectious up to 14 days before showing symptoms, hence the 2 week wuatantine.
- afiori 7y ago
  It can be up to 21-24, even if mostly it is under 14
bdamm 7y ago
And of course in the US there are not as many testing kits as in other countries, so the numbers are basically 3 months behind.
- standardUser 7y ago
  The US is probably a much larger vector than we realize. The testing rate is the lowest in the world and Americans travel like mad. Who knows how many undiagnosed Americans have been globe trotting over the last couple weeks?
  - anigbrowl 7y ago
    You have no idea :-(
  - Thlom 7y ago
    And you have millions without basic access to healthcare, meaning they will go around untreated passing the virus along to their fellow citizens.
    - jdietrich 7y ago
      Also no statutory entitlement to sick pay, so many people will drag themselves into work because they can't afford to take time off.
      - mancerayder 7y ago
        And also unpredictable and variable (and delayed) medical bills for those who don't have great employer-provided healthcare (and even sometimes when they do). The stories abound of a hospital visit with a magical bill that appears months later with some unpaid sum that's in the 4 digits. Everyone knows someone who this happened to - I happened to know a couple who received a 5-digit bill for a baby who died many many months later. Now, as a rational person you're not going to go to an ER willy nilly, and sometimes an ER is what you get pointed to by smaller medical centers. The U.S. medical model doesn't work - for the group. It works - for the individual. I had superb eye surgery recently from a top world center and it was fully paid. But the viruses don't care if one of us can afford care, and the other can't, because the virus views us as a singular organism, and now we're all at risk. Which is exactly how the health system should begin viewing us.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    Wait, I thought the standard refrain is American's never travel - we don't even have a passport to get aboard.
- alasdair_ 7y ago
  I live in Seattle, so I’ve been following the WA outbreak with particular fervor. What is utterly batshit insane to me is that as of YESTERDAY, the nursing home with almost every death in the USA STILL didn’t have enough testing kits to test the 63 residents left, nevermind the dozens of staff. They received 45 test kits. Total. This is AFTER Mike Pence visited the state and assured everyone that “millions” of kits were available. I am extremely angry about the way Trump and his cronies have fucked up the most basic level of competency required here. People dying and people needing to be tested should not be a political issue. We should not have to worry if we make his “numbers look bad” to get basic help with a pandemic. Seattle is a fucking ghost town. Basic competency at governance would have mitigated this. I am enraged at the level of incompetence the current administration has displayed.
  - pishpash 7y ago
    Freedom is not free, self rule requires some people to actually sacrifice their careers to be in the political process rather than handing it over to student body president level nincompoops, ass kissers and sociopaths. The local government is shit with the homeless problem. The Federal government is shit because the then candidate told you he could kill somebody on Fifth Avenue with no consequence. So it's well established that people are okay with some citizens dying for nothing. What's so surprising or worthy of anger here, today?
    - Gibbon1 7y ago
      This is America 40 years after the neoliberal revolution. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhYJS80MgYA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhYJS80MgYA
  - consp 7y ago
    You sound correct about the hypocracy but as far as I can find out the normal tests are reported about 40-70% accurate (reports vary but my understanding is more near 40 than 70) in non-symptomatic people and around here they are thus only used and done twice if one has symptoms as even then they are not fool-proof. The test is thus pretty useless to perform on everybody as it gives too many false positives and too many false negatives to be useful to people with no symptoms. It would be a lot better though if they explained that. People here (Netherlands) are also complaining about not being tested before having symptoms or even after being admitted, as they assume the test will give them a yes/no answer which it won't.
- makomk 7y ago
  Not really. Even though the US media has focused on the raw number of tests carried out for domestic political reasons and left a lot of people with the belief that the number of confirmed cases is basically just a function of the number of tests, Italy has been visibly struggling to test people. If you look at the percentage of tests that came out positive rather than the absolute numbers, it's obvious that Italy was only testing people who were very likely to have the disease, especially during and after the big spike in cases that got everyone's attention. It was in the very high single digits for quite a while, compared to the 3% that the CDC's old, very restrictive policy of only testing a handful of people very likely to have it There's other evidence that Italy's numbers were off too. I'm particularly miffed about this because it seems to have spread to our shores and convinced a bunch of people that the reason the UK has lower numbers than Italy is because they're not testing people, to the point they're literally unable to believe that Italy has only tested twice as many patients for the coronavirus as the UK.
cocoggu 7y ago
In my opinion, this is really the main reason why this virus is spreading globally. In fact, the average incubation period seems to be 5 days, which is already a lot. But apparently, some subjects had an incubation period up to 24 days, if correct, this is huge and the main reason why it suddenly raised in Italy. Imagine only one relatively social person in Italy, in 24 days he/she can probably meet at least 50 person directly and much much more if he/she goes to some public activities. Like SARS, it just need a few super-spreaders who aren't even aware of being sick, to start an epidemic.
- gambiting 7y ago
  It's still unclear whether you are spreading the virus for the entirety of the symptom-less period though.
- jopsen 7y ago
  Risk of infecting others when you're without symptoms is supposedly small.. I'm by no means an expert, but to me the problem seems to be lack of proactive social distancing; and lack of proactive testing of everyone with symptoms. Current guidelines seems statistically sound, it's just that we have little mitigation for the few that do slip through.
  - notaki 7y ago
    "People who contract the novel coronavirus emit high amounts of virus very early on in their infection, according to a new study from Germany that helps to explain the rapid and efficient way in which the virus has spread around the world." "The researchers found very high levels of virus emitted from the throat of patients from the earliest point in their illness —when people are generally still going about their daily routines" https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/09/people-shed-high-levels-of-coronavirus-study-finds-but-most-are-likely-not-infectious-after-recovery-begins/ https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/09/people-shed-high-levels-...
jonplackett 7y ago
You can add the testing delay on top of that too. Some countries it's still taking a few days to get a result.

What I've been seeing is the experts think an individual may be infectious up to 14 days before showing symptoms, hence the 2 week wuatantine.

afiori 7y ago
It can be up to 21-24, even if mostly it is under 14

bdamm 7y ago

And of course in the US there are not as many testing kits as in other countries, so the numbers are basically 3 months behind.

standardUser 7y ago
The US is probably a much larger vector than we realize. The testing rate is the lowest in the world and Americans travel like mad. Who knows how many undiagnosed Americans have been globe trotting over the last couple weeks?
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  You have no idea :-(
- Thlom 7y ago
  And you have millions without basic access to healthcare, meaning they will go around untreated passing the virus along to their fellow citizens.
  - jdietrich 7y ago
    Also no statutory entitlement to sick pay, so many people will drag themselves into work because they can't afford to take time off.
    - mancerayder 7y ago
      And also unpredictable and variable (and delayed) medical bills for those who don't have great employer-provided healthcare (and even sometimes when they do). The stories abound of a hospital visit with a magical bill that appears months later with some unpaid sum that's in the 4 digits. Everyone knows someone who this happened to - I happened to know a couple who received a 5-digit bill for a baby who died many many months later. Now, as a rational person you're not going to go to an ER willy nilly, and sometimes an ER is what you get pointed to by smaller medical centers. The U.S. medical model doesn't work - for the group. It works - for the individual. I had superb eye surgery recently from a top world center and it was fully paid. But the viruses don't care if one of us can afford care, and the other can't, because the virus views us as a singular organism, and now we're all at risk. Which is exactly how the health system should begin viewing us.
- bluGill 7y ago
  Wait, I thought the standard refrain is American's never travel - we don't even have a passport to get aboard.
alasdair_ 7y ago
I live in Seattle, so I’ve been following the WA outbreak with particular fervor. What is utterly batshit insane to me is that as of YESTERDAY, the nursing home with almost every death in the USA STILL didn’t have enough testing kits to test the 63 residents left, nevermind the dozens of staff. They received 45 test kits. Total. This is AFTER Mike Pence visited the state and assured everyone that “millions” of kits were available. I am extremely angry about the way Trump and his cronies have fucked up the most basic level of competency required here. People dying and people needing to be tested should not be a political issue. We should not have to worry if we make his “numbers look bad” to get basic help with a pandemic. Seattle is a fucking ghost town. Basic competency at governance would have mitigated this. I am enraged at the level of incompetence the current administration has displayed.
- pishpash 7y ago
  Freedom is not free, self rule requires some people to actually sacrifice their careers to be in the political process rather than handing it over to student body president level nincompoops, ass kissers and sociopaths. The local government is shit with the homeless problem. The Federal government is shit because the then candidate told you he could kill somebody on Fifth Avenue with no consequence. So it's well established that people are okay with some citizens dying for nothing. What's so surprising or worthy of anger here, today?
  - Gibbon1 7y ago
    This is America 40 years after the neoliberal revolution. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhYJS80MgYA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhYJS80MgYA
- consp 7y ago
  You sound correct about the hypocracy but as far as I can find out the normal tests are reported about 40-70% accurate (reports vary but my understanding is more near 40 than 70) in non-symptomatic people and around here they are thus only used and done twice if one has symptoms as even then they are not fool-proof. The test is thus pretty useless to perform on everybody as it gives too many false positives and too many false negatives to be useful to people with no symptoms. It would be a lot better though if they explained that. People here (Netherlands) are also complaining about not being tested before having symptoms or even after being admitted, as they assume the test will give them a yes/no answer which it won't.
makomk 7y ago
Not really. Even though the US media has focused on the raw number of tests carried out for domestic political reasons and left a lot of people with the belief that the number of confirmed cases is basically just a function of the number of tests, Italy has been visibly struggling to test people. If you look at the percentage of tests that came out positive rather than the absolute numbers, it's obvious that Italy was only testing people who were very likely to have the disease, especially during and after the big spike in cases that got everyone's attention. It was in the very high single digits for quite a while, compared to the 3% that the CDC's old, very restrictive policy of only testing a handful of people very likely to have it There's other evidence that Italy's numbers were off too. I'm particularly miffed about this because it seems to have spread to our shores and convinced a bunch of people that the reason the UK has lower numbers than Italy is because they're not testing people, to the point they're literally unable to believe that Italy has only tested twice as many patients for the coronavirus as the UK.

cocoggu 7y ago

In my opinion, this is really the main reason why this virus is spreading globally. In fact, the average incubation period seems to be 5 days, which is already a lot. But apparently, some subjects had an incubation period up to 24 days, if correct, this is huge and the main reason why it suddenly raised in Italy. Imagine only one relatively social person in Italy, in 24 days he/she can probably meet at least 50 person directly and much much more if he/she goes to some public activities. Like SARS, it just need a few super-spreaders who aren't even aware of being sick, to start an epidemic.

gambiting 7y ago
It's still unclear whether you are spreading the virus for the entirety of the symptom-less period though.
jopsen 7y ago
Risk of infecting others when you're without symptoms is supposedly small.. I'm by no means an expert, but to me the problem seems to be lack of proactive social distancing; and lack of proactive testing of everyone with symptoms. Current guidelines seems statistically sound, it's just that we have little mitigation for the few that do slip through.
- notaki 7y ago
  "People who contract the novel coronavirus emit high amounts of virus very early on in their infection, according to a new study from Germany that helps to explain the rapid and efficient way in which the virus has spread around the world." "The researchers found very high levels of virus emitted from the throat of patients from the earliest point in their illness —when people are generally still going about their daily routines" https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/09/people-shed-high-levels-of-coronavirus-study-finds-but-most-are-likely-not-infectious-after-recovery-begins/ https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/09/people-shed-high-levels-...

jonplackett 7y ago

You can add the testing delay on top of that too. Some countries it's still taking a few days to get a result.