6 ms·

Wishful thinking. It was h1n1. If there was also breathing problems reported - then we are talking

by Giorgi 6y ago

dilyevsky 6y ago
+1 this “i had the worst flu” meme needs to die - nobody was stockpiling dead bodies in mobile refrigerators in jan as far as i recall
- thu2111 6y ago
  Your statement isn't logical. Disease spread tends to always show a pretty standard shape. It was that observation (Farr's law) that led to epidemiology being born as a field. It grows, it peaks, it enters immediate decline. Importantly the peak doesn't last long - epidemics don't spend 6 months with a stable number of people getting sick at the peak. Look at graphs of COVID deaths and cases and you'll see the standard pattern. We know now that this virus has left hospitals virtually everywhere without overload, even in places like Sweden. A few other places were hit much harder. But the response in New York (with mobile morgues) wasn't reported anywhere else. It's apparently some kind of invention of New York policymakers during a brief peak rather than a worldwide phenomenon. A virus can be spreading and growing for a long time before it attracts attention. The evidence keeps mounting that the first reports in Wuhan were not in fact the first cases after COVID had mutated or crossed from animals but merely the first where doctors decided to search for a novel virus after coming under pressure and noticing some novel symptoms. What you saw in New York was a mix of: 1. Conditions at the absolute peak of infection, not at the start. 2. Media hype and fake news. For (2) I present https://nypost.com/2020/04/01/cbs-admits-to-using-footage-from-italy-in-report-about-nyc/ https://nypost.com/2020/04/01/cbs-admits-to-using-footage-fr... as evidence. CNBC spliced video from an ICU in Italy into reports about New York without telling anyone. Outright deliberate deception is also the tip of an iceberg: there's far more selective reporting, exaggerated anecdotes and so on. On April 6th Vox reported the entire USA was running out of sedatives needed for ventilation: https://www.vox.com/2020/4/6/21209589/coronavirus-medicine-ventilators-drug-shortage-sedatives-covid-19 https://www.vox.com/2020/4/6/21209589/coronavirus-medicine-v... On the same day Gov Cuomo was saying they had enough ventilators with some in reserve. A few days later he was sending them to other parts of the USA. Whatever you think you know about the situation in New York you really only have a tiny fragment of the whole picture (and the same for me and everyone else posting here). Our understand of reality lies shattered in pieces on the floor, smashed by speed, poor quality data, poor use of data, and extremely poor journalism. All we can do is work to piece together a narrative of what really happened by examining all the evidence we can get. Repeated anecdotes from many different people about having had a COVID-like illness before it was being discussed much are interesting for that reason.
  - yomly 6y ago
    Actually a personal friend who is a doctor on the frontline in Paris saw mobile morgues back in late March. So I am capable of personally falsifying your statement: >But the response in New York (with mobile morgues) wasn't reported anywhere else. I lack a citation but I'm not really trying to prove anything either. I don't think New York is isolated. Lombardy seems to be stricken pretty hard, and it's hard for us to know what it was truly like in Wuhan.
    - lbeltrame 6y ago
      Speaking for Italy: at least part of the high number of deaths might be traced back to hospital infections (such as a massive outbreak in the hospital of Alzano Lombardo, which initially was kept open after a very brief closure) which of course targeted more vulnerable people. Also nursing care homes make up a significant part of the deaths: some infected patients from elsewhere were put there under the "promise" of keeping them separate from the others, and you can imagine what happened later.
  - mcbits 6y ago
    > Importantly the peak doesn't last long - epidemics don't spend 6 months with a stable number of people getting sick at the peak. Look at graphs of COVID deaths and cases and you'll see the standard pattern. What's interesting is that many US states have shown virtually linear growth for more than a month, which is an extended "peak", assuming it's a peak. That depends on if enough of the population is exposed before the interventions are relaxed, or else it will just revert to its natural progression and the media will have something exciting to report on again.
    - Majromax 6y ago
      > What's interesting is that many US states have shown virtually linear growth for more than a month, The US data is tricky to interpret because the nation's testing rate has been growing relatively slowly. Over the past week (Covid tracking project data), the US has reported about 242k tests/day; for the week ending April 7 (so 4 weeks ago), that number was 144k tests/day. In the meantime, an extended peak is consistent with the idea that policy measures in place have reduced the R0, but only to a value close to 1. Suppose stay-at-home orders reduce the number of daily contacts by about 70%, taking the R0 from 2.5 to about 0.8. With an infection period of two weeks, that would only reduce the number of new infections per day by 35% after a month.
- gridlockd 6y ago
  Excess deaths as of today are maybe 50% higher than usual even at the peak, so there is no way we would able to tell that we had an outbreak from excess deaths that early on. The only way to know would have been to perform tests, which we did not do. All the antibody studies so far suggested infection numbers that were massively higher than confirmed cases. Furthermore the PCR tests used for initial diagnosis have high false negative rates and most people with only mild or no symptoms never got tested in the first place.
  - rjtavares 6y ago
    How would we not tell 50% excess mortality? BTW, that 50% is for national level and with a shutdown in place. Regions hardly hit by the virus have a much higher excess mortality (Bergamo province 450%, NYC 390%, Madrid 250%, Manaus 250%) [1] [1] https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1256312094334619648 https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1256312094334619648
    - gridlockd 6y ago
      It is that high now, it would not have been that high early on, especially considering that mortality is most likely closer to 0.5%. It simply would not have registered among the usual deaths from viral pneumonia, which has a year over year variance of a similar magnitude. The actual death numbers are also highly dependent on the age groups affected, in Germany for instance there is no discernible excess mortality because most of the infected are below the age of 65.
      - foobarian 6y ago
        I want to believe that a bunch of us already had and got over Covid, I really do. I am in northeastern USA and a lot of people around me had this "unusually bad" flu this year. Coworkers, kids, me and family - took us a month to get over it. But, that would mean the disease was super widespread and we couldn't call that period "early on". Based on anecdata and Bayes it means a lot of people had it already in Feb, as many as during peak flu season. This is why I believe it's just a bad flu after all - the spread pattern matches the usual seasonal flu/cold; and we would have noticed an elevated mortality.

Wishful thinking. It was h1n1. If there was also breathing problems reported - then we are talking

by Giorgi 6y ago

Wishful thinking. It was h1n1. If there was also breathing problems reported - then we are talking

+1 this “i had the worst flu” meme needs to die - nobody was stockpiling dead bodies in mobile refrigerators in jan as far as i recall

thu2111 6y ago
Your statement isn't logical. Disease spread tends to always show a pretty standard shape. It was that observation (Farr's law) that led to epidemiology being born as a field. It grows, it peaks, it enters immediate decline. Importantly the peak doesn't last long - epidemics don't spend 6 months with a stable number of people getting sick at the peak. Look at graphs of COVID deaths and cases and you'll see the standard pattern. We know now that this virus has left hospitals virtually everywhere without overload, even in places like Sweden. A few other places were hit much harder. But the response in New York (with mobile morgues) wasn't reported anywhere else. It's apparently some kind of invention of New York policymakers during a brief peak rather than a worldwide phenomenon. A virus can be spreading and growing for a long time before it attracts attention. The evidence keeps mounting that the first reports in Wuhan were not in fact the first cases after COVID had mutated or crossed from animals but merely the first where doctors decided to search for a novel virus after coming under pressure and noticing some novel symptoms. What you saw in New York was a mix of: 1. Conditions at the absolute peak of infection, not at the start. 2. Media hype and fake news. For (2) I present https://nypost.com/2020/04/01/cbs-admits-to-using-footage-from-italy-in-report-about-nyc/ https://nypost.com/2020/04/01/cbs-admits-to-using-footage-fr... as evidence. CNBC spliced video from an ICU in Italy into reports about New York without telling anyone. Outright deliberate deception is also the tip of an iceberg: there's far more selective reporting, exaggerated anecdotes and so on. On April 6th Vox reported the entire USA was running out of sedatives needed for ventilation: https://www.vox.com/2020/4/6/21209589/coronavirus-medicine-ventilators-drug-shortage-sedatives-covid-19 https://www.vox.com/2020/4/6/21209589/coronavirus-medicine-v... On the same day Gov Cuomo was saying they had enough ventilators with some in reserve. A few days later he was sending them to other parts of the USA. Whatever you think you know about the situation in New York you really only have a tiny fragment of the whole picture (and the same for me and everyone else posting here). Our understand of reality lies shattered in pieces on the floor, smashed by speed, poor quality data, poor use of data, and extremely poor journalism. All we can do is work to piece together a narrative of what really happened by examining all the evidence we can get. Repeated anecdotes from many different people about having had a COVID-like illness before it was being discussed much are interesting for that reason.
- yomly 6y ago
  Actually a personal friend who is a doctor on the frontline in Paris saw mobile morgues back in late March. So I am capable of personally falsifying your statement: >But the response in New York (with mobile morgues) wasn't reported anywhere else. I lack a citation but I'm not really trying to prove anything either. I don't think New York is isolated. Lombardy seems to be stricken pretty hard, and it's hard for us to know what it was truly like in Wuhan.
  - lbeltrame 6y ago
    Speaking for Italy: at least part of the high number of deaths might be traced back to hospital infections (such as a massive outbreak in the hospital of Alzano Lombardo, which initially was kept open after a very brief closure) which of course targeted more vulnerable people. Also nursing care homes make up a significant part of the deaths: some infected patients from elsewhere were put there under the "promise" of keeping them separate from the others, and you can imagine what happened later.
- mcbits 6y ago
  > Importantly the peak doesn't last long - epidemics don't spend 6 months with a stable number of people getting sick at the peak. Look at graphs of COVID deaths and cases and you'll see the standard pattern. What's interesting is that many US states have shown virtually linear growth for more than a month, which is an extended "peak", assuming it's a peak. That depends on if enough of the population is exposed before the interventions are relaxed, or else it will just revert to its natural progression and the media will have something exciting to report on again.
  - Majromax 6y ago
    > What's interesting is that many US states have shown virtually linear growth for more than a month, The US data is tricky to interpret because the nation's testing rate has been growing relatively slowly. Over the past week (Covid tracking project data), the US has reported about 242k tests/day; for the week ending April 7 (so 4 weeks ago), that number was 144k tests/day. In the meantime, an extended peak is consistent with the idea that policy measures in place have reduced the R0, but only to a value close to 1. Suppose stay-at-home orders reduce the number of daily contacts by about 70%, taking the R0 from 2.5 to about 0.8. With an infection period of two weeks, that would only reduce the number of new infections per day by 35% after a month.
gridlockd 6y ago
Excess deaths as of today are maybe 50% higher than usual even at the peak, so there is no way we would able to tell that we had an outbreak from excess deaths that early on. The only way to know would have been to perform tests, which we did not do. All the antibody studies so far suggested infection numbers that were massively higher than confirmed cases. Furthermore the PCR tests used for initial diagnosis have high false negative rates and most people with only mild or no symptoms never got tested in the first place.
- rjtavares 6y ago
  How would we not tell 50% excess mortality? BTW, that 50% is for national level and with a shutdown in place. Regions hardly hit by the virus have a much higher excess mortality (Bergamo province 450%, NYC 390%, Madrid 250%, Manaus 250%) [1] [1] https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1256312094334619648 https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1256312094334619648
  - gridlockd 6y ago
    It is that high now, it would not have been that high early on, especially considering that mortality is most likely closer to 0.5%. It simply would not have registered among the usual deaths from viral pneumonia, which has a year over year variance of a similar magnitude. The actual death numbers are also highly dependent on the age groups affected, in Germany for instance there is no discernible excess mortality because most of the infected are below the age of 65.
    - foobarian 6y ago
      I want to believe that a bunch of us already had and got over Covid, I really do. I am in northeastern USA and a lot of people around me had this "unusually bad" flu this year. Coworkers, kids, me and family - took us a month to get over it. But, that would mean the disease was super widespread and we couldn't call that period "early on". Based on anecdata and Bayes it means a lot of people had it already in Feb, as many as during peak flu season. This is why I believe it's just a bad flu after all - the spread pattern matches the usual seasonal flu/cold; and we would have noticed an elevated mortality.