Monday, March 23, 2020

COVID-19 # 32 (Required Parts are Highlighted)

I pick on China a lot. I hope they don't take it personally. Let me pick on India instead: they're lying too. India claims they have 425 "confirmed cases". The key word there is confirmed: if you don't confirm them, you don't have them. Anyway, in a country with few cars, they have shut down public transportation. Sometimes it's better to pay attention to the non-numerical rather than the numerical data.

Continue to have your thinking cap on whenever you hear about a record increase in cases. Of course the increases are a record, that's how the math works. Expect this, and ignore the journalists just looking for new stuff to write and say.

There's initial research out on disease features in Italy. Median age of those who tested positive is 69. Hospitalization rate was 47% amongst those testing positive. ICU admission rate was 18% of those testing positive. Serial interval was 6.6 days (recall that one is how long from when you show symptoms until the person you infected shows symptoms). R0 estimated at 3.1 (recall that this is the average number of people infected by each person, and that it is around 1.2 for the flu and initial estimate for SARS-CoV-2 from China were just over two).

But, there's a worrying bit about Italy's data too. The death/recovered ratio is 82%. Italy still have over 50K people in earlier stages who are neither. That would suggest they're still looking at 23K deaths, or more.

Bored? The New York Public Library has an app that allows you free download access to over 300K titles. The app works the same way as a library — if you check something out, someone else can not, so don't abuse it. BUT, 300K is a really big set of titles to choose from.

Just one more note to freak you out. I mentioned that Iron County has only 6 ICU beds, right? Well, Beaver, Millard, and Garfield counties have zero, and while there are not that many people that live there, they're probably coming here first.

The Epoch Times (not a supporter of the government in China) has more on the missing cellphone accounts. They count 21 million missing accounts that have gone missing over the last 3 months (that's based on official, publicly available, data). Keep in mind that everyone in China is now required to be able to display a health app on their phone to move about outside their homes. This is not a seasonal drop off: last year cellphone accounts went up by 24 million over the same quarter. While adults in China are allowed to have up to 5 accounts, there are 1.15 accounts per capita. One innocent possibility is that the 300 million Chinese who migrate internally for work maintain accounts in two locations. Perhaps they went home for the holidays and discontinued the account where they work. This seems unlikely, given the desirability of jobs in richer urban areas. As always, check the math: the official death toll can account for 0.02% of the missing accounts. While it really can't even qualify as circumstantial evidence, the account loss is so large that even a small inaccuracy in that percentage would correspond to a large number of unreported deaths.

In a similar vein, Hubei province put 40 mobile cremators, typically used for biological waste, into service on February 16th. Each is capable of processing up to 30 bodies per day. It's not clear if they are still running. However, keep in mind that the outbreak was supposedly winding down by this point.

Either way, both the above paragraphs point to the Chinese experience, as officially tallied, as not being a good way to measure the severity of the outbreak in Italy, and as an underestimate of what is likely to happen in the U.S.

Our son goes to the U. While he does not live in campus housing, he has, so we are still on the mailing list. Here's what's new this morning: while they have let students remain in the dorms voluntarily through the end of the semester, they have started a plan to push them out prematurely. This will be involuntary, and is due to guidelines about population density from the CDC. I wonder if SUU will do the same?

Good news:
The "health QR code" is the phone app that shows green, yellow, and red depending on your level of quarantine. On the other hand, there's this video from last Wednesday:

The issue here is that they won't let a nurse pass the barricade to get in to their neighborhood because they don't have written permission to go home. There are also videos showing a temporary hospital in Wuhan that was "closed":
In fact, what happened was that it was disassembled and reassembled overnight on the outskirts of town.
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