Saturday, March 21, 2020

COVID-19 # 30 (Required Parts are Highlighted)

Italy continues to get worse. There's no science for this yet, but the timing seems right to me for things to start to level out there in a week or so. It's happened in Codogno and Vo, which had a 2 week headstart. Cross your fingers.
Keep in mind that we have 5 times Italy's population.

 The U.S. now has 86 million people in a China/Italy style lockdown: the states of California, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. New York is leading the country in testing:
That's why probably no one you know has it. Here's the scary epidemic time-lapse map:
Not really surprising, I suppose.

Cool chart on social distancing: China got average daily human contacts down from 15 to 2:
Note in the panel on the right, they greatly reduced contacts by the young. The thread notes that the lines in the middle correspond to age dispersions within families.

In Europe, ICU patients are now being sent across borders (from Grand Est region in France to Baden-Wurttemberg region in Germany).

China continues to get weirder. They've now banned Chinese citizens from working for the big 3 U.S. newspapers, and have asked other American media outlets to give the government of China lists of the names of their employees in China. As recently as Thursday, Emily Feng (an American working for NPR, based in Beijing) argued that tossing out other American reporters might open the door for just such Chinese reporters as these. Personal Note: the macroeconomist in my head never quite turns off, and I'm starting to think there's a lot more to this story than just petulance about stories in our papers.

Nothing from Iran. Uh-oh.

So how are we to figure out what is going on within China? The same way Li Keiquang does it! Alternative sources, that's how! China Mobile, the country's largest cellphone carrier, reports that subscribers are down by 8 million since our new year.
Sooooo ... while in quarantine a lot of people decided they didn't need their phones? There's tangential evidence that subscriptions are off a total of 7 million at China's other major carriers.
The outbreak is ramping up in Hong Kong, which has been able to socially distance itself from China just a bit. High school diploma exams were just postponed for a month. They were set to start later this week. There was a also a new video released this week of a temporary hospital being built in a stadium in Wuhan. Also, the schools are still not open in most provinces, the borders with friendlier neighbors North Korea and Russia are still closed, and the Lianghui (national political conference) has not even been rescheduled.

There's more evidence in the flu data that ... for a while the people going to hospitals with the flu have had something else:
The green is positive tests for flu. The dark blue is negative for flu, so the top line is people going to the hospital for flu-like symptoms. There are definite upticks in January in many locations. On the other hand, a problem with this is if cases of SARS-CoV-2 are doubling every 6 days, it's hard to reconcile with it being widespread in the U.S. more than a few weeks back (even with minimal testing). Tip: don't forget, you have to read graphs like this in terms of vertical distances, not areas shaded.

BTW: I mentioned in class that Iron County has "about 10" ICU beds. The correct number is six. I presume IHC is working on ramping that up.

Here's a great hand washing video (retweeted by Ava Duvernay of all people). Watch and learn.

The border between the U.S. and Canada closed at midnight. That is the most heavily traversed border in the world.

Hopeful news: some of you may have clicked through on some of my news items from the twitter feed of health reporter Julia Belluz (@juliaoftoronto). She had a baby the other day, and covered the outbreak until just before. :)

Bad news: Australian friends of ours have tested positive. They are older than us, and she is immunocompromised. (No worries for you, we haven't seen them in person in a few years).

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