Glad to see Tooth is back! If you're still on one of the islands in lijepa njihova I hope it's Cres or Krk as these have their own water supply if I'm not mistaken. But that is prepper talk

Any thoughts on this euro doomsday interview?

The medium is obv biased as they're in the gold business, but the "expert" probably isn't affiliated.
https://www.voimagold.com/insight/pr...mpression=true

Welcome back Tooth!

The Imperial Report estimates a IFR of 0.9%. Are you suggesting the real IFR is possibly double this?

Tooth, do you still think there is nothing weird about Germany data?
Do you really believe they will move closer to the averages of their peers?
Germany currently has 4 death / million capita, with the majority of their European peers that have similar characteristics being at >20.

wishful thinking maybe but I hope startign next week or soon we start on our road to decline and things start getting better. idk guess im hoping the sun and heat magically do something to help us

German death rate has been steadily rising every day and is currently at 0.67%. Given this, I see no reason to assume it won't follow a trajectory similar to South Korea, which is currently at 1.48% and still (slowly) rising.

Amesh Adalja* said he believed the worst case scenario will be around 0.6% overall.
Of course, Germany has not recorded every infected person, whereas the dead are more accurately recorded.

Also

https://www.theguardian.com/film/202...onavirus-fears

And they closed their borders for all foreigners.

Then what's the reason for countries like France, Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, UK (with a small delay)... having so much more fatalities / million? None of their healthcare systems have been particularly overloaded upto now. We assume that for some reason Germany has significantly less total infections?

Does anyone have a good idea on how much infections South Korea could possibly have missed?

I'm guessing consolidated European deaths will start stabilizing in the next 10 days, since the majority of Europe is going into their third week of some form of lockdown. At what level that will be, I have no idea. USA will keep moving up for a while, and then there's Africa/Central & South America/India/... that could keep increasing as well if this thing sucks even more.

China closing their theaters is actually pretty interesting.
My initial analysis was:
They reopened them given that they were able to handle the infection and spread pretty good all things considering, making it feel like a manageable virus. (I know it was terrible in China, I mean more in like them being able to sort it out in 3 months and having it under control since then)
Now they're seeing the absolute destruction in Europe and are like "OK maybe it's good to be really careful".

Anybody have any other ideas why they'd reverse the decision so fast?

I've been keeping track of the US numbers on worldmeters for a couple of weeks now. I can't vouch for the accuracy of their numbers but they seem as good as any. What I've noticed is that the daily increase of the number of active cases bounced around a lot, averaging about 35% per day, until March 16. After that the number increased every day for a few days, peaking at a 50% daily increase on March 19. Since then it's been a steady drop every day with the exception of March 21, where it looks like something weird happened with the data reporting.

Yesterday we were at a 23% increase in active cases from the previous day. Today isn't over but it's currently at a 17% increase from yesterday.

Obviously there are lots of caveats here (e.g. some places have decided not to test anyone unless the outcome of the test would change the treatment) but it's at least somewhat encouraging.

I would take it as very encouraging for me. at least im going to.

hopefully my end of april we re nearing "the end" of this imo, thast what I was hoping for. sooner would be better but doesn't seem too likely.
hopefully we can look back and say things coudl have been A LOT worse wrt escalation

Those countries aren't testing the mild/asymptomatic cases as well as Germany. If those countries did, their death rates would go down. There is also going to be some variance due to how different countries differentiate a death with COVID vs a death from COVID, quality of health system, and the demographics of people getting infected. But these factors aren't going to bridge the whole gap from Germany to France death rates. Variable testing of mild/asymptomatic cases is going to be most of it, at least until the medical system collapses.

Also, Germany is converging up like South Korea because it is taking time for the early detected serious cases to die. Its easy to have a super low death rate from a disease that takes time, if you haven't waited enough time for most people to die.

I think a lot of it is noise from different states/cities changing their testing strategies. Los Angeles County went from a long time of testing basically no one, to testing ~500 patients/day, and recently ramped it up to ~5000/day. Each of these abrupt changes is going to cause an artificial change in reported cases that isn't related to the actual amount of new cases in the community.

Plan on this lasting 1.5-2 years

I imagine there will be one hell of a party when everyone is able to gather in large numbers again.

But why would testing of mild/asymptomatic cases have such a large impact on fatalities per capita at this stage of the outbreak? I agree it should have a positive impact (=decreasing) on fatalities per capita in the longer run, because qurarantine/isolation of the sick works better, but we are not yet at the part of the outbreak in these countries where that can/will make a difference.

Germany is a week behind France. France is severely under-reporting cases. No offense, but you guys keep making the same mistakes over and over with the data. Germany just has better testing, the doubling-time in deaths has already proved this.

EDIT: Once you account for better testing, and move 7-9 days to the right on the x-axis, case fatality rate ends up very similar.

There are so many unfounded assumptions in the Imperial Report it's hard to read. Not that it doesn't have interesting data and even discussion, but the table you quoted isn't data, it's based on assumptions.

Real IFR is possibly 5x what they're estimating. The math is pretty inescapable, actually. I'll run you through it.

Ignoring China, we have 500K cases with 25K dead. At an IFR of 0.9% and a six day doubling (and the death data is showing a 6 day doubling) and a generous 3 week death lag, that implies 25K * 111 * 8 = 22 million people have it right now! But 22 million people is entirely inconsistent with all the other data we have. With a 6 day doubling it implies that three months ago - December 27th - there were 680 infectious people in the rest of the world ex China. All of Wuhan barely had that many and most people don't travel. The math just doesn't work at an IFR of 0.9%. You need to get to around 4% death rate to fit all the data we have.

If the doubling rate is 4 days (i.e. it's highly infectious) then the math can work out to that smaller death rate. But a 4 day doubling with 3 weeks to death and 0.9% death rate implies that 63 million people have it right now. The few proper population sample tests just aren't showing that in the infected countries; That's all of Europe + USA with a 6% infected rate. Wuhan had major population sampling of various independent expat communities, and they came out at <0.5% for example. This wouldn't be possible with a 4 day doubling. Nor would the numbers in the rest of China.

You just can't get away from the numbers; however you run them one of two things happens: a huge death rate OR high infectious with a very high "already infected" rate that even at a low death rate means many hundreds of thousands now certain to die and millions from infections in two weeks.

However you run the numbers, all you can do is lock down.
Most infections are local and who gets infected early matters a lot. I mean, have a look at this:



These countries are within 2x population of each other, all modern health care systems, all wealthy, all the same age. Why is Netherlands 10x Austria? You going to put that down to better health care too? On what grounds?

It's really quite simple imo: where and who the early cases hit, PLUS the exponential nature of spread, PLUS the variance in spreaders (recall Korea's cult church) drives huge variance in what a particular snapshot in time looks like.

Let's say a particular country has a 1% chance of getting its first infection on Jan 24, a 2% chance on Jan 30, a 4% chance on Feb 6, an 8% chance on Feb 13, at which point many countries closed their borders to most infectious agents (China) and a second infectious source becomes more prominent and an exponentially growing source (Italy, which got early infections).

At any snapshot in time going forward, the countries in the 1% chance Jan 24 club will have 8x as many deaths, and 8x the death rate, of the countries in the 8% chance Feb 13 club.

Then 1.5 months later testing starts in earnest and is highly variable between countries. Some countries like Korea saturate testing, catching all cases; other countries can't get enough kits or have different rules for testing or have a populace not predisposed to seeking it out. So you can get similar "officially infected" number with widly different death rates. All it is is a function of how many infections are being caught.

It means absolutely nothing. The trajectory for all is that same, they just had different start points and/or multipliers for the first infecters.

The high variance is even further enhanced when you consider that young low death rate travelers and workers are the first infected, who interact with similar people, and that it needs to spread into old communities before the death rates soar. The time of first spread and degree of spread into old communities is another huge source of various in snapshot comparisons. Cultures that live with parents/grandparent will be much harder hit earlier on than when the young live by themselves. Good infection prevention procedures in old people homes is another variable. You think Spain does better than Germany?

No country is doing better with its infected dying once they get infected, that's just silly. There's no health care miracle here. It's just variance on who's getting infected and when.
This is probably correct for the entire world, maybe a bit low. There are very few old people. When the Rockefeller foundation created the Green Revolution in the 70s to help feed the world's poor (thanks, rich selfish capitalist scum! tax the rich!) third world populations were close to non-existent. Western technology and food has exploded the third world to many billions of people, such that there are almost no old people in the second and third world



Most of Africa for example has an average age of 18. SE Asia in the teens to 20s. None of this analysis has anything at all to do with what we'll see in old countries in East Asia, Europe, North American. Those death rates are way higher.

I can share something wrt Germany(just anecdotal evidence).

Met a friend yesterday (reliable source, no bullshitter) who has a friend in Berlin.
She works as a hospital nurse and is specifically trained so she can operate ventilators.
I don't know her, never seen her, never talked to her, but some of my friends know her so I know she exists and works in Berlin as a nurse.
However, I can't say if she makes stuff up or talks ****.

Anyway my buddy talked to her on the phone 2 days ago and she told him they had 13 deaths in the past few weeks at her ward. This ward is specifically venilators only.
He didn't remember the specifics but she said that this was definitely not the norm. What struck me as weird was that she allegedly said no one tested positive for Covid or Influenza although the patients had pneumonia.

As of today there were 8 deaths in all of Berlin officially.
So I don't know how much I can trust this source (the girl) but I'm pretty sure that the German numbers are higher than the official count.

Everyone kills people, murders people, steals from you, steals from me, under reports deaths.

Just saw on r/medicine they claimed that the current corona test has about a fifteen or twenty percent rate of false negatives, in other words fifteen percent of people who are positive will swab negative. That seems absolutely horrible to me. How can they make good healthcare decisions with such shitty testing? Anyone know if that’s accurate?

Ps glad to have you back tooth!!

Most pneumonias can. As far as I've read, there is nothing special about this virus causing more than average lung tissue damage. It's the disease the virus brings on that causes the damage.

I guess I can accept that there is variance in the size of the outbreak pre-quarantine measures. I still find it hard to believe given that Germany its cities are just as international as the other European countries, and they also have large ski areas resulting increased tourism. But it's one of the only things that fits.



I remember reading somewhere else that Germany is one of the only European countries doing no post mortem-check if the person dying had corona, but don't remember where... But it would be more of a thing if they were significantly underreporting, right?

Imperfect sensitivity on the PCR test is well known because viral load in nasopharyngeal area is too low and because it's an RNA virus which copies imperfectly and generates a lot of garbled mutations such that the specific gene fragments tests are targeting might get garbled in the sample taken. Thats why tho on avg I think the global avg so far has been two tests used per person tested and so I guess it should be more like a (1-15%^2=) 98% sensitivity per person tested

Nice analysis. In both Austria and Norway a large fraction of the early cases are indeed younger (presumably fit) people that got infected in ski resorts. So the low death rate so far in both countries makes a lot of sense.

Not sure about Germany, but the situation could easily be the same there.