That and they're just incompetent.

They "found" this by dividing deaths/total cases. But the cases haven't played out yet. Going by the serious and critical remaining which have yet to resolve (around 10x dead so far, with around 20% of these dying), the final death rate will end up the same as Wuhan, 1.5-2%.

Another interesting point: Italy has 11 dead with 283 claimed cases. At a death rate of 2% and lag of 3 weeks from infection to death and a non-quarantined doubling of infections every week, that implies conservatively that 550 were infected three weeks ago, and 2200 are infected right now. Conservatively. The way this spreads it's likely even 2-3x higher than that. So they've caught less than 10% of the infected. Many of those have fanned out across Europe no doubt.

Similar math for other countries like Iran, which probably has >10,000 infected at this point.

You can see why the cat is out of the bag.

And how many have died in Wuhan without being counted, under the radar so to speak? I mean, they went around locking people into apartment buildings, nailing their doors shut. How many just died at home without even making it to a hospital or quarantine facility?

As for the rest of the world, the cat is well and truly out of the bag.

I'm guessing 2-3 times at least the official death number. I'm also guessing that they failed to catch maybe 75% of cases, which were mild (meaning they only caught 1/4). It wouldn't be much more than that or Wuhan's infection wouldn't be contained now. The numbers mostly cancel themselves out and you end up at 2-3% death rate.

random twitter threads, idk if the guy is legit but it sounds smart

https://twitter.com/moldbugman/statu...81478138925058

https://twitter.com/moldbugman/statu...31678354591744

tl;dr italy probably got their cluster from illegally imported labor from Wenzhou.

and less likely, iran probably got their cluster from middle eastern traders in Yiwu, possibly via train.

From what I've seen so far smoking appears to be a massive risk factor.

Apparently this thing binds to a gene called ACE2. Smokers (for whatever reason) have a much higher "gene expression" of ACE2. And China is filled with smokers.

So the death rate among non-smokers might be much lower, which would be great news for non-smokers who live a healthy lifestyle.

There are two big effects that distort the CFR.
First the fact that some of the people in the alive column will naturally move to the dead column.
Second the fact that mild cases are obviously more underreported than deaths.

Guessing which effect is bigger is super hard. My gut feeling says it’s lower than the 2,3% that came out of the Chinese study but not that much lower. Higher than 1% imo.

The Italians numbers have huge distortions because of both effects. We need to see what happens in the next 2 weeks to see what happened. All the deaths are from people over 75 except from one person that had cancer so those mean nothing yet.

Also I’m not buying the virus peaked in China when we still have circa 100 deaths per day.

The truth is that we still don’t know how bad this is for different ages groups. We are in still in the dark here.

There is at least a 15% chance we don’t have any more northern Italy style outbreaks imo.
There is at least a 15% chance that every country in the world has to quarantine like Daegu or Lombardy.


My opinion is that by the end of next week we will have a much better picture of what’s going on.

I would like to know more about non-fatal but longterm consequences of COVID-19. Have seen some discussion about permanent damage to lungs, kidneys, and testes, in critical but non-fatal cases, but no idea on veracity or likelihood.

People who are 75+ could die from anything, anytime. It does not take much.

Yeah, I think everybody realizes that

A.) There are tons of underreported / asymptomatic cases
B.) Not everyone that's infected who is ultimately going to die has died yet.

Curious what those "at least 15%" statements are based on? No offense, but that basically sounds like verbal diarrhea.

It’s a fancy way of saying I don’t have a ****ing clue of what’s going on.

The optimistic scenario is based on the chance than tighter control from countries plus warmer weather are really good news.
The pessimistic scenario is based on the Iran thing being all over the place.

I shouldn’t have said “more likely than 15%” I should have said both scenarios are plausible instead of quantifying it like I did.

Let’s not obsess over the percentages , let’s focus on the fact that the range of posible outcomes are all over the place. I think that should be a thread consensus.


Edit : What I’m trying to say is that right now the range of outcomes is all over the place, anything could happen.
By the 8th of March the range will be much less wide.

My last post was bad , it was too disorganized and sloppy.

South Korea is going to test 200,000 people...

Fair enough. I've been following a lot of the epidemiologists really closely on Twitter, and the general consensus seems to be that the cat is out of the bag and we're gonna have a global pandemic.

I recommend following Scott Gottlieb on Twitter, and anyone that he recommends. In particular, the guy that I really like is Neil Ferguson at the Imperial College of London. He's been saying for weeks that he thinks we're in the early stages of a global pandemic.

That having been said, of course need to be wary of confirmation bias and consider alternative points of view. But personally I think we're going to be in for a rough 12-18 months.

Iran clearly has everything under control...

Do we believe the olympics are happening ?
Is that relevant for the world economy ?

Thoughts on that ?

Do you guys see any blowback on China or long-term ramifications for them as a country as a result of all this?

Given there are more pressing immediate issues, haven't seen this discussed much.

Anyone else here think tooth and despacito are possibly the same person?

I don't think the Olympics are happening. The only chance is if the virus really does wind down in April-May, and even then, preparations will have been pretty seriously interrupted.

Yes, I have been thinking that.

Quite impressed at my ability to be on two different continents simultaneously and violently disagree with myself 90% of the time.

Yes. The communist party leadership will definitely pay costs within the country.
People are ****ing pissed, being locked for 6 weeks inside an apartment hoping to not catch a potentially deadly virus is not fun.
No idea what happens in the short term but the social fabric definitely takes a hit.

Of course the political implications are imposible to predict but there is no way this doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some further income redistribution effort in the middle term to appease the masses.

Yeah I def think it’s a long shot and very unlikely. Ive learned a lot from reading Tooth’s posts in BFI over past couple years and it’s just a hunch I got after a couple drinks.

What was your previous account before this one though?

This is a good question, information is sparse about this. Most of the people on this forum are younger and should be less concerned about dying, but if it turns out a lot of cases get permanent damage that would change my entire risk model.

I don't think it's an issue for the young and those with normal immune systems. I've done a lot of reading about this. Basically the viral load/toxin load/hypoxia becomes so bad in the critical cases (about 5% of all cases and maybe a few of the 15% which are "hospitalized buy only serious" cases) that it progresses to organ failure as toxins build up. Toxins + hypoxia have their effect on organs. I don't think, independently, that non-critical levels of the virus actually attack the kidneys or anything. If you don't get severely ill with it I don't think there's much to worry about.

But yeah to the 3-4% who progress to critical stage but don't die (most of these will probably die if the hospitals get overwhelmed and the 15% who are serious can't be treated), there could be ongoing complications. Generally though I'm leaning on the side that you're mostly ok if you survive it.

That said, 15% getting sick enough to need hospital is no joke especially as it spreads and hospital capacity chokes off (Western hospitals run at near 100% efficiency and have few spare beds) so it's not something I'd take too lightly.

the worldometers site indicates that the number of active cases is going down. Any consolation in that?

Not when in the last week its spread in large numbers to multiple countries. China has leveled off, but other countries are exponentiating with just confirmed cases.

There's consolation in the fact that extreme measures (economy-wide shutdown and home isolation) can contain it, and less stringent measures than that like contact tracing can do it when it's not thousands already.

I don't think this applies to the world. People in Italy weeks ago have spread it to 6+ countries (that they've found already). People in Iran has spread it to 5 countries. There are thousands of infections in each that have been fanning out for weeks from those countries. There is probably a third and fourth country then haven't found yet where there are thousands of infections. Italy had 5 last week with now new for ages. 5. When there were 1000s in the country. Pandemic looks inevitable now.

The time to stop this was when the piece of trash corrupt head of the WHO was kissing China's ass and saying not to declare it an emergency or close borders (under Chinese duress), and the idiot Brass was saying he "knows what he's talking about". Monitoring should have been properly set up across countries to catch infections early/report atypical pneumonia right away. That didn't happen so it's over now.

I do think extreme efforts will be taken to contain this in Western countries (hurting economies, but probably saving millions of lives) but lots of countries won't contain it because they're incompetent and poor, and it's here for good now until a vaccine comes out in 3-12 months.

All the news and predictions about events such as the Olympics happening or not sound like the market is overvalued now.

But aren't those thoughts pretty basic and everyone else has thought about it already? That means all assumptions made about whatever is gonna happen to the world economy should be priced in already?

I am basically trying to decide whether it actually makes sense at all to analyse it at all, considering that the whole world does it already and there is no way I can have an edge?