Coronavirus – The Outlook Has Worsened
cassandracapital.net
cassandracapital.net
* At this point in the epidemic you can't compute fatality rates simply by deaths/recoveries, because recoveries lag deaths by several weeks (once you're dead you're dead, but if you survive it takes a few weeks to recover and start testing negative).
* It is well known that China is undercounting cases, not because of some deep CCP conspiracy, but because Wuhan/Hubei's health system is so overloaded that only the sickest cases are hospitalized, much less tested.
* This also skews death rates very high, because mild cases are not detected and counted at all. This is also clear from the divergence in death rates in Hubei (2.x%) and outside Hubei (under 0.5%, and there's undercounting happening here too).
* The virus has been in the wild in a number of countries outside China (Singapore, Japan, Thailand, etc), yet to date local transmission has petered out and there's no sign of massive outbreaks happening. This argues for a much lower R0, and/or that there's something specific to Wuhan that favors the virus, with cold, dry winter air and heavy air pollution (and the accompanying chronic lung damage) cited as possible factors.
There are limitations with this method, but I think it’s the best possible at the time. What method do you think is better?
I think this is because it’s hard to know date of infection, but it’s definite to know whether the case resulted in death or has been determined “recovered.”
Oh, but the author's other content inspires so much faith!
what is worrying is that the percentage of 'serious/critical' cases seems to be stable at 20%. Regardless of fatality rate, if this holds, and the virus becomes pandemic it will impose a significant burden on health systems.
While I agree with your other points, the idea that transmission in Japan is petering out is wildly optimistic and not what epidemiologists in Japan are saying. Unfortunately, you can couple that with the possibility of transmission in states where the medical infrastructure is especially weak (in Africa, for example, where millions of Chinese people work).
Does that take the Diamond Princess cases into account, or just the others (66 last time I checked, and IMO the most important ones are the cases reported outside the group of people who were repatriated and quarantined)? IMO it is clear that keeping all those people in close quarters in the cruise ship wasn't the best idea after all (because interactions keep on occurring, and thus infections keep on spreading).
I also don't find the story of the health officer infected for "10 minutes contact" (or so the NHK says) very credible, or at best, it is a stochastic event.
A real problem is instead that, for outside infections, people kept on working and having contact with others despite being sick.
I don't want to downplay the issue at all, but as far as I can see the Japanese press (I can't say much about the actual people living there) going absolutely hysterical over this (but it was the same with H1N1 back in the days). The government then follows suit.
This CoVid19 outbreak in the age of social media has caused too many wanna-be epidemiologists to post their unfiltered, unscientific opinions and present them as facts. How can we ever get reliable information from that?
No, it took until several weeks into the epidemic until the number of recoveries exceeded the number of deaths.
> We know China has been undercounting deaths as well as cases
All deaths are counted, people don't just leave corpses lying around, although it is true that many coronavirus deaths were likely misclassified. By comparison, if someone gets a mild case (80%+ probability) and recovers at home, they'll never get recorded in any stats.
> it was aggressively stamped out via contact tracing
In some countries like Singapore, yes. But in countries like Thailand and Mexico, contact tracing was haphazard to nonexistent, and epidemics still failed to materialize.
China has said the fatality rate is about 2%, and most experts are agreeing it's probably roughly 2% - with all your points factored in. In Wuhan, for example, it's over 4% due to hospital overload.
> All deaths are counted... many coronavirus deaths were likely misclassified.
That's really the same as being not counted in the tally of Coronavirus deaths.
> in countries like Thailand and Mexico...
The common theme here is tropical climate that makes most Coronaviruses less virulent.
This obviously cannot happen in countries like North Korea, which is likely silently enduring a pandemic that they just won't talk about.
I am bit shocked to learn that that the R0 of the Spanish flu was only around 2 though.
Regarding the number of case outside of China, raising exponentially, at least half of them, 454 as of today are onboard of the Diamond Princess. I am not sure if this is good or bad but surely a cruise ship is a bit peculiar situation, and maybe you cannot extrapolate too much based on that .
On the other hand, it also means that if a "dense" community is hit where people are living closely, it can have a bad outcome as well.
It surely can't be Taiwan, since these are Western articles, whose audience probably won't confuse the two. So is it about Hong Kong? That doesn't make much sense either, since most of Hong Kong is on the mainland.
And yet, while these reports all talk about mainland China, they still include Hainan (a large island off the south coast of China). In fact this article has it highlighted in its map as being an area under lockdown. And yet Hainan is quite obviously not a part of the mainland.
So why do writers keep referring to 'mainland' China?