endogui

Health and food supply are both parts of the economy, unless you trust the Feds to set up rationing.

Which is not to defend the managers who are pushing for things to open when they don't have front-line exposure.

Unlike other countries which announce fatalities on the date they become known to authorities. Sweden updates its fatality chart retroactively on the day each person actually died. Since it takes a long time to get/process death information to/in the national government, the effect of this is that Sweden's Covid fatality chart always looks like it has just peaked. The apparent dip in daily deaths is just a delay in reporting.

https://mobile.twitter.com/NiklasJonsson91/status/1252976186...

It's useful to think that way, until you add more options:

G: 5% chance one of your parents die, preparation costs $X

H: 3% chance you die, preparation costs $Y.

What at what values of $X and $Y do you prepare?

Korean testing is revealing a fatality rate of about 2% over all cases, with about 8% requiring hospitalization. You are off by an order of magnitude.

Wouldn't it make more sense to compare new cases vs active cases? At the end of this plot you can see China's new cases increasing again, but the number of total cases is so large that the x axis doesn't move.

The murder rate isn't growing at 30% day-on-day.

Most "asymptomatic" people will show symptoms within two weeks, so aggressive cluster/contact tracing works. South Korean local goveenment staff are following the credit card use, transit use, and other daily movements (CCTV logs) for every confirmed case, then issue two week self-isolation orders to those who shared a workplace, restaurant, cafe, church, or elevator with the confirmed case. Since most cases get a short lived fever or cough within two weeks, SK has been able to stop most transmission chains. I'm actually a bit confused about the scope of SK testing. It looks like everyone with symptoms is being tested, as well as quarantined health care workers and quarantined people from high risk groups, but I'm not sure whether asymptomatic people are tested at the end of their quarantine period.

The Italian number (75%) comes from testing everyone in a village of 3000 people. The Chinese number (1%) comes from testing everyone who comes to hospitals and maybe their family members. I would guess that the Chinese sample was selected for people displaying symptoms (asymptomatic people will not go to the clinic), while the Italian number biases for people early in the course of the disease. For the purposes of public health and controlling disease spread, the Italian number is more meaningful.

Note also that it is possible the virus has evolved to spread more easily, which in the context of a lot of screening and social distancing of symptomatic people would mean more asymptomatic spreading.

SK has also instituted widespread work from home, closed schools, and people voluntarily wear masks and cancel events. Daegu was a ghost town for at least 2 weeks after patient 31 was detected, because each citizen decided to minimize activity.

That level of population flow and population density are not as special as you are making them out to be. The transfer station nearest Seoul's most recent cluster (discovered 7 days ago) gets about 25% more annual traffic than King's Cross, according to Wikipedia (125,000 per day at Sindorim Station vs. 34 million at King's Cross annually). Despite the cluster having developed at the beginning of March, Seoul is finding fewer than 100 new patients per day. With masks, reduction in ridership, cancellation of meetings, extensive WFH, extensive testing and isolation measures, this epidemic is not as hopeless as the UK seems to be making it out to be.

China has classified masks as strategic assets and is only exporting them to select countries.

As of last night the number of cult-linked cases was "more than half". So > 3500. It turns out that in addition to worship services teice per week a lot of the cult members save money by living together. So even though worship has been stopped for nearly a month, new cult cases are still being reported.

If the West is going to eschew the Chinese route, then they need to embrace the Korean route: agressive testing and contact tracing, mandatory quarantines for suspected contacts, bans on public gatherings, massive PSA campaigns about hand washing and wearing face masks, providing a hotline people with symptoms can call so they don't walk into an ER and accidentally shut down their neighborhood hospital for two weeks.

So far the West is striking out on most of these measures, either for lack of political will or for technical incompetence.

In shortage situations, one mask reused properly is better than no mask.

I work at a medical center in Korea and we are under the following instructions:

1. Place masks for reuse in a specific place to avoid cross contamination. 2. Treat the outside of the mask as contaminated. Don't touch. 3. Wash hands after wearing a reused mask. 4. Throw out masks if they get wet, damaged, or (N95 only) folded.

In late January, Chinese media widely reported "news" about an American flu "epidemic" to distract from nCoV. However, the US CDC reports pneumonia and influenza deaths as a percent of overall mortality on a weekly basis, and right now the numbers are shy of what they consider an epidemic. The rate of lab confirmed cases is tracking 2012-2013, and mortality looks about the same as last year.

The current nCoV outbreak is more worrying because the percentage of patients needing intensive care is very high, and because it looks very easy to spread.

> the form the tweet posted explicitly said ...

> the form says he authorized ...

You seem to be repeatedly missing the point: he claims to have never seen nor signed this form. The "signature" is decidedly pixellized. The claim is that the insurance company put his name on this form without showing it to him, which both defeats the point of the form and is a crime (forgery) in the US.

Well, here he is claiming they didn't sign that document at all: the signature was copied from elsewhere.

In Korea (not China), but here it is common to get PCR assays for infections when the cause is unknown. People are also tested to determine the type (type A influenza) when showing flu-like symptoms. So if someone comes in with severe flu-like systems but is not a match for flu, that may trigger further assays.

I found that for me it depends a lot on the tilt of the seats: when I flew Southwest, the seat was ramrod-straight, and I am not able to relax. On Asian carriers, seats are more comfortable, and I was even able to fall asleep. It didn't really depend on the seat pitch, so much as the seat angle.

> Second, figure out how many clinical/surgical encounters a physician in training needs to truly be competent when they complete their training.

This seems like the sort of thing that should be widely studied, but I can't find the terms to get nice Google Scholar results. In my field we do this sort of assessment for the users of (fairly low-risk) medical devices. It requires a team and is quite work-intensive to assess, but the stakes for insurance providers are high enough that this must already be known....