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“The speed with which we have [produced these candidates] builds very much on the investment in understanding how to develop vaccines for other coronaviruses,” says Richard Hatchett,
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BadgerJelly » Sun Mar 29, 2020 3:56 am wrote: At the end of the day it doesn’t matter if something was done inefficiently. It matters more that we put aside differences and show and encourage why certain procedures work better than others for everyone.
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While Covid-19 hasn’t wreaked nearly as much havoc in the Netherlands as in Italy and Spain, it’s still conspicuous that a healthcare system as finely tuned and well coordinated as the Dutch system would have such alarming numbers in terms of mortality and morbidity.
The confirmed case fatality rate in the Netherlands of 6.3% stands in stark contrast to its neighbor Germany’s 0.6%. The Netherlands, with a younger overall population and one that is almost 5 times smaller than Germany’s, has 60% more deaths. And, unlike Germany, the Dutch haven’t done widespread testing, so it’s likely its number of confirmed cases significantly underestimates the actual number of infections.
While the number of confirmed cases in Germany is large, partly due to its testing campaign, the case fatality rate and overall death toll have been relatively small, compared not only to Holland, but also almost all other European nations. Similarly, the numbers of patients in serious or critical condition have remained very low.
Both the German and Dutch healthcare systems are relatively well-funded, and score well internationally on population health indicators, such as life expectancy and morbidity. Yet, thus far, the impact from Covid-19 in Holland has been worse. It has led to a situation in which the Netherlands now faces the real possibility of an impending shortage of intensive care units.
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toucana » March 28th, 2020, 2:24 pm wrote:
One more reason why China’s official COVID-19 mortality statistics are being treated with some scepticism by overseas observers:
http://shanghaiist.com/2020/03/27/urns-in-wuhan-far-exceed-death-toll-raising-more-questions-about-chinas-tally/
Journalists from a Chinese language news service called Caixin (财新传媒) have discovered that one mortuary in Wuhan had recently taken delivery of 5000 urns in the space of just two days. And this was at just one of seven known mortuaries located in Wuhan.
According to official Chinese government data, 50,006 were infected with COVID-19 virus in Wuhan with 2,535 dying from the disease.
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toucana » March 29th, 2020, 11:54 am wrote:The worrying detail is that this sighting was made at just one of seven known mortuaries in Wuhan. Now conceivably this site was a focal distribution point for all such deliveries in Wuhan. But if it turns out that all of the other six mortuaries were also receiving similar bulk deliveries, then there really would be cause for concern about the true nature of the COVID-19 mortality figures for Wuhan.
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BadgerJelly » March 29th, 2020, 3:13 pm wrote:Including everyone an average of 832 people died every day.
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Published March 31, 2020
Updated April 1, 2020, 8:54 a.m. ET
As many as 25 percent of people infected with the new coronavirus may not show symptoms, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns — a startlingly high number that complicates efforts to predict the pandemic’s course and strategies to mitigate its spread.
In particular, the high level of symptom-free cases is leading the C.D.C. to consider broadening its guidelines on who should wear masks.
“This helps explain how rapidly this virus continues to spread across the country,” the director, Dr. Robert Redfield, told National Public Radio in an interview broadcast on Tuesday.
The agency has repeatedly said that ordinary citizens do not need to wear masks unless they are feeling sick. But with the new data on people who may be infected without ever feeling sick, or who are transmitting the virus for a couple of days before feeling ill, Mr. Redfield said that such guidance was “being critically re-reviewed.”
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In fact, there’s one very good reason to believe many more people have died due to the outbreak in Hubei, and it’s not because someone passed on a rumor, who passed on a rumor, who passed on a rumor about urns. The reason is something that affects not just China, but every country, and has been repeatedly demonstrated in Italy—and is even now being seen in New York City. As hospital beds fill up with COVID-19 patients, those patients go into competition with those who arrive at the hospital with other life-threatening conditions. Deaths from COVID-19 may be slanted toward the elderly, but caseloads do not appear to be. Younger patients catch COVID-19 just fine.
This is not true of heart disease, or strokes, or any number of conditions that preferentially affect the elderly. So medical personnel all over the planet are coming down to the same brutal calculus: An otherwise healthy young patient stricken with COVID-19 isn’t just competing for attention with older COVID patients who may have additional underlying conditions, that patient is also competing with heart attack patients, with car accident patients, with stroke patients … and so on.
The result of COVID-19 overloading the healthcare system is that standard of care plummets for everyone whether or not they have COVID. Already in the United States, ventilators are being pulled from cardiac care and other specialty units. A bed is a bed is a bed, and doctors in China, Italy, or the U.S. are unlikely to kick a 25-year-old COVID patient out of that bed to replace them with a 60-year-old heart attack victim whose odds aren’t great on the best day.
In a couple of communities that have been examined so far, the overall rate of death has been much greater than just the numbers that are being written down for COVID-19. Like two or three times higher. This is almost certainly true of Hubei Province, just as it is of every other facility. During the period in which their facilities were overloaded, deaths from all causes soared in Hubei. Those people are also victims of the pandemic, but their numbers definitely do not make the daily totals.
Any claims that there were more funeral urns coming out of, or going into, Hubei than could be accounted for by the number of people who died, not of COVID-19, but because of it.
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Serpent » April 1st, 2020, 8:48 am wrote:I wear one every two weeks when I go to the grocery store. The operation is planned with the precision of a military strike. Mask, rubber gloves and a light overcoat that goes straight into the washing machine. One supermarket, arrive at opening time, go in alone with a list, touch nothing I don't buy, stay clear of other shoppers; pay with tap-card; out by 8:30, home by 9:15; leave shoes on porch, swab down purchases before storing.)
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TheVat » April 2nd, 2020, 11:48 am wrote:Bra cup for a facemask? IMO that's simply a case of replacing one kind of boob with another.
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TheVat » March 22nd, 2020, 8:02 pm wrote:Starting a thread specifically for tracking the pandemic. Feel free to post global counts, country-specific counts, hospital beds, any graphs that help illuminate trends, math analysis, demographic analysis, etc.
Cultural and political/economic effects and issues can still go in the original Year of the Rat Fears thread.
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