covid-19 epidemiologic data

[TheVat]

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-sho ... ospital-da

Wonder why the administration wants more control of this type of data. Hmm.

[charon]

viewtopic.php?f=10&t=35905&p=351657#p351657

[TheVat]

https://epi.ufl.edu/articles/silent-tra ... id-19.html

Half of transmission is silent.

The new model estimates that even if all cases of people with symptoms are immediately isolated, the disease will continue to spread stealthily via symptomless infections. This means that many people are silently transmitting the virus and driving the pandemic’s spread—either because they do not yet know they are ill, or because they are asymptomatic carriers who are infectious but never develop symptoms.

“The single biggest lesson of this is that we need to prioritize contact tracing,” Singer says. “Without that, we won’t get any traction against the virus. But the question is, where will it be most effective?”

[Serpent]

From the

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/07/17/892357733/with-cdc-pulled-off-data-collection-some-states-lose-access-to-covid-hospital-da

Wonder why the administration wants more control of this type of data.

Besides that redacting opportunity?
from that article:

The Trump administration had said the reporting change was needed because of reporting delays and other problems with the CDC.

I suspect it's more the "other problems", as delay doesn't seem to be an issue for this administration.

So - with unfamiliar and sometimes incompatible platforms, overwork, overstressed human and computing capability, being rushed into the change and garbled information through crossed lines of communication - whatever arrives will be approximate at best. Where, precisely, do the reports arrive? Who sees it first? Who decides what to do with it?

Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the C.D.C. director, and José Arrieta, the chief information officer for the Department of Health and Human Services — defended the decision in a conference call with reporters, saying that the new database was necessary to expedite and streamline data, which is used to help the government make decisions about where to deploy personal protective gear or drugs like remdesivir https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/15/us/politics/coronavirus-database.html.

Oh, I see. To decide which [friendly] states get first dibs on resources and which [nasty] ones, get left out in the cold. That makes sense.

Plus: ""Here's ten million. I want you to do us a favor, though..."

But the officials had no explanation for the TeleTracking contract, which was awarded on a sole-source basis, federal records show. Mr. Arrieta said he was not involved in the contract negotiations. The company did not respond to emails seeking comment.

[/quote]

[toucana]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uLJkpH__os

Within the next two weeks, USA will reach 4 million known cases of COVID-19 infections

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/22/health/us-coronavirus-wednesday/index.html

The tabulation below shows that the time interval between each million cases is now *halving*.

January 21 —> First reported case in USA

April 29 —> I million cases in USA —> 99 days

June 10 —> 2 million cases in USA —> 43 days

July 8 —> 3 million cases in USA —> 28 days

August 5 —> 4 million cases (projected) —> 14 days

[TheVat]

No one who has parented small children will be surprised to learn about these new findings....

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamape ... le/2768952

Children are susceptible to infection with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) but generally present with mild symptoms compared with adults.1 Children drive spread of respiratory and gastrointestinal illnesses in the population,2 but data on children as sources of SARS-CoV-2 spread are sparse.

Early reports did not find strong evidence of children as major contributors to SARS-CoV-2 spread,3 but school closures early in pandemic responses thwarted larger-scale investigations of schools as a source of community transmission. As public health systems look to reopen schools and day cares, understanding transmission potential in children will be important to guide public health measures. Here, we report that replication of SARS-CoV-2 in older children leads to similar levels of viral nucleic acid as adults, but significantly greater amounts of viral nucleic acid are detected in children younger than 5 years.

[toucana]

The BBC Persian language service has published a report claiming that nearly three times as many people have died in Iran from COVID-19 than the Iranian government has admitted to.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-53598965

The information is said to have come from a whistle-blower within the Iranian government, and it includes large amounts of detail such as independently verifiable names and dates of daily hospital admissions and subsequent deaths.

The government's own records appear to show almost 42,000 people died with Covid-19 symptoms up to 20 July, versus 14,405 reported by its health ministry.

The number of people known to be infected is also almost double official figures: 451,024 as opposed to 278,827.

In recent weeks, it has suffered a second steep rise in the number of cases.

The first death in Iran from Covid-19 was recorded on 22 January, according to lists and medical records that have been passed to the BBC. This was almost a month before the first official case of coronavirus was reported there.

Tehran, the capital, has the highest number of deaths with 8,120 people who died with Covid-19 or symptoms similar to it.

The city of Qom, the initial epicentre of the virus in Iran, is worst hit proportionally, with 1,419 deaths - that is one death with Covid-19 for every 1,000 people.

It is notable that, across the country, 1,916 deaths were non-Iranian nationals. This indicates a disproportionate number of deaths amongst migrants and refugees, who are mostly from neighbouring Afghanistan.

Lockdown measures were imposed over the Nowruz (Iranian New Year) holidays at the end of the third week in March, and there was a corresponding decline in cases and deaths.

But as government restrictions were relaxed, the cases and deaths started to rise again after late-May.

Crucially the first recorded death on the leaked list occurred on 22 January, a month before the first case of coronavirus was officially reported in Iran.

At the time Health Ministry officials were adamant in acknowledging not a single case of coronavirus in the country, despite reports by journalists inside Iran, and warnings from various medical professionals.

In 28 days until the first official acknowledgement on 19 February, 52 people had already died.

The start of outbreak coincided both with the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution and with parliamentary elections.

These were major opportunities for the Islamic Republic to demonstrate its popular support and not risk damaging it because of the virus.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, accused some of wanting to use the coronavirus to undermine the election.

[TheVat]

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/25/health/c ... index.html

Based on a pre-print, not yet peer reviewed, but does provoke thought on the potential scale of "superspreader" events.

And has a touch of irony, which I probably don't need to point out.

[toucana]

A motorcycle rally held in South Dakota in August and attended by hundreds of thousands of Americans from across the country is linked to more than 260,000 Covid-19 cases recorded in the US since 2 August (almost 20% of new cases in the past month) a new study suggests, with researchers describing the event as a "worst-case scenario" for spreading the disease.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/coronavirus-almost-20-cases-past-month-stem-controversial-motorcycle-rally-research-claims-b420887.html

Between 7 and 16 August, around 450,000 people from across the states flocked to Sturgis for the annual 10-day Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, which featured several concerts and was held despite cases soaring across the country. Last week, a 60-year-old man with underlying health conditions was the first known person thought to have died with coronavirus having attended the event.

The study, by San Diego State University's Center for Health Economics & Policy Studies, estimates that the 260,000 figure represents around 19 per cent of all virus infections reported in the US between 2 August and 2 September.

http://ftp.iza.org/dp13670.pdf

As part of their study, the reserchers tracked anonymised mobile phone data that showed “smartphone pings from non-residents” and “foot traffic at restaurants and bars, retail establishments, entertainment venues, hotels and campgrounds each rose substantially.”

Using that data and linking it to corresponding rises in Covid-19 cases, the researchers - aided by a team of economists - calculated that the public health cost associated with treating the infections was in the region of $12.2 billion (£11.1bn). "This is enough to have paid each of the estimated 462,182 rally attendees $26,553.64 not to attend," the researchers claim.

It is understood that the annual festival, which went ahead with the blessing of South Dakota governor, Kristi Noem - an ardent Donald Trump supporter - generates somewhere in the region of $800 (£618) million in revenue. Festival attendees did not wear face coverings or practise social distancing while at the event, The Associated Press reported at the time.

[toucana]

A blunder that saw 16,000 UK positive Covid-19 tests go missing was caused by failing to replace software an astonishing 13 years out of date, experts believe.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/coronavirus-missing-tests-microsoft-excel-matt-hancock-b859322.html

The version of Microsoft Excel used – known as XLS – was superseded back in 2007, but was still being deployed by Public Health England’s systems.

It could handle only about 65,000 rows of data, rather than the million-plus that the newer software XLSX is capable of – which meant any additional test results were silently lopped off.

The revelation will pile further pressure on Matt Hancock, the health secretary, who has refused to discuss details of the fiasco, or explain why modern software was not used.

One expert told the BBC that even a high-school computing student would have known that better alternatives to XLS existed.

“Excel was always meant for people mucking around with a bunch of data for their small company to see what it looked like,” said Professor Jon Crowcroft from the University of Cambridge.

“And then when you need to do something more serious, you build something bespoke that works. There’s dozens of other things you could do – but you wouldn’t use XLS, nobody would start with that.”

Downing Street has launched an inquiry into the mistake, which has left tens of thousands of contacts of positive Covid cases still untraced.

[Serpent]

Have we all seen this one yet?
https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-the-fall-of-the-cdc?utm_source=pocket-newtab

n interviews and internal correspondence, CDC employees recounted the stunning fall of the agency many of them had spent their careers building. Some had served on the front lines of the CDC’s most storied battles and had an earned confidence that they could swoop in and save the world from the latest plague, whether it was E. coli on a fast-food burger or Ebola in a distant land. Theirs was the model other nations copied. Their leaders were the public faces Americans turned to for the unvarnished truth. They’d served happily under Democrats and Republicans.

Now, 10 months into the crisis, many fear the CDC has lost the most important currency of public health: trust, the confidence in experts that persuades people to wear masks for the public good, to refrain from close-packed gatherings, to take a vaccine.

....

Early in the outbreak, the lack of widespread testing had caused a shortage of data, obscuring the agency’s vision as the virus spread in Washington state, New York and New Jersey. The CDC updated its well-regarded hospital tracking system to collect information about COVID.

But in a startling power play this spring, the Trump administration stripped the CDC of its lead role in handling this vital hospital data, bringing in a private contractor that would struggle to gather reliable information. The unprecedented move, CDC scientists and public health specialists said, struck at the heart of the agency’s mission.