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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Wed May 27, 2020 6:24 am 
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4%? That's a pretty high case fatality rate, which means there's a lot of cases your health authorities don't know about (and people are in bad shape by the time they show up at the hospital door), or there are a lot of vulnerable people in the population.

Have there been any reports about how HIV-positive people who are on drugs for it fare when they get coronavirus?

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Thu May 28, 2020 3:04 am 
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This virus is a killer, yes. Looking at the worldwide stats, the number of closed cases that ended in fatality were around 13%, worldwide, our fatalities are about a third of that figure. We're not the best, but we're a long, long way away from the worst. (Some other countries: USA, 17%; Finland, 5.78%; Hong Kong, 0.385%; China, 5.58%; India, 6.27%; Germany, 4.98%) South Africa's 3.94% stands up reasonably well in that company, I think, though Hong Kong's still doing a full ten times better and making most of the rest of the world look pretty ridiculous by comparison.

If there have been any reports on how HIV+ people who are on antiretrovirals have done when faced with Coronavirus, then I have certainly not come across or even heard about any of them.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Thu May 28, 2020 6:43 am 
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I don't think Hong Kong hospitals were 10 times better at saving people with coronavirus. Our public health infrastructure was better at detecting the mild and asymptomatic cases.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Thu May 28, 2020 7:28 am 
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Well, to be fair, Hong Kong's only had four Coronavirus deaths so far; statistics based on small numbers like that can be quite skewed from the large-number averages. If you'd had, say, two more people dying of coronavirus, that would push your number up by 50%; if we had two extra coronavirus deaths, that would barely move our percentage (we've had 552 deaths so far). On top of that, you've had a very small total infection of only about a thousand people - probably due to the people who bought it into the country being found and isolated super fast, I assume - which of course would make the whole thing easier to track, due to limited peple coming in contact with the virus.

So, yeah, whether the thing that Hong Kong did right was to find and isolate mild cases extremely quickly, or brilliance in tracing contacts. or treating the patients in exactly the right way, or just being plain lucky, or (most likely) some combination of all of the above; it is nonetheless clear that Hong Kong very much did something right.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Thu May 28, 2020 8:06 am 
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We stopped this thing at the border, is what we did. Everyone coming in had to isolate for 14 days. All of them were tested. If they were positive, they traced their contacts, and isolated those people too. That kept the numbers small, which made it possible to trace and isolate them efficiently. It also means that everyone who tested positive was sent to the hospital to be monitored, which meant there wasn't anybody passing out and dying alone at home unnoticed.

Our hospitals are pretty good but we don't have a magical mystery cure that nobody else in the world does.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Thu May 28, 2020 8:21 pm 
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CCC wrote:
This virus is a killer, yes. Looking at the worldwide stats, the number of closed cases that ended in fatality were around 13%, worldwide, our fatalities are about a third of that figure. We're not the best, but we're a long, long way away from the worst. (Some other countries: USA, 17%; Finland, 5.78%; Hong Kong, 0.385%; China, 5.58%; India, 6.27%; Germany, 4.98%) South Africa's 3.94% stands up reasonably well in that company, I think, though Hong Kong's still doing a full ten times better and making most of the rest of the world look pretty ridiculous by comparison.

I think most of that is an artifact of testing. New York City got hit as hard as anywhere in the US, and our death rate was 1.4%; the actual death toll is about half again the official one, but the actual infection total was over ten times as high as the official one. All up, there are an enormous number of asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic cases that are just falling through the cracks.

Mind you, there's an awful lot of Republican lies here in the US too: Florida, which saw an average of 918 pneumonia deaths during the period of the epidemic from 2010 to 2019, officially had 1700 Covid deaths and 5700 pneumonia deaths (and that ignores completely the stroke and heart attack Covid deaths). At least 6 Republican states are playing that game right now; inflating test counts and covering up deaths. It's making the epidemiology tricky.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Fri May 29, 2020 1:40 am 
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I heard that some states were conflating their PCR and serology test results to make it look like they were doing more testing and drive down the positive rate.

This is the sort of ridiculous crap I'd expect to find in China. I'm appalled. The CDC is the last government agency I'd have expected Trump to manage to hollow out. It's a festering bucket of rot.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Sat May 30, 2020 11:35 pm 
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The current head of the CDC is a hack, and falsifying inconvenient health data is a very Republican thing to do. F'rinstance, we're asked to believe that Tennessee doesn't get food poisoning cases in spite of having no meaningful food safety laws (because they don't budget any money to enforce them). They simply fired everyone in the office that collects the data, and there are no officially reported cases any more.

Trump delayed (and possibly cancelled) the upcoming G7 meeting in the US. Why? The first official reply was Merkel telling him to pound sand; she wasn't coming to his plague ward of a country to help him pretend things are normal. I guess he didn't want to keep having such replies make the news, so it's off. He also started talking about inviting nations who have no business being there, but who also probably wouldn't blow him right off, just so there will be some sort of show for the fools in his base of him pretending to do diplomacy.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Sun May 31, 2020 3:33 am 
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Kea wrote:
We stopped this thing at the border, is what we did.


Oh, yeah. That's definitely the ideal. The problem on our end is that, by the time our government started reacting, the virus was already in the country. We've basically closed our borders now, but it's already too late...

Weremensh wrote:
I think most of that is an artifact of testing. New York City got hit as hard as anywhere in the US, and our death rate was 1.4%; the actual death toll is about half again the official one, but the actual infection total was over ten times as high as the official one. All up, there are an enormous number of asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic cases that are just falling through the cracks.


Yeah, I was kind of hoping that these statistical biases were about the same in each country, so that the figures could be meaningfully compared. More or less, at least.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Sun May 31, 2020 8:25 am 
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Weremensh wrote:
The current head of the CDC is a hack, and falsifying inconvenient health data is a very Republican thing to do. F'rinstance, we're asked to believe that Tennessee doesn't get food poisoning cases in spite of having no meaningful food safety laws (because they don't budget any money to enforce them). They simply fired everyone in the office that collects the data, and there are no officially reported cases any more.


I heard about the hack, he was a borderline AIDS denier in the 80s who had HIV positive troops dishonourably discharged for being allegedly gay. It's still incredible how much damage one hack can wreak in 4 years.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Sat Jun 06, 2020 10:36 pm 
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I find this kind of amusing, in an 'of course it's unbelievably stupid, Trump was involved' sort of way. Given a shortage of testing swabs for Covid tests, Trump visits a factory that makes them in Maine for a photo op. He didn't bother wearing a mask. The swabs produced or out in the open while he was there will have to be thrown away.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Mon Jun 08, 2020 12:46 pm 
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I am not sure why the US hasn't switched to using throat swabs or saliva tests, they are equally effective and less uncomfortable. And don't require sticking giant q-tips up people's noses.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Mon Jun 08, 2020 1:08 pm 
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Because the test the CDC finally settled on, which is pretty much the slowest and most expensive to operate out there, uses nasal swabs. Three guesses who would have to make the decision to change that.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Fri Jun 12, 2020 9:18 am 
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The Republican plan for reopening adopted for Trump's campaign: the commoners at his rallies won't be permitted to sue over Covid. Anyone who attends has to sign a waiver. Gonna be an interesting moment for the old, fat white smokers in his base right there.

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 Post subject: Re: The Virus
 Post Posted: Tue Jun 23, 2020 10:49 pm 
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Apparently Trump was serious that there's too much testing going on out there. The Feds are stopping funding of 13 testing sites for Covid infections, most of which are in states which are currently still in the upswing of their first wave (like Texas). Good thing you can't get pregnant if you don't get a pregnancy test, isn't it?

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