The whole situation surrounding the corona virus strikes me as a spectacular clusterfuck of global proportions.
I wouldn’t put much confidence on any of those numbers. There’s a whole bunch of factors that could skew an estimate of the mortality rate in either direction.
Off the top of my head, here’s a few:
-The hospitals in Wuhan are completely overloaded, so:
-the true mortality rate is going to be higher due to lack of intensive care for people who would otherwise pull through, creating a gap between the mortality rate in wuhan and elsewhere.
-only the worst cases are going to be dealt with in hospitals, skewing the reported mortality rate towards the higher end.
-Wuhan is taking extreme containment measures. For instance, [people are probably being welded into their rooms](https://www.the-sun.com/news/378365/coronavirus-patients-welded-into-homes-in-china-as-death-toll-spirals-to-813/) God knows what happens to them and how their infections turn out.
-The spread of the virus is rapid and exponential, so mortality can only be lower bounded by taking total dead/total cases
-It’s faster to die than to recover, so you get the opposite effect from looking at deaths/(deaths + recovered)
-CPP is probably not being very transparent or outright lying about the situation.
-for instance as I understand it WHO officials have still not been allowed into Wuhan.
-this is probably also happening internally such that even CPP officials can't really get a good grasp of the situation if they wanted to.
-there are rumors of crematoriums operating 24/7 indicating that the real death rate is far higher than the reported death rate.
-I’ve also heard rumours of widespread online censorship, evidenced by trending misspellings of #coronavirus but without the proper spelling trending on twitter and moderator and administrator actions on reddit. Further obfuscating the underlying situation.
-There are rumours of possible reinfection and even that the second time round might be worse along with heavy censorship/firing of the people starting these rumours in china.
-Many countries are only screening people who have had direct contact with people coming in from china, and there’s evidence of many asymptomatic/weakly symptomatic carriers. Thus, external death rates will also be difficult to estimate, as many unusual pneumonia deaths will not be attributed to the virus and the total number infected will not be known either.
-The tests we are using are new and have false positive and negative rates, further skewing the numbers.
All these factors either add uncertainty or skew the numbers in one direction or the other in a way that is both region and context dependent. When you put all of it together you get mortality rate estimates ranging anywhere from 0.1% up to +15%, and who knows about the long term effects of the disease.
Some paper also indicated (very)weak evidence of discrepancies in susceptibility between Asians and other races and at the moment I’m unaware of any confirmed deaths that aren’t east asian.
There’s at least two Iranians now, and the thick spread has so far been primarily in Asia aside from the cruise ship which we are only just getting to the point that we’re starting to see deaths, and i’m pretty sure that data is confounded by the smoking effect because I have seen a follow-up that got to more of a tissue bank and did not see ethnicity differences.
Was that the analysis that provide the information on smoking in China by gender—which was then consistent with the pattern in China of the majority of deaths being older males with existing health, and particularly respiratory, weakness.
Iran is accelerating quickly it seems -- 4 deaths now and 13 new cases, in less than a day from the first report I think
I’m combining that analysis with another preprint that went into more extensive higher N tissue bank data and found no correlation of ACE2 expression with ethnicity or gender.
To top it off with Iran, now we have local authorities saying its in many cities and TWO confirmed international travelers that caught it in Iran over the last few weeks (in Canada and Lebanon). That is the smoking gun, i’m calling thousands of cases there as of now.
I’m starting to suspect I won’t be getting to that conference this June...
The whole situation surrounding the corona virus strikes me as a spectacular clusterfuck of global proportions.
I wouldn’t put much confidence on any of those numbers. There’s a whole bunch of factors that could skew an estimate of the mortality rate in either direction.
Off the top of my head, here’s a few:
-The hospitals in Wuhan are completely overloaded, so:
-The spread of the virus is rapid and exponential, so mortality can only be lower bounded by taking total dead/total cases
-It’s faster to die than to recover, so you get the opposite effect from looking at deaths/(deaths + recovered)
-China seems to have a different method for reporting causes of deaths, leading to underestimation of the mortality rate.
-China has really bad air pollution, and there’s weak evidence that smokers might be more suceptible to this disease. Men also smoke far more than women in china and it’s being reported that men are disproportionately affected by the disease.
-CPP is probably not being very transparent or outright lying about the situation.
-Some paper also indicated (very)weak evidence of discrepancies in susceptibility between Asians and other races and
at the moment I’m unaware of any confirmed deaths that aren’t east asian.Apparently24 Iranians died from the virus.-I’ve also heard rumours of widespread online censorship, evidenced by trending misspellings of #coronavirus but without the proper spelling trending on twitter and moderator and administrator actions on reddit. Further obfuscating the underlying situation.
-There are rumours of possible reinfection and even that the second time round might be worse along with heavy censorship/firing of the people starting these rumours in china.
-Many countries are only screening people who have had direct contact with people coming in from china, and there’s evidence of many asymptomatic/weakly symptomatic carriers. Thus, external death rates will also be difficult to estimate, as many unusual pneumonia deaths will not be attributed to the virus and the total number infected will not be known either.
-There’s also evidence that the incubation period might be in some cases even higher than 14 days. This skews estimates based on total infected vs total dead.
-The tests we are using are new and have false positive and negative rates, further skewing the numbers.
All these factors either add uncertainty or skew the numbers in one direction or the other in a way that is both region and context dependent. When you put all of it together you get mortality rate estimates ranging anywhere from 0.1% up to +15%, and who knows about the long term effects of the disease.
There’s at least two Iranians now, and the thick spread has so far been primarily in Asia aside from the cruise ship which we are only just getting to the point that we’re starting to see deaths, and i’m pretty sure that data is confounded by the smoking effect because I have seen a follow-up that got to more of a tissue bank and did not see ethnicity differences.
Was that the analysis that provide the information on smoking in China by gender—which was then consistent with the pattern in China of the majority of deaths being older males with existing health, and particularly respiratory, weakness.
Iran is accelerating quickly it seems -- 4 deaths now and 13 new cases, in less than a day from the first report I think
I’m combining that analysis with another preprint that went into more extensive higher N tissue bank data and found no correlation of ACE2 expression with ethnicity or gender.
To top it off with Iran, now we have local authorities saying its in many cities and TWO confirmed international travelers that caught it in Iran over the last few weeks (in Canada and Lebanon). That is the smoking gun, i’m calling thousands of cases there as of now.
I’m starting to suspect I won’t be getting to that conference this June...