Mega-Thread: Coronavirus Pandemic

[Acidbaron]

Prove me wrong.

I know we are all home for a long time with free time on our hands but proving you wrong on everything you say would be a full time job nobody is really interested in, because the reward for it would be more ignorance from your end while acting obtuse.

Still don't know what you are gaining from all this with making comments "it is all over" when no respectable virologist follows that stance, even the herd community group what you appear to worship.

[Egomaniac]

I have not, so far. We started restricting access to our lobby this morning (finally), so I think I interacted with about 5 people today. Which I'm fine with - motherfuckers keep coming in visibly ill and it's just mind-boggling.

I'm in a group on Facebook where one girl is asking for advice on where to hold her 50 person wedding. Anyone who points out what a completely irresponsible thing it is to hold a wedding right now (oh, and she's pregnant, too!) is being told they're "mean."

Tell her to have the wedding in a football stadium. Space the guests at least 10 seats apart from each other (in every direction), Give the wedding official, the Bride, and the Groom all megaphones so they can yell their vows at each other, no kissing the bride, each person in the wedding party will need to come in their own separate limo, and no dancing.

Oh and the reception should have an open bar...but only serve corona.

[Acidbaron]

What if the numbers are true and China actually does end up with the least amount of casualties?
Could something like that even be possible, statistically speaking?

As for numbers i do not know, but take note that China is not a democracy, that China does not care about their subjects or human rights.
So it could be they end up with overall less because we are more humane and don't consider grouping up infected in a place and welding it shut to be a valid strategy.

[Blur4stuff]

Several million deaths in China seems a bit high, but it doesn't matter because you simply cannot trust anything they report.

[Dentelan]

As for numbers i do not know, but take note that China is not a democracy, that China does not care about their subjects or human rights.
So it could be they end up with overall less because we are more humane and don't consider grouping up infected in a place and welding it shut to be a valid strategy.

Its not about China can violate human rights and democracies cant, and thats why they did better.
No, almost in every democracy country is law about state of emergency, that you can use to violate human rights of freedom etc in extraordinary situations.
West fucked up because horizontal system of managing country is shit when things go bad, vertical is more effective in such times.

[Draco-Onis]

Several million deaths in China seems a bit high, but it doesn't matter because you simply cannot trust anything they report.

I was similarly skeptical of their numbers but the WHO is on the ground and has confirmed their numbers actually overall the Asian countries seem to have gotten it under control. It's a shame we all should have copied the South Korea model their cases are going down also.

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As for numbers i do not know, but take note that China is not a democracy, that China does not care about their subjects or human rights.
So it could be they end up with overall less because we are more humane and don't consider grouping up infected in a place and welding it shut to be a valid strategy.

South Korea, Thailand, Singapore have all gotten it under control without going all China on their population.

[Acidbaron]

Its not about China can violate human rights and democracies cant, and thats why they did better.
No, almost in every democracy country is law about state of emergency, that you can use to violate human rights of freedom etc in extraordinary situations.
West fucked up because horizontal system of managing country is shit when things go bad, vertical is more effective in such times.

I am sorry but if you expect me to engage in a serious conversation about this knowing that you are from Russia, knowing what informative sources you most likely used. Knowing the misinformation campaigns going around, so nothing against you personally i don't see how a proper conversation can be held here. So that's all i really have to say about that to, maybe someone else will indulge you but i won't.

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I was similarly skeptical of their numbers but the WHO is on the ground and has confirmed their numbers actually overall the Asian countries seem to have gotten it under control. It's a shame we all should have copied the South Korea model their cases are going down also.

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South Korea, Thailand, Singapore have all gotten it under control without going all China on their population.

Fair enough, i forgot about those nations for a while. Some of those do have a high number of beds/care available, South Korea and Japan come to mind.

Edit: Went to look into how come those countries do so much better, the reality is they have been trained by the previous wave of viruses and their population takes it far more serious than we do. So it is not just the amount of medical supplies at hand.

[Forogil]

I dont remember there having been any lockdowns in 2009. For a pandemic it was barely even mentioned while it was active.

It was stopped early - so it was discussed before the time it would have been most active if we hadn't taken action.

The reason is that there was a vaccine to stop the swine flu in 2009 (for the 2009/2010 winter flu season)- and the vaccinations was discussed; and it seems some tens of millions were vaccinated in the US. We don't have a vaccine this time.

[Yunru]

WuHan has no new case for 2 days in a row !
It is a safe heaven now.

I heard people paid tens of thousands of dollars to get into China now.

No sorry, that is just a propaganda.

More un-cenzored news:

[jonnysensible]

you should really stop posting that china uncensored stuff. Its run by a homophobic cult thats pushing qanon and vaccine autism shit. It does dunk on China but cmon man its Epoch Times linked.

[Forogil]

I was similarly skeptical of their numbers but the WHO is on the ground and has confirmed their numbers actually overall the Asian countries seem to have gotten it under control. It's a shame we all should have copied the South Korea model their cases are going down also.

Many Asian countries - but not all.

Iran does not have it under control - and even if Japan and Malaysia have fewer cases it may be getting out hand there as well. And I wouldn't trust that India and Pakistan report correct numbers and have it under control.

[bbr]

Lets keep the political shenanigans and conspiracies out of this...

We should be hitting 300k total infections today.
Italy alone will probably add another 5-7k

[Skroe]

Amazing news! China, with a population of over 1.4 BILLION people, now has fewer COVID-19 deaths than Italy, with a mere 60 MILLION people.

Despite having over 23 TIMES the population of Italy, China is on track to have the lowest COVID-19 mortality rate of any country in the entire world. And no new COVID-19 cases in Wuhan, despite the ceaseless efforts of the U.S. Army to poison them with bioweapons. IT'S A MIRACLE!

Foreign media are “carriers”. Kick them out, and look how the numbers go down.
Transparency spreads germs!

Pretty much this. China's a country where numbers of any type are political things.

We're talking about a country that, in paper, says its grown at between 8% to 6% since the Great Recession, when more likely it's been closer to 1% to 3%. The Wuhan Virus probably threw them into a deep quarterly contraction, but expect to see a nice, manicured GDP growth number next quarter that illustrates the resiliency of the Communist regime and the great leadership of Xi Jinping.

https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-e...number-says-us
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/11/b...ata/index.html
https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-artic...onal-accounts/

[Dentelan]

I am sorry but if you expect me to engage in a serious conversation about this knowing that you are from Russia, knowing what informative sources you most likely used. Knowing the misinformation campaigns going around, so nothing against you personally i don't see how a proper conversation can be held here. So that's all i really have to say about that to, maybe someone else will indulge you but i won't.

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Fair enough, i forgot about those nations for a while. Some of those do have a high number of beds/care available, South Korea and Japan come to mind.

Edit: Went to look into how come those countries do so much better, the reality is they have been trained by the previous wave of viruses and their population takes it far more serious than we do. So it is not just the amount of medical supplies at hand.

I am from Russia, but i dont watch/read russian state media lol. That was mean, but as you wish

[Skroe]

Im surprised that west is doing so awful job dealing with virus comparing Asian countries. You can say chinese were lying etc. But hey. They localised outbreak very quickly. Or look at south korea, Taiwan.
I think we should not fall in to conspiracy theories and admit that asian people are just more disciplined as society than westerners. It seems we will have 1mill worldwide in a month or so.

China's numbers are bunk.

https://www.barrons.com/articles/chi...oo-51581622840

China’s economic data have always been fraught. Now, all eyes are on the coronavirus numbers, which economists and investors are using to estimate the outbreak’s toll—and they are too perfect to mean much.

A statistical analysis of China’s coronavirus casualty data shows a near-perfect prediction model that data analysts say isn’t likely to naturally occur, casting doubt over the reliability of the numbers being reported to the World Health Organization. That’s aside from news on Thursday that health officials in the epicenter of the outbreak reported a surge in new infections after changing how they diagnose the illness.

The most current WHO data count more than 60,000 cases of infection and nearly 1,400 deaths. Most of those cases and all but one death have been in China.

Torsten Sløk, chief economist at Deutsche Bank Securities, expects the outbreak to shave 1.5 percentage points off of Chinese gross domestic product this year. He recently revised his 2020 GDP estimate for China to 4.6% from 6.1%, and said he thinks the virus will take a 0.5 percentage point off of global growth this year. Estimates like Sløk’s, of course, rely on the tally of coronavirus infections and fatalities that China is reporting.

China’s official economic statistics often differ from private attempts to replicate the results. Take a set of purchasing managers’ indexes. In each month of 2019, the government-created version beat a closely watched private version. Some economists say that such data-reporting anomalies are a function of the country’s size, growth rate, and relative lack of transparency.

“It’s an emerging economy,” says Carl Weinberg, chief economist at High Frequency Economics. “There’s a natural roughness to the data.”

In terms of the virus data, the number of cumulative deaths reported is described by a simple mathematical formula to a very high accuracy, according to a quantitative-finance specialist who ran a regression of the data for Barron’s. A near-perfect 99.99% of variance is explained by the equation, this person said.

Put in an investing context, that variance, or so-called r-squared value, would mean that an investor could predict tomorrow’s stock price with almost perfect accuracy. In this case, the high r-squared means there is essentially zero unexpected variability in reported cases day after day.

Barron’s re-created the regression analysis of total deaths caused by the virus, which first emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan at the end of last year, and found similarly high variance. We ran it by Melody Goodman, associate professor of biostatistics at New York University’s School of Global Public Health.

“I have never in my years seen an r-squared of 0.99,” Goodman says. “As a statistician, it makes me question the data.”

Real human data are never perfectly predictive when it comes to something like an epidemic, Goodman says, since there are countless ways that a person could come into contact with the virus.

For context, Goodman says a “really good” r-squared, in terms of public health data, would be a 0.7. “Anything like 0.99,” she said, “would make me think that someone is simulating data. It would mean you already know what is going to happen.”

There’s one scenario where the data could be understandably jiggered, Goodman said. Because there are privacy concerns around public health data, it’s conceivable that someone would simulate the data based on real data, so as to make the individuals unidentifiable. But even then, the r-squared in this case is extraordinarily high. Moreover, says Goodman, when data are manipulated to protect privacy, it would need to be disclosed; there is no such disclosure on the WHO site.

What does this mean for investors and analysts? If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

It is a conspiracy theory to say "China is hiding 8 million deaths".
It is not a conspiracy theory to say "China is very likely to be hugely lying about the infection and death numbers, like they lie about almost all their numbers".

Regardless, the Chinese Communist Party has a reckoning coming to it, and they won't be able to use fake numbers to save themselves. They've proven themselves an existential threat to global security and economic and physical welfare. And as with every authoritarian regime, the first victims is their own people.

At long last, it is time to deal with them.

[Forogil]

I am sorry but if you expect me to engage in a serious conversation about this knowing that you are from Russia, knowing what informative sources you most likely used. Knowing the misinformation campaigns going around, so nothing against you personally i don't see how a proper conversation can be held here. So that's all i really have to say about that to, maybe someone else will indulge you but i won't.

An interesting note about Russia is the gap between the official statements and actions.
All cases are classified as imported, i.e. no local transmission (and the death was reportedly due to blood clot, not respiratory illness), and all arrivals are quarantined for a few week.
And Russia regularly disinfect public places due to covid-19 - which assumedly is to stop local transmission.

It may be that it is under control and the authorities use it as an excuse to go more authoritarian, but I highly doubt it and assume https://www.rt.com/russia/483646-cor...l-head-doctor/ is intended to prepare for further spread and more draconian measures.

[Stelio Kontos]

What is she on about? Reparations to the US? Wtf.

This is also something that annoys me. Could we please not make the corona virus an "American" story? This is a world wide problem, with Europe currently being savaged the most.

It makes sense for her to focus on America considering she's specifically referring to the Chinese attempt to legitimize a conspiracy theory that the US used a bioweapon on them.

[Gaidax]

Daily update on local numbers.

Total cases 883, 15 high severity, 1 dead, 36 recovered.

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An interesting note about Russia is the gap between the official statements and actions.

Russia, Iran and China numbers needs to be taken with a big grain of salt. I think overall Russia is still fine, but Iran and China for sure have quite a lot more cases and deaths than they report.

[markos82]

Well in my country about 150 cases and 1 death so far, things will get worse and I get that, what I don't get it is that people that were put in mandatory isolation left it l, now for that they can get up to 3 years in prison which is low Imo, I think it should be at least 5 years and 25 if someone dies due to them spreading the virus basically on purpose...

[xenogear3]

Lots of people here are jealous at Chairman Xi's success !

A famous prophet foretold that he will become the greatest emperor ever.
Greater than Trump and Palpatine.
Now we know how. China becomes a holy land with no infection.