Chat about Novel Coronavirus - 2019-nCoV - COVID-19

These are banging. Fucking love mala!

The guy doing the sign language on the daily briefing right now sort of looks like a Chris O'Dowd/Justin Trudeau hybrid.

Masturbation will not spread coronavirus

Kinda the opposite really as it boosts the immune system.

That'll explain why I never get colds.

I believe it is the only known cure for coronavirus.
But couldn't find them anywhere!

Has Govid-19 been listening to The Smiths?
'will pull through'?

Is that 'Italy' or 'Lombardia'?
Lombardia could easily be obscuring other regions figures.

Interesting that they are broadcasting COBR powerpoints now on live TV. Surely a graph like this is meaningless if it's not weighted according to population. How can you compare China to UK.

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I thought this was a good article discussing how underreported deaths in Italy are.

The small town of Nembro has 11,600 inhabitants. Typically it would have 35 deaths over the first quarter. This year it had already had 158 deaths by March 24. Yet the official data counts just 31 Covid-19 mortalities. The implication is that the real pandemic death rate has been four times higher.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/03/30/italys-true-death-rate-warning-britons-want-call-covid-19-lockdown/

Just weighting it against the entire population makes it just as worthless though. The infection will never take off everywhere at the same time, so at least at the start - or if you manage to contain it mostly to one area like China apparently did -, only the population of the actual areas affected count. Otherwise, it's a game of "who has the most population overall" to keep the relative infection numbers down...

Surely a graph like this is meaningless if it's not weighted according to population. How can you compare China to UK.

No, that's exactly how you do want to compare things. A pandemic spreads amongst people. It doesn't spread faster in a more populous country, it just hits various limits (at significant proportions of the population) earlier/later.

Closer to what seems to have happened in China too-I read somewhere that locals estimate deaths in Wuhan to be closer to 50k...

Hmm, OK.

Some thoughts from the FT as to why they don't weight their graphs by population
https://www.ft.com/video/9a72a9d4-8db1-4615-8333-4b73ae3ddff8

Ta, from the transcript:-

"
The second question I often get asked is, why aren't we adjusting for countries' population sizes in this chart? So this one is a bit more of a judgement call. What we have with this virus is something which spreads at a fairly consistent rate regardless of the situation on the ground. We tend to see over a certain number of days the same number of cases, after day one, day two, day ten, et cetera.

And that's because this virus, it does spread fast, but it doesn't, you know, ripple through a country's entire population in a matter of days. So the overall population of a country is not any sort of limiting factor on how fast it spreads. It will tend to spread as the people in those cities, in those areas mix at similar rates at the same rate.

Now, we could, of course, still adjust for population, and give you sort of per capita or per million people numbers of cases or deaths. What that would do is essentially just make larger countries look like their outbreaks aren't quite as bad, and smaller countries look like theirs are much worse. With this chart, we're focusing on trajectory. We're focusing on saying, where are things right now, where are they going to be in a few days, and how does this compare to other countries that you're already familiar with from following the news.

So if we changed to per capita, the slopes wouldn't actually change. All that would change is the vertical positioning of different countries' lines. And they would change in such a way that, for example, the American outbreak would look less alarming than it is, and the Danish or Swiss outbreaks would look worse. The numbers that come up in the news, and the numbers that we as humans instinctively react to are numbers of people, numbers of deaths.

I think if we start moving into per capita, per million people rates, first of all, you lose a bit of the immediacy, a bit of the sort of visceral nature of these numbers. We would lose that connection with the numbers that we're seeing in the news. We're hearing about hundreds and thousands of people being infected and dying tragically in countries like Italy and Spain. And I want people to be able to see on that y-axis where they are in relation to that, not where they are in relation to some more abstract number, which loses, as I say, some of the sort of emotional power that I hope this chart has.
"

Erm.
Please show your working.
You sound ever so confident and yet epidemiology uses direct standardised or age standardised rates for comparing different population sizes

https://youtu.be/5y2FuDY6Q4M

Seriously god is not on anyone's side.
What is it with the religious?
Mass meetings now? FFS
India - 8000 Muslims
America - christian gatherings. Rodney Brown arrested
STOP
Bonkers

Ultimately, at some point the metric will be :
1 in 10 people
For every 20 people, 5 people.

That sort of thing l.

No proof or anything. But wouldn't surprise me if this was the cause.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU

I did this to my finger trying to catch a toppling wine glass last year. Unpleasant.

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Why's it bubbling? That's fucking stinking.

Disk brake maintenance fail, luckily a few weeks ago now. 10+ years of cleaning fixed drivetrains and never had anything that bad :(

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Think it was wee blood clots, but IANAD.

Hide these^ ^^ please, behind a paywall or a spiler warning or something ffs

You sound ever so confident and yet epidemiology uses direct standardised or age standardised rates for comparing different population sizes

Oh really, do they? Does epidemiology look at the Wuhan outbreak numbers by dividing the number of infected by the entire population of China?

What exactly does that tell them?

It would pick an appropriate population right?
You might say:
The rate in London is 5 per 1,000,000 people
Which would mean 40 people (ISH)
In Wuhan it's 6 per 1,000,000

At some point you're going to start using a rate of something. And it is normally per 100,000 people.