First US Coronavirus Case of Unknown Origin
What’s going on in San Diego County?
What’s going on in Germany?
Frankfort Airport Wednesday Afternoon
Italian Prime Minister Admits Hospital Screwup
Jim Bianco on South Korea
Trump’s Coronavirus Czar
Affordability is Not a Goal
South Korea Runs 35,000 Tests, US 426
Protect Yourself
Discharged Patients Test Positive
CDC Competency in Question
HIV-Like Mutation
Recession Warning
Could or will?
Then again, was one already in the cards?
Travel Ban to South Korea
The US should have done this long ago. Trump is way behind the curve.
Containment Fails
What’s Happening?
- CDC Admits Spread of Coronavirus in the US Appears Inevitable
- Lie of the Day: This is Not a Pandemic
- Bond Yields Crash and Gold Soars on Pandemic Threat
- Fed Minutes Highlight Coronavirus Concerns and Uncertainty 8 Times
- Nearly 50% Odds of “At Least” 3 Rate Cuts by December
- San Francisco Mayor Declares State of Emergency, Europe Prepares for Pandemic
- Trump proclaims We are “Very, Very Ready for the Coronavirus, for Anything”
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
I agree 100%. It is the “we crowdsourced that it’s already in all these different communities and the CDC is covering it up” part that is bunk.
could this please be the black swan that causes domino effect
This feels more like the bioweapon lab in Wuhan theory is true.
Certainly beginning to make more sense.
Laugh of the Day
HERE’S how you control an epidemic:
North Korea’s First Confirmed Coronavirus Patient Shot Dead
Hey Mish, don’t leave us hanging…what is going on in San Diego County?
If the number of confirmed cases is growing like it is, there must be millions of people infected worldwide.
That’s the problem. There aren’t. The WHO mission to China established this.
If there were, then the fatality rate would be such that nobody would really care.
Oh OK. Like the WHO has any idea of how many are infected. I would be surprised if 5% of infections are confirmed.
You would be surprised, but the WHO rely on more scientific measurements. They witnessed thousands of tests done in Wuhan in China and found very little evidence. Random test rate was 0.49% positive at the epidemics peak and fell to 0.002% within a matter of weeks.
Going back to this data set: The current reading on the Diamond Princess is 705 cases (about 20% of the ships population). 4 deaths (about 0.5% of the people who got ill). 36 in “serious condition”(death plus serious is about 6% of the population that got ill). 10 reported as “recovered”.
OK, in a mythical country of 300 million, 20% falling ill would be 60 million.
Of that 60 million, 3.6 million would get seriously ill–requiring some form of medical intervention. And if the medical care is provided as optimally as for the Diamond Princess people, only 300,000 deaths would occur.
That is the best case scenario based on the only experiment-like set of data that we have.
Thanks for spelling this out 😐
Experts claim 70% attack rate.
Mythical country now has 210 million ill.
Of that 210 million, 12 million would need medical care and because of the speed that the virus spreads, you could probably say that at peak, that would equate to 3 million people needing beds.
A fictional nation has 792,000 beds today, most of which are already occupied with sick people.
Therefore there is no way that medical care can be provided as optimally as for the Diamond Princess.
Which is probably why a not so fictional country called Britain is predicting +/- 500,000 deaths despite being 1/5th the size of your fictional country.
Throw in many health care workers getting infected and going off line won’t help situation.
If things turn out bad, best hope is for everyone to limit exposure (self quarantine) and stretch out period of infection. IOW, not everyone getting sick at once swamping the system.
It appears Wuhan’s downfall was everyone racing to hospital (infection hotspot) to get tested … and contracted virus there.
Indeed, I had not appreciated that the Chinese view hospitals as something to be visited on the slightest provocation. If you look at where the clusters are outside China (old people’s homes, hospitals and ….ummm…..cruise ships) that was probably the worst move.
There’s a lag between infection and death. We have no way of estimating the death rate until the number of infected has reached a somewhat steady state for a period of time.
Thanks for the extrapolation. I’ve been thinking along the lines of this comment thread, but hadn’t done the math.
Cruisers are not a representative population. Not the youngest, or healthiest vacationers.
Those patients who require ICU level intervention will occupy those beds for about three weeks, further crimping availability.
So if you should have a near-death case, you need to get it early rather than late. (Not really the best survival plan…)
Re-read the Internet from 1992 onward .. re: Y2K. This thing smacks of a “media push” to get people to watch TV news. Maybe Im just getting old – I see these “world coming to an end” narratives around every corner.
How many people died due to Y2K? I think the analogy is inexact.
The yelling, screaming and gnashing of teeth IS exact 🙂
I’m intrigued by the lack of leaks from the early Wuhan antiviral trial of Gilead’s Resdevivir. It’s probably a ten day intravenous regimen. If so, they should have known for several days by now whether it helps or not. If not, I’m sure people like Eric-Deng would be finding a way to tell us by now. The other thing to watch would be Gild’s price…which is running, and whether there’s a scramble to ramp production.
They said the results would not be due until April, and its also been stated that they are strugglign to recruit since recruits must not have been treated with anything else.
In other words, they could only really recruit from the pool of patients who have been diagnosed in the past week or so, since everybody else will have been treated with something.
This is not new. It is the same drug that was given for MERS and SARS, which are also coronaviruses. This plus the HIV antiviral seems like the best treatment to date.
“This is not new.” Agreed. The point I was trying to make is that there are no early leaks saying it’s not working on Covid-19 like it did on MERS, and such leaks are becoming conspicuous by their absence, I think.
From what I’ve read, the treatment Resdevivir regimen is probably around 10 days long.
If I’m running a double blind placebo controlled test involving a couple hundred “severe” cases in Wuhan, I should be seeing one death per day on the 200 if nothing’s changed.
On the other hand, if my experimental group on the Resdevivir is NOT dying, I’d probably be itching to tell someone…unless my friendly CCP commissar is standing nearby promising me the North Korean rumor control fix if I do say anything before more solid stats can be run. In no case, I think, will it be April before the word is out.
“While it is possible that this virus, like many other respiratory viruses, will not survive as readily in warm temperatures, it will be encountering a “completely susceptible” U.S. population, said Maciej F. Boni, an associate professor of biology at Pennsylvania State University.
Hardly anyone in this country has been exposed to the new virus (other than some travelers to China and their family members), so there’s been no chance to develop immunity. That means the coronavirus — even if it turns out to be hampered somewhat by rising temperatures — has plenty of opportunity to infect people and get passed along, said Boni, a member of Penn State’s Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics.”
Look at Philippines. They have tens of thousands of Chinese tourists there at all times. Only 3 cases and 1 death – all Chinese tourists who already came infected. It doesn’t look like the virus likes hot weather.
“Hardly anyone in this country has been exposed to the new virus (other than some travelers to China and their family members), so there’s been no chance to develop immunity. “
That might no be 100% true. There appear to be enough similarities to some of the coronaviruses that cause the common cold (especially Cov-OC43) that perhaps that explains why children are not getting Covid-19 as much as older folks.
“There appear to be enough similarities to some of the coronaviruses that cause the common cold (especially Cov-OC43) that perhaps that explains why children are not getting Covid-19 as much as older folks.”
I agree. And their parents, as well. I’ve watched our grandkids drag home cold after cold for years now, and most of the time, one or both parents end up catching it. The wife and I very seldom do, dramatically reduced exposure, I think.
If I were a virion on a do-or-die suicide mission to infect, I’d a thousand times rather take on the wife and I than a family bristling with the latest antibodies to cousin Cov-OC43.
“Osterholm notes that MERS, another coronavirus that emerged in humans in 2012, does not follow the pattern of expected seasonality at all. “MERS cases continue when temperatures are 110 degrees in the Arabian Peninsula,” he says, noting that “several of the [virus’] peaks have been in the middle of the summer.”
As with so many things with this novel coronavirus, whether it will peter out with warmer temperatures, is something we just don’t know.”
“For that reason, he says, “I do think seasonality will play a role. As this outbreak unfolds and we approach spring and summer, I do think we will see some tapering off of cases.”
So as China and the rest of the Northern Hemisphere head into spring, the virus could begin to peter out or plateau. But the southern half of the globe is headed into fall and winter “so we may see this [virus] have increased transmission” in parts of the southern hemisphere, says Adalja — for example, in Australia. That’s similar to what happens with the flu each year.
“It’s not unreasonable to make the assumption” that cases will die down come spring, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told NPR. “We hope when the weather gets warmer it will diminish a bit,” he says.
But he sounds a cautionary note: “However, we don’t know that about this [new] coronavirus. We don’t have [a] backlog of history.”
Cold viruses like dry air.
We are going to get outbreaks in the States, and this Solano Country guy could represent the first.
That being said the idea that Covid-19 is widespread in multiple places already and the CDC is covering it up because a guy and his friends “crowdsourced” it, is bunk. Lots of viruses cause pneumonia and we treat it every winter. We should stop signal boosting this guy.
At the same time though, when a first unsourced case appears, there is usually a background of wider transfer in that community. It would be a guess, could be from ten to a thousand people, or more as time goes by. The potential is maybe for two weeks or more worth of unchecked transmission having occured, two weeks because that is around when a case becomes severe enough to be tested. Look at Italy for a clear example. In Gomera a nurse from an old people’s home has the virus, that’s heavy.
“In Gomera a nurse from an old people’s home has the virus, that’s heavy.”
If most infected younger people remain unsymptomatic, as China asking people to return to work indicates, while old people die like flies, this sort of thing can become an almost intractable problem. All staff and visitors at places with high concentrations of old people having to take a “real time” test before every entry, becomes untenable fast….
In the old days didn’t old people get sort of confined to the attic or something, even without epidemics etc. ? I guess no attics possible in big city apartment housing.
No, we’ll be like Italy and wondering where the multiple “patient zeros” were from. I anticipate multiple localized outbreaks.
It is looking like 80% have very mild illnesses, and 15% need medical intervention (Mostly O2)… But 5% need extensive acute care (ICU beds, breathing machines) for three weeks! Do the math where you live: If 40% of your community becomes infected, do you have enough ICU beds available to handle that? Here in Fort Worth that implies that we need 18,000 ICU beds…
Absolutely, if 40% of a city gets infected, the ICUs will become overwhelmed. I don’t think it will get to that point. Japan already closed every school in its country. That sort of thing will happen first.
So, how do you contain something that can (as documented) potentially survive up to 9 days on a surface and exist in a contagious carrier who is asymptomatic (exhibits no symptoms at all) for up to 27 days?
Ineffective/inconsistent testing, reinfection news coming now, and inept bureaucratic responses globally, ain’t helping matters. Reanalysis, after the fact, will provide actionable clarity.
Stop posting nonsense. The incubation period is 3 days. The 27 days case was an unconfirmed report and impossible to prove – most likely BS.
Here is the citation.
Yes – one case at 27 days. Very unlikely that it actually took that long.
Median incubation period is 3 days. 2 – 14 days is safety buffer.
Glad you realize I was not posting nonsense.
The 19 day case documented by the JAMA study is not nonsense either.
My whole point is there are many fluid variables involved, including ACE2 receptors, predispostition charachteristics, general living condition environments and habits, etc. that all impact these preliminary incubation period numbers. As stated, reanalysis will bring clarity in the end.
Note what the WHO guy said, too: ie that most transmission seems to be within family units and NOT in the community. The sudden explosion in Italy seems to feature lots of old people, presumably from the same old people’s home, and the people who visited them.
That might explain the apparenty odd comment from one of the health departments a week or two back, in which they said there was no need to quarantine an uber driver as he’d been exposed to a patient for less than 15 minutes.
ZH ran an article on a study that explained the binding mechanism for nCov being 100 to 1000 times as effective as Sars
That most infections will occur in family units is obvious, because one person goes out and catches the virus and the family are then infected by that person.
That does not mean it is not infectious outside of family unit.
I’m watching new cases appear across Spain now, the US has similar going on in one region also I think.
Message is simple, the virus is now clearly present in some number, and will increase in number, so act accordingly.
It is hard to calculate what to do at this point, you don’t want to be premature in actions, you don’t want to get caught up in the start of the epidemic either. E.g. Now I have to consider, do I go into town to add a further months supplies, or do I wait till sanitary measures are introduced who knows when and public contact will be minimal due to those. There must be many people faced with many new difficult decisions of all kinds right now.
Take care anyone, and try to keep actions as methodical and planned as possible, to avoid obvious errors.
Looking at Italy,
“The alarm of San Paolo and the Cremona hospital
(Simona Ravizza) The San Paolo hospital in Milan and that of Cremona sound the alarm: “We no longer know where to put the patients” . In Cremona, the cases of Coronavirus positive patients are 81 as of yesterday evening, including 42 pneumonia and 18 serious . At San Paolo an anesthesiologist was hospitalized because he found it positive. “
Via Corriere Della Sera
They also report testing will only be for people who appear with symptoms from now on, so case reports might go down in Italy.
From same source and to remind that the younger generations are also susceptible :
“23-year-old professional futsal player, Elham Sheikhi , died in the hospital in the city of Qom, Iran, where she tested positive for coronavirus, according to reports attributed to the “Qom Football Association” and published by the local agency “Rokna” “
Interesting, early this morning I saw a report that Iran had 100 cases of Coronavirus and 20 had died. That implied a 20% mortality rate, but now hours later they are reporting 246 sick with 26 deaths. That is about 13% and it seems to only make sense from the prospective that new cases are vastly outstripping the rate at which people die, so that the number of sick is constantly going up faster than the rate of deaths. But, just as in China when wew had that one day last week where deaths spiked overnight the deaths will catch up to the real mortality rate. So far in Iran that was much higher than anywhere else. Of course healtcare facilities have a lot to do with it.
They notice the people dying of viral pneumonia quicker than all the people who have colds. Also, Iran is authoritarian, and poor. Can’t draw any meaningful conclusions from those numbers.
Iran has no idea how many cases they have so you can’t draw any conclusions on mortality rates. When it gets going here, the U.S. won’t have the slightest idea how many cases we have here either. I’m pretty sure they already don’t have the foggiest notion.
If the Flu-B virus is actually Coronavirus, it has swept through Minnesota.
I wouldn’t bank on that though. Very few pneumonia cases along with fatalities. Way below the 2%ish rate.
Covid 19 is a “novel” coronavirus. That is, never before infecting humans. To help you get up to speed: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCD2-QVBQi48RRQTD4Jhxu8w
Do try to keep up!
Should I buy the dip? Let me ask the Treasury market…. Nope.
MMM, guacamole dip with bacon!
LOL.
It’s got a long way to go yet. I tried to explain this to my stepdaughter yesterday, since she has taken to mocking me for putting some food in the cupboards whle she and her partner don’t bother. It won’t affect her apparently.
I explained to her that she will be out of a job in three months. She scoffed. She works for a specialist new-homes mortgage arranger. I consider it a certainty.
The Fed will save her !
Write puts on stocks you wouldn’t mind holding. Underwrite insurance on stocks that won’t go to zero. Realistic worst case, you’ll be stuck underwater for a while, collecting a dividend. More likely, the market will stabilize and you’ll keep the premium and never takes the shares. The option premiums are fantastic.
Debts that can’t be paid won’t be paid.
Oh great, im in Kansas. I suspect in order to prevent panic this crap will be everywhere before they admit to it. Meaning everyone thinks they are safe at the moment when in reality it’s all around. Good times.
Yes. I feel bad for those people living in urban areas depending on mass transit and Common Areas everywhere. Of course, expect those people to scram to lesser inhabited areas … bringing virus with them.
I am watching with a fatalistic view that it is already in my community about 20 miles from the California state line. And I am not optimistic since I am 61 and smoked for a long time. I also preparing to move to Florida where I made an offer on a house in January before this became so bad, close is set for April 6 but am now wondering if I will ever see the house again. Also set to fly back via San Francisco to get my car on the 7th. Then drive the whole 3k miles all over again. My life has turned great in the last few months, doing well, and then along comes this mess and I am watching as talk rattles around about travel restrictions. I went to my favorite pizza place and had a pint and talked to another friend that is also moving to Florida this spring, he had a cold. I hope it was a cold. I was always sort of glad none of the lottery tickets I ever bought ever won more than about $11 because I always knew if life ever got that good it would mean I would not live long enough to collect the winnings. 🙂
By the way, I Googled something about the COV19 today and about 1/3rd of all the sites that the search engine returned were dead ends marked page no longer exists. Interesting thsat yes?
You’re not in Kansas anymore.
We are living in a real-world version of “Idiocracy”, and people expect the government to be competent?
I can’t say I agree with that entirely. Even those who preach “moar, moar gov” will eventually see that their health is their concern and no gov help will be there. They just won’t want to believe it and definitely won’t say it until things are way too far along.
I do think you’re right about Idiocracy. I can’t believe how many grown people, supposedly educated, stupidly regurgitate hearsay as pure truth, and don’t bother researching further.
Trump proclaims We are “Very, Very Ready for the Coronavirus, for Anything”
…
Sure sure.
How long till DJT in front of the camera – preaching All Is Well and …, uhh,… we don’t want to do anything to upset the Beautiful Stock Market – wearing a MASK?
Look on the bright side, he has as good a chance of getting it as we do.
His and Sanders’ chances both, being they are octogenarians left little choice but to go in front of crowds as big as possible while kissing every “baby” put in front of them for the next 9 months, are statistically a lot higher than yours or mine…..
Having wide open borders and not monitoring people entering the country is a big problem. No surprise San Diego is having issues.
$15 grand a week (day)to stay in a hospital,more than the Palms,i doubt Obamacaid will cover that and you just need one homeless dude to catch the (bioweapon)virus and wala an entire city decimated..billions (trillions)in hospital costs.
And you think private health insurers will stand tall in any circumstance that may come?
Time to check the fine print in your health insurance plan.
“Force Majeure clause”.
That’s “bankruptcy” in plain English no ?
I don’t have health insurance. Hmm, hospitalization or homelessness? I might have to pick…
The problem isn’t the nominal bill to stay in a hospital if you have the virus. Noone will pay that anyway, and doctors will still treat all comers they can get their hands on, and have resources to treat. The idiots having set themselves up with lucrative franchises as gatekeepers to medical resources, will easily be brushed aside if it gets serious. Noone of competence pays any real attention to a word out of their half literate mouths anyway, for any other reason aside from yadayada’ing in order to obtain funds and made-up “permissions.”
Instead, the problem is just that the kind of costs you refer to, is only possible because of an extreme shortage of resources to begin with. Cost are high because supply is not even remotely close to meeting demand. All as a result of policies aimed at letting idiots leech off of inserting themselves, at the point of a totalitarian Junta’s guns, between competent medical staff and people requiring/demanding their services. Now, increase immediate demand by an order of magnitude……
Fascinating to consider that we might see a real economic depression. As I’ve stated in earlier posts, I’m a retired high school and community college history teacher. The coronavirus outbreak is obviously paralleled in the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. And now a potential economic recession to mirror the Great Depression? Not fearmongering, just musing.
Have spent quite a while in regions that are depressed, I remember a local quote describing the reality “people are going around like they can’t find a place to die” .
Well, we are about to have social upheaval at the very least. Since Trump elected to conceal rather than confront, and to cut CDC just when it is needed the most, Republicans will get the blame. For at least the next dozen years, more likely 20, Democrats will have the Presidency and a 2/3 majority in both houses, and will certainly pack the Supreme court as well. We will implement Socialism, and I can’t imagine that the economy will ever recover.
Carl, even though I am a democrat I say that is Sanders is the nominee Trump will be in for another four years (or however long he lives short of that) because there are WAY too many of us that would just never vote for Sanders.
are there enough people who’ll vote for the current blithering idiot?