Let’s tune in to the latest data from the Covid Tracking Project and Tweets on the Coronavirus in general.
There has been some flattening of the curves as well as an interesting but not unexpected development: Hospitalizations lag cases and deaths lag hospitalizations.
The latter is more reliable as the former is a function of the number of tests. But tests or not, if people get sick enough, they go to the hospital and a portion of them will die.
It is the hospitalization trend that matters most.
I may work on a hospitalization chart next as the Covid Tracking Projects recently added new data items including ICU cases and current vs total hospitalizations.
It is current hospitalizations and ICU data that I believe will predict the trend of future deaths.
The Covid Tracking Project does a brilliant job even though it is hard for me to keep up with format changes.
On Ventilators in New Jersey
A Word About Masks
Testing Stepping Up
More tests is a good thing.
Sobering Situation
Overwhelmed Hospitals
Sad to say we have overwhelmed hospitals.
Deaths in the Netherlands
The same is undoubtedly happening in Sweden, Italy, India, and even the US, but especially China.
No one in their right mind believes data from China.
Comment of the Day
I still have people emailing and even commenting on my website that this is No Worse Than the Flu™ .
I have had enough of this nonsense. Hospitals are overflowing and short of ventilators.
Forget about Sweden, or better yet compare Sweden to Trump’s early comments about the US.
By any chance does anyone recall Trump’s proclamation: “We have 15 cases soon to be zero“?
Check it out. 15 soon to be zero is now over 30,000 cases and 7,000 deaths.
Global Coronavirus Cases
Price of Ignorance
There is a price to be paid for ignorance, and the US is paying it now.
New York is US ground zero today.
Ground zero tomorrow will come in states where foolish governors did too little, too late.
Yet, despite the obvious trends, foolish people still persist with nonsensical this is No Worse Than the Flu™ comparisons.
If by some miracle, things turns out better than the current path we seem to be on, it will only be due to the measures we take today, not because fools spreading fake news have any idea what they are talking about.
Holy Cow!
Bond yields CRASHING.
30 yr yield down 24 bps
Yeah couldn’t believe I was looking at the 30 yr. Treasuries are the trade of the moment?
Two thoughts. First, in the coming months, many of the regular contributors here will get COVID-19. Some of us will not make it. Along with other preparations, now might be a good time to consider whether your will is in order.
Second, I talked to a nurse I know in Washington state (not in Seattle area). If someone needs to be tested, they have to be sent somewhere special for that, and it takes 4 days for the results to come back. Thus, keep in mind when looking at the US numbers that there is still a considerable lag between the numbers you see and when the people were actually infected.
Also knowing the time from infection to symptoms can be as long as 14 days means almost 3 weeks before being diagnosed. That’s if you head to the doctor and don’t think it’s the flu.
If you have a cough and a fever, doctors who are following recommended protocol will not see you. You will be referred to the COVID hotline, and sent somewhere for tests.
Hope you are first.
3 cases in MD. Just outside DC. Same county that NIH is in.
I wouldn’t want to be in the travel business right now. Hotels, casinos, cruise ships, airlines, etc may see a lot of bankruptcies, especially if they are highly leveraged.
Boeing’s commercial jet biz might bite it too. Mostly self-inflicted, but the covid-19 might be the coup de grace.
“If”?
So true … and if some go belly up … how many were done in by high level of debt … used for stock buyback?
There are plenty of people in the travel business who aren’t leveraged, too, like family owned hotels. A downturn purges the leveraged people, and the strong survive, and benefit in the recovery as they have less competition. An event like this teaches people the value of being prepared for bad times, and not always living on the edge.
endebted up to eyeballs has become fashionable since CBs decided to apply insane policies in order to keep fairy tales going! Family business or not , nobody is going to throw good money after crazily inflated asset bubbles, when things go belly up ….
WHO and others have estimated Ro of 1.4 to 3.5. That was with draconian lock downs in China and South Korea testing like crazy. What is the Ro for Italy where the data is probably better?
Applying that Ro, how long until 20% of the US population will be infected given the limited success of Doctors to request testing, the complete lack of proactive testing, and only instituting “suggested” quarantines?
Trumps legacy might be his poor response to a Pandemic that caused the unnecessary death of millions of Americans.
In Iran
” “We estimate that 30 to 40% of Tehran’s population will be infected with COVID-19 by March 20,” says Dr. Massoud Mardani, member of Iran’s National Influenza Committee. Tehran population: 12 million. “
This is going to be terrible.
“Trumps legacy might be his poor response to a Pandemic that caused the unnecessary death of millions of Americans.”
L.A. County had one of the first cases and yet the Democrat run jurisdiction waited until March 4 to declare a state of emergency.
Who in the F declares a “state of emergency” over ONE sick guy?
Respectfully, i think we have to stop running down China’s data. The WHO say it tallied up with what they saw on the ground AND it tallies with what we are seeing in South Korea.
While every health service in the west finds a reason NOT to test people (Italy decided a week ago to only test those with symptoms) Korea is testing everybody.
And what are they finding? Well the numbers speak for themselves. CFR of around 0.65%. Not 3.4%.
It’s Italy’s numbers you should be very suspicious of.
In the UK as of last night, we had 13 patients with no history of travel or contact with anybody else. Presumably, they sought help because they are quite ill, let’s say they are “severe”. So there are at least 4 times as many walking around with no reason to call for help.
Looking at Italy, if you assume that the South Korea CFR is correct (may be a stretch – italy has an older population), then you multiply up the 148 deaths and get 22,000 cases who haven’t died. But let’s halve that and say 11,000. That’s 3 times the admitted rate.
Now think about how many countries received cases from Italy.
And multiply that by 3.
This is just playing with numbers but two points:
How can you control an epidemic when you don’t know how big it is and have made no effort to find out?
Would the economic carnage and utter panic be the same if only 0.65% of patients were dying (and 3/4s of those were elderly)?
An 85 year old man has a 9.95% chance of dying this year. Just perspective against the (admittedly cumulative) 14.8% death rate.
Though I don’t have clear data, so am educated guessing only, like most people, I think caution is a good approach here. If we want to test the possible limits of the parameters that is fine as long as that is understood as what is being done.
The S. Korea outbreak took off a couple of weeks ago, many cases were found due to testing before the roughly four week survival time for those presenting symptoms.
So, well if you want optimism include “at best” or similar – at best a higher amount of people will survive than in China.
Note also it was stated somewhere official (sorry no link) that children are actually as likely to catch the virus as anyone else, but show less symptoms, so far.
The various idiot armies heading up “agencies” in the progressve failed states of the West, are more concerned about “managing” what they believe “the people” should think, than about producing as much possibly relevant information for baring decisions on as possible.
It’s not The Age of Incompetence for nothing.
Per current trends, the US looks to be perhaps THE hardest hit of all countries. Not all too surprising, considering it is perhaps the one country where people are most thoroughly trained to believe the most important response to an ailment, is not to call a doctor, but rather some illiterate ambulance chaser. With the second most important, being to sit and wait to be connected to some insurance ape, until your phone battery dies out.
they are not counting deaths due to filled hospital beds and displacement of other sick people who don’t have Covid 19
it is hard to kick people on ventilators out of the hospital, so if or someone you know needs the bed once their filled….
9 more cases in Iceland is catastrophic. Its the equivalent of more than 9000 cases in the US. Sweden appears to be getting hit hard too. Probably a lot of Iranian asylum seekers spreading the disease there.
They’re just testing more. Since, like, they have test kits and the resources to test and stuff. Unlike the US, North Korea and Venezuela.
Told my team today we are going 100% work from home now for foreseeable future, instead of normal 3 days per week. They are all under 40 so not much direct risk anyway. But we all know high risk individuals, so just as important for the young and healthy to not be transmission vectors, as is practical. I may be early here, but I imagine in a month it’ll be “common sense” everywhere in US to WFH if at all possible.
From the above, the conclusion should be that Korea has apparently chosen (knowingly because of their experience with other virus invasion) the best method in order to curb the infection rate but also avoid the severe cases to decay beyond possible repair by taking care of them at an earlier stage of lungs destruction.
One of their joker; Make an easy testing method and test almost everybody in the way of infectious people..
Well, the western countries though so much they would only be outside observers like in the previous cases (SARS, MERS..) that NOTHING was available to test the population at risk of being infected even if no symptoms are noticeable
The epidemic (even if stopped someway in the future) will be more serious and lethal than could have been for sure.
School districts in Redmond, Bellevue, Kirkland (suburbs of Seattle) still open. It is all for the children.
Study of cases in Shenhzen…
….Cases were older than the general population (mean age 45) and balanced between males (187) and females (204). Ninety-one percent had mild or moderate clinical severity at initial assessment. Three have died, 225 have recovered (median time to recovery is 32 days). Cases were isolated on average 4.6 days after developing symptoms; contact tracing reduced this by 1.9 days….This work shows that heightened surveillance and isolation, particularly contact tracing, reduces the time cases are infectious in the community, thereby reducing R. Its overall impact, however, is uncertain and highly dependent on the number of asymptomatic cases. We further show that children are at similar risk of infection as the general population, though less likely to have severe symptoms; hence should be considered in analyses of transmission and control….
Identifying, testing, contact tracing, rapid treatment and quarantine–all important to putting a lid on an outbreak. What is the US doing in the cases here?
By the way, median time to recovery….32 days!!!
Kids are a stealthy vector for the virus.
Hey, whats going on–CDC reports 99 cases total.
” with the exception of testing results for persons repatriated to the United States from Wuhan, China and Japan.”
probably why.
Also, I read that the CDC is no longer going to provide timely, accurate information. Their information will be updated only once a week, on Fridays, so look for new data today. Meanwhile, in the ultimate irony, i heard ads on the radio that if you want to really know what is going on with Coronavirus, you should go to cdc.gov.
UK is also going to weekly reporting. A weekly surprise!
I think they are worried about economic disruption and want people to focus on something else some of the time. Good luck with that!
Weekly is a really stupid idea.
As we saw with Wuhan, when people don’t KNOW, they IMAGINE.
Coworker had his Princess Cruise cancelled due to the above story. Him and another coworker state that Hawaii vacations are now quite cheap.
As are Chinese mail order brides!
In Madrid they lost a quarter of bookings before there was even a clear outbreak there
“El sector hotelero de Madrid ha sufrido la cancelación de una de cada cuatro reservas entre el 24 de febrero y el 31 de marzo”
Searching on local news there and it is all very hushed “we lost a few bookings, easter should go ahead as normal” etc. They cannot believe that though, or are uncomfortable in believing that, not after watching Italy. The economy was stagnant anyway and bumped up with public spending, I guess they might go negatives a few % gdp at least this year even with added public spending.
I would assume that some people are deferring travel just to save money over economic uncertainty.
Because of wider uncertainty for sure. They don’t know if they will have to be present somewhere else now, if travel will be interrupted, they want to prepare at home, they might need to look after family if there is no school. Some cancellations are business meetings that aren’t looking favourable any more, trade fairs which were closed, in Canary islands it was the first cases there that saw people change plans, 30% drop from what I read etc. So a lot of things at once, but there aren’t going to be many places without virus soon anyway, including airports.
The UK is being very disingenuous now, via Sky:
“The government is not considering stopping flights into the UK to limit the spread of the coronavirus, the health secretary has said.
“Matt Hancock said he was speaking after advice from the government’s chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty, who had told him that stopping flights would only delay the spread of the disease “by a matter of days”.
Matt Hancock warns stopping flights would make it harder for the UK to get many medicines which are produced overseas. “”
…
He was told – but did not release study…delay virus a few days – how only, or does he mean it is established now….he says stopping flights, not passengers or quarantine – very vague… he says no meds if no flights – what, is he being blackmailed by China or is he just stupid…
In other words the government has decided it will take an open transit approach, without giving any proper explanation, without opportunity to hold it accountable, with feeble excuses. If they had painted it in clear terms, the disruption, the moves they would make to mitigate the increased arrival of virus, open calculations of cost in terms of casualties which could be criticised, or to which they could be held accountable, well maybe. The approach they are taking though is lacking.
Seems to me a lot of TV commercials advertising cruising have suddenly cropped up.
The huge difference in death rates between Hubei and the other China cities continues.
The 13,004 cases outside Hubei have reported only two deaths in the past five days. Hubei has reported 175 during the same period on 65,187 cases, using report 37 as a reference starting point for both.
At this rate, Hubei will lose 175 X 6 = 1,050 in a month, or 1.6% while all 33 China cities outside Hubei will lose only 2 X 6 = 12 in a month or only .0009%.
Someone has some ‘splainin to do.
Jennifer Zeng’s twitter blog said 5 cases from Guangdong were shipped to a hospital in Wuhan. That is one way China is keeping down the number of cases ‘outside’ Hubei. Underreporting is the other.
China is desperate for workers to return to work. Can’t trust anything they report.
wife’s conference in Las Vegas called off.
as above: airlines, hotels, eats, entertainment all gone.
Have national elections ever been cancelled due to epidemic?
I won’t miss the elections, as they are a foregone conclusion — Orange Man wins. But I’ll sure miss major league baseball! Hope they can at least play in empty stadiums. Selfish, I know…
Have national elections ever been cancelled because no candidate survived an epidemic?
That’s the real risk. The candidates are all high risk. If there are any candidates the election can be held by mail, if necessary.
Interesting note by the doctors over at promedmail.org… they’re comparing Egypt’s lack of reporting to what happened with Dengue. All the surrounding nations seem to know Egypt is a problem because everyone coming back has coronavirus, but Egypt won’t admit it.
From the Country who refuses to let anybody know what’s under the Sphinx.
Will WHO never call a pandemic?
It’s a bad word. Like recession.
Honestly, who cares?
Reducing all available information to condition yellow, orange and red seemingly works well in military combat formations. But those guys are being shot at right now , and need to respond within seconds.
Once you have the luxury of even 15 minutes of contemplation before you need to make decisions to act decisively and irreversibly, there is no longer any benefits from that sort of over the top restrictive quantization. At least for those capable of counting beyond the fingers on one hand.
They’ll call a pandemic after the World Bank Pandemic Bonds have been redeemed.
Fascinating. And scary. I’m retired, so I don’t have to worry about losing work hours due to quarantine, but this will be tough for many Americans who live month to month. Gosh.
Hoping for the best.
If you are retired, the real question is: “How long can your retirement fund hold out against a stock market that is dropping and bonds that become nonperforming.
Mine main retirement plan was funded 120% when I retired, now it’s just 67%. There was a major Federal rules accounting change under Obama where most of the drop occurred.
What is this “pension” thing of which you speak?
I’ve thought of that…I think about that. I don’t know if it matters, but the state I draw from has its pension fund 100% funded. For now, I suppose. Thanks Greggg, I was going to sleep well tonight.