Some interesting finding from Netherlands, 6% of health workers are infected, half of them would not even get screened as having any symptoms!
This highly matters for spread and infection, no symptoms means this goes undetected but there is starking difference of how various random segment population show symptoms or die, it is not just elderly & unhealthy as some would think
The % on health workers is difficult to link to average population as they have more exposure and more protection, so now idea how things get balanced but the surprising fact is that that “testing/quarantine suspects” on population will not work, so either everybody goes home or everybody should get tested…
At the moment only Netherlands/Switzerland did run random sampling on non-suspected population
There is some terminology in there which I had never come across before 
Peter wrote:
Did you come back commercial, Jason? Someone I know had to leave their bizjet in South Africa and had huge hassles getting back to the UK. It made quite a story e.g. here.
Commercial both ways as landing in Iceland to get there would have prevented me entering the US.
But recently Beijing authorities announced on March 19 that more than 21 million cell phone accounts were cancelled while in past three months 840,000 landlines were closed in China, which gives an idea that probably these closed numbers belonged to the people who died due to the disease.
Totally irresponsible reporting.
@LeSving, I’m happy to be around people having a level of judgement, self reliance and independence above that of children, who generally do what healthy fear and common sense tell them either in accordance with government ‘direction’, or maybe not, depending on personal circumstances. Either way my behavior in this situation is not dictated by government, nor is my healthcare related to or provided by government.
As an example of the above, I’m happy when those people keep flying, without any contact with others outside of family being required to do so, calling BS on the nonsensical arguments not to do so. The ‘burdening the emergency services’ argument is particularly silly, given that my base of 600 operations on a normal day utilizes the local emergency services about twice a year.
In relation to sexual practices and the NY City Health Department government guidance, I’d prefer to consult with my private doctor or equivalent versus being subjected to what some may consider a disgusting government memo. Beyond that I’ve generally found it good to avoid NYC at any time, even more so now. I think that’s a good health management practice that I’d choose.
Re corporate flying, a neighbor of mine flies a Gulfstream for a company that apparently invests in financially high risk locations. They have several crews and last week one of them was involuntarily quarantined in Uganda IIRC, or someplace like that, and has yet to be released. With that in mind my neighbor is happy to be sidelined for a while – he doesn’t really need the money, at least not for some time.
Peter wrote:
because the data is not out there, or not out in a clear form.
Peter wrote:
You probably won’t because e.g. in the UK 600k people die annually anyway, most of them are (obviously) old, and until some epidemic kills say 100k who would not have died anyway during that year it won’t show up in the numbers. Especially if the epidemic kills mostly “old” people, like this one does.
But nowhere have 100k people died in excess of regular deaths, not even close.
If you assume that there is no data and thus no evidence, I guess it’s down to assumptions.
It is always presumptuous to try to understand the thought process of others, I might be way off but I’m reading two assumptions in your post:
1) That the danger is very big, specially if nothing is done.
2) The damage from the current measures is small
I understand the fear of 1). Like so many, when news started coming out of China, I just though, yeah, right. I’ve been hearing that for 20 years, SARS, H1N1, MERS, Corona… whatever!
Then the news from Italy, and specially the pleas from Doctors about the situation in their Hospitals, made me, if not fearful of the desase itself, fearful of the consequences of overburdening health care. Started thinking that maybe it was like the story of the boy who cried ‘Wolf’. This time it was actually real and we ignored it.
We all got bombarded with graphs, stats, and curves that need flattening. It all made sense.
But several things made me uncomfortable. Rarely (ever?) does panic, mass hysteria and mobs lead to rational decision. Comments, also here, about empty Hospitals, countries supposedly just behind Italy but without the thousand of deaths, made me more doubtful. I started looking, and many distinguished scientists were actually raising very pertinent points, and saying that the evidence was just not there. And although I’m not an expert at all, I figure that if we are going to do unprecedented measures with very bad consequences, the data should be clear enough for even me to understand. And I could not find it.
I started asking if the situation wasn’t akin to a fire in a theatre, where the crowd pushed against the door (built to open towards the unsafe side) trapping everyone. We all know this scenario. If the crowd took a step back, the door could be opened and save people. But no logic, shouting or persuading will make the crowd move in the direction of the flames. The flames here is the shouts of “BUT PEOPLE ARE DYING”. And it becomes very difficult to step back and look at numbers. Again, I was there too.
Well, saying people are dying isn’t really news. You have to ask what is causing those deaths. And if those deaths are with diseases and symptoms like what happens every year in large numbers (we are not taking about ebola here, or other uncommon ways of dying) then the obvious next question is “Is it happening more than normal?”
As much as it hurts us lots of times, people die, every day, in large numbers. It hurts us when it is close to us. And when a very old and very frail acquaintance or family member dies with respiratory complications, no matter the health and age of the person, it always seems to be premature. Very little we can do about it.
As for 2) I can not even begin to imagine the anguish of millions worrying about rent or buying food, and all the old and frail people condemned to house arrest without visits. Without non urgent but important medical care, and sometimes without urgent care at all.
But if some just want to go ahead and accept assumptions without data, take unprecedented actions just because a tyrannic regime did the same, can I ask, when will it stop? If we can just assume scenarios without data or evidence, can I propose another one, and you decide which is more likely or tragic?
Every hour, the assumption that the virus is pretty much everywhere and not causing harm becomes more plausible. The number of confirmed cases just rises naturally with number of tests, growing at the same rate https://coronadaten.wordpress.com
This virus is just another one of the Corona family, viruses mutate every year, and research indicates that always a percentage of people hospitalised have those kind of virus with them. So even without the almost dishonest reporting like this one https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/27/chloe-middleton-death-21-year-old-not-recorded-nhs-covid-19-related (Not tested positive, but had a ‘cough’. Really?), a lot of deaths will be of people with the virus, and that now is a mandatory reporting death ‘cause’, inflating stats.
As more tests will continue to “inflate” the number of deaths, by just transferring almost every other death to that column, eventually, almost no deaths will occur that are not attributed to Covid19, and the panic will go on and on. Although no one will report that every other cause of death seems to be down. Way down. Remember “PEOPLE ARE DYING”! As old and frail people continue under house arrest, without social contact, with stress and worries, more will die, now really increasing the number of deaths. Panic will continue to drive caos at Hospitals. Unneeded quarantine of medical staff tested positive but healthy will make things worse, for patients and remaining staff. When will it stop? When will the number of deaths look ‘normal’? When all the old and frail have died, and only young and strong people are dying? Does that scenario not scare anyone? After all, without evidence, how can you disprove either scenario?
hmng
Perhaps these suggest excess deaths? Excess urns in China . Or maybe it’s just normal for such a populated city.
If the pictures of taxiways filled with airlines did not drive the point, the consumption of Jet fuel is lagging far behind production. Not unexpected.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/glut-jet-fuel-brink-overwhelming-154516964.html
“The world is close to running out of space to store all the fuel that jets are no longer burning.”
hmng wrote:
But nowhere have 100k people died in excess of regular deaths, not even close.
Give it another three weeks, we’ll talk about it then.
