re: Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) ***W.H.O. DECLARES A GLOBAL PANDEMIC***

I'm paranoid about the up and down temperatures right now, as well. Plus, I was on a cross country flight yesterday.

Sipping chicken broth as we speak.

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I'm paranoid about the up and down temperatures right now, as well

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I’ve been popping Zyrtec since returning because I frequently get sinus infections and my luck would be to get one as soon as I got back and then have the CDC quarantine me

The last temp flux got me though and its supposed to get cold again tomorrow.

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Could have sworn the definition of Ro assumes a hypothetical, fully vulnerable population that doesn’t help isolate, and the final value is an average of all transmissions and therefore all variations of behavior frequency.

I will say this though: if it IS region specific, and Ro has little applicability outside of study location.....when that makes all the crazy hysteria on the topic here and Twitter two weeks ago even more fricking absurd.

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The paper was interesting, to say the least.

It obviously spent alot of time focusing on the proper and improper uses of R0. Seems it's highly specific, hence ranges like 12-18 on something like measles. That's a substantial difference.

Biggest takeaway -

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Yet, even if the infectiousness of a pathogen (that is, the likelihood of infection occurring after an effective contact event has occurred) and the duration of contagiousness are biological constants, R0 will fluctuate if the rate of human–human or human–vector interactions varies over time or space. Limited evidence supports the applicability of R0 outside the region where the value was calculated (20). Any factor having the potential to influence the contact rate, including population density (e.g., rural vs. urban), social organization (e.g., integrated vs. segregated), and seasonality (e.g., wet vs. rainy season for vectorborne infections), will ultimately affect R0.

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News from Singapore:
MOH: 500 to 600 pneumonia patients to be tested for Wuhan virus every week

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News from Singapore:
MOH: 500 to 600 pneumonia patients to be tested for Wuhan virus every week

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I don’t see any way that SG has a substantial number of infections compared to the likes of HK, Thailand, Philippines, etc...

The mass spread was due to CNY and Singapore isn’t exactly the go to destination for vacations.

But like it’s been said, SG will lock that shite down...

Some potential good news on that asymptomatic transmission front...

LINK

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The original report said a Shanghai resident came to Germany on a business trip and did not exhibit symptoms of illness while she interacted with several German colleagues. On her return flight to China, she became ill and later tested positive for the novel coronavirus.

After her visit, four individuals at the company -- two of whom had direct interactions with their Chinese colleague -- tested positive for the virus.

In an email to CNN on Tuesday, German public health officials said the report was incorrect.

"In contrast to first reports according to which the index case (a Chinese traveling in Germany) seemed to have been asymptomatic during the time of likely transmission here, recent interviews by the Bavarian health authorities and the Robert Koch Institute in Chinese language revealed that she might have had mild unspecific symptoms including back pain and also took antipyretic medication."

One of the paper's authors previously told CNN they relied on interviews with the German patients.

"This was likely an error of being inadequately careful by the authors, an error that is understandable in a crisis situation, but is still problematic," said Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology and director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Lipsitch was not involved with the NEJM study.

"Data has circulated that the new coronavirus would be infected throughout the incubation period," The Public Health Agency of Sweden posted on its website. "This information has not been presented in a way that provides scientifically substantiated facts. Rather, it has emerged that the data is unfortunately based on misconceptions. We believe that it is impossible for the new corona virus to infect throughout the incubation period ... This applies, among other things, to an article in the New England Journal of Medicine that has subsequently proven to contain major flaws and errors."

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I'm paranoid about the up and down temperatures right

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Huh?

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Somehow I missed back pain as a symptoms of the Corona Virus. Taking aspirin or ibuprofen without saying it was for pain or to reduce a temperature further muddies the waters. Back pain? After a long plane ride?

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Back pain could easily be unrelated, but without knowing if the pain was localized or what area was affected, it’s not completely impossible for that to be a symptom of a respiratory virus. Sometimes inflammation or infection in the lungs can cause referred pain to the upper back, especially around/underneath the shoulder blades. (Didn’t seem like she had major lung symptoms from the report, but who knows for sure.)

Taking antipyretic medication, on the other hand, is a lot more of a red flag. The way that it’s stated doesn’t leave the same room for interpretation as taking aspirin or ibuprofen for unspecified back pain. Even without knowing exactly what she took, it sounds clear that she had or suspected she had enough of a fever to take meds to mitigate it. At that point she was clearly symptomatic of something, and novel coronavirus was the most likely candidate.

Edited to add: Antipyretic specifically means fever-reducing, just in case there was any misunderstanding about the German statement.

LINK

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IPEI (Taiwan News) — As many experts question the veracity of China's statistics for the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, Tencent over the weekend seems to have inadvertently released what is potentially the actual number of infections and deaths, which were astronomically higher than official figures.

On late Saturday evening (Feb. 1), Tencent, on its webpage titled "Epidemic Situation Tracker", showed confirmed cases of novel coronavirus (2019nCoV) in China as standing at 154,023, 10 times the official figure at the time. It listed the number of suspected cases as 79,808, four times the official figure.

The number of cured cases was only 269, well below the official number that day of 300. Most ominously, the death toll listed was 24,589, vastly higher than the 300 officially listed that day.

Moments later, Tencent updated the numbers to reflect the government's "official" numbers that day. Netizens noticed that Tencent has on at least three occasions posted extremely high numbers, only to quickly lower them to government-approved statistics.


Netizens also noticed that each time the screen with the large numbers appears, it shows a comparison with the previous day's data which demonstrates a "reasonable" incremental increase, much like comparisons of official numbers. This has led some netizens to speculate that Tencent has two sets of data, the real data and "processed" data.

Some are speculating that a coding problem could be causing the real "internal" data to accidentally appear. Others believe that someone behind the scenes is trying to leak the real numbers.

However, the "internal" data held by Beijing may not reflect the true extent of the epidemic. According to multiple sources in Wuhan, many coronavirus patients are unable to receive treatment and die outside of hospitals.

A severe shortage of test kits also leads to a lower number of diagnosed cases of infection and death. In addition, there have been many reports of doctors being ordered to list other forms of death instead of coronavirus to keep the death toll artificially low.

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One of the paper's authors previously told CNN they relied on interviews with the German patients.

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Eyewitness reports are unreliable? Shocking.