Flutterby™! : COVID-19 cases 2020-03-20 23:41:23.610544+01

COVID-19 cases

2020-03-20 23:41:23.610544+01 by Dan Lyke 5 comments

Look at us! Blowing past Spain and on track to take over China! USA! USA! USA!

(Okay, not totally fair, 'cause these are absolute numbers not relative ones, but...) RT Justin Wolfers @JustinWolfers

No other country has been this far into the pandemic and still had the number of cases growing at the rates the U.S. is seeing.

( https://www.ft.com/content/a26fbf7e-48f8-11ea-aeb3-955839e06441 )

#Comment Re: COVID-19 cases made: 2020-03-21 14:31:08.127036+01 by: Bunny

Yeah, but they're not necessarily new cases. As testing becomes more readily available, people will discover they are positive who didn't even know they had the virus. Asymptomatic, they call it. That'll spike the numbers and make everybody run to the grocery store for more TP. I'd like to see the stats about the number of people who have had it and recovered, or didn't get sick at all. You know what they say about lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Just out of curiosity, when over 18,500 people in the US alone died of seasonal flu last year, not counting the numbers all over the world, why isn't that a pandemic? Is it because COVID-19 is new?

#Comment Re: COVID-19 cases made: 2020-03-22 17:40:49.467018+01 by: Dan Lyke

It's because COVID-19 is new, it's also because the death rate is so much higher than seasonal flu. If similar numbers got the flu, that'd be one or two orders of magnitude more deaths.

#Comment Re: COVID-19 cases made: 2020-04-01 18:54:47.831947+02 by: meuon

We don't want to find out for sure the hard way, but several of us got an ass-kicking "flu" in January. I was craving very spicy foods, nothing tasted good. -- I wonder..

#Comment Re: COVID-19 cases made: 2020-04-03 18:57:54.813002+02 by: Dan Lyke

Yeah, and the antibody test is non-specific enough that we can't really use it as an "oh, I'm okay to be out and about now"...

#Comment Re: COVID-19 cases made: 2020-04-03 20:38:20.592546+02 by: Dan Lyke

Here's a little Twitter thread on why the Cellex antibody test, with 93.8% sensitivity and 95.6% specificity, isn't really useful until a whole ton of people are infected, or there's other good reason to know infection status...