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Post by cjm on Mar 28, 2020 7:24:20 GMT
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Post by Trog on Mar 30, 2020 2:51:09 GMT
If the stats released during the past two days are at all grounded in some sort of reality, then the SA infection rate is now indeed dropping. However: If this is grounded in some sort of reality, then the infection rate will turn right around and go BOOM. There is no such a thing as one person infected with the virus in Khayelitsha - if one person has it, you can be guaranteed that there are many others. It has to be said that I'm becoming a bit skeptical about South Africa's capability to accurately identify a Corona infection - I mean, of the two deaths that was attributed to it, one turned out to be false, and the other iffish.
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Post by cjm on Mar 30, 2020 6:03:35 GMT
If the stats released during the past two days are at all grounded in some sort of reality, then the SA infection rate is now indeed dropping. However: If this is grounded in some sort of reality, then the infection rate will turn right around and go BOOM. There is no such a thing as one person infected with the virus in Khayelitsha - if one person has it, you can be guaranteed that there are many others. It has to be said that I'm becoming a bit skeptical about South Africa's capability to accurately identify a Corona infection - I mean, of the two deaths that was attributed to it, one turned out to be false, and the other iffish. Perhaps the virus does not like black people.
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Post by cjm on Apr 2, 2020 7:55:37 GMT
While bearing Trog's reservations about the accuracy of the stats in mind, seems that the country is still doing well. Of some interest is that the infection rate for the Western Cape is the highest in the country. One would rather have expected that for Gauteng - with a higher population density (?).
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Post by Trog on Apr 20, 2020 2:30:57 GMT
Over the past 2 weeks, the infection rate seems to have been pretty stable at about double the amount of new cases every 10.2 days.
i.e. lock-down as currently implemented => number of new COVID-positives doubles every 10.2 days.
So, if we currently have about 400,000* COVID-positives (my best estimate taking into account all the published data from the beginning), then we should have about 1 million total COVID-positives by the end of April.
Another way to put it: If you go out to do something today, then the probability that you will come into contact with someone who is COVID positive is almost zero.
But if you go out to do something during the middle of June, the probability that you will NOT encounter someone who is COVID positive is almost zero.
By the end of July, it should be about over.
3 months: If you can avoid getting it for the next 3 months, you probably won't get it.
(Could get hectic. If South Africa, with its AIDS and TB epidemics get up to a 2% mortality rate, then at some stage they will need to find the ability to bury about 9000 people a day. However, there is still huge uncertainty about what the actual mortality rate is, which in the normal world is probably closer to between 0.1 to 0.6 percent. The 10% plus rates we currently see in places such as Italy and Spain is an artifact of how cases are identified, diagnosed and reported. For South Africa, however, it could be very different - there is not any workable data so far).
* This should reflect in the number of COVID deaths during the next 3 weeks, i.e. by the 10th of May, assuming a 0.5% mortality rate, my guess is that we should have about 2000 Covid deaths.
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Post by cjm on Apr 20, 2020 6:06:28 GMT
Over the past 2 weeks, the infection rate seems to have been pretty stable at about double the amount of new cases every 10.2 days. i.e. lock-down as currently implemented => number of new COVID-positives doubles every 10.2 days. So, if we currently have about 400,000 * COVID-positives (my best estimate taking into account all the published data from the beginning), then we should have about 1 million total COVID-positives by the end of April. Another way to put it: If you go out to do something today, then the probability that you will come into contact with someone who is COVID positive is almost zero. But if you go out to do something during the middle of June, the probability that you will NOT encounter someone who is COVID positive is almost zero. By the end of July, it should be about over. 3 months: If you can avoid getting it for the next 3 months, you probably won't get it. (Could get hectic. If South Africa, with its AIDS and TB epidemics get up to a 2% mortality rate, then at some stage they will need to find the ability to bury about 9000 people a day. However, there is still huge uncertainty about what the actual mortality rate is, which in the normal world is probably closer to between 0.1 to 0.6 percent. The 10% plus rates we currently see in places such as Italy and Spain is an artifact of how cases are identified, diagnosed and reported. For South Africa, however, it could be very different - there is not any workable data so far). * This should reflect in the number of COVID deaths during the next 3 weeks, i.e. by the 10th of May, assuming a 0.5% mortality rate, my guess is that we should have about 2000 Covid deaths. You think they will extend the lockdown again?
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Post by Trog on Apr 20, 2020 6:51:38 GMT
You think they will extend the lockdown again? I don't know. Personally, I don't think there is much point. Say, for instance, a million people are going to die. Then a million people will die, irrespective of whether there is a lock-down or not. The lock-down is just there to spread them out over a longer time-period, so that government has the opportunity to get rid of the corpses. And, say for instance you want to sit it out, i.e. try to not get it. Then the longer the thing lasts, the longer you would need to maintain whatever it is you are doing to try not to get it. So for government it make sense to extend the lock-down I suppose, but with relaxed conditions. The optimum solution would be to maintain the maximum infection rate you can cope with. That is, to have people become infected as quickly as possible within the resources you have available to handle the consequences. That said, even with the lock-down as it is, the number of new infections doubles about every 10 days. There is no way in which they will be able to shrink that, and with relaxed conditions it will pick up, (become shorter) again.
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Post by cjm on Apr 21, 2020 7:44:01 GMT
The optimum solution would be to maintain the maximum infection rate you can cope with. The crux of the matter I think - but how long would you not have to try to flatten the curve. The worse your health services, the longer you would have to "lockdown" and the more serious the damage to your economy would be. The more primitive economies would suffer most.
I suppose there is no chance of eradicating the virus without a vaccine?
In the end one can wonder whether the lockdown has achieved much because they are already lifting restrictions without a sustained decrease in infections having been achieved. Further, if your predictions are correct, the worst is still to come.
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Post by cjm on Apr 21, 2020 8:49:11 GMT
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Post by Trog on Apr 22, 2020 15:31:30 GMT
I suppose there is no chance of eradicating the virus without a vaccine? Well, if herd-immunity is achieved the virus will die. But that is the only alternative to a vaccine - which isn't going to happen before herd-immunity happens. Alternatively, if one can treat it effectively and cheaply then all issues suddenly disappear. In fact, in some respects that is even better than to actually eradicate the virus. I've mentioned this previously - it seems a promising approach: Trial drug may block early stages of COVID-19Another approach is that those who die of Covid-19 seems to actually die of something called a Cytokine Storm, which is basically an allergic response by your own immune-system. There are established protocols in place to treat Cytokine Storms. People with diabetes and rheumatic diseases are more prone to cytokine storms, and diabetics are also often prescribed ACE2 inhibitors, which may explain why elderly diabetics seem to be at particular risk. Weathering the cytokine storm in COVID-19
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Post by Trog on Apr 25, 2020 10:10:33 GMT
SA’s Covid-19 models were ‘flawed’Professor Madhi qualified as a paediatrician. Juliet Pulliam is a professor of Applied Mathematics. I know who I am going to believe. This is a trivial aspect of modeling epidemics. I very much doubt that SACEMA would've overlooked it: Anyway, "A new modelling report ... by the NICD" will be released this week, apparently. I'm hoping it will be generally available.
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Post by cjm on Apr 26, 2020 7:02:33 GMT
The models elsewhere (eg the US, Bill Gates Foundation) also widely exaggerated mortality rates and infection rates. It was not underestimated anywhere. Likely the SA model piggy-backed on those models
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Post by cjm on Apr 26, 2020 7:30:27 GMT
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Post by Trog on Apr 28, 2020 10:55:20 GMT
I don't think the experts were wrong. I think it is sort of generally accepted (by the experts) that the number of people who will test positive for Covid-19, if exhaustive testing was possible, will be in the order of 10 to 50 times the number of so-called 'confirmed cases'. I think that what is really happening here is a confusion of vocabulary, mainly in the difference between 'confirmed cases' and number of people infected. I'm fairly sure that Drs. Fauci and Birx did not develop any models of their own, they're probably working from models developed by places such as the MIT, Cambridge, the CDC, Princeton and so forth - probably by the same caliber of people who worked on the Manhattan Project. These are very early days still and it will be a while before anything corresponding to reality will emerge. At the moment, the models can go anywhere. The people who generate them will calculate confidence levels for their predictions, which at this stage will be very wide. The problem for planners is that they have little choice but to prepare for worst case scenarios.
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Post by cjm on Apr 29, 2020 8:57:23 GMT
I don't think the experts were wrong. I think it is sort of generally accepted (by the experts) that the number of people who will test positive for Covid-19, if exhaustive testing was possible, will be in the order of 10 to 50 times the number of so-called 'confirmed cases'. I think that what is really happening here is a confusion of vocabulary, mainly in the difference between 'confirmed cases' and number of people infected. I'm fairly sure that Drs. Fauci and Birx did not develop any models of their own, they're probably working from models developed by places such as the MIT, Cambridge, the CDC, Princeton and so forth - probably by the same caliber of people who worked on the Manhattan Project. These are very early days still and it will be a while before anything corresponding to reality will emerge. At the moment, the models can go anywhere. The people who generate them will calculate confidence levels for their predictions, which at this stage will be very wide. The problem for planners is that they have little choice but to prepare for worst case scenarios. The models are not only wrong, they are spectacularly wrong. To call them models is an insult to science. Any guess would have been just as good. Perhaps a better term would be random guesses. They also all err on the side of excessive figures. Not a single underestimation. Perhaps they reflect the end position, but they did purport to reflect the situation after a certain number of weeks and so on.
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