Harry

@ASF one thing I did find interesting though is this clip from one of our former PM's. Basically saying Yeah every government already knows the WHO are sympathetic towards China and therefore knows to take their comments with a grain of salt. Hence why most countries had their own experts recommending early action ahead of what the world health organisation were putting out.

Yeah my wife's company had surprise redundancies followed by a letter sent to all staff, requiring their signature to accept that individual wages would be temporarily reduced by 20% (with no end date specified). China was also an important ally of current director general Tedros in the WHO’s D.G election in 2017. Months before the election, Tedros was invited to speak at Peking University where he called for stronger cooperation between China and the Global South on health issues. China’s support for Tedros paid off immediately. The day after his electoral victory, Tedros confirmed to Chinese state-media that he and the WHO will continue to support the “One China” principle, which recognizes the government in Beijing as the legitimate Chinese government. Three years later, Tedros’ enduring support of China’s response to COVID-19 shows that their early support for him is still paying dividends.

There's been a lot of talk of these love televised daily briefings being a huge waste of time and becoming a surrogate campaign rally for trump in an era where he can't do them.... See below. They have been essential in allowing the president to pull himself out of a state. The narcissist needs his fix. Sounds like today was his worst one yet.

Yeah that's fucked but there should be a few things happening in that space. Expectation management and a public conversation about what comes next. Vaccine best case is 18 months away. The economic hit being taken now probably can't be sustained that long.

Yes but your testing rate (per capita) is 6 or 7 times higher than Brazil or Argentina.

There may be a few but surely this plays well with the overwhelming majority...? It was a marvelous speech. Very humble and grateful. A much needed shot in the arm for the spirits of many in the nation.

What do we know about the probability of false negative test results? Background: My mother in law has come down with pneumonia. Two weeks earlier her daughter went to hospital with coughing and severe asthma. First time she'd ever been hospitalised for asthma in her life. Was tested for corona and came back negative. It seems unlikely to be COVID because Australia is definitely seeing a tapering off, with less than ten positives a day in my state. But it still could be?

Get real man! What about our liberties man!?

I think a bat shat on a pangolin that was then eaten.

The conspiracy theorists are coming out of my Facebook feed because of this fact

Do we know if they're basically assymptomatic? What a rough blow to catch the full thing twice

You mentioned 0.4%. Yet I’ve read 3-4% today as a figure believed by the WHO. Amazing that width of range. The gap between those two is enormous....

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

This is a great site. I presume most here would be aware of it? Shows basically all the data you could want. Cases, deaths recoveries, testing rates, etc.

Mate the count of confirmed cases is a lagging indicator. A person who was exposed to corona today would not become a confirmed case for around 12 days. I.e no symptoms for around 5 days. 3-5 to get sick enough to seek out a test and 2 days minimum for a test result. So basically that means the current official/confirmed count reflects the number of people who had the virus around 12 days ago. But the actually number of people affected right now is higher than that, by 12 days of additional spread. Better indicators of how countries are going is by looking at whether that country even has a true handle on the size of their outbreak. Indicators of that are the number of tests performed per million people, and the percentage of those tests that are coming up positive. In Peru theres been 39k tests performed, for 4k cases. So you have about a 10% positive rate. Ecuador have run 13k tests for 4k cases. That's a 30% positive rate. Very high, and a stronger indicator that the 4k count of confirmed cases is just the tip of the iceberg in Ecuador. In some places that positive test rate is much lower (like Australia, or South Korea who have run a high number of tests and are around 1.8% positive. Those countries can be more confident that their number of confirmed cases is fairly accurate. I would guess that even if Ecuador have the same number of confirmed cases as Peru by the end of this Ecuador will still have more fatalities and it will be less due to their healthcare system quality and more due to them having a larger outbreak.

The situation in Wisconsin is outrageous. In person election going ahead today at same time as local coronavirus peak. Governor tried to extend timeframe for mail in ballots to enable everyone to postal vote. In person polling stations were reduced from 180 to just 5 in line with the expected bulk mail in approach. Mail in date extension order overturned by the conservative majority on the US supreme Court, largely because it sets the precedent for November 2020 elections, and the GOP know that a mail in system will greatly increase turnout, and in particular amongst the crowd that don't usually vote, which typically lean against the GOP. Therefore significant likelihood of greatly exacerbating the epidemic in Wisconsin to protect Trump's chances of reelection in November.

Neither

Is the latter category definitely corona as cause of death? Why would they not release those numbers? Any chance they are being consistent with other countries and it may be a broader issue...?

That's an issue basically everywhere mate. I think it was the imperial college in London that estimated the size of the outbreak in some countries. They had 15% on the entire population of Spain, and 10% of Italy, France and a bit less for the UK. That's 50 times more people than the confirmed cases. The positive is it means there's a lot of mild cases with good recoveries that are not being captured in the data.

Even if that was true though you'd think the PM would pull through with all the care he'd be given