Coronavirus
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Robbo, George Galloway had a health expert on his show and it appears the earlier estimates about the mortality rate was based on statistics partly determined in China when there was a lack of knowledge on the care and treatment of those with Covid-19.
However, later analyses of when they had better understanding shows that the mortality rate although still high was more in the region of 0.7 – 0.8%
I hope our H.O.O has stocked us up with hand gel, tissues, paper towels and masks for volunteers getting the Standard out and for EC meetings when the government health minister has got clobbered by this bug it is serious enough to warrant us taking robust preventative measures.
A guest lecture by Marcel Salathé in the BIO-477 Infection Biology course at EPFL a couple of weeks ago. It's a good introduction to basic epidemiology and summary of what we know about SARS-CoV-19/COVID-19 what it does, how it spreads, and so forth. It is worth watching if you're interested in those things. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYTQI2DvAfo
Now the Minister of Health has spread it:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-51827356
You’ve got to laugh but either she didn’t do what her ministry was telling the rest of us to do or they’re running around like headless chickens.
She’s a raving free-marketeer so maybe she thought she could ignore the advice of the “nanny state”.
Was talking to a big hotel chamber-maid laid off with no compensation because of the cancellations of the bookings by the Chinese.
I recall at the last flu outbreak the prison authorities were impressed by the enthusiasm of prisoners for hand-washing…until they discovered that most hand-gels are based on alcohol and was being used for making illicit hooch.
In the US, inmates will be used to manufacture the hand sanitisers who typically earn less than $1 an hour and will be banned from using the gels they make.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/03/10/hand-sanitizer-prison-labor/
Am I the only one unmoved by all this panic?..aaaatischooo…
Robbo, George Galloway had a health expert on his show and it appears the earlier estimates about the mortality rate was based on statistics partly determined in China when there was a lack of knowledge on the care and treatment of those with Covid-19. However, later analyses of when they had better understanding shows that the mortality rate although still high was more in the region of 0.7 – 0.8%
Not according to this, Alan
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-rate/
Also, if there is really no need for concern, why the concern? I mean its not exactly in the interest of business-as-usual to promote a panic on this scale, is it? We have seen significant falls in shares in stock markets round the world, lockdowns in Italy and elsewhere, all sorts of events cancelled and public transport affected.
Is this all just a conspiracy by toilet roll and hand gel manufacturers? Or maybe Big Pharma hoping to cash in on the corona virus crisis? Hmmmmmm
Robbo, perhaps the reason is that the virus doesn’t respect wealth and the 1% are as likely to catch it as us proles.
I saw this on FB. One of my family members liked. All good I thought, he’s reposted/liked stuff which is a tad racist unfortunately.🙁
This meme sums it up really.
— The Socialist Party (@OfficialSPGB) March 4, 2020
Robbo, there is many variations of the mortality figure. It is early days.
“The mortality rate in South Korea, where more than 1,100 tests have been administered per million residents, comes out to just 0.6%, for example. In the U.S., where only seven tests have been administered per million residents, the mortality rate is above 5%…The quality of the data per country range from extremely precise, such as in South Korea and the U.K. to fairly rough, as with Australia, whose department of health offered a rounded number.”
https://time.com/5798168/coronavirus-mortality-rate/
The 3.4 percent estimated mortality rate will likely change downwards as more and better information comes in. Remember, stats are over-estimates because do not include those who suffer no or insignificant symptoms to bother going to the doctor and go uncounted.
And of course it is age-related
“In data from China, less than two-tenths of one percent of victims under 40 who got COVID-19 died from their infection. But the mortality rate multiplied rapidly as patients got older, to nearly 15 percent among patients over 80.”
Why the concern? Is it a justifiable fear? I still have no idea. It appears to be a panic or even hysteria.
Perhaps it is the highly contagious nature of it compared with SARS or MERS which have higher mortality rates. Also the speed of first shown symptoms to an acute medical condition. Like the flu, perhaps it is its possible potential to mutate annually? Unlike controlling Swine flu or bird flu we cannot cull the population of infected or potentially infected animals.
Question is about ignorance, even institutional, are we more developed in our emotional reactions to the unknown than a medieval population when faced with the Black Death and plagues?
Am I coronavirus denialist by suggesting an over-reaction to it?…I may well be verging on being one.
I view the consequences of the current response to Covid-19 to be more detrimental than the actual illness with the enforced quarantine and the economic impact on those financially vulnerable as that precarious employed chamber-maid I mentioned in my earlier post although some countries with advanced welfare systems are starting to tinker with it to cope with the economic issues. Poverty is always more a killer than any medical condition.
An update
Was this a rational well-thought out public health policy?
Trump has introduced a total travel ban from Europe, (excluding the UK), for 30 days.
So we can expect Europeans now to rebook to fly to the USA via Heathrow and Gatwick.
The ICT view
http://libcom.org/blog/initial-thoughts-coronavirus-its-fallout-10032020
“There is a cure for this virus, as for all the other disasters that the capitalist disease has produced, is still producing and, even worse, will produce in the future. The cure is not immediate and definitive, that is clear, but it is a cure that fixes the minimum conditions for facing the environmental, human and social emergencies that capitalism will bequeath to the society that will replace it. Communism is the cure for this evil…We can guarantee our cure will work because it implies a radical change in mindset as well as in economic and social relations, exactly what this planet and this humanity so dramatically ill with capitalism needs today.”
And he denounced it as a “foreign virus”, stopping short of saying it was biological warfare by China. You’ve got to give to him. He’s always true to form as the world’s prime idiot.
Robbo, perhaps the reason is that the virus doesn’t respect wealth and the 1% are as likely to catch it as us proles.
There may be something in this Alan but is this not also true of the flu which in absolute terms kills off far more people? Yet the official response to the regular culling of the old and the fragile – rich and poor alike – has been far more muted. No lockdowns or cancelled flights or stock exchange crashes in that case
I think the main driver behind the panic is the fact that the coronavirus is
- So easily transmittable unlike MERS or SARs which are far deadlier but affected far fewer people . Models I have come acorss suggest that in time, 50-70 % of the global population could succumb
- The mortality is significantly above that of flu. Granted the 3.4% mortality suggested by WHO may well be an gross overestimate because it discounts lots of people whose symptoms are mild and who have not bothered to present themselves to the medical authorities (the same would be true of flu), even it is only 1%, if you combine that with the ease of transmission, you have quite an alarming picture – 1% of half the world’s population is a lot of dead people!
I notice incidentally that the article from the ICT you posted states that: “Italy has currently one of the worst death rates from coronavirus (4%), higher even than China’s. This despite locking down over a dozen towns”. Perhaps, the variability of the death rate is additional factor causing concern
Here in Spain the number of cases at the time of writing is 2277 with 55 deaths. Spain has overtaken Germany which has 1966 cases with 3 deaths. Why the stark difference? Spain has a relatively good health service – some would say better than the UK’s NHS – and longevity is higher in Spain than in Germany. Maybe that’s part of the reason – we’ve got more old folk here cos we tend to live longer in Spain with all that Mediterranean food and oodles of sunshine which you poor buggers in Northern Europe are sorely missing
Perhaps like pigs that are already facing swine fever pandemic, people are reacting to crowded factory life conditions
https://www.grain.org/en/article/6418-building-a-factory-farmed-future-one-pandemic-at-a-time
African swine fever (ASF) outbreak has killed a quarter of the world’s pig population. The outbreaks are concentrated in geographic areas where small pig farms are being rapidly replaced by corporate pig farming operations. The vast majority of pigs that have died from this pandemic are in factory farms and primary vectors in the spread of the disease include meat processing plants, movements of live pigs and animal feed supply chains controlled by large pig farming companies. Big meat companies are making huge profits from the ASF pandemic and using it to consolidate their control over the global meat supply.
In the 1990s, small backyard farms supplied around 80% of China’s pork needs. But this has changed rapidly over the past two decades, as the government has steadily industrialised the sector. By 2018, the share of pig farms with more than 500 pigs was around 80%, state-run media reported in November. The government is aiming for at least 65% of pork from industrial farming operations by 2025. As the government’s focus has shifted towards supporting larger-scale production, smaller operations continue to be squeezed into contract farming operations for larger companies.
India suspends visas for visitors from all other countries for at least a month in response to the coronavirus pandemic, effectively bans all tourism to India until at least 15 April. It will be enforced from Friday onwards.
India’s coronavirus cases rose to 72
Karnataka invoked 123-year-old legislation to announce that any person who refuses hospital treatment or violates their quarantine will be prosecuted. The 1897 Epidemic Diseases Act was brought in by the occupying British administration to tackle the plague.
Is this a rational decision by the Indian government or driven by ill-founded fear? Is it justified?
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