Recent submissions

Comment · 6 years ago
The vast majority of people don't have an intuitive understanding of exponential growth.

People not trained well in math and science don't even have/know the tools to help them understand it analytically.

We need (much) better math education for people studying all majors.

Comment · 6 years ago
Most severe cases require trained medical staff. Since ~20% of infections requires hospitalization, no healthcare system is prepared for an exponential rise in SARS-CoV-2 infections.

Most fatalities are from pneumonia. Lots of details are available all over. You may want to read up.

Comment · 6 years ago
No healthcare treatment in real life can be sufficient for an exponential growth of severe cases that require skilled staff and specialized equipment.

Health service ranking focuses on treatment I suppose. We need a different ranking for epidemic prevention and control.

Comment · 6 years ago
Comment · 6 years ago
Yes, I think I might have mixed up stats of different kinds (Posting too late at night, sorry).

However, the point stands that fatality rates will likely go up a lot if medical resources are overwhelmed. Long-term lung damage is also another risk for younger people and its rate will also go up.

Comment · 6 years ago
If most people don't care to prevent infection, the hospitals and medical resources will soon be overwhelmed, the death rate will surge from 0.5-4% (no exact figure at the moment) to 10-20% like earlier in Wuhan. When viral load in the environment becomes sufficiently high, some young people will be taken away by it too, as in the case of several Wuhan doctors who sacrificed themselves under that circumstance.

Among the ~16-19% who are hospitalized and recover, you may suffer through weeks of pneumonia and your lungs could be damaged long-term.

Even if you're lucky to be among the 80% who survive without hospitalization, you could still be the vector who directly or indirectly infect someone you care about.

Comment · 6 years ago
Comment · 6 years ago
Comment · 6 years ago
Doctors and nurses are exposed to a much higher viral load than most people. In Wuhan, they may also overwork and have insufficient sleep.
Comment · 6 years ago
There seems to be many cases of young patients dying in Iran. Either because there are way more cases than being officially reported or (hopefully not) the virus has mutated to affect the young more, or both.

The first hypothesis is likely based on the number of infections found in international travellers who went to Iran. We still cannot rule out the second hypothesis though.

A 23-year-old woman soccer player: https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/faadg4/a_23_ye...

A male nurse talking of 8 deaths in one night during his shift. 23-year-old female (same case?), 29- and 30-year-old males, 50-year-old female among them. (1-minute clip)

EDIT: It's just n=8, but 37.5% dying at age 30 or below is most likely drawn from a different distribution from 0.6% among the 70,000+ cases in the largest Chinese study (where the worldometers data comes from).

EDIT 2: Based on a link in a sibling comment, only 7 deaths among 20-29 yo and 18 deaths among 30-39 yo in the n=44,672 Chinese report.

https://twitter.com/AlinejadMasih/status/1232779487647031302

http://weekly.chinacdc.cn/en/article/id/e53946e2-c6c4-41e9-9...

Comment · 6 years ago
I read that South Korea is developing them and it's close to ready. They probably need them for their own people first though.

It's a huge opportunity for a startup/company to create a home test kit for COVID-19. Massive global market for the product and growing exponentially.

Doing well & doing good at the same time.

Comment · 6 years ago
I have followed the news closely, the CFR might decrease a bit in Hubei because China has reinforced it with 20,000 medical staff and hospitals. They also have found some better treatments (not a cure, to be clear).

The approx. 20% hospitalization figure is the elephant in the room. Even if reduced to 10% or 5%, it would still overwhelm medical resources of any country.

The point is if a country gets complacent, it could be too late to contain it without drastic measures and mass sufferings.

Comment · 6 years ago
The doubling time is about 6 days for cases around the world excluding China. Graphs here: https://ncov.r6.no/

This means several people in contact with the unconfirmed infected case may not yet self-isolate and can spread it around during the wait time.

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