2020.03.14

Official Numbers:

Website Updates

• An external contributor made RSS feed work. Sorry, I didn’t realize it wasn’t working

Special Feature

So something has been bothering me for a while and I would really like an answer to it. The Chinese data shows that the fatality rate for people under 40 is much, much lower than everyone else, and other data sources generally match this. But fatality isn’t the only thing going on here. How does younger peoples’ rate of severity scale? Does this imply that they also get more milder diseases? Or do they get diseases just as severe but they live through it more frequently?

Singapore is (allegedly) doing a very good job with containment and tracking, and has a website up. As far as I know, this website tracks literally every coronavirus patient in Singapore. I looked through some of their data.

Of the people currently hospitalized, 15% are age 18-30 and 26% are age 31-45

Of the people who have recovered, the average stay in hospital for age 18-30 is 10.7 days and the average stay in hospital for people who are 31-45 is 10.9 days

There are 115 total infected between ages 20 and 50 in Singapore. Of those, 44 are currently hospitalized.

There are 90 total infected over age 50. Of those, 62 are currently hospitalized

There is no easy way on the site that I’ve figured out to include people who were previously hospitalized and then released

Now, small sample size, all sorts of confounds that could come into play here, but two things worth calling out. The first is that their hospitalization rate is dramatically higher than the mild/severe/critical data would suggest. What does this mean? I suspect it means that the threshold for hospitalization in Singapore is lower, and that milder cases are being hospitalized. Maybe they use hospital rooms as quarantine zones for positive patients.

The second thing I notice is that, while the risk of hospitalizeable illness is significantly lower for younger people than for older people, that’s still 38% of infected younger people currently hospitalized. Ten days in hospital sounds pretty fuckin’ serious. And again, I don’t have an easy way of getting a count of all people who were ever hospitalized, so for all I know their hosptialization rates are the same but young people recover while old people die.

More data is needed but I’m considering this significant evidence in the “even young people are fucked” direction. I am scared.

Sites/Links

• This is an interesting medium post that puts things in perspective. I’m not sure I agree with its relatively rosy perspective but it was still interesting

Asia

• Music clubs emerge as coronavirus transmission sites in Osaka. I have about $150 worth of wasted EDM tickets for shows I bailed out on over Coronavirus and I’m glad I did

Europe

• More places are going into lockdown now. It’s getting tiresome to keep track of them all.
• Sent in by a reader: Spains death rate is anomalously high. Run Google Translate on the page and then look at the graph entitled “Relative number of deaths”. No explanation for this at this time.
• The UK’s plan continues to be “infect ‘em all, let God sort’em out”. I am very, very worried that this will backfire horrendously. UK readers, take responsibility for your own well-being.

US

• Sent in from a reader: Trump apparently executive-actioned away a bunch of rules and regs that would slow things down. Private companies are actually picking up the testing slack (I’m skeptical but we shall see). And the markets seemed to respond positively to this?
• US Extends europe travel restrictions to UK and Ireland. That was fast
• Trump considering domestic travel restrictions. I think we’re one, maybe two weeks away from these. If you’re going to risk any travel right now, I hope you like where you’re going, because you may be stuck there indefinitely
• Washington state at stage 11 of it’s 13-stage pandemic response plan. Stage 12 is don’t-leave-your-house lockdown. Stage 13 is “nobody leaves this city”. Washington readers, prepare for the worst. Everyone else, prepare for the worst like a week after WA
• First confirmed case of COVID-19 in a prison employee. We’ve seen how this plays out elsewhere. Eventually they’ll be forced to either release the prisoners or make them all sick and die. If they choose the first option, I hope Delaware County exercises their right to keep and bear arms. If they choose the second, well, that’s pretty horrifying, but at least it functions as a sort of experiment.

Canada

• Covid Canada looks like a decent resource for tracking things.

Science/Medical

• People who recover from the virus have permanently compromized lung function?. At least some of them do. It seems to me, based on the news article, that it’s probably the people who recovered from more severe cases who have these problems
• Wuhan lockdown seems to have worked, but this guy crunched the numbers and there’s a problem: as soon as they lift it, they’re getting more outbreaks
• I am not a doctor, but some food for thought. I’m pretty sure wearing masks in public would dramatically help, and the “masks don’t really work” propaganda is mostly because the authorities think we are too stupid and selfish to accept “look we have massive shortages and healthcare workers need to be prioritized”
• Dutch researchers say they’ve identified an antibody that can be used against this disease. Good news, both directly, and because it presumably helps with progress towards a vaccine
• Over half of Dutch critical patients are under age 50. Now there’s a lot of confounders that could apply here, but this is unnerving.