Help the Fight Against COVID-19

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What is Germany doing? They have 6250 cases and only 13 deaths and a mere 2 serious/critical cases. We need to find out why they are statistically so much better.

The low death rate here in Germany has puzzled me also. As long as you don't believe in some Neonazi genetical superiority shit that we Germans are all members of an ancient evolutionary-biologically superior Aryan tribe that flew straight out of the heavenly bosom of Shangri-La, there are only three possible explanations.

The one is that we do indeed have a mutated strain here that is less lethal. However, since we "imported" the virus mainly from China and Italy, especially from people having been on holiday in Italy and South Tyrol, I do not believe that.

Next would be that elderly people have not been overly exposed to it yet and the infections in Germany have an overwhelming majority of younger / healthy cases. In contrast to what an earlier poster wrote, I don't think that Germans have such a huge sense of community. We have a lot of the elderly locked away in senior's homes because people rather focus on their career than on their relatives. That might contribute.

Last possibility: Very bad amount of testing on severely ill people and deaths that looked like a flu. I am very suspicious that this is the case. My 83 year old Mom lives with us, and she has an ergotherapist coming twice a week. The ergotherapist informed us today that she is not coming for the near future since the kindergarten where her daughter works has several suspects of CoVid-19. She described to me on the phone what an outrageously tedious procedure it was for herself to get tested, it still has not happened, and the results of the daughter are not in yet. So I think what Germany is doing is to test and report very poorly.
 
This is an example of why they have to shut things down. In summary:
"A woman, one of Nebraska's newest cases of coronavirus, attended two Creighton men's basketball games after symptoms developed, spending hours in bars and restaurants after each game."

https://journalstar.com/news/state-...74e1385.html#tracking-source=home-top-story-1

In Omaha, a Creighton game is huge, so tons of people there. And the bars/restaurants would most likely be packed afterwards. sigh!

People just CAN'T help it. They have to go out and about even if sick. And then of course, people will be out not realizing they might be sick also.
 
Maybe health care?
Germany is described as under pressure.
Italian hospitals are overwhelmed.

German Health care is not that great. Since we have privatised it over the last two decades, it is understaffed, underfinanced and underequipped. The government is trying to slow it down for a good reason - we will also be overhwelmed very quickly once the exponential growth really takes off.

Germany has lost a big part of its competence and efficiency in all such sectors, also in engineering, production, whatever. We have this never-ending story of being unable to finish building the new Berlin Airport... when the Covid-19 outbreak had not come to Germany yet, but the Chinese were building emergency hospitals in no time, I saw jokes on Facebook going like this: "The German Government has asked Chinese companies to take over building the Berlin Airport. They have refused. They said the two days of work are not worth the flight time." We all had a good but very bitter laugh, because it is so befitting.
 
The low death rate here in Germany has puzzled me also. As long as you don't believe in some Neonazi genetical superiority shit that we Germans are all members of an ancient evolutionary-biologically superior Aryan tribe that flew straight out of the heavenly bosom of Shangri-La, there are only three possible explanations.

The one is that we do indeed have a mutated strain here that is less lethal. However, since we "imported" the virus mainly from China and Italy, especially from people having been on holiday in Italy and South Tyrol, I do not believe that.

Next would be that elderly people have not been overly exposed to it yet and the infections in Germany have an overwhelming majority of younger / healthy cases. In contrast to what an earlier poster wrote, I don't think that Germans have such a huge sense of community. We have a lot of the elderly locked away in senior's homes because people rather focus on their career than on their relatives. That might contribute.

Last possibility: Very bad amount of testing on severely ill people and deaths that looked like a flu. I am very suspicious that this is the case. My 83 year old Mom lives with us, and she has an ergotherapist coming twice a week. The ergotherapist informed us today that she is not coming for the near future since the kindergarten where her daughter works has several suspects of CoVid-19. She described to me on the phone what an outrageously tedious procedure it was for herself to get tested, it still has not happened, and the results of the daughter are not in yet. So I think what Germany is doing is to test and report very poorly.

i only mentioned the sense of community as my experience living in the States is that there is - at least where I live near DC - very little sense of community. Neighbors mostly barely know each other.

The tedious procedures to get tested as well as the incidence of COVID-19 amongst children is troubling.

Stay healthy everyone.
 
It's not the infection rate that is remarkable. It's the death rate and complication rate. The disease is spreading in Germany very rapidly. However the percentage of people getting really sick and/or dying from it is far less than any other country. Perhaps there's a mutated strain that broke out there that's not as deadly.
Could it be better testing rates which show a closer number to what the actual infected population is?
 
I'm a U.S. citizen, but I haven't done anything that delayed the testing of cases in the U.S.; so I presume you don't think I should be ashamed about something. ;)

First off I've been following your posts in this thread and appreciate your insight.
Second, I read WAY too much fiction and am prone to hyperbole as a result.

My apologies to bald eagles everywhere. :laughing:

Gov Cuomo live on TV right now is hitting it out of the park as far as what normal folk need to be hearing.

That might indeed be the reason.

It's that way with crime stats. Huge disparity between the US and UK on the classification of a 'violent crime' for example.
 
Donnie:
First off I've been following your posts in this thread and appreciate your insight.
Second, I read WAY too much fiction and am prone to hyperbole as a result.

My apologies to bald eagles everywhere. :laughing:
Hey man, don't worry, I wasn't miffed or anything; that's why I did the, uh, whaddayacallit, the winky-emoji.

I am serious, though, when I ask whether anyone has heard any specifics about the challenges they're having with ramping up testing.

My best guess as to why we haven't heard a clear explanation about that is that it's a boring story: Supply-chain-blah-blah-blah. If it bleeds, it leads; if it makes viewers' eyes glaze over, they report a murder instead. :p

But whatever the story is, it'll need to explain why other countries were able to get there faster. Was that due to smaller populations? Less dependency on outside manufacturing?

Oh...and then, there's crap like this:

HEADLINE: Immigration Officials Seize Suspected Fake Coronavirus Test Kits At LAX
https://dailycaller.com/2020/03/15/cbp-fake-coronavirus-test-kits-lax/

Humans.

Some days I swear I'm gonna turn in my membership card.
 
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I feel slightly better knowing a 2 week shutdown on everything is in effect (and There’s a drive in test area)

people remain defiantly eager to violate the sequester and run to the stores but generally it’s quiet like Jumanji in northern NYC

I wish people would just stay home , just for two weeks man...imagine it’s a shitty vacation but at least at the end; you don’t DIE!

idk man...
 
Even scarier is that there is a high likelihood that this was man-made and escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology which just so happens to be near the market where China is saying the outbreak started. A woman scientist there has been experimenting with genetically modifying the coronavirus despite her colleagues in other countries telling her she's playing with fire. This is a biohazard level 4 lab which has had containment breaches before.
This is interesting - I've only seen that in that market they have bats and other animals that people slaughter and eat (cooked I would imagine, but the slaughtering is where the issue would be) and the common thought is that this did come from bats - do you have a source for the information above? I'd be interested to read more/see where it came from.
 
This is interesting - I've only seen that in that market they have bats and other animals that people slaughter and eat (cooked I would imagine, but the slaughtering is where the issue would be) and the common thought is that this did come from bats - do you have a source for the information above? I'd be interested to read more/see where it came from.
I thought it was a man made virus that escaped wuhan myself , but I thought that was a “dispelled myth?”
 
  • I keep hearing this poorly-explained, vague story that there was some regulation in place which prevented health-workers from using any test other than the bad one, until someone complained to HHS and the administration responded by removing that regulation. But I don't know any details. That might have hampered testing, to be sure. But it doesn't seem like that, alone, could have prevented other firms from spinning up their manufacturing of competing tests, in anticipation of the reg being removed.

You might start with these:

NY Times
The Week
The NY Post
Reason

Seems less "a regulation" than bureaucrats in bureaucracies doing what bureaucrats in bureaucracies do.
 
NY Times
The Week
The NY Post
Reason

Seems less "a regulation" than bureaucrats in bureaucracies doing what bureaucrats in bureaucracies do.
Thanks, YetAnotherOne! :)

There's another related article from Reason, about hospital beds:
https://reason.com/2020/03/13/ameri...-certificate-of-need-laws-are-one-reason-why/

Looking through your links, it seems to me that the NY Post gives the clearest explanation of the testing problems:

Overregulation of diagnostic testing has played a major role in this delay. For weeks, the CDC operated the nation’s sole diagnostic laboratory for coronavirus, while testing in the rest of the world proceeded apace.

Test protocols using the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) were publicly available shortly after Chinese researchers published (or described) the sequence of the virus in mid-January. The World Health Organization (WHO) used a freely available German procedure to create a test kit, shipping 250,000 tests to 159 laboratories worldwide.

Since early February, the WHO has facilitated specimen transfer to referral laboratories.

In China, labs have tested thousands of patients each day. By Feb. 23, the Chinese government had approved 10 test kits, and production capacity reached 1.65 million tests per week. Meantime, South Korea has more than 500 testing sites and has screened over 100,000 people, reportedly testing 10,000 individuals per day and pioneering “drive-through” testing facilities.

This enhanced testing capability is a key reason why the country has reported over 5,100 cases — the second-largest, outside China — including larger numbers of patients with mild illness, as reflected in a case fatality rate less than 1 percent.

...

By contrast, the United States had performed a paltry 472 tests by March 2. Further, CDC testing criteria have precluded recognizing community spread because of requirements stipulating recent travel to China or exposure to an infected person. Adherence to these guidelines delayed testing in the first probable case of community transmission, in Northern California, by four days.

The CDC has expanded indications for testing to include travel to Japan, Italy, Iran and South Korea, but testing guidelines remain biased toward the sickest individuals.

For those without known exposures, the CDC only recommends testing for severely affected patients.

In theory, doctors could have tested any individuals in whom they suspected coronavirus, and Vice President Mike Pence on March 3rd encouraged this; however, the unavailability of testing has been a major obstacle in practice.

From the above, it seems like...
  • Rather than leveraging what WHO was doing, the U.S. kept looking to the CDC, but CDC didn't get off the starting line;
  • Private/independent labs could've started testing everyone, but instead rationed testing for only the sickest persons with known transmission vectors, following the CDC's guidelines, although Pence had already made at least one statement calling for broader testing.

That seems to fit with my own local experience, and also with what Reason reports:

Seattle infectious disease expert Dr. Helen Chu had, by January, collected a huge number of nasal swabs from local residents who were experiencing symptoms as part of a research project on flu. She proposed, to federal and state officials, testing those samples for coronavirus infections.

Did the FDA and CDC functionaries commend Chu for being proactive? Not at all. Washington state epidemiologist Scott Lindquist recalled, "What they said on that phone call very clearly was cease and desist to Helen Chu. Stop testing." On February 29, the FDA finally agreed to unleash America's vibrant biotech companies and academic labs by allowing them to develop and deploy new tests for the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

Now is probably not the time to shake up CDC; they're, uh, rather busy.

But if (IF!) the reporting is accurate, then at least some of the blame for the slow testing falls there.

There's also this article...
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/20...racism-and-obesity-instead-daniel-greenfield/
...which basically rakes CDC over the coals for doing sociology and SJW-ism instead of staying on-mission. The source is hard-right (by U.S. standards, which is to say, NatSec-Libertarian) and one ought to keep authors' biases in mind. Nevertheless, this does match anecdotally with my own observations over the last 20 years: I've heard a lot from the CDC about gun violence, vaping, and the like. Whatever problems such things may present, having the CDC become activists on such topics feels like distraction and mission-creep to me...and, maybe, an example of Robert Conquest's 3 Laws in action.

Also, Dr. Chu sounds like she was doing the right thing and got smacked for it. (Somebody give that lady a Kit Kat bar.)
 
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I found this link but which is interesting but of course, who really knows the ABSOLUTE truth? I highly doubt if it were the case, any government would be like "Oh yeah, we did it on purpose, but it accidentally got out". From what I can tell, TheScientist.com seems to be considered reliable as far as factual data goes.

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-...virus-escaped-from-a-lab-lacks-evidence-67229

Also from that site;

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/why-some-covid-19-cases-are-worse-than-others-67160

"The latest data from China stem from an analysis of nearly 45,000 confirmed cases, and on the whole suggest that the people most likely to develop severe forms of COVID-19 are those with pre-existing illnesses and the elderly.

While less than 1 percent of people who were otherwise healthy died from the disease, the fatality rate for people with cardiovascular disease was 10.5 percent. That figure was 7.3 percent for diabetes patients and around 6 percent for those with chronic respiratory disease, hypertension, or cancer.

While overall, 2.3 percent of known cases proved fatal—which many experts say is likely an overestimate of the mortality rate, given that many mild cases might go undiagnosed—patients 80 years or older were most at risk, with 14.8 percent of them dying. Deaths occurred in every age group except in children under the age of nine, and, generally speaking, “we see relatively few cases among children,” World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said last week."
 
I can't imagine the amount of money being lost worldwide. The power company announced they wouldn't be cutting electricity off for late payment atm. Most working people live paycheck to paycheck and those that lose weeks or months work because of this will spend the next year trying to get caught back up. :rolleyes:
 
What is Germany doing? They have 6250 cases and only 13 deaths and a mere 2 serious/critical cases. We need to find out why they are statistically so much better.

I can't say for sure since I don't know under which circumstances Covid tests are administered in other countries. But under the assumption that the virus and its effects are the same anywhere on this world the most logic explanation is that we germans are testing more people. So more people are officially infected than in other countries where they might only be testing the severe cases and not every suspect.
I work in a hospital only a few kilometers away from one of Germany's Covid hotspots and as of now we don't have a single case. We have one case of viral pneumonia and that one is caused by the flu (corona test negative). Still we are preparing for the worst case.
 
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