Tracking the COVID-19-Virus in Germany, the USA, Italy and other hot spots in the world

Just to be clear about the graph, those are test results for each day.

But your question about the different test types is a good point. Another one that I am curious about is the rate of false positives/negatives, but I imagine that can wait until after the pandemic ends.

 

Testing is an issue for every country in the world. It would appear that testing swabs (like ventilators) and other equipment to run tests are in short supply globally.

To complicate matters, when the government recommended that all elective and other non-urgent medical be cancelled/postponed, all the laboratories who were running tests for all sorts of things saw their revenues plummet. Now they are expected to invest in high-dollar new equipment needed to run Coronavirus tests with little revenue per virus test to pay for that specific testing equipment.

https://www.modernhealthcare.com/clinical/lab-test-volumes-plummet-patients-put-care

Quest is saying that they are catching up on the backlog and Labcorp claims to have no backlog but it takes 4-5 days for turnaround.

"In early March, the nation’s two largest commercial labs, Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp, started testing, and they have acknowledged that their labs around the country were overwhelmed. Quest’s backlog is 80,000, according to the company, down from 160,000 on March 25. LabCorp says it has caught up, and now has a turnaround of four to five days from pickup.

Supplies of test swabs have gotten so low that most hospitals test only their most vulnerable patients, typically those being admitted.

Wendy Bost, a spokeswoman for Quest, which introduced its coronavirus tests on March 9, said the company had ramped up its testing and could now process more than 35,000 tests per day — over 200,000 each week — at its 12 labs around the country. Last week, Quest asked hospitals to identify health care workers and symptomatic patients for priority processing and she said the company was providing results now on an average of a day for that population.

To date, Quest has processed nearly 550,000 coronavirus tests, Bost said. The current turnaround time for other patients, she said, is now two to three days although she acknowledged there was a longer wait in the areas most affected, like Chicago, New York, New Jersey and Miami."

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation...acerbate-coronavirus-testing-gaps-in-the-u-s/

 

A while back I mentioned that I was doing deep breathing exercises as a means to keep myself healthy in case I ended becoming infected. It made sense to me but I had no basis for making any claims about it so I didn't.

It turns out that there is a good reason to be doing these deep breathing exercises,

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/chris-cuomo-coronavirus-advice_n_5e8bfc56c5b6e1d10a68d5bf

FTR the deep breathing exercise that I use involves breathing in deeply through your nose until your lungs are filled to capacity. Then slowly release the air from pursed lips to the count of seven. Repeat this 3 times in a row at least twice a day. If you feel a little dizzy that is normal, just allow it to pass and then continue.

 

The # of tests is tests for that day and the # of positives is positives for that day, right? I'm suggesting that the chart with the positives for the day indicate positives for tests which were taken 4-10 days earlier (if not longer). So the positives for day 30, may correlate to the tests on day 20, for example, on a 10-day lag. We don't know exactly how many days that lag is, and it appears to be another variable as backlogs come and go.

 

Maybe I should go to the grocery every day. When I see some other shopper is going to pass me, I inhale deeply while they are still far away and don't exhale until that other customer has gotten far more than 6 ft behind me.

(Just a mild attempt at humor there about shopping more often, not about holding my breath when I shop.)

Good advice on the breathing exercises.

 

Yes, I do. Why do you doubt the CDC ?? Why would anyone claim that the US data is wrong by using the NHS data ??

 

Data.

Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx et. al. believed the dishonest Red Chinese data which indicated to them that the coronavirus was much less contagious than it actually is. Those countries in very close proximity and with ties/spies/family members in Red China knew what was going on was far different from what the Red Chinese were reporting. Canada does not get the amount of international travel especially from China that the US gets. The breakout in Washington resulted from and Chinese traveler.

 

Again nothing.

 

I do that when passing someone when I'm out cycling.

 

So the US get 80,000 deaths from flu and the UK gets 372 deaths. And you ask why I doubt the figures from the CDC? Do you even bother to read links provided!

Your health service must be terrible. Given the huge numbers of US deaths from flu you must have known many many people who have died from flu in the last 10 years. It's a bit odd that I don't know anyone who has died from flu in the last 10 years, in fact, I don't know anyone who has had the flue in the last ten years let alone died from it and I know loads of people. Whereas for this Coronavirus I know several people who have had it or got it now, fortunately I don't know anyone who has died from it yet.

 

LOL you still think it is the 1950s

 

I quoted exactly from the link.

 

The single party totalitarian communist form of government exists in Red China to this day.

 

You clearly have no clue what you write or bother to look at links provided! Firstly there is no quote in your post, and secondly, there is not just one link. You just make things up to spam your nonsense.

 

In 2017/2018 Germany had 1,674 flu deaths according to the RKI but there is also the number of more than 25,000 flu deaths for the same time. The 25,000 flu deaths are just a statistical number which includes all excess winter mortality.

https://influenza.rki.de/Saisonberichte/2018.pdf

 

I quoted the numbers - 80,000 flu deaths in the US in the 2017 - 2018 flu season.

As I’m sure you know there are many more than one link.

 

The discussion is about the US.

 

You are just wasting your time because trolls feed off of responses so they will post any crap just to get a response out of you. Ignore is your friend when it comes to dealing with trolls.

 

Projection. ^^^

 

Tracking the COVID-19-Virus in Germany, the USA, Italy and other hot spots in the world

Why CDC Estimates the Burden of Season Influenza in the U.S.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/why-cdc-estimates.htm

 

We were specifically talking about the US.

And the result was 80,000 deaths in the US.

So what is your point. The estimates are too low, too high, accurate ???

 

And BTW there are quotes.

 

Exactly. The UK does the same. No doubt other countries do exactly the same. The quoted figures of 80000 flu deaths in US is clearly wrong and is again just a statistical number which includes all excess winter mortality.

 

There is a new study just out of the University of Southampton in the UK which shows that had the Red Chinese had not covered up the localized infections and acted 3 weeks earlier 95% of the damage done globally would have been prevented.

Thanks Red China.

China may have prevented 95% of virus cases if it enacted measures after silenced whistleblower’s warning

https://hongkongfp.com/2020/03/14/c...-cases-acted-silenced-whistleblowers-warning/

.

 

A note about Mortality Rates.

First off, here is a really good write up from Worldofmeters about how to craft a mortality rate while the pandemic is ongoing: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-rate/#correct

This is what they claim is one of the "correct" formulas:

They further note that you can estimate T by comparing the total cumulative of resolved (i.e. death and recovered) cases and by finding a previous day where the number of new cases matches. For the world, the current number of resolved cases is 370,731. On March 23rd, the number of total cases was 378,830. That yields a T of 14 days, which precisely matches the 14 day median finding from the Chinese National Health Commission study from Date of First Symptom to Death.

When you divide the number of deaths from April 6th (5227) against the cumulative case count from March 23rd (378,830), you get a fatality rate of 1.38%.

For those interested about the US numbers, I repeated the process. On April 6th, there were 1255 deaths and a cumulative resolved number of ~31,200. Fourteen days prior, on March 23rd, the cumulative case count was 43,781, which is too high. So that would mean that the T in the US might be a little larger (March 22nd had a cumulative case count of 33,592 and that is close enough for our purposes).

When you divide the deaths from April 6th (1255) against the cumulative case counts from March 22nd (33,592), you get a fatality rate of 3.73%.

So why is the fatality rate in the US so much higher than the Global number? There are probably several reasons: The significantly larger amount of data from the world versus the relative lack of data from the US. The fact that mortalities tend to be larger on the front side of an epidemic outbreak when healthcare infrastructure and personnel are still stressed/learning what works.