Coronavirus Outbreak

[jirskyr]

I’m working on an RSV vaccine right now


just out of interest, are you with the UQ group?

Nope.

Interesting, my wife is doing research the RSV field. Where are you based?

Sydney? Do you mean a hospital? I don't do vaccine development, I manage the research programs at hospitals. But vaccine's aren't my specialty, my specialty is clinical trials. So right now I am doing RSV vaccine, but we do any therapeutic area that comes along.

 

[Tim Sheens]

There are some simple things that HK does, like plastic film over lift buttons, so that it’s easy to sanitise.

I didn't realise lift buttons were difficult to sanitise? Why can't you just wipe them with disinfectant?

Things start to go overboard in this regard, I mean lift buttons? What about every other public surface in existence, are folks going to walk around opening things with a foot press or elbow or wave at a scanner, just to avoid germs?

Sure as hell don't touch money if germs are a problem, also don't talk to anyone, or shake hands - no no, that's instant transferal. We can all then add to the immuno-weaknesses that already might exist because some mums excessively disinfect their house and kids don't get a proper dose of bugs in their childhood.

This mentality is why Australia isn't going to do well through this.

The "Yeah, nah, she'll be right". Will make you tougher kind of response. Bud, that's why there will be a vaccination eventually built to ensure our immune systems can cope.

I mean, where do you draw the line? Would SARS landing in Australia mean that we start doing some smart things? Ebola?

High-touch surfaces such as lift buttons, public toilet doors (keep them open) all helps. You could label it soft. Label it an overreaction. But I would prefer to go with facts rather than a uncorrelated assumption about cleanliness causing auto-immune issues. Sounds all a bit anti-vax!

I'm a big proponent of both vaccination and exposure to environment after the effect time of the first round of injections, having little to no doubt on the benefits and effectiveness of utilising both.

Edit; Naturally, preventative measures are necessary at other times and particularly when confronted with new viruses.

 

[Tigerboy]

There are some simple things that HK does, like plastic film over lift buttons, so that it’s easy to sanitise.

I didn't realise lift buttons were difficult to sanitise? Why can't you just wipe them with disinfectant?

Things start to go overboard in this regard, I mean lift buttons? What about every other public surface in existence, are folks going to walk around opening things with a foot press or elbow or wave at a scanner, just to avoid germs?

Sure as hell don't touch money if germs are a problem, also don't talk to anyone, or shake hands - no no, that's instant transferal. We can all then add to the immuno-weaknesses that already might exist because some mums excessively disinfect their house and kids don't get a proper dose of bugs in their childhood.

This mentality is why Australia isn't going to do well through this.

The "Yeah, nah, she'll be right". Will make you tougher kind of response. Bud, that's why there will be a vaccination eventually built to ensure our immune systems can cope.

I mean, where do you draw the line? Would SARS landing in Australia mean that we start doing some smart things? Ebola?

High-touch surfaces such as lift buttons, public toilet doors (keep them open) all helps. You could label it soft. Label it an overreaction. But I would prefer to go with facts rather than a uncorrelated assumption about cleanliness causing auto-immune issues. Sounds all a bit anti-vax!

I'm a big proponent of both vaccination and exposure to environment after the effect time of the first round of injections, have little to no doubt on the benefits and effectiveness of utilising both.

Agree and with a lot of the sentiment AND sense being displayed in this thread. Safety first has to be the main factor being considered and how safe (vs paranoid) we as Australians are compared to the situation in China, specifically the location it started. Nothing meant by that?

If there’s a vacc for it considering the fact it’s a potential wildly mutating strain of the corona virus which is deadly , then you could only really claim ignorance or worse not getting done

 

[Cultured_Bogan]

Anyone else getting heaps of ads for respirators on this thread...?

Getting spammed with them.

 

[Cultured_Bogan]

Been saying it since day one. Incredibly overhyped by media and others - if I didn’t know better I would think their are ulterior motives at play here. Statistical likelihood of dying from CV vs Influenza is ridiculously low. But hey let’s not let facts get in the way of hysteriCal hand wringing and nonsense

Dazza the chance of dying from your typical flu is about .01% ....coronavirus is around 6%


Um yeah nah. Not getting into an argument on something almost as emotive as the NRL ad :grinning: however Influenza is 0.1% (NOT 0.01) and latest research has COVID around 3 to 3.4% not 6% (the probable reason for the COVID being currently at 3% vs Flu is it being "novel" and the whole science around adaptive immunity ).

Influenza in Australia only last year killed 255 people of all ages and all levels of "wellness" currently COVID seems to be deadly to elderly and/or people with respiratory or cardiac insufficiencies and excluding the outlier of the the young baby in SA, children seem almost immune to CCOVID's (for some reason)

All my point was that in comparison and asking any genuinely knowledgeable medical/scientific person, COVID is not "worse" than influenza - As I mentioned above, the initial and still some concern was around it being "novel" therefore there some some uncertainty about how or whether the virus would mutate quickly once it has "escaped" from China into something more deadly like SARS or MERS.

Hey Daz, what do you define as cardiac insufficiency? Out of curiosity more than anything else.

 

[innsaneink]

Looks like it's only gunna get worse before it gets better.... We are due to fly to philippines in 2 weeks... All this crap putting a real dampener on things

You going boracay?

My closest friends working at DFAT in the aussie embassey in Hanoi say its fine over there and around the area.

Not this time... been to Boracay a few years back, visiting.the Mrs mum in samar, a few days at a resort in Cebu and then to the Mrs place in palawan.

Visited a supermarket for the first time this week... The local aldi looked trashed
.. No dunny rolls, tissues, nappy, pasta and pasta sauce... Tinned Tuna and salmon nearly all gone

Thanks spud ?

 

[TrueTiger]

If you have basic hygiene in place re washing hands etc and having a healthy diet,as well as maybe taking extra vitamins then if you contract the virus it may help you through the most severe times of the virus..

I know many of you will absolutely smash me after I make this statement,but we allow many different cultures and people into our great country and I never bag their way of life within their own country,however this new virus just proves that what they do in their country is their business,if they want to eat raw feral animals because its what they do then fine,it goes to show if you cook and prepare food properly then you have a healthy system and lifestyle,this new virus shows the world what happens when you have prehistoric or outdated methods as the norm and it effects the whole planet because someone didn't proceed with caution...so much for street food etc...
nothing beats well prepared,clean food and basic hygiene...

While we are at it ...I had a week in FIJI 4 years ago at one of the popular resorts on the coral coast...we contracted a virus that caused nausea and diarehoa...why ..because someone bought it to the resort a week before we got there and they came from the USA,the resort was lacks in cleaning and disinfecting the place before we got there because of costs associated with it...how much do you think it cost them when we told everybody to be careful when you go there...a lot of $$$$$$..

 

[dazza65]

Been saying it since day one. Incredibly overhyped by media and others - if I didn’t know better I would think their are ulterior motives at play here. Statistical likelihood of dying from CV vs Influenza is ridiculously low. But hey let’s not let facts get in the way of hysteriCal hand wringing and nonsense

Dazza the chance of dying from your typical flu is about .01% ....coronavirus is around 6%


Um yeah nah. Not getting into an argument on something almost as emotive as the NRL ad :grinning: however Influenza is 0.1% (NOT 0.01) and latest research has COVID around 3 to 3.4% not 6% (the probable reason for the COVID being currently at 3% vs Flu is it being "novel" and the whole science around adaptive immunity ).

Influenza in Australia only last year killed 255 people of all ages and all levels of "wellness" currently COVID seems to be deadly to elderly and/or people with respiratory or cardiac insufficiencies and excluding the outlier of the the young baby in SA, children seem almost immune to CCOVID's (for some reason)

All my point was that in comparison and asking any genuinely knowledgeable medical/scientific person, COVID is not "worse" than influenza - As I mentioned above, the initial and still some concern was around it being "novel" therefore there some some uncertainty about how or whether the virus would mutate quickly once it has "escaped" from China into something more deadly like SARS or MERS.

Hey Daz, what do you define as cardiac insufficiency? Out of curiosity more than anything else.

Its a bit complicated @Cultured_Bogan but CI is a bit of a basic "catch all" term for heart failure or CHF (congestive heart failure) - here we are talking about chronic long term heart issues as opposed to acute (commonly known as a Heart Attack).

In short, due to a wide range of causes (artery disease, high blood pressure, alcohol, valve failures due to old age and other causes) the heart's ability to pump blood throughout the body is reduced.

Symptoms of chronic heart failure include fatigue, shortage of breath and a persistent cough (amongst other systemic symptoms) The last two is where viral infections, especially respiratory viral infection, like Flu or COVID, come into play as the heart and lungs are inherently connected (Cardio-pulmonary system). So people with cardiac insufficiency lack the same lung health as a healthy person does and find it difficult to fight off respiratory viral infections etc.

 

[happy_tiger]

There are some simple things that HK does, like plastic film over lift buttons, so that it’s easy to sanitise.

I didn't realise lift buttons were difficult to sanitise? Why can't you just wipe them with disinfectant?

Things start to go overboard in this regard, I mean lift buttons? What about every other public surface in existence, are folks going to walk around opening things with a foot press or elbow or wave at a scanner, just to avoid germs?

Sure as hell don't touch money if germs are a problem, also don't talk to anyone, or shake hands - no no, that's instant transferal. We can all then add to the immuno-weaknesses that already might exist because some mums excessively disinfect their house and kids don't get a proper dose of bugs in their childhood.

This mentality is why Australia isn't going to do well through this.

The "Yeah, nah, she'll be right". Will make you tougher kind of response. Bud, that's why there will be a vaccination eventually built to ensure our immune systems can cope.

I mean, where do you draw the line? Would SARS landing in Australia mean that we start doing some smart things? Ebola?

High-touch surfaces such as lift buttons, public toilet doors (keep them open) all helps. You could label it soft. Label it an overreaction. But I would prefer to go with facts rather than a uncorrelated assumption about cleanliness causing auto-immune issues. Sounds all a bit anti-vax!

I'm a big proponent of both vaccination and exposure to environment after the effect time of the first round of injections, having little to no doubt on the benefits and effectiveness of utilising both.

Edit; Naturally, preventative measures are necessary at other times and particularly when confronted with new viruses.

Half the hippies and naturelovers from your neck of the woods don't use the vaccinations anyway

How many now from Ryde Hospital have tested positive to coronavirus

 

[Cultured_Bogan]

Been saying it since day one. Incredibly overhyped by media and others - if I didn’t know better I would think their are ulterior motives at play here. Statistical likelihood of dying from CV vs Influenza is ridiculously low. But hey let’s not let facts get in the way of hysteriCal hand wringing and nonsense

Dazza the chance of dying from your typical flu is about .01% ....coronavirus is around 6%


Um yeah nah. Not getting into an argument on something almost as emotive as the NRL ad :grinning: however Influenza is 0.1% (NOT 0.01) and latest research has COVID around 3 to 3.4% not 6% (the probable reason for the COVID being currently at 3% vs Flu is it being "novel" and the whole science around adaptive immunity ).

Influenza in Australia only last year killed 255 people of all ages and all levels of "wellness" currently COVID seems to be deadly to elderly and/or people with respiratory or cardiac insufficiencies and excluding the outlier of the the young baby in SA, children seem almost immune to CCOVID's (for some reason)

All my point was that in comparison and asking any genuinely knowledgeable medical/scientific person, COVID is not "worse" than influenza - As I mentioned above, the initial and still some concern was around it being "novel" therefore there some some uncertainty about how or whether the virus would mutate quickly once it has "escaped" from China into something more deadly like SARS or MERS.

Hey Daz, what do you define as cardiac insufficiency? Out of curiosity more than anything else.


Its a bit complicated @Cultured_Bogan but CI is a bit of a basic "catch all" term for heart failure or CHF (congestive heart failure) - here we are talking about chronic long term heart issues as opposed to acute (commonly known as a Heart Attack).

In short, due to a wide range of causes (artery disease, high blood pressure, alcohol, valve failures due to old age and other causes) the heart's ability to pump blood throughout the body is reduced.

Symptoms of chronic heart failure include fatigue, shortage of breath and a persistent cough (amongst other systemic symptoms) The last two is where viral infections, especially respiratory viral infection, like Flu or COVID, come into play as the heart and lungs are inherently connected (Cardio-pulmonary system). So people with cardiac insufficiency lack the same lung health as a healthy person does and find it difficult to fight off respiratory viral infections etc.

Thanks for your input mate, appreciate it.

 

[happy_tiger]

Anyone else getting heaps of ads for respirators on this thread...?

Getting spammed with them.

Just ordered 4 boxes at work for staff ...wondering how much the price has escalated on them

 

[Tim Sheens]

There are some simple things that HK does, like plastic film over lift buttons, so that it’s easy to sanitise.

I didn't realise lift buttons were difficult to sanitise? Why can't you just wipe them with disinfectant?

Things start to go overboard in this regard, I mean lift buttons? What about every other public surface in existence, are folks going to walk around opening things with a foot press or elbow or wave at a scanner, just to avoid germs?

Sure as hell don't touch money if germs are a problem, also don't talk to anyone, or shake hands - no no, that's instant transferal. We can all then add to the immuno-weaknesses that already might exist because some mums excessively disinfect their house and kids don't get a proper dose of bugs in their childhood.

This mentality is why Australia isn't going to do well through this.

The "Yeah, nah, she'll be right". Will make you tougher kind of response. Bud, that's why there will be a vaccination eventually built to ensure our immune systems can cope.

I mean, where do you draw the line? Would SARS landing in Australia mean that we start doing some smart things? Ebola?

High-touch surfaces such as lift buttons, public toilet doors (keep them open) all helps. You could label it soft. Label it an overreaction. But I would prefer to go with facts rather than a uncorrelated assumption about cleanliness causing auto-immune issues. Sounds all a bit anti-vax!

I'm a big proponent of both vaccination and exposure to environment after the effect time of the first round of injections, having little to no doubt on the benefits and effectiveness of utilising both.

Edit; Naturally, preventative measures are necessary at other times and particularly when confronted with new viruses.

Half the hippies and naturelovers from your neck of the woods don't use the vaccinations anyway

How many now from Ryde Hospital have tested positive to coronavirus

It's a worry, as I went shortly after the hospital visit to a mate's place a fortnight ago and his daughter became ill a week later and she is still unwell. He told me that and doctors were thinking to test for the corona virus when I phoned him this evening and he was also starting to show symptoms. I then reminded him that I was at Ryde hospital, so now things are a bit more urgent, particularly so as it seems the other doctor there passed it on to her son without being infected herself. No symptoms in my household, nor my parents, who I visited immediately upon leaving the hospital as they live just down the road.

 

[happy_tiger]

There are some simple things that HK does, like plastic film over lift buttons, so that it’s easy to sanitise.

I didn't realise lift buttons were difficult to sanitise? Why can't you just wipe them with disinfectant?

Things start to go overboard in this regard, I mean lift buttons? What about every other public surface in existence, are folks going to walk around opening things with a foot press or elbow or wave at a scanner, just to avoid germs?

Sure as hell don't touch money if germs are a problem, also don't talk to anyone, or shake hands - no no, that's instant transferal. We can all then add to the immuno-weaknesses that already might exist because some mums excessively disinfect their house and kids don't get a proper dose of bugs in their childhood.

This mentality is why Australia isn't going to do well through this.

The "Yeah, nah, she'll be right". Will make you tougher kind of response. Bud, that's why there will be a vaccination eventually built to ensure our immune systems can cope.

I mean, where do you draw the line? Would SARS landing in Australia mean that we start doing some smart things? Ebola?

High-touch surfaces such as lift buttons, public toilet doors (keep them open) all helps. You could label it soft. Label it an overreaction. But I would prefer to go with facts rather than a uncorrelated assumption about cleanliness causing auto-immune issues. Sounds all a bit anti-vax!

I'm a big proponent of both vaccination and exposure to environment after the effect time of the first round of injections, having little to no doubt on the benefits and effectiveness of utilising both.

Edit; Naturally, preventative measures are necessary at other times and particularly when confronted with new viruses.

Half the hippies and naturelovers from your neck of the woods don't use the vaccinations anyway

How many now from Ryde Hospital have tested positive to coronavirus

It's a worry, as I went shortly after the hospital visit to a mate's place a fortnight ago and his daughter became ill a week later and she is still unwell. He told me that and doctors were thinking to test for the corona virus when I phoned him this evening and he was also starting to show symptoms. I then reminded him that I was at Ryde hospital, so now things are a bit more urgent, particularly so as it seems the other doctor there passed it on to her son without being infected herself. No symptoms in my household, nor my parents, who I visited immediately upon leaving the hospital as they live just down the road.

I sincerely hope none of your friends or family (or any other Forum members family or friends for that matter )are being affected by the virus

 

[weststigers]

Been saying it since day one. Incredibly overhyped by media and others - if I didn’t know better I would think their are ulterior motives at play here. Statistical likelihood of dying from CV vs Influenza is ridiculously low. But hey let’s not let facts get in the way of hysteriCal hand wringing and nonsense

Dazza the chance of dying from your typical flu is about .01% ....coronavirus is around 6%


Um yeah nah. Not getting into an argument on something almost as emotive as the NRL ad :grinning: however Influenza is 0.1% (NOT 0.01) and latest research has COVID around 3 to 3.4% not 6% (the probable reason for the COVID being currently at 3% vs Flu is it being "novel" and the whole science around adaptive immunity ).

Influenza in Australia only last year killed 255 people of all ages and all levels of "wellness" currently COVID seems to be deadly to elderly and/or people with respiratory or cardiac insufficiencies and excluding the outlier of the the young baby in SA, children seem almost immune to CCOVID's (for some reason)

All my point was that in comparison and asking any genuinely knowledgeable medical/scientific person, COVID is not "worse" than influenza - As I mentioned above, the initial and still some concern was around it being "novel" therefore there some some uncertainty about how or whether the virus would mutate quickly once it has "escaped" from China into something more deadly like SARS or MERS.

So I'm quite interested in this, mainly because I'm self employed and can't afford to spend time off work, but I was looking through some of the data and came across this.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Essentially, it's a list of reported cases (active and closed) worldwide, which can also be broken down by country.

So the 3.4% figure seems to come from total deaths divided by total cases (both active and closed).

Now my question is, wouldn't you look at death rate in terms of closed cases? As in, who recovered and who died? Reason being that, of the active cases, we do not know how many people will recover or die?

If you do this calculation it shows 59,569 closed cases worldwide for 3,461 deaths (3,461/59,569 = 5.81% death rate).

Second question is....Do you fully trust the numbers the Chinese government are reporting? Some are saying that the true number could be up to 10x what is being reported. The same is being said of Iran. Given the majority of the statistics are made up of Chinese cases - reported by the Chinese government, this can easily skew the true statistics.

The reason I ask is that, if we dig a little deeper and view by country, there is large discrepancy between closed case death rates of, say China, South Korea and Italy, where:


* China's closed case death rate is: 56,971 closed cases (3,042 deaths + 53,929) = 5.34%

* Italy's closed case death rate is: 720 closed cases (197 deaths + 523 recovered) = 27.36%

* South Korea's closed case death rate is: 178 closed cases(43 deaths + 135 recovered) = 24.15%

USA and France have rates in the 40's, however I've excluded them as total cases are relatively low in comparison, so maybe there isn't a large enough sample size just yet. I've also excluded Iran as data is reported to be untrustworthy.

Everyone keeps comparing the death rate to the common flu, saying the flu kills more people each year and the flu death rate is 0.1% or whatever it is, however isn't that 0.1% calculated from closed cases? I may be wrong, but if so, shouldn't we calculate the death rate of this virus in the same way?

I'm not even sure if I'm looking at it in the right way, so I wanted to put it to people on this forum that know more than me on how to analyse the numbers when it comes to these things.

 

[jadtiger]

Anyone else getting heaps of ads for respirators on this thread...?

Getting spammed with them.

I have adblock it works a treat

 

[jadtiger]

There are some simple things that HK does, like plastic film over lift buttons, so that it’s easy to sanitise.

I didn't realise lift buttons were difficult to sanitise? Why can't you just wipe them with disinfectant?

Things start to go overboard in this regard, I mean lift buttons? What about every other public surface in existence, are folks going to walk around opening things with a foot press or elbow or wave at a scanner, just to avoid germs?

Sure as hell don't touch money if germs are a problem, also don't talk to anyone, or shake hands - no no, that's instant transferal. We can all then add to the immuno-weaknesses that already might exist because some mums excessively disinfect their house and kids don't get a proper dose of bugs in their childhood.

This mentality is why Australia isn't going to do well through this.

The "Yeah, nah, she'll be right". Will make you tougher kind of response. Bud, that's why there will be a vaccination eventually built to ensure our immune systems can cope.

I mean, where do you draw the line? Would SARS landing in Australia mean that we start doing some smart things? Ebola?

High-touch surfaces such as lift buttons, public toilet doors (keep them open) all helps. You could label it soft. Label it an overreaction. But I would prefer to go with facts rather than a uncorrelated assumption about cleanliness causing auto-immune issues. Sounds all a bit anti-vax!

I'm a big proponent of both vaccination and exposure to environment after the effect time of the first round of injections, having little to no doubt on the benefits and effectiveness of utilising both.

Edit; Naturally, preventative measures are necessary at other times and particularly when confronted with new viruses.

Half the hippies and naturelovers from your neck of the woods don't use the vaccinations anyway

How many now from Ryde Hospital have tested positive to coronavirus

It's a worry, as I went shortly after the hospital visit to a mate's place a fortnight ago and his daughter became ill a week later and she is still unwell. He told me that and doctors were thinking to test for the corona virus when I phoned him this evening and he was also starting to show symptoms. I then reminded him that I was at Ryde hospital, so now things are a bit more urgent, particularly so as it seems the other doctor there passed it on to her son without being infected herself. No symptoms in my household, nor my parents, who I visited immediately upon leaving the hospital as they live just down the road.

Hope all the tests are negative and you and your family and friends are fine.

 

[earl]

Been saying it since day one. Incredibly overhyped by media and others - if I didn’t know better I would think their are ulterior motives at play here. Statistical likelihood of dying from CV vs Influenza is ridiculously low. But hey let’s not let facts get in the way of hysteriCal hand wringing and nonsense

Dazza the chance of dying from your typical flu is about .01% ....coronavirus is around 6%


Um yeah nah. Not getting into an argument on something almost as emotive as the NRL ad :grinning: however Influenza is 0.1% (NOT 0.01) and latest research has COVID around 3 to 3.4% not 6% (the probable reason for the COVID being currently at 3% vs Flu is it being "novel" and the whole science around adaptive immunity ).

Influenza in Australia only last year killed 255 people of all ages and all levels of "wellness" currently COVID seems to be deadly to elderly and/or people with respiratory or cardiac insufficiencies and excluding the outlier of the the young baby in SA, children seem almost immune to CCOVID's (for some reason)

All my point was that in comparison and asking any genuinely knowledgeable medical/scientific person, COVID is not "worse" than influenza - As I mentioned above, the initial and still some concern was around it being "novel" therefore there some some uncertainty about how or whether the virus would mutate quickly once it has "escaped" from China into something more deadly like SARS or MERS.

So I'm quite interested in this, mainly because I'm self employed and can't afford to spend time off work, but I was looking through some of the data and came across this.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Essentially, it's a list of reported cases (active and closed) worldwide, which can also be broken down by country.

So the 3.4% figure seems to come from total deaths divided by total cases (both active and closed).

Now my question is, wouldn't you look at death rate in terms of closed cases? As in, who recovered and who died? Reason being that, of the active cases, we do not know how many people will recover or die?

If you do this calculation it shows 59,569 closed cases worldwide for 3,461 deaths (3,461/59,569 = 5.81% death rate).

Second question is....Do you fully trust the numbers the Chinese government are reporting? Some are saying that the true number could be up to 10x what is being reported. The same is being said of Iran. Given the majority of the statistics are made up of Chinese cases - reported by the Chinese government, this can easily skew the true statistics.

The reason I ask is that, if we dig a little deeper and view by country, there is large discrepancy between closed case death rates of, say China, South Korea and Italy, where:


* China's closed case death rate is: 56,971 closed cases (3,042 deaths + 53,929) = 5.34%

* Italy's closed case death rate is: 720 closed cases (197 deaths + 523 recovered) = 27.36%

* South Korea's closed case death rate is: 178 closed cases(43 deaths + 135 recovered) = 24.15%

USA and France have rates in the 40's, however I've excluded them as total cases are relatively low in comparison, so maybe there isn't a large enough sample size just yet. I've also excluded Iran as data is reported to be untrustworthy.

Everyone keeps comparing the death rate to the common flu, saying the flu kills more people each year and the flu death rate is 0.1% or whatever it is, however isn't that 0.1% calculated from closed cases? I may be wrong, but if so, shouldn't we calculate the death rate of this virus in the same way?

I'm not even sure if I'm looking at it in the right way, so I wanted to put it to people on this forum that know more than me on how to analyse the numbers when it comes to these things.

My take is that you are being way way way overly pessimistic. Yes it appears to be a stronger virus than the common flu but it doesn't appear to be that bad. The statistics will probably be erring on the side of stating it is significantly worse than what it is because a lot of people won't get tested to confirm if they have it or not. The mortality rate in South Korea is for instance less than 1%. The mortality rate in Washington state is something like 14%. I think the figure in Washington State is clearly wrong.

The virus appears to be significantly weaker than for instance the SARS virus.

 

[Tim Sheens]

There are some simple things that HK does, like plastic film over lift buttons, so that it’s easy to sanitise.

I didn't realise lift buttons were difficult to sanitise? Why can't you just wipe them with disinfectant?

Things start to go overboard in this regard, I mean lift buttons? What about every other public surface in existence, are folks going to walk around opening things with a foot press or elbow or wave at a scanner, just to avoid germs?

Sure as hell don't touch money if germs are a problem, also don't talk to anyone, or shake hands - no no, that's instant transferal. We can all then add to the immuno-weaknesses that already might exist because some mums excessively disinfect their house and kids don't get a proper dose of bugs in their childhood.

This mentality is why Australia isn't going to do well through this.

The "Yeah, nah, she'll be right". Will make you tougher kind of response. Bud, that's why there will be a vaccination eventually built to ensure our immune systems can cope.

I mean, where do you draw the line? Would SARS landing in Australia mean that we start doing some smart things? Ebola?

High-touch surfaces such as lift buttons, public toilet doors (keep them open) all helps. You could label it soft. Label it an overreaction. But I would prefer to go with facts rather than a uncorrelated assumption about cleanliness causing auto-immune issues. Sounds all a bit anti-vax!

I'm a big proponent of both vaccination and exposure to environment after the effect time of the first round of injections, having little to no doubt on the benefits and effectiveness of utilising both.

Edit; Naturally, preventative measures are necessary at other times and particularly when confronted with new viruses.

Half the hippies and naturelovers from your neck of the woods don't use the vaccinations anyway

How many now from Ryde Hospital have tested positive to coronavirus

It's a worry, as I went shortly after the hospital visit to a mate's place a fortnight ago and his daughter became ill a week later and she is still unwell. He told me that and doctors were thinking to test for the corona virus when I phoned him this evening and he was also starting to show symptoms. I then reminded him that I was at Ryde hospital, so now things are a bit more urgent, particularly so as it seems the other doctor there passed it on to her son without being infected herself. No symptoms in my household, nor my parents, who I visited immediately upon leaving the hospital as they live just down the road.

Hope all the tests are negative and you and your family and friends are fine.

Thanks, family are all fine and being day 15 now since potential exposure, we should not be affected. A little concerned for my friend though, as he has some underlying chest issues that can be exacerbated. Yet, even though out of flu season, it is still more likely to be that than the corona virus.

 

[weststigers]

Been saying it since day one. Incredibly overhyped by media and others - if I didn’t know better I would think their are ulterior motives at play here. Statistical likelihood of dying from CV vs Influenza is ridiculously low. But hey let’s not let facts get in the way of hysteriCal hand wringing and nonsense

Dazza the chance of dying from your typical flu is about .01% ....coronavirus is around 6%


Um yeah nah. Not getting into an argument on something almost as emotive as the NRL ad :grinning: however Influenza is 0.1% (NOT 0.01) and latest research has COVID around 3 to 3.4% not 6% (the probable reason for the COVID being currently at 3% vs Flu is it being "novel" and the whole science around adaptive immunity ).

Influenza in Australia only last year killed 255 people of all ages and all levels of "wellness" currently COVID seems to be deadly to elderly and/or people with respiratory or cardiac insufficiencies and excluding the outlier of the the young baby in SA, children seem almost immune to CCOVID's (for some reason)

All my point was that in comparison and asking any genuinely knowledgeable medical/scientific person, COVID is not "worse" than influenza - As I mentioned above, the initial and still some concern was around it being "novel" therefore there some some uncertainty about how or whether the virus would mutate quickly once it has "escaped" from China into something more deadly like SARS or MERS.

So I'm quite interested in this, mainly because I'm self employed and can't afford to spend time off work, but I was looking through some of the data and came across this.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Essentially, it's a list of reported cases (active and closed) worldwide, which can also be broken down by country.

So the 3.4% figure seems to come from total deaths divided by total cases (both active and closed).

Now my question is, wouldn't you look at death rate in terms of closed cases? As in, who recovered and who died? Reason being that, of the active cases, we do not know how many people will recover or die?

If you do this calculation it shows 59,569 closed cases worldwide for 3,461 deaths (3,461/59,569 = 5.81% death rate).

Second question is....Do you fully trust the numbers the Chinese government are reporting? Some are saying that the true number could be up to 10x what is being reported. The same is being said of Iran. Given the majority of the statistics are made up of Chinese cases - reported by the Chinese government, this can easily skew the true statistics.

The reason I ask is that, if we dig a little deeper and view by country, there is large discrepancy between closed case death rates of, say China, South Korea and Italy, where:


* China's closed case death rate is: 56,971 closed cases (3,042 deaths + 53,929) = 5.34%

* Italy's closed case death rate is: 720 closed cases (197 deaths + 523 recovered) = 27.36%

* South Korea's closed case death rate is: 178 closed cases(43 deaths + 135 recovered) = 24.15%

USA and France have rates in the 40's, however I've excluded them as total cases are relatively low in comparison, so maybe there isn't a large enough sample size just yet. I've also excluded Iran as data is reported to be untrustworthy.

Everyone keeps comparing the death rate to the common flu, saying the flu kills more people each year and the flu death rate is 0.1% or whatever it is, however isn't that 0.1% calculated from closed cases? I may be wrong, but if so, shouldn't we calculate the death rate of this virus in the same way?

I'm not even sure if I'm looking at it in the right way, so I wanted to put it to people on this forum that know more than me on how to analyse the numbers when it comes to these things.

My take is that you are being way way way overly pessimistic. Yes it appears to be a stronger virus than the common flu but it doesn't appear to be that bad. The statistics will probably be erring on the side of stating it is significantly worse than what it is because a lot of people won't get tested to confirm if they have it or not. The mortality rate in South Korea is for instance less than 1%. The mortality rate in Washington state is something like 14%. I think the figure in Washington State is clearly wrong.

The virus appears to be significantly weaker than for instance the SARS virus.

I guess my question is how do you calculate mortality rate?

Is including active cases helpful in determining mortality rate if we don't know whether these people will recover or die?

Korea is a good example of why I'm asking these questions because if you include total cases (closed cases + those people currently sick), we only get a mortality rate of 0.65%, however if we only look at closed cases, i.e. did the person either recover or die from the virus, then it jumps to a 24.15% mortality rate.

One statistic shows no cause for concern, yet the other is at the opposite end of the spectrum.

 

[old_man_tiger]

I think there are probably a lot more cases worldwide than we know. Just seeing how slow to react some major public institutions in Australia are, and yet overall we are probably doing ok. I've been to Dorothy Henderson Lodge a number of times for work, would be surprised if we don't see quite a few more cases.

The worldometer site is good but it clearly shows the issue with numbers. When Iran were denying an issue their death rate was very high, probably because mild cases were being ignored. Now their infection numbers are sky high and deaths barely moving. Suss.