'Globally It's Worsening,' WHO Says of Coronavirus Pandemic (pbs.org) 274
An anonymous reader quotes a report from PBS NewsHour: The head of the World Health Organization warned that the coronavirus pandemic is worsening globally, even as the situation in Europe is improving. At a press briefing on Monday, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus noted that about 75% of cases reported to the U.N. health agency on Sunday came from 10 countries in the Americas and South Asia. He noted that more than 100,000 cases have been reported on nine of the past 10 days -- and that the 136,000 cases reported Sunday was the biggest number so far. Tedros said most countries in Africa are still seeing an increase in cases, including in new geographic areas even though most countries on the continent have fewer than 1,000 cases. "At the same time, we're encouraged that several countries around the world are seeing positive signs," Tedros said. "In these countries, the biggest threat now is complacency." There was some good news to come from the media briefing. "From the data we have, it still seems to be rare that an asymptomatic person actually transmits onward to a secondary individual," said Maria Van Kerkhove on Monday. "We have a number of reports from countries who are doing very detailed contact tracing. They're following asymptomatic cases, they're following contacts and they're not finding secondary transmission onward. It is very rare -- and much of that is not published in the literature," she said. "We are constantly looking at this data and we're trying to get more information from countries to truly answer this question. It still appears to be rare that an asymptomatic individual actually transmits onward."
Tedros also dedicated time to addressing protests across the globe fighting against police brutality and systemic racism. "WHO fully supports equality and the global movement against racism," Tedros said during the briefing. "We reject discrimination of all kinds. We encourage all those protesting around the world to do so safely."
Tedros also dedicated time to addressing protests across the globe fighting against police brutality and systemic racism. "WHO fully supports equality and the global movement against racism," Tedros said during the briefing. "We reject discrimination of all kinds. We encourage all those protesting around the world to do so safely."
Because of course it is. (Score:2)
Some questions (Score:3, Insightful)
1. If asymptomatic people aren't infectious, then how did this virus spread so far and wide in such a short amount of time?
2. Does this signal the end of lockdowns and return to normalcy?
3. If #2 is true, does this mean we don't really need to worry about a "second wave"?
Re:Some questions (Score:4, Insightful)
1. If asymptomatic people aren't infectious, then how did this virus spread so far and wide in such a short amount of time?
Because symptomatic people came in through major international airports and many went to hospitals operating normally. Actually sick people went to grocery stores and large events.
Yeah - we shut everything down. But we don't know which things actually needed shut down until we look back in hindsight.
2. Does this signal the end of lockdowns and return to normalcy?
I don't know about your area, but my state is moving in measured steps to exactly that.
3. If #2 is true, does this mean we don't really need to worry about a "second wave"?
I think this depends entirely on how seriously we take actually being sick. Schools, daycares and nursing homes are not open. People aren't going to large-scale events. If people start to think it's all overblown before things actually re-open, then they will go to work sick; they won't stay home and miss the game; they'll send their kids to school.
Goes back to #1. When people aren't careful, it spreads like wildfire. It might only take being a little bit careful to slow it to almost zero transmission.
End of lockdhwns (Score:3)
Remember, NZ is already done with COVID-19, and had a much shorter lockdown than the US. They just had a real lockdown without idiots constantly walking around.
Definitions (Score:3)
1. If asymptomatic people aren't infectious, then how did this virus spread so far and wide in such a short amount of time?
Their definition of "asymptomatic" is that the person never showed any symptoms. This is distinct from "pre-symptomatic" where the symptoms are not present yet but will eventually be so. The peak time to infect others seems to be sometime before the onset of symptoms, while pre-symptomatic (but not asymptomatic).
Because of the wording, I think this report is unfortunately going to cause a lot of people to think pre-symptomatic people aren't infectious.
Famine (Score:5, Interesting)
Swarms of locusts are devastating crops throughout Africa and Asia right now, a global famine in the coming months would wreck people's immune systems throughout the third world, making them much more prone to infection and serious consequences. Scary times.
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Thanks for this. Here's a link:
https://www.theguardian.com/gl... [theguardian.com]
We wait for vaccine or cut world population by 5.5% once everyone gets it (or stay in our houses until vaccine, those are the poisons, pick one).
Crop and livestock are being culled already in the US:
https://www.agriculture.com/ne... [agriculture.com]
Asymptomatic vs. Pre-symptomatic (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately WHO confused a lot of people with that news. They are distinguishing between those who never get symptoms (asymptomatic) and those who eventually do, pre-symptomatic. About 20% of the people who get the virus are asymptomatic. For those who do eventually develop symptoms, it looks like 40-60% of them spread the virus prior to symptoms.
Sadly, this will not make headlines. The damage is done.
Re:Asymptomatic vs. Pre-symptomatic (Score:5, Informative)
Very confusing communication from WHO. This article from Forbes actually tries to parse out the distinction, but even still it's hard to tell exactly which the WHO was referring to. Language matters.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/m... [forbes.com]
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Unfortunately WHO confused a lot of people with that news. They are distinguishing between those who never get symptoms (asymptomatic) and those who eventually do, pre-symptomatic. About 20% of the people who get the virus are asymptomatic. For those who do eventually develop symptoms, it looks like 40-60% of them spread the virus prior to symptoms.
Sadly, this will not make headlines. The damage is done.
Where do you get that only 20% are asymptomatic? All studies I've seen suggest half or more infections are asymptomatic. You can still have largely presymptomatic spread with largely asymptomatic infection.
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Asymptomatic OR pre-symptomatic, probably.
Asymptomatic means someone who NEVER gets symptoms. That's the distinction the WHO is making (a stupid distinction, IMHO. If someone spreads it without visible symptoms, it doesn't really matter if that is technically asymptomatic or pre-symtomatic)
In short, you guys are saying the same thing. Tons of transmissions, around half, occur from people with no symptoms. (But most of these are actuall
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Asymptomatic OR pre-symptomatic, probably.
Asymptomatic means someone who NEVER gets symptoms. That's the distinction the WHO is making (a stupid distinction, IMHO. If someone spreads it without visible symptoms, it doesn't really matter if that is technically asymptomatic or pre-symtomatic)
It's not a stupid distinction because it is much harder to do contact tracing among people who never exhibit symptoms.
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Where do you get that only 20% are asymptomatic? All studies I've seen suggest half or more infections are asymptomatic. You can still have largely presymptomatic spread with largely asymptomatic infection.
Correct. Many serology studies are showing asymptomatic rates approaching 80%. USC's study was very interesting.
Re:WHO vs Public Health Officials (Score:5, Insightful)
Where do you find a lot of people wearing masks and trying to "social distance" under difficult or impossible conditions: at a protest.
Where do you find people crowding together and partying with no masks in evidence: Vegas
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+1 for the parent on this point.
The videos of people crammed inside The D, largely without masks, in Vegas didn't look good.
I'm sure you'll see Covid cases as a result of the protests, but at least you're seeing attempts at wearing masks.
For those who dispute that it's worsening on a global scale, take a look at the global daily new case chart:
https://www.worldometers.info/... [worldometers.info]
Now maybe some of that increase is simply due to increased testing. Still, though, that's a lot of new cases.
June, so far, is not sh
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"trying to social distance"
Do, or do not. There is no try.
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Yes, you do that [reviewjournal.com]. Because a Forbes article with literally two pictures of staff beats local reporting, right?
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And I was repeatedly told that it was no worse than the flu.
It's nice that you've suddenly become concerned over African Americans' health. Are you proposing to provide them with Vitamin D supplements? Or are you just us
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It's never a good time to protest, there is always some excuse.
Pandemic, economy is recession so we can't afford it, reforms coming just be patient, it's X this week can you not disrupt it please... There's always some reason why people should wait to get their rights.
Re: WHO vs Public Health Officials (Score:2)
The crowds are mixed race. How you didn't notice is beyond me.
I don't know why you're complaining, I thought young people were supposed to be out and about ignoring the lockdown this whole entire time because the virus "only affects old people"? IDK, that's just what Fox News told me.
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Jesus, you really don't have any clue what it's like for the rest of the world, nor do you have a strong grasp on what a "police state" really is.
Best to sit down and let the adults handle this.
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Oh, it's OK then. As long as there are worse countries out there, we have our excuse to do whatever.
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I feel as though you don't have a strong grasp of what the constitution says. That or you don't really know WHAT Trump has been doing.
Truly, your ignorance appears to be staggering.
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So ignorant AND unstable.
Noted.
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"I feel as though you don't have a strong grasp of what the constitution says. That or you don't really know WHAT Trump has been doing."
Trump said he had the power to re-open states. Do you think the Constitution gives him that power?
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And if that list exists, it's bad too.
Police are the executive branch, not the execution branch. You get to have a trial and be innocent until proven guilty in court.
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You should be angry, but you're not. That's white privilege.
Ah, calling racist names. What's a discussion on the internet without someone throwing racial slurs. Just because this one passes the ivory tower list doesn't make it less racist to a non-trivial number of people.
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Dozens of people were murdered in the riots. Chicago had 60 blacks killed by other blacks in one night last week. Not a peep about that from the "Black Lives Matters" Marxists.
But don't let me dissuade you. Keep giving Trump more votes.
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Correction, 18 not 60. It was the deadliest night in 60 years.
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Dude....you have NO IDEA just what the term "racism" means. Please just stop because you are making yourself look like an idiot to people with an IQ above tepid water.
Re:Bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, but you always have to aware of the limitations of your data. For example North Korea has reported zero cases. Even given its isolation, is that plausible?
The number we're talking about is lab-confirmed COVID-19 cases, and many places don't have the infrastructure to test and report. Ecuador for example has reported a COVID-19 death rate that is quite small relative to the seasonal baseline, but people are literally dumping the bodies of their family members in the street because the mortuary services have been overwhelmed.
You see a lot of poor countries reporting low per capita testing rates AND low positive rates. This *could* mean they've been unaccountably successful at containing the spread of the virus. Or it could mean that they're just testing the people who run the country.
We can see mass graves in Brazil from Space (Score:2)
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To put that in perspective, Brazil has a baseline death rate for Brazil is 6.3/1000 people/year. Given Brazil's population of 209 million, that works out to 25,000 deaths/week.
The total number of COVID-19 deaths reported by Brazil to date is around 37,000, or about the number of people who'd normally die in about ten days. The anecdotal reports aren't consistent with a number that low, and are a reasonable basis to believe that the death count is probably an underreport.
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We know the number of dead from covid-19 in the U.S. is also underreported. First, we had coroners begging for test kits [cnn.com] to confirm their suspicions someone died from covid-19 based on the symptoms exhibited before the person died. Since we didn't have enough kits to test, and to this day still don't have enough, all those people were never counted.
Then you have those who died but no one knew they had symptoms such as s
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"We know the number of dead from covid-19 in the U.S. is also underreported. "
Of course "we know" this. Seriously, RE-EXAMINE YOUR LIVES AND MOTIVES.
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About the mass graves, to be fair, at least for the moment they are being dug as a precaution. You know, so they don't end up like those videos we saw in New York of the dead bodies being piled into storage closets and shit like that. Nothing wrong with being over-prepared...lets just hope that it doesn't end up being necessary to use them.
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> Sure, but you always have to aware of the limitations of your data. For example North Korea has reported zero cases. Even given its isolation, is that plausible?
Of course it's possible. As soon as somebody show symptoms of covid, you shot that person in the head.
Re:Bullshit. (Score:4, Insightful)
I never said the data was bad. It has limitations.
Re: Bullshit. (Score:2, Insightful)
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Guy brainwashed by right-wing news accuses others of "groupthink," stop the presses!
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Nope. That is just what you would like to accuse people of. It is not what happened.
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Bullshit. And you were one of the assholes who was predicting the end of the world.
I most decidedly did not. You need to have your head examined. What I did was point out a possible collapse of society if nothing is done to reduce the spread of this thing. That is a bit different. That is not a prediction either, it is pointing out a risk.
What morons like you do not understand is that business as usual (mostly) and collapse are very close together with something that can spread exponentially.
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Probably.
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Who are you accusing of "they hate the world as it is and wish to destroy us"? Asking for clarification first, because that is a pretty monstrous accusation.
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Please provide evidence for my case. (I have no idea what the other 3 posted...) All slashdot postings are archived. Unless you are just doing hate-mongering here yourself?
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You have some nice pathology there. Seems to be something from the paranoid spectrum. Because your accusations are entirely baseless. Case in point: If I wanted maximum suffering and see "the US burn", I would just have sat back and said nothing, because that would be the maximum I could contribute to see that happen. Did I do that? No. Instead I tried (in vein, obviously) to convince thick-headed nil-whits like you to take this thing seriously. That does not strike me at all to be consistent with your accu
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Traditionally, the accuser has to provide evidence first. There are pretty good reasons for that. Slashdot has all the old posts, so, if the accusation is true, that should be easy.
Re:Bullshit. (Score:4, Insightful)
No, the data has always had limitations. For example, when positive test counts were rising exponentially in the US, many people who did not want to believe that suggested this was because the volume of testing was rising exponentially.
That was an entirely possible. Given just that number, it could well be that the volume of infections were constant or even dropping and we were just measuring the increase in testing volume. It was equally possible that the volume of cases was rising as well.
There were two *equally possible* interpretations of the data. Does that mean you get to pick the one you like best? No. You have to look at *more data together*. If you look at positives found and the positive test rate together, that conclusively shows that infections were in fact increasing about as rapidly as the case numbers, with a few provisos.
You have to look at numbers *critically*. One form of headline that always irritates me is "politician does X after spike in COVID-19 cases". If you look at the reporting of COVID-19 cases they follow a sawtooth pattern as the result of states reporting cases in batches. Everything happens after a "spike" in reported cases. You could just as truthfully say "politician does X after *drop* in COVID-19 cases".
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My approach to the data has never changed. I've always looked at it critically. Calling me a shithead for that reflects more upon you than it does on me.
It's easy to make a clearly correct statement about data; what's hard is making justifiable inferences from data to reality.
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"I noticed you guys were hyping this from the very start. SALIVATING at the prospect of millions of deaths. Pretty fucking sick"
That sounds like a lie. Do you have a citation?
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"That statement is CLEARLY CORRECT"
That's just stupid. COVID-19 deaths are occurring all over the world, in different countries with different levels of health care, different types of regulations. Are you seriously arguing that as the disease moves across the developed world the death rate report is going to be equally reliable? Hell, Brazil -- which probably has the worst outbreak right now -- stop releasing its COVID-19 statistics.
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Literally look at my first comment. I stated a easily verifiable fact. "A simple graph shows the daily death rate rolling 7 day average peaked April 7th at 7,000. It is now 4,500."
IMMEDIATELY SHITHEAD #1 jumped in with "well bad data" comment, and then another guy jumped in with "BRAZIL HAS MASS GRAVES IN SPACE!1!1!!1!" and then some anti-Trump guys jumped in with some meaningless comment. You guys seriously need to re-examine your lives.
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I see. So it suddenly "isn't reliable" when the graph is CLEARLY GOING DOWN but you never happened to mention that fact WHEN THE GRAPH WAS CLEARLY GOING UP? Seriously you need to get laid or see a psychologist or something.
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LOL. What fucking hole did you crawl out of? Of course the data had limitations on the way up. Every fucking non-Trumpian person under the sun was ranting about how we weren't doing enough testing, and if such a large percentage of the people actually being tested were coming back positive, that meant the numbers were certainly much higher than what we were seeing.
And please point me to the (non-joking) posts that said everyone was going to die in 20 days. I mean, I'm sure you can find me a few idiots that
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You just did.
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Shut the fuck up Pope. You are one of the shitheads who need to shut the fuck up. And take "gweihr" and that moron rsilvergun with you. You can all share a fucking basement and complain to each other about how bad life is. Stupid fucking spolied Westerners need a reality check.
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I notice how you ignore all the things he said that you have no plausible response to.
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Yep - that's what all researchers do. Throw out every bit of data and start over whenever they recognize limitations in data gathering. They certainly don't try to do statistical analysis to try to figure out the underlying structure to the data and try to extrapolate where the real numbers should be. We need only perfect data and we won't take any action until all of it is gathered.
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but it is apparent to anyone with a brain cell that the 7 day rolling average death rate is declining locally AND globally.
Now try again with infections.
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This is absolutely true; if you increase your test volume you will -- all things being equal -- increase your case count.
However if the increase in cases is purely a function of testing volume, you'd see your positive test rate drop accordingly. In fact, it *has* dropped, but only slightly. This tells us that *some* of the case increase is due to more testing, but most of it is due to other factors.
Alone the positive test count and positive test rate are not robust measures of what is going on. You have t
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Nope. You don't get to play the "bad data" card. You accepted the data when it was going up, now you have to accept it when it is going down.
Who was saying the data was perfect when the infections were going up? No one. Countries were reacting strongly in most part because we didn't trust much of the data when things started to get bad, and they weren't sure if things were worse or better than the official data. And as the epidemiologists have been saying, any reaction which doesn't appear to be an overreaction at the time will not be sufficient, since currently available data will always be a lagging indicator in these situations.
So now we are
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Oh right. NOW the data is "bad" and "not reliable" but it was 100% reliable on the way up. You guys are so transparent. You guys just need to stay in your basements permanently. Testing is meaningless as a metric. If you don't test you have zero cases, if you do test you find a ton. The only semi-meaningful metric is "confirmed deaths". And that is clearly declining.
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Oh right. NOW the data is "bad" and "not reliable" but it was 100% reliable on the way up. You guys are so transparent. You guys just need to stay in your basements permanently. Testing is meaningless as a metric. If you don't test you have zero cases, if you do test you find a ton. The only semi-meaningful metric is "confirmed deaths". And that is clearly declining.
But you can't have confirmed death without testing.If the less developed countries do not test enough, they have less confirmed death, but that does not mean much. Moreover the Southern Hemisphere is approaching winter, things can only get worse over there.
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I'm not even sure that "confirmed deaths" are meaningful either, due to testing rates; IE: has everyone who has died in the past 6 months been tested, and is the test a known good test? (hint: NO)
And that huge percentages of people have survived COVID-19. And many of the deaths happened due to co-morbidities; IE: those patients would have died due to a pneumonia or any of many ailments. So yeah, we've never had good data on this disease, infection/spread rates, etc. And, there have been stories that som
Re:Bullshit. (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, if you look at the lagging indicator (COVID Death Toll), the rate is constant and has been constant for the past 20 days.
Data source: https://observablehq.com/@neel... [observablehq.com]
Until we hit the inflection point (negative slope) on the lagging indicator, it ain't over. And this doesn't include the people who are seriously messed up from COVID with organ damage etc..
I agree that with increased testing you will find more COVID cases, but the lagging indicator (death rate) isn't fairly constant.
I f*ing hate COVID as much as the next person and if it were in the room, I would punch it in the face, however I think it is going to have a long, long tail.
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Dude, I go out into the world all the time, and I even wear a face mask, not to protect me, but to protect grandma, grandpa, and the vulnerable in society.
I hear people say things all the time like, "The virus is fake-news, it's only in liberal areas and big cities why should I have to inconvenience myself wear a mask or social distance?" In fact I heard this exact conversation at Walmart this morning.
The reality, COVID is killing people, it might not be you or me, but it is spreading and killing, and yes
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A simple graph shows the daily death rate rolling 7 day average peaked April 7th at 7,000. It is now 4,500. [...] Time to move on, people.
Why does a slowing rolling death rate mean we should move on? It means global action to slow the spread of the disease has been working, but very little has fundamentally changed from March from a therapy standpoint. The best course for countries who now have proper levels of testing and contact tracing is to open up their society on a limited basis while constantly monitoring the pandemic. For countries like the US where we don't have those things yet, we probably need to accept our federal governments hav
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Errrrr....what? What does that even mean? I never said "Europe" or "US" anywhere.
The story is about more cases appearing outside of Europe - a relative measure. Your objection is that you get more cases when you do more testing - an absolute (and accurate) statement. To make your absolute statement connect with the claim about relative cases you would have to infer that there was a change in the relative amount of testing in the regions. Otherwise there is no connection.
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See the "Daily Deaths" graph ON THE VERY FUCKING WEBPAGE YOU JUST POINTED US TO? Is it going UP or DOWN? It clearly peaked on April 15th. Stay in your basement for the rest of your life if you want. Jesus Christ, how many scared little boys are there on here?
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Infections are still going up. Deaths are behind, but they will catch up. And you seem to be forgetting that quite a few of the ones not dead have long term health problems some of which may be permanent.
Also your panicked insistence that this thing is over is very unbecoming.
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Of course deaths are going down. Nearly a third of the cases and a quarter of the deaths so far have been in the US. The US appears to be on it's way out of the current danger (at least if we continue to be cautious about how we open back up). But now the cases are starting to pick up in other countries...countries that don't quite have our quality of hospital care. I'd be very careful about reading too much into the declining death rate at this point. I hope you are right, but I certainly wouldn't be willi
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This is literally a CCP propaganda talking point right now. [youtube.com] Guess who put Tedros in his position? Guess who controls the WHO narrative?
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Re:Oh, Beau (Score:5, Interesting)
. It's just part of our collective vira now, it is never 'going away'.
That doesn't explain why you're not treating it at least as seriously as flu. If anything, public responsibility regarding going out with other deadly common viruses should improve with this new knowledge and experience. There is no reason for our flu epidemics to get out of control like they have. We shouldn't just worry about SARS, MERS, and SARS-CoV2. If you think you have influenza and you go to the store, wear a mask. Don't go to work. Not just this year. We know better now. And legal liability for someone who knowingly spreads deadly diseases.
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No one is saying it will "going away" (except maybe Trump in the beginning) in the sense we can totally forget about it. We still have the Avian & Swine Flues. We still have MERS & SARS. Why would it be different for another member of the coronovirus family? We consider smallpox, measles, rinderpest, rubella "eradicated" but that doesn't mean they have completely gone extinct. They are just small enough that we don't worry about them and we have procedures in place if flare ups happen in some p
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Several countries have already halted it through strong social distancing, quarantine, and contact tracing. You are empirically wrong.
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That's because the herd immunity threshold is not a fixed parameter as everyone assumes. It is a function of the base reproduction rate, which in turn is a function of people's behavior.
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