new deadly human-to-human-transmissible coronavirus emerges out of China
POSTED BY: 1KIKI
UPDATED: Tuesday, May 5, 2026 22:21
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Many people with 'symptoms' get tested. The vast majority in most cases do NOT have SARS-CoV-2.
If the testing program is adequate and it's sampling enough people to be representative, you'll have a maximum of about 5% positive. (It's a sampling statistical thing.) From that you can back-calculate and estimate of how many people in the population actually have the virus.
Many deaths occurred before sampling was widespread. But since then sampling has really kicked up. The old case fatality rate before all the testing was, iirc, 4% or thereabouts. Since then it's dropped so that total number is now around 2% +/-. As time goes on, the early numbers will get washed out, and the total should approach the real value.
The other way to do it is to keep track of CURRENT new cases/ new deaths, accounting for the timelag between infections and deaths, to properly assign the right numbers to each other. And to keep track of them for a while and then average them out, since the numbers will definitely be 'noisy'.
But that's for people whose full-time job is culling through databases and reports, and I'm actually too busy in my retirement to do that.
I'm OK with a ballpark figure at this point. And even if it's only 1%, it's STILL 10X more deadly than 'the' flu - which isn't deaths from one single flu virus, but a combination of deaths from all flu viruses and flu-like viral illnesses in an entire flu season. AS A SINGLE VIRUS, it outstrips an armada of influenza viruses for lethality.
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This is a graphic that shows what's hard to get off of 91-DIVOC, since that website doesn't allow for data overlay.
The sequence of cases => deaths is easy to see, as well as the timeline where testing finally got ahead of deaths (when 'daily new cases' sets a new direction before 'daily new deaths').
But indeed, new cases => new deaths.
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the current situation
Quote:Now that it's taking off - again - the rise will be at an ever faster rate.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/12/health/us-coronavirus-thursday/inde
x.html
There are currently at least 10.5 million cases of coronavirus in the US and more than 242,000 have died, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
Hospitalizations, ICU admissions and ventilator use are rising in every single state, the [Children's Hospital of Philadelphia Policy Lab] said; [and] "COVID-19 patients are occupying more than 25% of ICU beds" in every Midwestern state.
Some hospitals have reached full capacity and are sending patients away. https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/11/health/hospital-staff-shortages-covid-1
9/index.html
predictions with numbers and dates
Quote:Of course, as with all predictions, not only do these have error bars attached, but it's assuming nothing is done differently between now and then.
The previous ensemble forecast, published November 5, projected up to 266,000 coronavirus deaths by November 28.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicts there will be 260,000 to 282,000 coronavirus deaths by December 5, according to a forecast published Thursday.
Another widely-used Covid-19 model is predicting 438,941 deaths by March 1. That model is run by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington School of Medicine.
But if states relax restrictions and mask mandates, deaths could hit a staggering 587,000 by March 1, the IHME said.
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Quote:
Covid-19 was present in Italy as early as SEPTEMBER 2019, study of lung cancer screenings shows
https://www.rt.com/news/506796-coronavirus-italy-blood-september/
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
#WEARAMASK
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Quote:Wasn't it already agreed and understood that the first few months of testing would not reveal the entier specrum of cases, such as the asymptomatic and youth?
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Thinking ...
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
#WEARAMASK
And now with vastly larger quantity of testing, the results are "finding" the previously hidden sector, the cases which were previously not tested.
So this sudden "rise" or explosion of newly reported cases is exactly what everybody knew would be found when testing caught up, right?
Or did I miss something way back then?
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Hospitalizations and deaths are the more reliable metrics, as I stated WAY back at the beginning of the thread.
HOWEVER - they lag the virus spread considerably. If you need to know what's happening RIGHT NOW, you need to look at current infections numbers, immediately past infections numbers, and percent positivity, with the understanding that ^'cases' will always lead to ^deaths; and that positivity rates > 5% mean your testing is falling way behind actual cases.
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So, I believe I've concluded my quest to understand 'how SARS-CoV-2 spreads through a population'.
This post started with Sweden having to impose tough new rules due to an explosion of cases, and a beginning surge in deaths.
https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/coronavirus/1605539591-in-first-sweden-
bans-gatherings-of-more-than-8-people-as-covid-19-cases-rise ...
After suffering a per capita fatality rate easily 10X more than its Nordic neighbors http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/ Sweden has had to start imposing strong restrictions due to soaring cases - and deaths. (Where 'cases' rise, 'deaths' inevitably follow.).
As you might know, all along I've been wondering how exactly the virus moves through a population. And I think there are 2 things that needed to be separated out, which, due to the history of the virus, was difficult: 1) detectability, and 2) actual transmission/ cases.
Superspreader events
For a long time there was an idea that very few people transmitted the virus, and that it depended on 'superspreader' events for spread, which I think of as being a combination of circumstances and really effective transmitters - like the old Chinese guy on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, who managed to infect dozens, if not over a hundred, in his few days on board.
At the time, in the early stages of the pandemic, because testing capacity was so low, the medical system depended on major superspreader events to detect the presence of the virus. And that led to a bias in thinking.
Small scale transmission
But now the theory is that even small gatherings transmit the virus, and there's good historical data that it was spreading in N Italy and SoCal (and probably Wuhan) months before anyone realized it.
N Italy https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/covid-19-circulating-in-italy-as-
early-as-september-2019-scientists-claim/ar-BB1b3yvR
SoCal https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2020/09/11/ucla-study-covid-19-spreadi
ng-la-december/
And with increased testing capacity, we don't need tens of thousands of deaths to announce the presence of SARS-CoV-2, and can see it moving through communities and even families.
Anyway, given all that historic quiet spread, it looks like the virus actually spreads normally like the flu: between household members, between people just out in public, and so on, except it's more contagious.
But it ALSO has the capacity for superspreading, when conditions are appropriate, like SARS-CoV-1.
Historically, where it landed I think determined whether or not it was detected by the medical system at large.
In N Italy and SoCal it landed in the general population where it spread quietly, not creating a 'signal' event. (Eventually the 'signal' event in N Italy was triggered by a superspreading soccer match with Spain.) In Washington State and Sweden, it landed in nursing homes where it set off a notable conflagration that got a lot of attention. And in NYC, due to density and the high level of intermingling, after languishing for a while, it eventually set off a superspreader event, which triggered other superspreader events and so on. It went thermonuclear, "and it exploded" (to borrow a phrase from Galaxy Quest).
And WAY back when, before it was in the population very much, it was possible to contain it by limiting large gatherings - and by doing testing, contact tracing, and isolation.
But now that it's seeded itself throughout the country in even small communities, preventative measures have to be far more fine-grained, and take into account small scale transmission.
And fwiw, there's still a lot about the virus that's unknown. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions
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United States
On Nov. 16 14-day change
New cases 166,226 +82%
New deaths 796 +40%
NYTimes
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Interesting vid on today's NYTimes front page:
http://vp.nyt.com/video/2020/11/18/90130_1_graphic-containment-hp-vid_
wg_480p.mp4
The states with the fewest COVID-19 measures have the highest per capita COVID-19 cases.
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