Following is some additional terms and contextual information that I hope will be useful in understanding the situation.
I’ve compiled some useful (hopefully useful) information on COVID19/Coronavirus
- No. It is not due to drinking Corona or eating Chinese food, or going about your daily routine.
- No. COVID19 is not the same as the regular flu. It is a brand new viral infection.
- Yes. You should be using the same best-known practices of cleanliness for preventing the flu because that is the closest in terms of the way the virus is spreading. This is an extrapolation from current but incomplete information and statistics. (There will be a separate post on best practices).
- I am not going to dispense advice on how to protect oneself, because I don’t know what would help, given medical researchers do not know enough. The following links are fantastic explanations on known information on coronavirus and mythbusters
Following is some additional terms and contextual information that I hope will be useful in understanding the situation.
- Susceptibility
- This is different for each age group. In the beginning, it was noted that children and elderly were not as affected as middle-aged (traditionally non-susceptible) groups. However, this has changed given more information and now shows a clearly higher death rate for the elderly and those with compromised immune systems.
- What is real-time reporting?
- Many countries, states, cities, rural areas need to wait for some time before getting confirmation on the results before reporting. Example, currently NY city needs to wait for results from Atlanta, GA. So ‘real-time’ may be defined differently than one might expect.
- Current evaluation techniques for detecting COVID19 is inadequate.
- The CDC screwed up the testing kits that were sent to all states. Some states had kits that had bad reagents needed for a negative control for a PCR (polymerase chain reaction) assay needed to determine whether a sample (person’s fluid) reacts positively.
- Key point to know here: The kits were not bad because of wrong or inadequate information, the CDC screwed up. In layperson’s terms: the reagents reacted when it shouldn’t have. This issue was completely avoidable, and has nothing to do with ‘how new’ the virus is.
- A direct quote from the report: “The key problem with the kits is what’s known as a negative control, says Kelly Wroblewski, director of infectious diseases at the Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL). CDC’s test uses the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assay to find tiny amounts of the SARS-CoV-2 genome in, say, a nose swab. To make sure a test is working properly, kits also include DNA unrelated to SARS-CoV-2. The assay should not react to this negative control, but the CDC reagents did at many, but not all, state labs. The labs where the negative control failed were not allowed to use the test; they have to continue to send their samples to Atlanta.”
- New York has now decided to figure out its own testing kits and who can blame them?
- The CDC has finally allowed public health labs across the country to test for the virus using two of the reagents instead of the original three from the previous kits. They (the state labs) can then send results, samples, to the CDC for a secondary confirmation.
- Singapore’s efforts have been hailed as the gold standard for prevention of COVID19. This is partly due to the size of the country, but more than that, success could be attributed to their cleanliness practices.
- Inadequate information on transmission:
- There are some new cases propped up in California and a third case in Oregon through communal transfer. As of now, this is still unconfirmed.
- Inadequate testing:
- Most countries have tested significantly more people than the US has done. It is not surprising that ‘less’ people have been found to be positive.
- Explanation on R0, what it is and R0 for various diseases
- What is R0? R naught = statistical reproductive rate (if unchecked) This is a key statistic that explains the rate of disease spreading in a population.
- https://www.popsci.com/story/health/how-diseases-spread/
- R0 for COVID19 = 2.28
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32097725
- Comparison R0 for Flu = 1.3 https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-myths.html
- What is expected death rate?
- This is not the same as R0. Death rate for COVID19 = 2.3 % (on av.)
- http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/02/study-72000-covid-19-patients-finds-23-death-rate
- For flu = 0.2 % and COVID19 = 2.3 %
- If you do a little math, 0.2 * 10 = 2 %.
- Thus COVID19 has a ten times higher death rate than the flu.
- For comparison: SARS expected death rate/mortality rate = 10 %; MERS = 30 to 40 %
Updated on March 8th 2020:
- For flu = 0.2 % and COVID19 = 3.4 %
- If you do a little math, 0.2 * 17 = 3.4 %.
- Meaning the death rate is 17 % higher than the flu.
- https://www.sciencealert.com/covid-19-s-death-rate-is-higher-than-thought-but-it-should-drop
- Vaccines (I’ll write a separate post on
vaccines)
- Typically, it takes a long time to develop the vaccines; (typically in the US, it takes about 2 years for FDA approval). However, the mutual cooperation shown by various countries and their research labs is unprecedented. This means there is a chance of a vaccine proposed and tested outside the United States at a rate that would not be possible otherwise. That gives me hope that it will not take two years to develop but hopefully less than a year.