If you believe their reports…which I do not!
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Well they have closed almost all their quarantine hospitals and the way epidemics work is they will fall off quickly once transmission is interrupted and they are identifying the majority of the cases. The extreme strategy they chose of isolating people seems to have been quite effective in bringing the numbers down. Is it just forty infectiona, who knows…
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I don’t know if this answers your question, but it’s all I’ve got; this is a portion of a translation posted by @slawa of a Facebook post by a Dr. Daniele Macchini:
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Well, I’m sure the numbers are going to be skewed by how many have been tested, but I don’t know what direction the skew is going to be. I think I’ve read that the best data on the fatality rate is going to come with broad population surveys using an antibody test, but that hasn’t happened yet, and may not happen for a while. I just looked for those numbers as the best (but definitely not perfect!) that came to mind for comparing being treated vs not being treated.
Here’s a bit from Singapore, from late February, on antibody tests:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/singapore-claims-first-use-antibody-test-track-coronavirus-infections
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Good stuff! If I understand the article correctly, this test–if it turns out to be good enough for mass production–can help get a better picture of the presence of the virus in the population, as well as improve the ability to trace the transmission of it.
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I’m a little surprised the term “flattening the epidemic curve” hasn’t come up in this thread - maybe it was in last month’s thread? (Oh, now that I’ve posted the link below, I see @hansioux posted the same graph above, but not the term.) Anyway, the key idea behind a lot of this is to slow down the rate of infections, so the medical system isn’t overloaded. If all 1,000 forumosa users go to the hospital tomorrow, that hospital is in trouble. But if we get sick gradually, 20 per week over the next year, then the hospital will manage. Anyway, I’ve seen variations on this graph all over the place in the past few days:
From Vox:
“We saw in Wuhan 1,000 health care providers get sick and we had at least 15 percent severely ill and in ICUs,” Peter Hotez, a vaccine expert with the Baylor College of Medicine, testified before a House committee Thursday. “And that is very dangerous, because not only do you subtract those people out of the health care workforce, but the demoralizing effect of colleagues taking care of colleagues … the whole thing can fall apart if that starts to happen.”
But this nightmare scenario isn’t inevitable.
“If we slow it so that infections happen over 10 or 12 months instead of over one month, that’s going to make a big difference as far as how many people seriously infected, how many people may end up hospitalized, and how many they end up dying,” Smith says. “We talk about it as ‘flattening the epidemic curve’ — so that it’s not a big, sudden peak in cases, but it’s a more moderate plateau over time.”
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And as there is so many travel restrictions between EU/US and China, they don’t have to do anything to prevent the infection returning. I’m thinking China is going to come out in a relatively better position once this is all over.
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I didn’t mention it, but I read something about it a while back, after clicking a link in this tweet (or I think I read it in the linked article–anyway, I read it somewhere 
):
https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1231431890999140353
The article in the link refers to flatter curves in several places; for example:
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It’s very interesting to read about how the different cities handled the epidemic back then. New York had half the death rate of Pittsburgh for example. Tonnres of evidence that early and comprehensive isolation and quarantining made a big impact.
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I appreciate that many people want to cling on for as long as possible. As I said, keeping people alive a bit longer is great. There is a cost attached, of course.
- Sorry, this has been posted before in another subforum (beginner’s error, first post ever here), but got no answer because I guess all the attention on the Coronavirus topic is focused on this thread -
How would it affect foreign workers (non-APRC) in Taiwan if a company decided to have them working remotely? I mean as related to work permits, which usually require that they work in a specific location.
Is this allowed? Are they supposed to require a special permit for this? Or are changes due to measures designed to avoid epidemic allowed by law?
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A piece from the Atlantic about how much trouble Iran is in. (The answer is, “A lot.”) The official number of cases is 6,566; the article goes through a bunch of different estimates for how many cases there actually are, with a low-end number of 586,000, a high of 6.4 million, an average of 2 million. All conjecture, of course, but educated conjecture.
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“Of course, being a notorious sociopath confers no immunity against COVID-19. But here is where the rotting apples come in.”
That’s gold
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I don’t know, but it’s a good question, and I’m hoping that @tando or @yyy or some similarly knowledgeable person/skilled researcher can answer your question.
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Taiwan sent this out today
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Not sure if this has already been posted. Very good continual case updates by John Hopkins CSSE
https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6
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Thanks! It would be good to get an answer, let’s see if anybody knows about this.
They actually believe drinking alcohol will protect them from Wuhan virus 
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Holy shit. The Dow just plunged 2,000 points. That’s so catastrophic that Wall Street paused all trading. This recession might be worse than 2008.
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