more coronavirus fretting

[redbird]

So far, cattitude, adrian_turtle and I are fine. This is more general.



We have no idea how bad this actually is. The numbers the US is reporting to the World Health Organization are worthless (the March 16 report said zero new cases in the US). The numbers the CDC is publishing elsewhere and what we're getting from state governments are, I think, a floor--there are at least that many cases.

The thing is, given that the numbers the US is sending to WHO are useless, can we assume that they're getting useful data from elsewhere? (I'm assuming Russia is under-reporting, and the Syrian government almost certainly doesn't have good data--but is Boris Johnson's government going to do better here than Trump's? Ditto for anywhere that is still hoping to reassure either its own citizens or hypothetical tourists.

Being the age I am, I'm thinking about the early years of the AIDS epidemic, the willful denial from the White House, and so many people not quite believing what had changed and what they would need to change. We're a social species--closing the bathhouses was hard enough, can we cope with long periods of no restaurants, no theater, no dance parties...?

badger2305 said on Twitter a few days ago something like "I lost friends to AIDS. I'm going to lose friends to this." I fear he's right.

Comments

[ellarien]

I agree that the uncertainty is worrying -- I'm enough of a nerd that I'd feel a bit happier, or at least less uncertain, if we had the real numbers.

The UK government gave up on trying to test everyone last Thursday (and before that they were mostly testing (officially) travellers from China and Italy and contacts of confirmed cases -- there was a bit of a kerfuffle on Twitter last week when a government minister came down with it without meeting either criterion and people were demanding to know how she got tested. Now they're officially only testing people who end up in hospital, and those with mild symptoms are advised to self-isolate and not bother the medical authorities unless it gets worse or doesn't go away in a week. (And then you're supposed to do it online if possible because the phone service is overwhelmed.) But at least they're being kind of upfront about it, and I've heard a couple of semi-official guesstimates of the real infection rate -- about 10K a week ago and 50K now. (If that was right, and evenly distributed, it would mean about 1000 people in my city, which has 15 confirmed cases. But by all accounts things are worse in London than up north.)

I think they tacitly admitted that containment had failed a couple of days before the official announcement, when they decided to let the Grand Princess passengers self-quarantine at home, whereas previous evacuees had been solemnly put up in official facilities for the 14 days.

[green_knight]

The UK government has a tracker which seems to update once a day during the week and not on weekends; this morning's (9am) update is 1950 cases and 60 deaths; all the papers are currently (10pm) reporting 71 cases, which matches these worldometer stats - I don't know what the source of their data is. (Number of cases has been constant since the central update this morning. Yeah... right.)

Our government is doing badly, but at least they seem to cave if enough of us shout at them.

[minoanmiss]

Quite a few people have drawn parallels between this and AIDS, yeah.