The Diamond Princess, a floating Chinese Virus palace, provides suggestive data

The Diamond Princess, a floating Chinese Virus palace, provides suggestive data

"...What’s frightening about the Chinese Virus is the overwhelming amount of inconclusive data. We’re inundated with media speculation and hyperventilation, Chinese disinformation, and data that changes daily thanks to the treatment and quarantine initiatives governments are trying around the world.

The fact that the disease has different rates of contagion and mortality in different parts of the world makes things more confusing. We can understand why it exploded in China, a place of censored information, pollution, smoking, and primitive socialized medicine. But why was it so virulent in Italy?

Surely Italy’s socialized medicine is better than China's. Or is the problem Italy’s recent Silk Road Project agreement with China, which resulted in more than three-hundred-thousand Chinese workers entering Italy, mostly in the north, along with constant traffic between the two countries. Although the mainstream media celebrated the deal as a slap at Trump, in hindsight, it may have had disastrous consequences for Italy.

Fortunately, there is one almost “pure” location for coronavirus data, and that is Princess Cruise’s Diamond Princess cruise ship. This was the ship moored along California’s coast while the government tried to determine the best way to deal with a floating virus bomb. Writing at Watts Up With That, Willis Eischenbach looked at the Princess Cruise’s numbers and discovered some encouraging information:

We had a perfect petri-dish coronavirus disease (COVID-19) experiment with the cruise ship “Diamond Princess”. That’s the cruise ship that ended up in quarantine for a number of weeks after a number of people tested positive for the coronavirus. I got to wondering what the outcome of the experiment was.


So I dug around and found an analysis of the situation, with the catchy title of Estimating the infection and case fatality ratio for COVID-19 using age-adjusted data from the outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship (PDF), so I could see what the outcomes were.

As you might imagine, before they knew it was a problem, the epidemic raged on the ship, with infected crew members cooking and cleaning for the guests, people all eating together, close living quarters, lots of social interaction, and a generally older population. Seems like a perfect situation for an overwhelming majority of the passengers to become infected.

And despite that, some 83% (82.7% – 83.9%) of the passengers never got the disease at all … why?

What an excellent question. Why did 83% of the ship's passengers walk away unscathed?

It’s an especially good question because the majority of passengers were in the 60-79 age group, weighted slightly more heavily towards the 70-79 cohort. In other words, by the time the ship docked, it should have been a floating morgue, but somehow it wasn’t.

When Eischenbach looked at those on the ship who did not get sick, he discovered something equally intriguing:

[T]here’s not a whole lot of difference between young and old passengers in terms of how many didn’t get coronavirus. For example, sixty to sixty-nine-year-old passengers stayed healthier than teenagers. And three-quarters of the oldest group, those over eighty, didn’t get the virus.

And here’s where it gets really interesting because it has to do with the denominator — that is, the number of people who get sick. Because the Diamond Princess was monitored, we know precisely how many people got sick and we know that they would never have been noticed were they not on the ship:

Next, slightly less than half the passengers (48.6% ± 2.0%) who got the disease showed NO symptoms. If this disease is so dangerous, how come half the people who got it showed no symptoms at all?

What’s fascinating is that the group most likely to show symptoms was people aged 20-49. Children under 9 were almost entirely without symptoms. And here's the big surprise: People aged 70-79 tied with young people 10-19 when it came to being ill without symptoms.

Thankfully, only seven people died, all of whom were over 70. From this data, Eischenbach had some provocative and comforting conclusions:

It is particularly valuable to know that about half the cases are asymptomatic. It lets us adjust a mortality rate calculated from observations, since half of the cases are symptom-free and likely unobserved. It also gives a better idea of how many cases there are in a given population.

To close out, I took a look at the current state of play of total coronavirus deaths in a few selected countries. Figure 4 shows that result.

[see chart]

Figure 4. Deaths from coronavirus in four countries. Note that the scale is logarithmic, so an exponential growth rate plots as a straight line. Blue scale on right shows the deaths as a percentage of the total population.

At this point at least, it doesn’t appear that we are following the Italian trajectory. However … it’s still early days.

By now, one has to ask if there are genetic vulnerabilities and defenses affecting whole nations. Or do Americans just wash their hands more often? All these answers remain to be seen, but perhaps coronavirus won't be that bad at the end of the day...."

 

"...do Americans just wash their hands more often?..." Early on my youngest daughter who is an ICU RN remarked, 'it seems this virus spreads like Hep A'. This is another good piece from American Thinker:

March 2, 2020

A masterful post explains why coronavirus in China and America may differ

By Andrea Widburg

"...In San Francisco in the 1970s and 1980s, it was routine to see men from China spit in the streets, blow their noses in their fingers and then wipe their hands on anything nearby, and generally violate American hygienic norms. Outside the tourist zones, Chinatown's restaurants and grocery stores also suggested resistance to American hygiene.


The Chinese who came to America to escape communism were amazing people and model immigrants. They worked hard and were so family-focused and education-oriented that, usually within one generation, they made the leap from Chinatown squalor to lovely suburbs. However, unlike the Japanese, the Chinese did not bring with them a culture of cleanliness.


When it comes to epidemic diseases, these cultural norms matter — and political systems may matter even more.


One of the things noted here last week is that the coronavirus, unlike ordinary respiratory viruses, may also be transmitted through fecal matter (emphasis added):


Speaking of filthy, one of the problems with coronavirus is that, even though it's an upper respiratory disease, it's also spread by fecal matter. It will be a disaster in places that don't have good fecal matter control: China (primitive toilets and no culture of hand-washing); India (which is working hard to bring toilets to people, but it's slow going); Africa (a world drowning in fecal matter); and San Francisco (also drowning in fecal matter).

That reference to hygiene in China gained new meaning from reading a viral post from Regie Hamilton, who was in China eighteen years ago to adopt his daughter. He vividly remembers the cultural comfort with fecal matter and other disease vectors:


When my wife and I got off the plane, 18 years ago, to adopt our first daughter, we were taken aback by the split pants. Split pants are (or at least were, back then) pants the children wear that are open in the crotch area. That allows them to urinate or defecate unobstructed, onto the street or wherever they may be. The theory is that eventually they will learn to "aim it at the toilet" or something to that effect.


Either way, I distinctly remember my brand new Nike slip-ons (probably made not far from where I was standing) sloshing into a mix of urine and who knows what else, and continuing to do so for the next three weeks.


[snip]


Over the next several days and weeks, we would experience the amazing culture of China, in several different cities. But some things stood out to this germophobic American. I watched a man hock up something from his chest and spit it on the floor, right next to us, in a restaurant. No oysters for me, thanks. I've suddenly lost my appetite.


We visited a Hutong (inner city — where the locals live) and saw raw chickens, skinned and bleeding, just laying on the floor, waiting to be thrown on a restaurant grill...for public consumption. No FDA or USDA or food inspectors or "codes" to comply with, here. But why? This is the last purely communist country on earth. You'd think there would be red tape everywhere. What was happening here?

Hamilton thinks there's a greater problem in China than filth, and that's socialism. After taking his new daughter to the hospital and seeing that it was as filthy inside as the streets were outside, he knew what was wrong. When there's only one entity selling health care and that entity is a police state, two things happen — people have no recourse when the system fails, and the system has no incentive to improve:


I was witnessing the kind of maximum, almost brutal efficiency a society must develop when the state is the master and the individual is merely a subject. Why would a Communist country not have an effective FDA? Because who are you going to complain to if you get tainted food? The government? They don't answer to you. The press? They are owned by the government. And again, they don't answer to you.


So what if you don't like the conditions in the hospital? Where else are you going to go? This hospital is the last (and only) stop. You can't opt for another place and then just pay out of your own pocket. The government has capped financial upward mobility. There is now "income equality." And that means nobody has the means to buy their way into a different (or better) situation. And even if you could, one doesn't exist. The state provides it all. You're stuck.


Hamilton's post is magnificent and a necessary antidote to the leftists insisting that socialized medicine is the answer to epidemic disease. You should read the whole thing...."
​

 

<waazat mean?>

You didn't assign it a number, not on your list?

 

...and <SMH>?
(really, you should probably add this to the list)

 

Did you catch that this basically halves the mortality rate?: