SLU & NCAA Corona Virus Discussion

[Sheltiedave]

There aren’t many seasonal Chinese workers in Bergamo or Venetian during the winter months.  There is a fair number of travelers, vacationers, and family visiting back and forth, but that is a normal state of affairs. 

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/us-immigrant-population-metropolitan-area

Interestingly, the US map of Chinese populations concentrations dovetails with many of our Covid hotspots. This follows the dictum that those areas with the highest number of contacts with the initial vector for the virus will follow suit for infection.

Because it isn’t immigration, it is contact with and travel from vector rich areas, Italy can be a reasonable model for us, within modeling limits.

There are about 320,000 Chinese-Italians. There are about 5.1 million Chinese-Americans. Italy has about 3.5 million Chinese tourists annually, the US has a little over 3 million. There is some research.

 

[brianstl]

 

[BIG BILL FAN]

19 hours ago, Sheltiedave said:

There aren’t many seasonal Chinese workers in Bergamo or Venetian during the winter months.  There is a fair number of travelers, vacationers, and family visiting back and forth, but that is a normal state of affairs. 

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/us-immigrant-population-metropolitan-area

Interestingly, the US map of Chinese populations concentrations dovetails with many of our Covid hotspots. This follows the dictum that those areas with the highest number of contacts with the initial vector for the virus will follow suit for infection.

Because it isn’t immigration, it is contact with and travel from vector rich areas, Italy can be a reasonable model for us, within modeling limits.

There are about 320,000 Chinese-Italians. There are about 5.1 million Chinese-Americans. Italy has about 3.5 million Chinese tourists annually, the US has a little over 3 million. There is some research.

 

You certainly have a problem with the truth....do you realize that Italy is only about the size of California yet has 61,000, 000 people? It certainly doesn’t model the United State...

I’m starting to think you are nothing but a heavy footed troll....( oh, but I meant that in the nicest way!)

Wenzhou and Rome may be 9,300km (5,800 miles) apart but public anxiety about the coronavirus is the same in both places.

This is especially true for the thousands of businesspeople from the eastern Chinese coastal city, who have moved to the Italian capital in the last few decades and established one of the biggest Chinese communities in the country.

About 100,000 people from Wenzhou, and another 100,000 from nearby Qingtian county, live in Italy, according to official Chinese data, with Milan also hosting a sizable Chinese community.

[3star_recruit]

Italy's not the only European country with soaring death totals now.  Last week this time, Spain's daily totals looked like ours.  Pray that the numbers peak soon.

 

[Sheltiedave]

Italy is the size of California. Italy has 61 million people, California has 40 million people. The epicenter of the corona epidemic in Italy are Bergamo and Veneto, which are both supremely cosmopolitan and sophisticated areas. Most parts of these regions are on par with Ladue, Creve Coeur, Denver, and New York. They have great wealth, culture, and medical amenities on par with us. Their epidemic is not centered in the impoverished areas of Sicily, or in the hardscabble back country.

If corona virus were the truth, you would have a very hard time catching it.

Italy’s hospital system in urban areas is on par with the US. They have world class medical schools. They have their fair share of great doctors and nurses.

The fact that significant immigration has occurred from Wenzhou to northern Italy in the last couple decades is not material to how the virus has been recently transmitted. One demographic shift has happened over the course of decades.

Recent moves to northern Italy could have been a vector, or more likely it was a few of the more that 5 million tourists from China to Italy in the past year, and also visiting friends and relatives in northern Italy. It is silly to blame China for the pandemic, as with our supply chains there is no way to keep these profile epidemics from going pandemic.

Btw, the New York Times has a superlative article about the Italy  fiasco. Talks about the European  superspreader in detail, Chinese schoolchildren returning home from vacation in China, and the efforts to curb the spread. Great read with many tidbits of info for those willing to read the fake  news. 

[RiseAndGrind]

I’ll listen to Dr Fauci and BBF can listen to whomever he would like 

[Old guy]

Every one will listen, as they always do, to whoever they choose to listen to. No difference whatsoever in this regard. Truth is, oftentimes, very hard to distinguish from falsehood.

In the case of Covid-19 I do not really think intentional falsehood is likely to be the rule, exaggeration is the rule. The effect is panic. I believe that people going after different goals (like having the public follow social distance rules) try to emphasize the magnitude of the problem on purpose by choosing to quote the worst possible estimates available. Therefore I think a lot of what you hear comes down to opinion backed by some fact.

When all is said and done you can be absolutely sure that there will be a very large number of people diagnosed with the disease who recovered without problems, and a very small number of dead bodies resulting from the disease. You can count the dead bodies. The number of people actually contracting the virus and surviving with no obvious problems will always remain shrouded in estimates, claims that the number of tests were too low, and claims that the tests really produced very large numbers of false positive results. In other words, the number of dead bodies will be clear, the number of actual cases who recovered will not be clear.

Mitigation procedures must be put into operation and we need people to follow the rules, period. If this does not happen, the number of dead bodies on the final end will be much larger than with the mitigation procedures in place. This epidemic is not the black plague, or the 1918 flu pandemic, but its potential to cause large numbers of dead cannot be underestimated. How large a number of dead bodies? The lower the better. The answer is yet to be determined although I made my  prediction already.

 

[moytoy12]

1 hour ago, Old guy said:

Every one will listen, as they always do, to whoever they choose to listen to. No difference whatsoever in this regard. Truth is, oftentimes, very hard to distinguish from falsehood.

In the case of Covid-19 I do not really think intentional falsehood is the rule, exaggeration is the rule. I believe that people going after different goals (like having the public follow social distance rules) just try to emphasize the magnitude of the problem by choosing to quote the worst possible estimates available. When all is said and done you can be absolutely sure that there will be a very large number of people diagnosed with the disease who recovered without problems, and a very small number of dead bodies resulting from the disease. You can count the dead bodies. The number of people actually contracting the virus and surviving with no obvious problems will always remain shrouded in estimates, claims that the number of tests were too low, and claims that the tests really produced very large numbers of false positive results. In other words, the number of dead bodies will be clear, the number of actual cases who recovered will not be clear.

Mitigation procedures must be put into operation and we need people to follow the rules, period. If this does not happen, the number of dead bodies on the final end will be much larger than with the mitigation procedures in place. This epidemic is not the black plague, or the 1918 flu pandemic, but its potential to cause large numbers of dead cannot be underestimated. How large a number of dead bodies? The lower the better. The answer is yet to be determined although I made my  prediction already.

 

Times have changed from the plague and the 1918 flu epidemic. Population density is much higher. Personal interaction is much higher. Cross border travel is much higher. The assumptions from 100 or 700 years ago do not apply as accurately to the current time. 

[Old guy]

Hate to tell  you Moytoy, but what you say is absolutely true (overall population density, city  crowding, personal and cross border interactions) for some parts of the country and not true for others. The big cities of the East Coast were teeming with generally young male immigrants from Europe, possibly many of which  were trying to escape the draft by 1918 (in prior times the same had occurred with the potato famine in Ireland, and with the failed German Democratic rising of the 1830s and early 40s). Every time some terrible event happened somewhere, the US swelled with immigrants coming here to literally save their lives. A lot of these people concentrated in cities, in unspeakable clumps of crowded poverty, malnourishment, and low access to medical care. These groups, then as they are now with the homeless in California, were very vulnerable to diseases and epidemics like the 1918 flu. The plague (XIII Century) did not reach America as far as I know, but the European arrival in this area of the world unleashed enormous epidemics of smallpox among others that killed the native Americans by the thousands. This is acknowledged as one of the causes of the defeat of the Aztecs by the Spaniards and their allies.

Yes the country had a lot less people in 1918, and the population density was nil in vast areas of the land, but some areas in the cities were really crowded and underfed. You, of course have heard of Little Italy and Hell's Kitchen in NY I am sure. True, times have changed and the overall population density has changed, but they also have remained similar to some degree when you consider concentrated pockets of poverty and malnourishment that still exist in the US. These pockets of crowding and malnourshment are still very vulnerable to epidemics. This is not a political statement, it is a demographic/epidemiological statement.

[moytoy12]

14 minutes ago, Old guy said:

Hate to tell  you Moytoy, but what you say is absolutely true (overall population density, city  crowding, personal and cross border interactions) for some parts of the country and not true for others. The big cities of the East Coast were teeming with generally young male immigrants from Europe, possibly many of which  were trying to escape the draft by 1918 (in prior times the same had occurred with the potato famine in Ireland, and with the failed German Democratic rising of the 1830s and early 40s). Every time some terrible event happened somewhere, the US swelled with immigrants coming here to literally save their lives. A lot of these people concentrated in cities, in unspeakable clumps of crowded poverty, malnourishment, and low access to medical care. These groups, then as they are now with the homeless in California, were very vulnerable to diseases and epidemics like the 1918 flu. The plague (XIII Century) did not reach America as far as I know, but the European arrival in this area of the world unleashed enormous epidemics of smallpox among others that killed the native Americans by the thousands. This is acknowledged as one of the causes of the defeat of the Aztecs by the Spaniards and their allies.

Yes the country had a lot less people in 1918, and the population density was nil in vast areas of the land, but some areas in the cities were really crowded and underfed. You, of course have heard of Little Italy and Hell's Kitchen in NY I am sure. True, times have changed and the overall population density has changed, but they also have remained similar to some degree when you consider concentrated pockets of poverty and malnourishment that still exist in the US. These pockets of crowding and malnourshment are still very vulnerable to epidemics. This is not a political statement, it is a demographic/epidemiological statement.

Was there a lot of air travel in 1918? Car traveling to gas stations? Spring breaking? 

[3star_recruit]

The scary thing about the 1918 pandemic is that there were two phases to it, and the second phase was longer and more lethal:

https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/influenza-epidemic/

The plague emerged in two phases. In late spring of 1918, the first phase, known as the "three-day fever," appeared without warning. Few deaths were reported. Victims recovered after a few days. When the disease surfaced again that fall, it was far more severe. Scientists, doctors, and health officials could not identify this disease which was striking so fast and so viciously, eluding treatment and defying control. Some victims died within hours of their first symptoms.

[Old guy]

13 minutes ago, moytoy12 said:

Was there a lot of air travel in 1918? Car traveling to gas stations? Spring breaking? 

Of course not, the fastest modes of travel in 1918 were by steamers (including river boats) and railroads. However, there were  much larger numbers of dead bodies in 1918, and like 3star mentioned some people died within hours of their first symptoms. This epidemic has not been piling dead bodies, so far at least, and I do not think anyone has died within hours of the first symptoms, not yet anyways. These are two different diseases at two different times.

The bubonic plague of the XIII Century took years to transmit from central Asia where it started, to Europe and Africa. It has been estimated that it killed about 30% of the population of Europe at the time. Not sure about the 1918 flu epidemic, because the estimates have been ratcheted up steadily with the passage of time.  Nowadays with air travel and cruise lines transmission and spread is a lot faster, of course.

[moytoy12]

1 hour ago, Old guy said:

Of course not, the fastest modes of travel in 1918 were by steamers (including river boats) and railroads. However, there were  much larger numbers of dead bodies in 1918, and like 3star mentioned some people died within hours of their first symptoms. This epidemic has not been piling dead bodies, so far at least, and I do not think anyone has died within hours of the first symptoms, not yet anyways. These are two different diseases at two different times.

The bubonic plague of the XIII Century took years to transmit from central Asia where it started, to Europe and Africa. It has been estimated that it killed about 30% of the population of Europe at the time. Not sure about the 1918 flu epidemic, because the estimates have been ratcheted up steadily with the passage of time.  Nowadays with air travel and cruise lines transmission and spread is a lot faster, of course.

And to be fair, in rebuttal to my own questions, medicine, research, technology, etc are much better and more efficient now.  It’s just a weird time and I guess trying to make sense of it is difficult,  at least for me. 

[ARon]

3 hours ago, moytoy12 said:

Times have changed from the plague and the 1918 flu epidemic. Population density is much higher. Personal interaction is much higher. Cross border travel is much higher. The assumptions from 100 or 700 years ago do not apply as accurately to the current time. 

Population density of St. Louis City (proper) in 1918 would have been more than twice what it is now.

[Old guy]

1 hour ago, moytoy12 said:

And to be fair, in rebuttal to my own questions, medicine, research, technology, etc are much better and more efficient now.  It’s just a weird time and I guess trying to make sense of it is difficult,  at least for me. 

Moytoy, no need to be hard on yourself, most people do not understand or can make much sense of what is going on now. You are OK and honestly trying to understand, I wish more people tried as hard as you do.

[Sheltiedave]

Montoya, the Spanish Flu had an enormous lever in 1918. A significant amount of the population was moderately to severely malnourished, as foodstuffs were being shipped to Europe for the troops. 
Also, the troops were being discharged and being shipped back home to bases en masse, including to Jefferson Barracks here in St. Louis. Union Station was a huge depot for everyone going west, so we saw over 50% of  all the troops discharged to all points west.

I can’t find the population stats now, but back in 1900, Soulard Restoration Group has said over 100,000 people lived in Soulard. 3500 people live there now, albeit with a reduced housing stock due to 55.

There are all sorts of confounding wrinkles, but the lack of vaccines, penicillin, lesser hygiene, lesser nutrition, lesser medical care(as in none for the poor,) the need for fresh food daily, etc all were challenges greater then than today.

Until we can bring an effective vaccine to market, find drugs to combat it, and slow down the spread via vigorous social distancing, all we are is a biomathematical model with an exponential expansion factor of 2.3. the virus spread in China, Korea, Italy, Iran, Spain, and hot spots in the US all support this statement.

[Sheltiedave]

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/22/world/coronavirus-spread.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage
And another superior modeling article in the NYT

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/19/united-states-might-have-secret-weapon-against-coronavirus/

the Post article posits about spread of the virus re population density and use of public transit.

[Old guy]

19 minutes ago, Sheltiedave said:

Montoya, the Spanish Flu had an enormous lever in 1918. A significant amount of the population was moderately to severely malnourished, as foodstuffs were being shipped to Europe for the troops. 
Also, the troops were being discharged and being shipped back home to bases en masse, including to Jefferson Barracks here in St. Louis. Union Station was a huge depot for everyone going west, so we saw over 50% of  all the troops discharged to all points west.

I can’t find the population stats now, but back in 1900, Soulard Restoration Group has said over 100,000 people lived in Soulard. 3500 people live there now, albeit with a reduced housing stock due to 55.

There are all sorts of confounding wrinkles, but the lack of vaccines, penicillin, lesser hygiene, lesser nutrition, lesser medical care(as in none for the poor,) the need for fresh food daily, etc all were challenges greater then than today.

Until we can bring an effective vaccine to market, find drugs to combat it, and slow down the spread via vigorous social distancing, all we are is a biomathematical model with an exponential expansion factor of 2.3. the virus spread in China, Korea, Italy, Iran, Spain, and hot spots in the US all support this statement.

The one thing you are missing here is the number of deaths. As long as this remains relatively low, meaning people at large infected with the virus are not dying in a large scale, things will be OK vaccine or no vaccine. What is an acceptable death total from something like this, just compare it to the flu. We suffer flu epidemics every year that kill thousands of people without having a second thought about this. Things get serious when the death is much higher than the flu's. Things get unacceptable when the death rate reaches over 6 figures in the US. It becomes a true catastrophe it the number of deaths goes over 7 figures.

The rate of spread is important, and needs to be moderated, but only as a means to keep the number of deaths low in the acceptable range.

[cheeseman]

22 minutes ago, Sheltiedave said:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/22/world/coronavirus-spread.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage
And another superior modeling article in the NYT.

Excellent post - thanks for posting

[Sheltiedave]

You are right, Old Guy. You are one of the few who can SWAG about # of deaths with any degree of scientific validity, I don’t trespass there.

My concern is people refuse to accept and take sensible action based on the models we have available. If we don’t radically change our social behaviors over the next three months, we will rapidly blow through the safety net our hospitals and medical community provide.

[moytoy12]

Thanks to corona virus, I was able to watch Tiger King on Netflix.  Holy sh1t. That was a journey. Absolute must watch. 

[RiseAndGrind]

5 minutes ago, moytoy12 said:

Thanks to corona virus, I was able to watch Tiger King on Netflix.  Holy sh1t. That was a journey. Absolute must watch. 

Hell yes. This is on my list for tonight. Looks absolutely bat sh!t crazy. 

[moytoy12]

6 minutes ago, RiseAndGrind said:

Hell yes. This is on my list for tonight. Looks absolutely bat sh!t crazy. 

Each episode brought a new level of crazy that I didn’t think was possible. 

[Sheltiedave]

Spend half an hour reading this article on most facets of the 1918 Spanish flu. Some of these doctors that unlocked the mysteries are incredibly dedicated public health servants!

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/reconstruction-1918-virus.html#background

[RamJAMTIME]

Anyone have an FSN contact to suggest playing classic Billikens games? Even if it's in the middle of the night to DVR. The Conklin screen would temporarily raise everyone's spirits.