The coronavirus spread updated in real time

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

Speaking of making things go faster, you can do your part when the site is back up and running:

https://fold.it/portal/node/2008926

It’s down thanks to the Reddit hug of death:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/co ... avirus_by/

From the top comment this is how it works:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=you ... dBcpdH_ptA

I don’t know if it’s legit, but it’s worth reading this ELI5 comment:

ELI5 version. Exact shape is very important to proteins but hard to work out as 1 protein chain has many possiblities. You can think of it like origami. You're handed a flat piece of paper with a pattern on it and you're told to make a dragon with no instruction. The pattern can give you some clues but its not much help. What you do have is some basic rules to follow but they can be applied in any which way such as pyramid or valley fold and no cutting. We would know when you've got it right when the mouth of the dragon can perfectly hold onto a nicknack. The same piece of paper though could also easily make a box that, although useful, isn't what were after. The reason they don't use computers for this is because they are still really bad with shape. Human brains are still the best tool we have for thinking our way around images and objects. There's another project like this one where people are asked to classify new galaxies. Not complex for a human but computers just can't seem to manage it accurately enough.

- Doc

[_Jersey Girl]

So I looked at our handy dandy OP map before logging off last night. The US was at 105 case and now at 107. One case is about an hour-ish drive of where I was planning to visit in Florida.

Yeah. Not going. I really had my hopes up...it wasn't just a vacation. It was a visit to see someone important to me.

[_moksha]

I worry for my elderly parents.

I'm worried about my kid's elderly parents.

[_Res Ipsa]

So I looked at our handy dandy OP map before logging off last night. The US was at 105 case and now at 107. One case is about an hour-ish drive of where I was planning to visit in Florida.

Yeah. Not going. I really had my hopes up...it wasn't just a vacation. It was a visit to see someone important to me.

I just watched today’s WHO teleconference. They are clearly assimilating a ton of data from different countries and using the evidence to draw conclusions. If you want to know the “state of the virus,” I think that’s the best source.

The countries that are doing widespread testing of the population today are finding something interesting and important. COVID-19 doesn’t seem to be spreading through community transmission the way seasonal flu does. In other words, South Korea is finding all those cases through aggressive and thorough contact tracing, with relatively few cases found in their drive through testing clinics.

That indicates that the disease can be contained and even interrupted by aggressive contact tracing and strict isolation of close contacts. We don’t even try to contain seasonal flu because it spreads very efficiently for a couple of days before it becomes symptomatic. As more data comes in, it looks like SARS-CoV-2 spreads almost entirely by coughs and sneezes, meaning when the infected person is symptomatic.

That means what we should be doing right now is throwing bodies at contact tracing for identified patients and effectively isolating those contracts. I hope that’s what we’re doing, but the two local county information meetings I’ve seen implied that moving away from containment is inevitable. WHO is seeing evidence of containment moving countries from community spread, to known and traced clusters, to isolated cases, to interrupted transmission. Usually, it goes only the other way, with containment abandoned when community spread becomes widespread.

We now have two CDC teams on the ground, and I hope they’re supporting contact tracing. It would be nice to see the CDC exercise some leadership and publicly advocate and assist these efforts instead of patting you know who on the back.

[_Jersey Girl]

The map in the OP. Just noticed it includes Canada. So you have to poke around by clicking the locations and see what you see.

[_Jersey Girl]

RI--contact tracing. Example, persons on the same flight/cruise, persons with connections to a specific public school? Have I got that right?

[_MeDotOrg]

I would love to see the database design for tracking infectious disease spread for NIH, CDC and WHO. How do they share information? Does each agency have software that can extract information from other databases? Tracking, correlating and analyzing all of the data sounds like a fascinating challenge.

[_Res Ipsa]

RI--contact tracing. Example, persons on the same flight/cruise, persons with connections to a specific public school? Have I got that right?

They look at what are defined as “close contacts,” and that’s a defined term. But it boils down to people that the identified case was likely to have coughed on, sneezed on, or been in prolonged proximity of. So, for example, one of our identified new deaths actually occurred last week. She was identified by tracing contracts of confirmed cases in the Lifecare Cluster backward in time. She was exposed at Life Care, but died at home.

Now they will be tracing everyone who had close contact with her between her onset of symptoms and death. All of those people will be asked to self quarantine at home for 14 days, with monitoring by the local health department. If any of them show symptoms, they will be tested. If any of them test positive, same process.

If the WHO is right, they are saying that this is the process used by China to beat back the spread of the disease. The severity of the isolation procedures was scaled to the amount of spread. Draconian in Wuhan, where the disease overran the health care system. Much less so in the outlying provinces, where there were far fewer cases when the government started to take action.

What China also did was aggressively moved people and resources to the most affected areas to do the necessary tracing. The equivalent would be Idaho sending masks, gowns, gloves, and people to Kirkland, Washington to get out ahead of the spread. They essentially flooded the hottest zones with people and resources to slow the spread and beat the epidemic back.

China sent the first team to Iran to use what it has learned to help Iran get on top of what looks like an out of control mess. There is clearly a ton of information sharing going on among all the scientists in the affected countries that the general public doesn’t see.

[_Res Ipsa]

I would love to see the database design for tracking infectious disease spread for NIH, CDC and WHO. How do they share information? Does each agency have software that can extract information from other databases? Tracking, correlating and analyzing all of the data sounds like a fascinating challenge.

One of the southeast countries has an amazing and beautiful chart for that. I’ll see if I can dig up and post an image.

ETA: This link looks like what I saw: http://alexkoh.net/covid19/

[_MeDotOrg]

I would love to see the database design for tracking infectious disease spread for NIH, CDC and WHO. How do they share information? Does each agency have software that can extract information from other databases? Tracking, correlating and analyzing all of the data sounds like a fascinating challenge.

One of the southeast countries has an amazing and beautiful chart for that. I’ll see if I can dig up and post an image.

ETA: This link looks like what I saw: http://alexkoh.net/covid19/

Wow. I'm going to go get lost in there for a while...