COVID-19 resurges in reopened countries; Wuhan sees first cluster in a month

China ordered all Wuhan residents get tested for COVID-19—that’s ~11 million people.

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[SixDegrees]

China ordered all Wuhan residents get tested for COVID-19—that’s ~11 million people.

So at US testing rates that would take a couple of years.

 

[Deputy Cartman]

"I think we've done a great job, a fantastic job, just the best, against this Chinaman virus. I've always said we would only have 200,000 deaths and I was right again. Y'know, we would have had at least 5 million deaths if Sleepy Joe were president. That's why we had to re-open! You can get tested if you want it so quit hiding! Get out there and buy stuff!" - Trump on Fox News in June.

 

[psunami]

Cotton McKnight: Meanwhile, the US plunges ahead with removing restrictions without testing or tracing in place.

Pepper Brooks: It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for 'em.

 

[Sarty]

I am not a super-internet highly-introverted person. I crave people, I crave big crowds, in a way I cannot effectively express. Gimme a baseball game or a state fair or something. I need it.

That said, I cannot envision visiting five bars and a nightclub right now. Keep it, I dunno, sensible or reasonable? Stay at the same neighborhood bar?

I dunno. All of this is extremely terrible and I'm not trying to be too terribly judgmental.

 

[UnnDunn]

Society as we knew it in 2019 won't be possible until we have an effective, mass-deployed vaccine.

 

[Baymax]

Society as we knew it in 2019 won't be possible until we have an effective, mass-deployed vaccine.

Exactly. At this point anything that draws a big crowd of people all breathing the same air is a covid outbreak waiting to happen.

 

[Kasoroth]

I am not a super-internet highly-introverted person. I crave people, I crave big crowds, in a way I cannot effectively express. Gimme a baseball game or a state fair or something. I need it.

That said, I cannot envision visiting five bars and a nightclub right now. Keep it, I dunno, sensible or reasonable? Stay at the same neighborhood bar?

I dunno. All of this is extremely terrible and I'm not trying to be too terribly judgmental.

I'll admit, I am a highly introverted person, and I've actually been kind of enjoying the lock down because I get to work from home, and I have a perfect excuse for avoiding social events. The only thing that actually frustrates me about it is that my local grocery store is no longer open 24 hours a day because they close at night for cleaning now, so I can't do my grocery shopping at 3:00 am.

 

[billmao]

If they can pull off testing 11mil people in a reasonable time frame it'd certainly be impressive. Testing on this large a scale would be a wet dream of any country's health officials right now.

 

[bthylafh]

Society as we knew it in 2019 won't be possible until we have an effective, mass-deployed vaccine.

Well, the Air Force has all those chemtrail generators...


/s

 

[dogwitch]

we knew this would happen

 

[jhodge]

If they can pull off testing 11mil people in a reasonable time frame it'd certainly be impressive. Testing on this large a scale would be a wet dream of any country's health officials right now.

Especially since you basically need two tests: a highly sensitive test to cast a wide net, and a more specific confirmation test to weed out the false positives. Even assuming unlimited test kits and perfect tests, just the man-hours to run 1 million+ tests per day in one city is hard to imagine!

 

[parasyte]

If they can pull off testing 11mil people in a reasonable time frame it'd certainly be impressive. Testing on this large a scale would be a wet dream of any country's health officials right now.

One way to achieve it might be to batch the tests, so you test a "neighborhood" at once. If it's negative then they're clear, if it's positive you have to lock down the neighborhood and then test individually. That'd be similar to how donated blood is tested.

 

[jhodge]

This is why Sweden's approach is superior.

Unless you want to keep your country locked up and unemployed for a year until the vaccine scales up.

Only if I can go to Sweden and and take advantage of Swedish health care and the Swedish economic safety net.

 

[SixDegrees]

This is why Sweden's approach is superior.

Unless you want to keep your country locked up and unemployed for a year until the vaccine scales up.

Yeah, it's pretty amazing what you can do when you have modern, universal health care and a robust social support system in place for all.

Although Sweden is progressing at the expense of its elderly, so there's that, too.

 

[dougcp]

This is why Sweden's approach is superior.

Unless you want to keep your country locked up and unemployed for a year until the vaccine scales up.

I suppose the Sweden approach is superior for funeral homes.

 

[SixDegrees]

If they can pull off testing 11mil people in a reasonable time frame it'd certainly be impressive. Testing on this large a scale would be a wet dream of any country's health officials right now.

Like we are to believe they will be able To test 11 million people in a week. Just like we are supposed to believe they have only had they have had only 85,000 cases and 4600 deaths. When they have done next to no testing to this point.

People love to complain how bad the US has done at testing. But we have done more tests than almost the rest of the world combined.

Well, in the fictitious world inside your head, anyway.

 

[zarkonite]

Ouch. How many people will now end up going through significant challenges in that healthcare system just from all the false positives.

None, that's how many.

 

[Futurix]

Writing this on Tuesday evening - Germany didn’t really see an uptick in cases (aside from the usual post-weekend temporary raise in new cases, as there are less tests done on weekends), but an increase in R (reproduction number) that was caused by several highly localised clusters of infections at meat processing plants. R is decreasing again, and (for now) other indicators look fine.

Mind you, most of the country still doesn’t have any restaurants or gyms open.

 

[MWells]

Though many areas of the US are beginning to reopen, it is unclear if the country has those systems in place to handle resurgence.

Can't have a resurgence if the virus never went away.

 

[raxx7]

This is why Sweden's approach is superior.

Unless you want to keep your country locked up and unemployed for a year until the vaccine scales up.

Yeah, it's pretty amazing what you can do when you have modern, universal health care and a robust social support system in place for all.

Although Sweden is progressing at the expense of its elderly, so there's that, too.

Elderly apart they're playing a high risk game, low reward game.

I think mid-April they had 80% of their ICU beds occupied.
They're not testing much either.
And as Italy and Spain have shown us the virus can creep undetected and explode in one's face.

Also I keep hearing about herd immunity in Sweden though it's not clear to me if it is/was part of the official reasoning.

Meanwhile economic projections are not very different than for their neighbours.

EDIT:
For context:
Like other less-hard-hit countries in Europe, Sweden's neighbours didn't close as hard as say Spain, Italy or California.
Broadly schools, traveling, non-essential commerce, restaurants, bars, etc cultural activities have been ordered shut but everything else was allowed to go on with more or less formal restrictions and a big focus on work from home.
There was also a wave of involuntary of shutdowns as the closing of schools forced parents to stay home and take care of kits and voluntary shutdowns as companies took the time to prepare for production in a constrained environment.
Eg with car sales dropping 60-90% YoY most car plants in Europe are stopped though not forced to do so.

 

[LiKenun]

China ordered all Wuhan residents get tested for COVID-19—that’s ~11 million people.

So at US testing rates that would take a couple of years.

Years, decades, or never—depending on which officials get elected

 

[zarkonite]

This is why Sweden's approach is superior.

Unless you want to keep your country locked up and unemployed for a year until the vaccine scales up.

You don't seem to know what's happening in Sweden, maybe a little research next time? We don't want Sweden's death rate.

 

[Wheels Of Confusion]

Are the tests antibody-based? I'm not clear on the process where someone who can test positive on antibody-based test is determined to still have the disease rather than someone who came through it and recovered.

 

[Imbrium]

This is why Sweden's approach is superior.

Unless you want to keep your country locked up and unemployed for a year until the vaccine scales up.

Yeah, it's pretty amazing what you can do when you have modern, universal health care and a robust social support system in place for all.

Although Sweden is progressing at the expense of its elderly, so there's that, too.

Sweden likes to think of it as "Urban Renewal for the citizenry. Out with the old, in with the new".

/s

 

[itfa]

So far the somewhat limited "safer-at-home" reopening in Colorado has gone well. Just over two weeks in and new cases are still on the decline and fatalities over the past few days are down over 95% from the peak. Probably won't last though. The sheer number of people not wearing masks still is ridiculous. I wish some of the big boys like Walmart would man up and refuse entrance to anybody who wasn't covered up.

 

[OrangeCream]

This is why Sweden's approach is superior.

Unless you want to keep your country locked up and unemployed for a year until the vaccine scales up.

Sweden has a 12.1% fatality rate, so far, meaning 1 in 8 people who catch it die.

Translated to the US that would mean 40 million Americans would die within the first three months.

Or put it another way, our population of over 65 years old is only 52 million people. Between that and the 26.8 million diagnosed with diabetes (some will be over 65), and the 121 million people who have heart disease (also going to be represented heavily in the older population), you're more or less going to kill half of the people over 65 years old and a good number under as well.

 

[Fancy Internet Person]

Ouch. How many people will now end up going through significant challenges in that healthcare system just from all the false positives.

None, that's how many.

Correct. Everyone knows there will be x% of false positives. Across 11M people, there would be 110,000 false positives I'd the rate is 1%.

If they are competent, they will isolate and retest.

 

[soccerguyla]

Society as we knew it in 2019 won't be possible until we have an effective, mass-deployed vaccine.

I don't need life as we knew it in 2019 but I also can't make do with life in 2020 as far as my employment prospects are concerned.

There needs to be a middle ground for those of us who don't have luxury and privilege of remote work. I don't know what that answer is exactly, but I know I can't afford life with another 2-3 years in lockdown until a vaccine is developed, mass produced, and makes its way through the majority of 330 million people.

 

[Bloater51]

In other news, the true UK death rate (excess deaths) is already north of 50,000. High as this is, it simply reflects that the UK is releasing fuller and more up to date figures than many other countries. Bearing in mind that UK hospitals have not been overwhelmed there is nothing to suggest that the per capita rate will be out of line with what has happened in many other comparable countries. And we are still very much in a continuing epidemic.

 

[billmao]

we knew this would happen

I don't know if I knew, but I hope it wouldn't. As the epicenter Wuhan locked down HARD, like cops-locking-your-house-doors-with-steel-chains hard. If they can have outbreaks returning this soon then most other places would be in worst shape. COVID19 resurgence in Wuhan is bad news for everyone.

 

[Hovemond]

This is why Sweden's approach is superior.

Unless you want to keep your country locked up and unemployed for a year until the vaccine scales up.

It's not just vaccines we can wait for. Therapeutic drugs will continue to be discovered as we progress (we're already seeing indications that remdesivir has an effect on mortality). Trying to get the deaths over with means that lives that therapeutics could have saved are lost instead.

 

[whobeme]

Likewise, the mayor of Seoul shut down bars and restaurants over the weekend—just days after South Korea had eased restrictions and allowed businesses to reopen—due to a spike of 86 new COVID-19 cases.

That confuses me. How many days? It sounds like the 86 cases resulted from those bars opening, and it is hard to see how anybody could make contacts at closed bars. On the other hand, "just days" suggests a small number, and it is unusual for this disease to show symptoms that fast.

Whatever the timing, this shows that the South Koreans have their disease tracking working at a level which is orders of magnitude better than ours.

 

[Fancy Internet Person]

Society as we knew it in 2019 won't be possible until we have an effective, mass-deployed vaccine.

I don't need life as we knew it in 2019 but I also can't make do with life in 2020 as far as my employment prospects are concerned.

There needs to be a middle ground for those of us who don't have luxury and privilege of remote work. I don't know what that answer is exactly, but I know I can't afford life with another 2-3 years in lockdown until a vaccine is developed, mass produced, and makes its way through the majority of 330 million people.

The government should borrow money, at the current interest rate of nearly 0% to fund a universal basic income.

At the same time, suspend loan repayment, debt collection, and rent for anyone affected by the pandemic.

The US's national output is vast, but the share of it that goes to the 1% is obscene.

Fund food for people, not third yachts.

 

[xoa]

China ordered all Wuhan residents get tested for COVID-19—that’s ~11 million people.

So at US testing rates that would take a couple of years.

While the US is far behind where we should be and behind where we need to be later as well, you're still about an order of magnitude off aren't you? That seems a little too much hyperbole. From the Ars article on the Senate hearing today:

To date, so far, about 9 million COVID-19 tests have been performed in the United States. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) pointed out that 40 million tests in a month would average to about 1.3 million tests per day; currently, he observed, we are seeing about 300,000 to 400,000 tests performed per day.

So 11 million would take something like a month to a month and half here. Slower for sure, but not remotely "years", and importantly scaling up by a factor of 3-4 is a lot less daunting than needing a factor of 80-100+.

FWIW as well, some PPE supply lines seem to be starting to catch up (or enough new capacity is coming online to really start to meet demand). Back in February & March, unrelated to COVID-19, work (and I) ordered some additional 3M VersaFlo PAPR units so more folks would be covered on planned building renovation projects where lead/asbestos may be an issue. Then the crush hit and ship date got pushed out and out. Supplier contacted recently though and said something interesting: first that earliest orders will start to go mid/end of this month, but also that 3M had said orders placed today would only take until end of June/beginning of July. So they're going to be able to start meeting backlog this month but then expect to clear the entire last few months of backlog in a matter of weeks. If PPE fully catches up that'd be another useful piece along with testing until a vaccine can put a nail into this for good.