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June 3, 2020 at 17:22 #54638Clark
SA – “I take it you fully agree with what Dr Edd has written and which is the consensus amongst many scientists that this is a natural virus because this has been proven beyond doubt.”
No, I lack sufficient technical knowledge to either agree or disagree with Dr Edd’s May 28, 20:02 argument. I already expressed this as accurately as I could:
– “[…] the debate about the possible origins of SARS-CoV-2 seems to be ongoing in the scientific community and the scientific literature. […] Dr Edd, your May 28, 20:02 argument seems convincing, but there are elements of it which, as a non-specialist, I would have to take on trust.”
Regarding my first sentence above, “the debate about the possible origins of SARS-CoV-2 seems to be ongoing in the scientific community and the scientific literature”,
(1) I have yet to watch Coronavirus may have been a ‘cell-culture experiment’ gone wrong, another video from Sky News featuring Flinders University Professor Nikolai Petrovsky, which follows on from the one Michael Norton posted a link to before;
(2) I have seen a US scientist also refusing to rule out lab origin; I doubt I will be able to find the link again, but I think he was from a relevant field, though since I don’t remember the name it may have been Bret Weinstein;
(3) I have listened to a podcast by Prof. Bret Weinstein, biologist and evolutionary theorist, in which he claims that there is fairly compelling evolutionary evidence of lab manipulation of SARS-CoV-2’s genome, but that more “establishment” academics in relevant fields are pressuring less established scientists to avoid saying so, and
(4) a friend of mine who has been following this tells me that there are frequently papers either way appearing on the preprint servers of appropriate fields.
These are my reasons for regarding the question as open and ongoing within the relevant fields. My own take is that a lab escape cannot be ruled out, since bio laboratories keep libraries of natural viruses. Indeed I have heard it said that one of the Wuhan laboratories held the largest library of bat viruses in the world.
I don’t even care about the outcome particularly. SARS-CoV-2 is in the global human population now, and we need to deal with it however it got there, and I’m content to wait until more definitive evidence emerges, it it ever does. But I do find it curious that there is such strong pressure upon me from yourself and Dr Edd to conform to the “entirely natural” proposition, and I note that this question is far from neutral politically.
June 3, 2020 at 17:32 #54639ClarkI suspect that Paul Barbara is in direct communication with various conspiracy theorists such as Wakefield. Note how he says he’ll get back on certain questions, and then does so a day or two later. He has stated that he meets with Twin Tower demolition theorists including Gage and Chandler. I tried discussing with him but he simply avoids engagement, so I have given up, but I don’t need to discuss to simply post evidence.
June 3, 2020 at 22:33 #54642SAClark
A preliminary answer to your last but one post. What I meant is that the virus was not a genetically engineered virus as Dr Edd explains. Genetic engineering leaves tell tale traces. Therefore it is a natural virus. As I had previously explained, its presence in a lab would either be explained by a programme of injecting the virus into animals until it adapts or by a fluke, both somewhat unlikely.
I have not read in detail any of your references but they do not amount to any overwhelming evidence of anything. As to Petrovsky, my quick reading of what he says is that it is a theoretical possibility rather than that there is any proof.
I think the WHO and China are willing to collaborate on this but it is very difficult for China to accept the intrusive inspections that the US who wants to demonise both, would want to conduct any investigation. It also seems that the Australian government is also active in taking this anti China line.
This will never be solved by over-politicising. The US has form here whereas China has no such history. I would just be careful that this does not become a distraction given that China has managed the virus whereas US and U.K. have not.
June 4, 2020 at 08:29 #54656Dr Edd@ Clark 17:22
You’re wise to suspend judgement. Parts of my earlier post were reproduced from a recent email exchange with someone who has expertise in genetic analysis and manipulation. Although he hasn’t studied this coronavirus, he’s adamant that the results from other labs show that the virus has a natural origin. However, the science is very complicated.The best explanation I’ve found is on stackexchange, in response to the question “Is it possible for coronavirus or SARS to be synthetic?”
It includes a diagram which shows where the SARS-CoV-2 genome fits on the natural coronavirus family tree:
It seems quite conclusive. However, new information is emerging which casts some doubt on that neat explanation. Apparently some researchers have found some tell-tale signs of genetic manipulation. This morning’s Telegraph has an exclusive article – Coronavirus began ‘as an accident’ in Chinese lab, says former MI6 boss.
International scientists have reached a near-unanimous consensus, however, that the virus emerged in animals – most likely bats or pangolins – before jumping to the human population.
But Sir Richard, 75, pointed to a scientific paper published this week by a Norwegian-British research team who claim to have discovered clues within Covid-19’s genetic sequence suggesting key elements were “inserted” and may not have evolved naturally.
Dearlove casts blame for the pandemic on the Chinese authorities and raises the prospects of demands for reparations. Is this politically motivated? In view of the fact he was Spook-in-Chief, there could be some counterintelligence briefing going on.
The explanation on stackexchange outlines the science behind detecting the telltale signs of genome synthesis pretty well. If those signs have actually now been found, then the Chinese government is really going to be in the crosshairs.
June 4, 2020 at 09:27 #54663SADr Edd
Never mind what Dearlove Or The Telegraph says, what does the Norwegian paper actually say?June 4, 2020 at 10:26 #54666Dr EddYou can read it yourself, if you like. It’s in the Cambridge Coronavirus Collection.
Sørensen, Susrud & Dalgleish (2020) – Biovacc-19: A Candidate Vaccine for Covid-19 (SARS-CoV-2) Developed from Analysis of its General Method of Action for InfectivityBear in mind the authors may have an economic interest: they’re developing a rival vaccine with an approach based on targeting “inserted sections” of the genome.
June 4, 2020 at 12:29 #54668SAThanks Dr Edd
This is a fascinating analysis but as pointed out by Sputnik this version does not seem to make out clear allegations that this is a man made virus.The report is cited as warning that the SARS-CoV-2 spike differs greatly from any other Sars virus studied previously, and, accordingly, it is doubtful that efforts to develop a vaccine will result in success. The scientists are suggested as believing the true aetiology of the virus has been “misunderstood”, which has spurred them to develop their own vaccine, produced by Immunor AS, a Norwegian pharmaceutical company led by Sorensen.
The analysis offered by Professor Dalgleish and his colleagues, scheduled for release in the coming days, claims the virus possesses “unique fingerprints”, “indicative of purposive manipulation”, thus calling into question the theory that the coronavirus evolved naturally.
The research suggests COVID-19 is a “remarkably well-adapted virus for human co-existence”, and was likely engineered via a Wuhan lab experiment to develop “chimeric viruses of high potency”.In the preprint you post, no such clear claims are made. From what I gather reading this paper the authors explain why they believe that the current understanding of how the virus is infectious and how it produces various tissue damage is related to some basic misunderstandings. They say that there is a second mechanism of cell invasion other than the ACE2 receptor and that there are other receptors which would allow the virus to infect and destroy other tissues which do not bear this receptor. This explains some of the other symptoms noted such as the loss of taste and smell, and gastrointestinal symptoms that some patients suffer from, and the effect on other tissues noted clinically, that do not have Ace2. This makes sense. The other point they make about the development of vaccines, is the choice of adjuvants, and how some adjuvants can enhance antibody responses, whereas others enhance T cell responses, and this is important as some antibody responses early on may actually be harmful. Similarly vaccines that contain human like epitopes may produce autoantibodies which may damage tissues and that is why they produce a chimeric protein that is made of polypeptides lacking the human like epitopes and joined together by scaffolding. Again this is a concept paper not producing any solid data yet, although they refer to unpublished safety data that is not analysed.
In other words, I can’t see that this paper you posted has anything to do with the sensational pronouncements of Dearlove who obviously has a specific anti-China agenda. Other scientific sources of attack come from Australia and it is obvious to me that these are orchestrated to prepare for a psychological demonization of China prior to some military action. Tensions between China and India are escalating, and so is US naval activity in that area. I have also noted a lot of conspiracy theories coming out of India from the beginning of this pandemic. In the political context there is a build up of anti China propaganda from US, UK , Australia and India. This of course is not in itself indicative of anything, just that one has to be extra careful as to look at sources of these allegations more carefully.June 6, 2020 at 07:03 #54727SAClark
In a previous discussion we mentioned reliance on mathematical modelling as one of the problems of why the government mishandled the management of this epidemic and why it says that it has relied on the science throughout.
This to me, being somewhat old fashioned, but at the same time not a technophobe, is an important question in order to understand what went wrong.
There has been heavy reliance on statistics, modelling and IT number crunching. Everything is dealt with in terms of data. This has been used probably with some success in manipulation of elections, but mostly with failure in most economic modelling. The reasons are that these methods do not take account of ideology and erratic human behaviour.This modelling has been pitted against the old fashioned way of how public health has been formulated and conducted for many years with principles set out to deal with situations in a reflex and proactive manner. I remember that at the outset of the epidemic conversations in this forum centred on the science and the data. Some even prominent scientists advocated waiting for the data before taking decisions and everyone quoted that they were guided by the science when this was far from the case. Science and research is often reflective and retrospective because of the required data. The rise of the ‘modellers’ tried to overcome this by an attempt to predict, based on known variables. But many of these variables, including those related to human behaviour are difficult or impossible to predict. Added to this is that modellers have to rely, on the case of a new virus, to base their variables on what is known from other viruses, which has now been proven to be mistaken.
So if we were to replay the management of this crisis I would advocate the following: The primary focus should have been to obtain data fast, and this would be by testing as many people as possible, not only to make a diagnosis to isolate cases, but to try to understand the nature of this disease. You can only understand the full extent of a disease by studying not just the severe cases but also the mild cases and the asymptomatic carriers. These are relatively low key public health measures that were neglected from the outset in favour of ventilators and vaccines, concentrating at the apex of the pyramid rather than the base. Then having identified individuals who are infected, these should have had proper medical quarantine, which means proper enforced isolation with all facilities provided, for 14 days.
But what has happened is a game of catch up, first concentrating on the severe cases in the NHS, then realising that by doing so you have pushed the infection to the care homes, and when deaths mount there, you then realise that you have the massive reservoir in the community. I am afraid the ‘science’ has been misused here and the scientists have allowed themselves to be exploited and I am afraid will probably be ultimately scapegoated.June 6, 2020 at 08:20 #54730Clark– ‘All this had to be fought for. Otherwise we’d have had the same sort of set-up that you objected to. Let me talk a bit of philosophy and sociology. Has it ever occurred to you, Geoff, that in spite of the changes wrought by science – by our control over inanimate energy, that is to say – we still preserve the same social order of precedence? Politicians at the top, then the military, and the real brains at the bottom. There’s no difference between this set-up and that of ancient Rome, or of the first civilisations in Mesopotamia for that matter. We’re living in a society that contains a monstrous contradiction, modern in its technology but archaic in its social organisation. For years the politicians have been squawking about the need for more trained scientists, more engineers, and so forth. What they don’t seem to realise is that there are only a limited number of fools.’
‘Fools?’
‘Yes, people like you and me, Geoff. We’re the fools. We do the thinking for an archaic crowd of nit-wits and allow ourselves to get pushed around by ’em into the bargain.’
‘Scientists of the world unite! Is that the idea?’
‘Not exactly. It isn’t just a case of scientists versus the rest. The matter goes deeper. It’s a clash between two totally different modes of thinking. Society today is based in its technology on thinking in terms of numbers. In its social organisation, on the other hand, it is based on thinking in terms of words. It’s here that the real clash lies, between the literary mind and the mathematical mind. You ought to meet the Home Secretary. You’d see straight away what I mean.’Chris Kingsley, Professor of Astronomy and mathematical modeller, University of Cambridge, talking to Dr Geoff Marlowe, senior administrator of Mount Palomar Observatory; The Black Cloud, Fred Hoyle, 1957.
June 6, 2020 at 08:45 #54733ClarkFerguson has already been scapegoated. It started at Off-Guardian and UK Column, and now it’s in the Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the Sun. Ferguson’s presence on the SAGE Committee is about all that averted utter carnage. The corporate sector took to hating him for shutting down much of the economy and set a team of “reporters” after him, just waiting for him to put a foot wrong. Those “reporters” must have all been breaking the stay-at-home order too, but no mention of that…
The ICL model seems pretty good to me. It has served its purpose by dissuading the government from their murderous “herd immunity” plan. ICL’s “total infected so far” figure seems to match post-peak antibody studies within a factor of two, which is damn good modelling for a brand new disease. So if the UK has ~40,000 dead and ~6% infected so far, and infection would reach say 75% before causing the epidemic to self-limit, we could expect:
40,000 x (100/6) x (75/100) = 500,000 – Spot on the ICL figure!
ICL did very well indeed. They weren’t asleep when covid-19 cut through Wuhan. They collected their data and tweaked their model, and had their output ready to present when it arrived.
June 6, 2020 at 09:11 #54734ClarkIt’s lose/lose for the ICL team though. The 500,000 dead scenario assumed no social restrictions. The media now can bray “but the real deaths were less than a tenth of that”, but that’s with social restrictions, and after decades of dumbing-down and stupid “scientists say” stories, most of the public are gullible enough to regard the restrictions as unnecessary and “Ferguson” as needlessly alarmist.
My take on what happened is a bit different from yours, SA. I think the government were preparing to let covid-19 rip through the population, and orders were issued and preparations made hastily on that basis. Thus we got emergency mortuary plans, the Nightingale hospitals, and a crisis/overload policy of discharging back to care homes. But Ferguson put the ICL output on SAGE’s table, and the majority view was that such carnage couldn’t be permitted to happen. The SAGE committee were witnesses that the government had seen the numbers, denying the government the option of claiming ignorance post-disaster.
Widespread testing wasn’t possible at first because manufacturers were still gearing up to supply test kits. What should have happened was early, forceful restrictions, accompanied by a very clear message; “this disease spreads very fast, so we have to slow the spread with these restrictions until we’re ready with test kits, quarantine facilities and PPE”.
We have two curves; a rising curve of test-kit supply, and the curve of infections. Restrictions should have been applied forcefully – you brake hard immediately in a potential collision scenario – and then eased as test kit supply overwhelmed infection numbers.
June 6, 2020 at 09:37 #54735ClarkHow many tests per day are required to contain a given outbreak? This looks like a modelling problem to me. Obviously more tests are required than there are infections, but what’s the ratio? It probably depends on lots of things. 100 infections in one village are easier to contain that 100 infections dotted about all over the UK. 100 infected travelling salesmen would be a lot worse than 100 people working from home.
June 6, 2020 at 10:27 #54741ClarkOf course, the corporate media and covert PR fronts have been attacking mathematical modelling for decades as a means to discredit climate science. The public were primed to distrust models. But remember that the planet Neptune was discovered through primitive mathematical modelling.
Modelling doesn’t affect underlying facts; greenhouse gases trap heat, and infections spread. But we want to know more than that; how will the world change with additional heat? How fast will a given infection spread? You can attempt a static calculation but you can only extrapolate so far without gross changes to your initial assumptions; a warmer world has different cloud cover, a more widespread outbreak has access to different population centres. This is where models become useful, running the same calculation over and over again, each run’s output being the next run’s input. This also makes models susceptible to accelerating divergence from reality, but it’s a modeller’s job to understand and allow for this, just as it’s a doctor’s job to understand symptoms from more than one cause, and interactions between drugs.
June 6, 2020 at 10:58 #54742SAClark
I am not trying in any way to discredit mathematical modelling. I am just saying that it is one component. Tried and tested public health measures and trust in an international cooperative body is what should have been stressed and acted upon initially and the mathematical modelling follows to refine the response. But what has happened is that mathematical modelling became the lead here and that is wrong in my opinion, and the proof is that none of the basic public health actions to contain epidemics were applied properly. The politicians ignored public health not just advice but systematically over many the years through austerity, deliberate ignoring of advice since 2016 and privatisation and outsourcing with non-joined-up services. The modellers should have pointed this out also. In any case the scientists and the modellers should have made it very clear that their advice was not being followed or were politically interpreted and misapplied. But there has not been any open dissent, no resignations, and no complaints that Cummings and others have been sitting on SAGE meetings.
The situation of mathematical modelling and climate change is completely different from that of epidemics as many of the elements in climate change are well known and studied. But very little was known about SARS-cov2 when the modelling was started, and still much remains to be known. And on top of all of this it is the political interpretation of this mathematical modelling that the government uses to say that ‘we are guided by the science’.
June 6, 2020 at 12:53 #54750ClarkSA, I haven’t followed corporate media coverage sufficiently to actually know the propaganda situation, but if I had this government’s motives, I would issue press releases and hold press conferences pushing the modelling to the fore, knowing it would be a prime target for the corporate media. It would draw the media’s criticism away from the government, and it would provide the government with a convenient and essentially defenceless scapegoat after or during the disaster.
The government of course want it both ways. They want it to look as though the “lockdown” is not their fault, but they want the death toll to look like it’s not their fault either. This is a fundamental weakness of democracy; to get re-elected, a government has a strong incentive to divert blame elsewhere. I suspect that Labour would have gone for strong and early lockdown, accepting that they’d then be ridiculed by the corporate media. There would have been a much lower death toll, but the Conservative’s high death toll would never have occurred for comparison, so the corporate media would then have blamed Labour for the ensuing recession all the way to the next election…
– “Tried and tested public health measures and trust in an international cooperative body is what should have been stressed and acted upon”
Absolutely! When faced with an emergency, use the tried and tested, reliable, age-old tools. Gain time to develop and deploy more advanced measures, certainly, but procrastinating is inexcusable.
In practice, the modelling is of very limited relevance. All we needed in order to estimate the eventual death toll was the infection fatality rate. Additionally, knowing that covid-19 was novel implied that the entire population was extremely vulnerable, and covid-19 would spread very rapidly. But all of this was obvious anyway, from Wuhan, Beijing, the Diamond Princess, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea.
The UK government had more than ample warning from other countries’ experience; it didn’t need the model, not in the slightest. Jeez, if I could see what was coming there’s no way the government could have been taken by surprise, not with all its additional staff and resources. It takes several days for the ICL model to produce output; probably the government just used that delay as an excuse for doing nothing for a little longer. It’s probably all about the Cheltenham Festival in fact, the Tories’ annual Spring piss-up and adultery opportunity.
June 8, 2020 at 12:58 #54794ClarkThe origin of SARS-CoV-2 debate.
Extensively referenced article in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 27 May 2020, by Milton Leitenberg, a senior research associate at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland (CISSM):
I reach the same three conclusions as I have done consistently.
1) Secrecy kills. All surveillance systems point in entirely the wrong direction. They snoop on the public, and deliver that data into the control of organisations. Those organisations are variously private/corporate or governmental. But organisation itself is the greatest amplifier of human ability, for good or for ill. Organisations must be permitted no secrecy, no concealment. If their work produces good, disclosure will distribute that good. If their work results in danger or damage, the people of the world have a right to know that, and understand everything about it. Competition is killing us and our world.
2) Biological laboratory security is hopelessly inadequate. These facilities must be in remote places, with live-in accommodation and on-site quarantine.
3) The US political mud-slinging over CoVID-19 is utterly hypocritical because this strongly appears to be yet another outsourcing issue:
– “Details of the most recent National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) grant for WIV bat coronavirus surveillance and WIV bat coronavirus gain of function research are publicly available” – NIAID is part of the US NIH. Article citation number 28:
Project Number: 2R01AI110964-06
Title: UNDERSTANDING THE RISK OF BAT CORONAVIRUS EMERGENCELink.
It seems to me that both the US and Chinese governments are seeding conspiracy theories to divert attention from their own contributions to what was a collaborative project.
Here’s another article on the same topic, with some simple explanation:
Lab-Made? SARS-CoV-2 Genealogy Through the Lens of Gain-of-Function Research
June 9, 2020 at 20:38 #54838SAClark
It all still remains circumstantial and all of what this author is saying is pointing out possibilities in an opinion piece, looking at existing evidence.
But let me add something else to fuel this fire. The Chinese discovered and sequences this virus in record time. They knew very well and feared its potential so much so that they took extreme measures to suppress it and managed to do so.
Some other countries were slow with much more disastrous consequences. Does this mean that the Chinese new more about the virus from the very beginning than they let on?June 9, 2020 at 21:00 #54842ClarkHmm, there are indications both ways. Yes the genome was sequenced fast, suggesting that maybe they had a head start from existing knowledge of the virus and the way SARS-CoV-2 had been derived, but even China’s extreme measures were late, and if the joint US-Chinese NIAID project was the source, you’d have expected word to have got back to the US, yet the US’s responses have been among the worst. Mind you, maybe word did get back, but the Trump administration…
June 10, 2020 at 05:51 #54857SAThere you are. We have just got a step towards getting to the realisation that part of the problem is that there are unknown unknowns and also unknowable Unknowns.
June 10, 2020 at 19:45 #54895ClarkYuri Deigin:
– “But possibly, the biggest problem with the 4% difference argument is that it relies on RaTG13 being exactly what WIV says it is. If we are to seriously consider the lab leak hypothesis, we must concede that it does not make sense to blindly trust the data released by the very lab suspected of the leak. If the leak did occur, as is the premise of the lab hypothesis, then the description of what RaTG13 is could be furthering the goal of covering up the leak.
– Again, I am not claiming with certainty that is what is happening here. All I am saying is that this is what could have happened, and we need a lot more evidence before we can reach a definitive conclusion. One thing that could help rule out tampering with RaTG13 is having independent labs sequence the 2013 Yunnan samples that She Zhengli extracted RaTG13 from. WIV must still have them if they re-sequenced RaTG13 in 2020.”
June 17, 2020 at 18:19 #55218SACoronavirus breakthrough: dexamethasone is first drug shown to save lives
In a large trial the drug was found to reduce the mortality in severe cases of covid-19 on ventilators or those needing oxygen therapy by 20-30%.
Dexamethasone is a steroid which is widely used and cheap and with few side effects. There is a good experience of using this drug in ITU and in some cancers. It supresses the hyperreactive immune response that is seen in patients with severe disease. The drug has no effect in milder cases.June 19, 2020 at 12:33 #55310SASome observations on today’s snapshot figures
Pop(M)
Cases
Deaths
O rate
CFR
Pop. Density
USA
331
2,191,200
118,435
0.66
5.4
35
Brazil
212
978,142
47,748
0.46
4.8
25
Russia
146
568,292
7,831
0.39
1.4
9
India
1380
380,532
12,573
0.027
3.3
420
UK
68
301,935
42,373
0.49
14
279
Spain
47
245,268
27,136
0.52
11
92
Peru
33
244,388
7,461
0.74
3
26
Italy
61
238,159
34,514
0.39
14.5
201
Chile
19
225,103
3,841
1.2
1.7
25
Iran
84
197,647
9,272
0.23
4.7
51
France
65
195,272
29,606
0.3
15.1
118
Germany
84
190,118
8,882
0.2
4.7
235
China
144
84,494
4,638
0.005
5.4
148
Singapore
5.8
41,473
26
0.72
0.06
8240
Bahrain
1.7
20430
55
1.1
0.27
6791
What is apparent is that the rate of diagnosed infections vary between .005 %(China) and 1.2% (Chile).
The CFR vary from 1.4% (Russia) to 15.4% (France) with UK high at 14%. But so far as these figures show, density of population does not appear to be a major cause of increased infection.June 20, 2020 at 12:48 #55377ClarkSA, some questions: what is your source for the figures, and what is the formula for the O rate?
Perceiving trends in this pandemic has so many problems of variability of accuracy of data; some counties have tested a much higher proportion of the population than others, and most countries’ rate of testing has presumably increased; testing is targetted in various ways, very little of it is random and thus a representative sample of the population; attribution of cause of death probably varies a lot; we don’t have any metrics for either imposition of social restrictions or actual public behaviour in social distancing.
Maybe proxy data would serve us better. For instance, when considering diverse countries, the overall excess death rate is probably more reliable than the covid-19 death rate.
Population density is an interesting one because the overall population density of a country tells us hardly anything about, for instance, how often people inhale each other’s breath. England has a population density of 430 per square kilometre, but obviously the potential for cross-infection varies hugely between 430 people out looking for mushrooms compared with 430 people attending a meeting in the village hall.
What would serve as a good proxy for social proximity distribution? And what about social mixing, ie. unusual meetings between people as opposed to repeated ones? I suppose transport use might help – a distribution curve of number of journeys and their distance.
It’s frustrating. The things to be considered are so mundane, yet quantifying them is so elusive. I can certainly see the temptation to modelling – just write a program, let the machine crunch the numbers, and ponder upon the output at leisure. But I expect that hammering out good parameters and directly measurable proxies for them would provide a better route to being able to think about the problem directly.
June 20, 2020 at 16:34 #55383SAClark
Apologies for not explaining more the source of my data.
The data about no of cases reported per country and of deaths related to Covid-19 come from COVID-19 Dashboard by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU). The source for population and density come from World Population Review
The other figures are calculated by me. The Overall rate is the number of reported cases divided by the population of that country. The CFR is the number of deaths divided by number of cases. I guess the number of deaths divided by the population may also be useful.
Of course this is all governed by the robustness of the data in the first place as you point out and I agree that the excess death rates may be more indicative, but these are not easy to extract from the different countries. Of course the numbers of cases and deaths are also a function of where in the epidemic countries are. For example China is fairly advanced in this respect because they were the first and went through suppression and possible resurgence, whereas Russia and Brazil and other Latin American countries are very much on the steep rise arm.. Another piece of data worth looking at is the daily changes shown in my first link as a bar chart.
There are different patterns. Take a look at US. The chart shows that what has actually happened is very partial suppression and continuation at a high level.Whereas the pattern for Italy shows a good suppression. UK is in between.
These charts are worth looking at because I think they reflect effectiveness of measures taken by each country. The initial firmness of the lockdown shown by countries like Spain, Italy, France, Austria and other European countries are seen in their charts, whereas the chart for Iran shows how relaxation of measures leads to a rebound.June 20, 2020 at 16:37 #55384SASorry Clark, it looks that the links I tried to post to individual countries does not work it just goes back to the dashboard but you can look at figures by clicking on each country and then click at daily change in the bar chart at the bottom of the page on the right side.
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