Covid-19 News & Updates (Thailand and Southeast Asia only)

[uncle tom]

Bit of context:

China's annual death rate is 7.11 per 1000 population. That works out at 27000 per day.

106 deaths will occur anyway in that country in just five minutes 39 seconds.

[buksida]

More context - its just a couple of regular days on Thai roads ...

[HHTel]

hundreds of mask-wearing workers toiling around the clock

I can't remember the verb 'to toil' being used since I was at school. Reminds me of when an indian worked for me and told me "I've tried thrice to contact that company."

[Big Boy]

Yes, it is putting the statistics into context, but how many are telling us the stats are grossly understated? Problem is, we don't know what is true and what isn't.

Why is it we see people falling in the streets in China, yet Thailand is curing the infected people with over half of those infected, now continuing their holidays? We are being bombarded with fake news, problem is, how do we know what the real news is?

[nil]

Interesting article from Korea. They are disagreeing with the Chinese that the virus can be transmitted during the incubation period. Also they state the country only has 1000 Coronavirus test kits, so they don't want to test everyone that is showing a fever. This makes you wonder how many test kits China have left and other country's have.

http://www.koreabiomed.com/news/article ... idxno=7289

[handdrummer]

The WHO response was pitiful.

[buksida]

Six more Chinese tourists found infected with coronavirus
Another six Chinese nationals entering Thailand were found to be infected with the Wuhan coronavirus, bringing a total number of cases detected in the country to 14.

Health permanent secretary Sukhum Kanchanapimai said on Tuesday there were six new cases of coronavirus infection in Thailand. They were aged 6-60 years.

All were Chinese nationals and five of them were family members travelling from China’s Hubei province, Dr Sukhum said.

Health officials had tested them all twice, and confirmed they were positive for the novel coronavirus, he said.

The new cases brought the number of coronavirus infection cases detected in Thailand to 14, he said.

https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/ge ... oronavirus

Thailand is the second highest country in terms of infections now ... keep them coming ...

[PeteC]

php3gDmITAM.jpg (74.1 KiB) Viewed 429 times

(Poll is only on Khaosod English Facebook)

[Nereus]

Experts say China virus outbreak will last months at least

https://www.bangkokpost.com/world/18455 ... t#cxrecs_s

WASHINGTON - The deadly new coronavirus that has broken out in China, 2019-nCoV, will afflict a minimum of tens of thousands of people and will last at least several months, researchers estimate based on the first available data.

"The best case scenario, you would have something... where we go through the spring into the summer, and then it dies down," David Fisman, a professor at the University of Toronto who wrote an analysis of the virus for the International Society for Infectious Diseases, told AFP.

"It's not something that's going to end the next week or the next month," said Alessandro Vespignani, a professor at Northeastern University. He is part of a group of researchers that manages an online dashboard about the outbreak.

Epidemiologists have no crystal ball. They have only piecemeal information on the new virus, which appeared in December. They use mathematical models to estimate the actual number of cases, as of the current date, and compare them to past outbreaks -- but many of their hypotheses remain uncertain.

Until the past weekend, researchers thought that infected people were not contagious until they began exhibiting symptoms, such as fever, respiratory problems, and pneumonia. But Chinese authorities said Sunday they had established the opposite.

US health authorities said Monday they had not seen evidence that asymptomatic patients can infect other people. But if they can, this would definitely change the outbreak's dynamics.

The first estimates for the length of the incubation period -- about two weeks -- are recent.

- Patience -
In recent days, multiple experts have calculated an important parameter for any outbreak: the basic reproduction number, or "R0." It represents the number of people contaminated by an infected person. Estimates range from 1.4 to 3.8, according to Fisman, figures that are considered moderate.

That is only an average: some patients may infect many people, while others infect only a few. "On its own, it isn't a reason to panic," said Maimuna Majumder, a researcher at Harvard University and at Boston Children's Hospital.

She said the rate is 1.3 for seasonal flu (which has millions of cases per year) and between two and five for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which resulted in 8,000 cases and 774 deaths, the majority in mainland China and Hong Kong in 2002-2003. In comparison, the rate for measles ranges from 12 to 18.

Quarantines and isolation measures, systematic hand washing and masks could help drive down the average number of infected people. If the rate falls below one, the epidemic will die down.

But the effect of the control measures China has implemented won't be felt for another week or two, researchers say, based on the virus's cycle.

"The more we learn about it, the more it looks like SARS," said Fisman. "SARS was controllable; hopefully this will be too. But we won't know for a few weeks."

"It's going to be many weeks, probably months, and nobody knows where this will go," he added.

The official number of cases is more than 4,000 in China, with more than 100 deaths, and some 50 confirmed infections outside the country.

But the actual number of Chinese cases, including those not yet detected, is likely to be more than 25,000, said Vespignani, according to the analysis of the group coordinated by Northeastern.

And researchers at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) estimate the number of actual cases has currently passed 40,000.

"It's easy to get to twice or three times as much, even just in the city of Wuhan," the virus's epicenter, said Vespignani. "If we start to have other larger areas affected, then those numbers are going to be much, much bigger."

He said he doesn't want to estimate the number of possible deaths. The mortality rate, until now, has hovered around three percent, but rates tend to fluctuate: they increase at the beginning as the most vulnerable patients die, then drop, and then rise again as others die.

Again, only time will tell.

[Geko]

Where were the last 6 Chinese found? I see they are being treated at Bamrasnaradura Infectious Diseases Institute in Nonthaburi, but is this were they were living when identified with the fever?

[HHTel]

I'm not sure it matters. There have been no incidents outside of China where the disease has been caught from an already infected person. Of those that have been confirmed, most have already recovered.
It appears that the info coming out of China is very suspect.

[Big Boy]

I think the info from China is referring to the mutated strain, which has recently been identified for the first time outside of China in Germany.

[REEM]

There have been no incidents outside of China where the disease has been caught from an already infected person.

Not so.

Germany now has four confirmed cases of the coronavirus sweeping China, health officials said Tuesday, all of them employees at a Bavarian firm recently visited by a Chinese colleague.
The health ministry in Germany's southern Bavaria region said in an evening statement that it had detected a further three cases, following that of a 33-year-old German man announced earlier in the day.

"These patients are all employees of the company in the Starnberg district where the first person affected worked," the health ministry said.

READ ALSO: Coronavirus in Germany: What you need to know

The ministry added that 40 other employees at car parts supplier Webasto had been identified as having been in "close contact" with the first patient, and they will be screened on Wednesday.

All four patients are staying in an isolation ward at a Munich hospital.

Germany's first confirmed patient, the 33-year-old man, fell ill after attending a training session hosted by a visiting Chinese colleague on January 21st.


Unlike other patients of the viral outbreak in Europe so far, the man contracted the disease without having been to China himself.

A spokeswoman for the Robert Koch Institute, Germany's centre for disease prevention and control, told AFP the German case appeared to be the first instance of a "human-to-human transmission" outside Asia.

Japan has also reported a patient testing positive for the strain of coronavirus without having travelled to China.

In Vietnam, a man visiting from Wuhan is suspected of infecting his son who had been living in Ho Chi Minh City for four months.

The Chinese woman who held the training session in Germany "started to feel sick on the flight home on January 23", Andreas Zapf, head of the Bavarian State Office for Health and Food Safety, told a press conference.

She immediately sought medical attention on her return and was confirmed to have caught the virus, which has spread rapidly in recent weeks after first emerging in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

The woman had recently visited her parents in the Wuhan region, Zapf said.

In a statement, the Webasto company said it had halted all business travel to and from China "for at least the next two weeks".

The virus has so far killed over 100 people and infected more than 4,500 people in China.

Cases have also been reported in a string of other countries, including the United States, France, Australia and Japan.

https://www.thelocal.de/20200128/number ... ps-to-four

[oakdale160]

This Virus seems to be MORE infective than SARS but LESS virulent,
Sars infected less than 9000 worldwide--Corona has infected more already
Mortality rate for Sars was close to 10% Total deaths less than 1000
Too early to know the Mort rate for Corona but indications are that it will be much less than|Sars.

OK. If there are going to be 250,000 infected patients (projected by one "expert",) and the Mort rate is very low, say 1%,
Do the math.

[HHTel]

The WHO puts the fatality rate for SARS at between 14 and 15% with deaths up to 50% in the high risk category.
Currently WuFlu is far below that at around 3%