NBC News Employee Dies After Coronavirus Diagnosis

hollywoodreporter.com ^ | 3/20/2020

[miss marmelstein]

Put down the bong ahole.

[crusty old prospector]

Bwa ha.

[central_va]

I had to drive around piles of corpses on the way to Food Lion to get the last roll of tp. It was gruesome.

[Vermont Lt]

You still won’t answer the question. Would you ride in a cab with someone infected?

Seems to me you are deflecting. That is an early sign of dementia. And I know it’s sundowning time. These questions aren’t that hard.

I would be near them. But I have common sense. No doctorate needed.

[billyboy15]

I have a Food Lion quite near me as well as a Harris Teeter and both have been cleaned out of TP for a week. The Manager tells me the people follow the truck into the lot and wait in the store until they put it out.

They won’t allow anyone to buy more than one package per visit.

I am ashamed to be part of the human race at times.

[PGR88]

I WROTE the following

The average age of coronavirus death in Italy is 79.2 years (which I actually got from the Telegraph).

According to the Italian Gov’t itself (and Bloomberg citing it):

The average age of those who’ve died from the virus in Italy is 79.5.

Get it straight. Read from comprehension, my friend.

[cantfindagoodscreenname]

I can’t even imagine! However, I was hopeful that that is a distant memory for you now. Glad to hear you are happily remarried!

[jurroppi1]

To give a little perspective here, I was not immunosuppressed back when swine Flu was an issue, though I am now.

This is not to say I’m panicked, but I am certainly more concerned now than I was then.

Perhaps some of what you are seeing as panic is well founded concern.

I will agree some of the stuff going on seems to be irrational though.

[Vermont Lt]

Did you see the sentence that said the median was 64?

Same Bloomberg article.

There is a huge difference between median and average. Especially when you are selling this as hitting “the elderly.” 64 is far from elderly.

[Let_It_Be_So]

nwrep, I asked you a question on another reply to one of your earlier posts wherein you referred to the Imperial College report.
In case it got lost in the shuffle, I will repost it below and again ask you for a reply:

Here is what I posted to you:

“I went to the link you provided and could not find the raw data and assumptions used by the authors in developing projections of outcome scenarios.

I’m not saying the information used by the Imperial College study group is inaccurate. I just want to see the assumptions they used in developing their projections, projections they used to form their conclusions, thereby leading to their recommendations to leaders of the governments of the UK and the US.

Would you please provide a link to that kind of information?

Thank you in advance for your reply.”

I’m not trying to argue with you about anything, I sincerely would like to see the information as it seems from your posts that you may know where I could find it.

Thanks.

[nwrep]

Hi Let_It_Be_So:

Sorry for the delayed response.

The assumptions and raw data are explained on Page 4 as follows:

We modified an individual-based simulation model developed to support pandemic influenza planning (5,6) to explore scenarios for COVID-19 in GB. The basic structure of the model remains as previously published.

Note: here are the references:

5. Ferguson NM, Cummings DAT, Fraser C, Cajka JC, Cooley PC, Burke DS. Strategies for mitigating an influenza pandemic. Nature 2006;442(7101):448–52.

6. Halloran ME, Ferguson NM, Eubank S, et al. Modeling targeted layered containment of an influenza pandemic in the United States. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 2008;105(12):4639–44

Further, from the Imperial College paper, the rest of the assumptions:

We assumed an incubation period of 5.1 days9,10. Infectiousness is assumed to occur from 12 hours prior to the onset of symptoms for those that are symptomatic and from 4.6 days after infection in those that are asymptomatic with an infectiousness profile over time that results in a 6.5-day mean generation time. Based on fits to the early growth-rate of the epidemic in Wuhan10,11, we make a baseline assumption that R0=2.4 but examine values between 2.0 and 2.6. We assume that symptomatic individuals are 50% more infectious than asymptomatic individuals. Individual infectiousness is assumed to be variable, described by a gamma distribution with mean 1 and shape parameter  =0.25. On recovery from infection, individuals are assumed to be immune to re-infection in the short term. Evidence from the Flu Watch cohort study suggests that re-infection with the same strain of seasonal circulating coronavirus is highly unlikely in the same or following season (Prof Andrew Hayward, personal communication). Infection was assumed to be seeded in each country at an exponentially growing rate (with a doubling time of 5 days) from early January 2020, with the rate of seeding being calibrated to give local epidemics which reproduced the observed cumulative number of deaths in GB or the US seen by 14th March 2020.

My note: I think these are reasonable. Doubling time of 5 days may actually be somewhat optimistic - we are currently doubling every 2 to 3 days in the incidence rate here in the US.

Hope that helps.

[Let_It_Be_So]

nwrep, it certainly does help! It is exactly the information I was seeking. THANK YOU!

[Frapster]

She cane back negative on covid. She’s doing better - they didn’t put her on the ECMO but she was on dialysis and and a ventilator. They were trying to get her off the vent today. She’s off dialysis and looks to be improving.

[billyboy15]

I’m glad she is improving.

My prayers offered for a speedy and full recovery.