Covid19mathblog.com
Scary movie plot – best way to transmute a virus – through food supply – highly contagious virus impacts slaughter houses across America (unfortunately true) – then meat being supplied to people and restaurants contain virus too (hopefully not true and only limited to the following article find)– IF only it was a movie but its 2020 – However I will still contend the data shows most infection from breathing not consuming or by fomites – https://www.investing.com/news/coronavirus/china-finds-coronavirus-on-frozen-beef-tripe-from-various-countries-2348345
“The eastern Chinese city of Jinan said it has found the new coronavirus on beef and tripe, and on packaging for these products, from Brazil, New Zealand and Bolivia as China ramps up testing on frozen foods.
The importers were a unit of Guotai International Group (SZ:002091) and Shanghai Zhongli Development Trade, the Jinan Municipal Health Commission said in a statement on its website late on Saturday.”
“The samples that tested positive came from a 24-tonne batch of frozen pork that was sent from a cold storage facility in Qingdao port to a warehouse for a market in Zhengzhou city.
The batch was found to be contaminated during a screening before the goods could enter the warehouse, the government said.
The World Health Organization says the risk of catching COVID-19 from frozen food is low, but China has repeatedly sounded alarms after detecting the virus on imported food products, triggering disruptive import bans.”
Now didn’t New Zealand say they got it from import – now China saying they got it from New Zealand? Sounds like isolationism could be coming….
Here is a positive article – find using existing drug Baricitinib – used to treat rheumatoid arthritis – which is focused anti-inflammatory so it makes sense to be effective in treating covid-19 – https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/arthritis-drug-can-reduce-mortality-rate-in-covid-19-patients-by-71-study/story-EHoV7dBtUBU0ao1KwGPYKI.html
“Covid-19 researchers have identified that an Arthritis drug can help in reducing the mortality rate in elderly people by 71%. As per the findings, a daily pill of baricitinib along with standard care can reduce the deaths by 71% in Covid-19 patients with moderate or severe infection.”
That’s the good news – but its 2020 – the bad news its $2265 for 30 day supply! https://www.lillypricinginfo.com/olumiant
Well here is a study showing the negative side of closing schools down. I hope we can learn from the past and have acceptance that perhaps we made the wrong decisions – certainly as a parent I cannot say I have always made the right decision but I try to learn and do better – and just perhaps no matter how you may hate someone e.g. Trump – they can be right on things and perhaps for the wrong reason – but nonetheless right https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2772834
“Results A total of 24.2 million children aged 5 to 11 years attended public schools that were closed during the 2020 pandemic, losing a median of 54 (interquartile range, 48-62.5) days of instruction. Missed instruction was associated with a mean loss of 0.31 (95% credible interval [CI], 0.10-0.65) years of final educational attainment for boys and 0.21 (95% CI, 0.06-0.46) years for girls. Summed across the population, an estimated 5.53 million (95% CI, 1.88-10.80) YLL may be associated with school closures. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported a total of 88 241 US deaths from COVID-19 through the end of May 2020, with an estimated 1.50 million (95% CI, 1.23-1.85 million) YLL as a result. Had schools remained open, 1.47 million (95% credible interval, 0.45-2.59) additional YLL could have been expected as a result, based on results of studies associating school closure with decreased pandemic spread. Comparing the full distributions of estimated YLL under both “schools open” and “schools closed” conditions, the analysis observed a 98.1% probability that school opening would have been associated with a lower total YLL than school closure.
Conclusions and Relevance In this decision analytical model of years of life potentially lost under differing conditions of school closure, the analysis favored schools remaining open. Future decisions regarding school closures during the pandemic should consider the association between educational disruption and decreased expected lifespan and give greater weight to the potential outcomes of school closure on children’s health.”
“While the scientific evidence on transmission of SARS-CoV-2 by children remains in flux, recent studies indicate that young children (<10 years) appear less likely to serve as vectors for COVID-19 transmission.3,4 Although the risks of keeping schools open drove decisions made in the early phases of the pandemic, the probable harm to children associated with school closure were less explicitly discussed.5 The public debate has pitted “school closures” against “lives saved,” or the education of children against the health of the community. Presenting the tradeoffs in this way obscures the very real health consequences of interrupted education.
These consequences are especially dire for young children. There is little reason to believe that virtual learning environments can be effective for primary school–aged children. A meta-analysis6 of 99 experimental studies included only 5 conducted in school-aged children, and they were primarily in fifth through eighth grade. The meta-analysis concluded that “the mean effect size [for online learning] is not significant for the seven contrasts involving K-12 students.”6(pXV) That so few studies have even been conducted in this age group is also telling. A recent study comparing Indiana children in grades 3 through 8 who switched from brick-and-mortar to virtual schooling “experienced large, negative effects in math and [English/language
arts] that were sustained across time”.7(p170) Sal Khan, a widely respected innovator in the field of distance learning, reported that distance learning approaches do not work for younger students.8 Furthermore, it is not clear how much access to remote instruction primary school–aged children actually received during the spring of 2020. For example, in its March 2020 guidelines for districts, the Illinois Department of Education recommended that primary school children have a maximum of 60 to 120 minutes per day in remote learning, representing a fraction of a regular school day.9 In 2 national surveys, teachers of all grades reported that only 60% of their students were regularly engaging in distance learning at all, and only 27% of teachers took attendance.10-12 Accordingly, it is reasonable to infer that primary school–aged children received minimal meaningful instruction beyond what is being delivered by their parents or other caregivers at home.13 It is not surprising, then, that the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine’s report on school openings13 concluded that districts should make returning primary school children to in-person classes a priority.”
“One US report18 found that the single best predictor of high-school graduation was fourth-grade reading test scores: 23% of children who are not reading at grade level by the end of third grade will not graduate high school, compared with 9% of those who are. The risks are even greater for low-income Black or Hispanic students: 33% of those not reading at grade level will not graduate from high school. These educational impairments are in turn consequential for mortality: the quality and quantity of education received today have considerable effects on life expectancy.”
“Scenario 1 Estimation This analysis suggests that 10 days of missed school is associated with a reduction in final educational attainment of 0.0262 (SE, 0.0064) years for boys and 0.0217 years (SE, 0.0062) years for girls.”
“Prior research in economics has estimated the association between decreased educational attainment and life expectancy using a variety of causal inference techniques.21,22,26-30 Using the method described in the eAppendix in the Supplement, we estimated a weighted average effect of these estimates, which suggested that each additional year of education attained is associated with a relative risk of 0.75 (95% CI, 0.60-0.90) of annual mortality.”
“Scenario 2 Estimation
Estimation of YLL under unobserved conditions (ie, US primary schools being left open with a potential for increased spread of COVID-19) necessarily required explicit modeling of a range of potential scenarios. In order to model parameter uncertainty, we again performed a Monte Carlo simulation, this time using a Program Evaluation Research Task (PERT) distribution”
“Auger and colleagues37 recently published an estimate that school closures may have prevented 40 600 US deaths during the early phase of the pandemic, with a mortality rate of 19.4 deaths per 100 000 population under school opening and 6.8 per 100 000 under school closure. In contrast, Courtemanche and colleagues38 estimated a nonsignificant daily decrease in mortality associated with school opening. Using a PERT distribution, we used the Auger mortality ratio (2.85) as our maximum estimate. Given the belief on the part of some investigators that young children do not measurably influence disease spread, we used a mortality ratio of 1 as our minimum estimate. To define a plausible modal estimate, we used the average of the Auger and Courtemanche mortality ratios, using a baseline schools-closed mortality rate in the Courtemanche estimate (which was not provided) equal to that in Auger. This yielded a modal mortality ratio of 1.93.
We summarized our data with 95% credible intervals (95% CIs) drawn from our Monte Carlo estimates, constructed distributional summary plots, and finally estimated the probability that YLL associated with COVID-19 in 2020 were greater under primary school closure than had schools remained open by enumerating the proportion of Monte Carlo draws where this event was observed. All statistical analyses and graphs were constructed using R, version 3.6.2 (R Foundation).”
“Both Argentinian and US data suggest the influence of educational interruption is greater for low-income children and for boys, suggesting that the potential outcomes of school closures may be felt more substantively by vulnerable populations in the United States.14,18 Those outcomes are compounded by the fact that there was demonstrably less engagement in distance learning among low-income minority children: schools serving predominantly Black and Hispanic students reported that only 60% to 70% were participating in remote education on a regular basis, and only one-third were participating daily.11,40,43 Finally, to preserve intergenerational equity, the costs of future life years lost for young children today must be factored into decision-making regarding school openings and potential future closings. We believe that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States has extracted an enormous sacrifice from its youngest citizens to protect the health of its oldest. During a pandemic, this may well be an ethically defensible tradeoff, but only if resources are invested to reverse the potential damage to health and education that this strategy may inflict on a population with low visibility and high vulnerability.”
US deaths 1266 – with confirmations just out there +167555! Just think about how many test would have to be done to get that number in 1 day! Lets assume even 20% positivity – that’s almost 1 million test done in 1 day
IL leading both death and confirmation
Seriously Cook County IL has serious issues topping confirmation and deaths again
Deaths are becoming less disperse as was for most of the summer
Going with the theme of figuring out the odds of bumping into someone that is potentially infectious ASSUMING 30 days past data is irrelevant as the person is likely recovered or past away. We see even though US leads in confirmations by a significant amount over last 30 days they are right at average at slightly under 1% per capita.
But as we showed aggregation data is not the best to be using in deciding reality decision as Covid is quite focused but viral at the same time.
