Oh... juicy.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-52526554

"A patient diagnosed with pneumonia near Paris on 27 December actually had the coronavirus, his doctor has said.

Dr Yves Cohen told French media a swab taken at the time was recently tested, and came back positive for Covid-19.

The patient, a man in his 50s who has since fully recovered, said he has no idea where he caught the virus as he hadn't been to any infected areas."

Hopefully the countries who are detecting these earlier cases will go back and check for antibodies where the patients are still alive.

I got an email from a friend last night saying saying someone he knows has just died from C19. 

Another matter discussed on an earlier thread on [23 January 2020] - New coronavirus spreading - Don't panic just yet!  - is the issue of alternative/reservoir hosts. The thinking now seems to be that it is unlikely that such a host will ever be identified. However, viruses do not waste time on speculation! They are constantly attempting to spread and infect, and as a jump between species worked before it could well work in the future. Best to keep in mind the zoonotic angle. [Interesting to review our thoughts from way back then!]

Coronavirus: 'Missing link' species may never be found
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-52529830

Roger

So much conflicting info though.

A great number of people claim to have had symptoms matching COVID around Christmas and that French case backs it up. But then why were excess deaths at the time not higher?

Is the Wuhan version a mutation of what was already going around?

So many questions and little in the way if answers.

The thing going round at Christmas was regular flu - H3N2, to be exact.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/882403/National_influenza_report_30_April_2020_week_18.pdf

However, that doesn't preclude covid-19 being present: it's almost certain it was doing the rounds a few weeks before it was officially recognised as such. It would take a while to get going, even with a relatively high R value.

It's a bit like mice: by the time you see one in your house, it usually means you have an infestation.

EDIT: Just look at the care home case chart. Covid-19 shows up really well there!

I hadn’t appreciated just how many epidemics the WHO tracks on an ongoing basis. Apparently there are typically 50 or more outbreaks worldwide at any one time, mostly in Africa.

SARS-Cov2 is very far from unusual as a pathogen. Only continued vigilance and coordination via the WHO keeps us relatively safe.

It’s been posted before but the list of nasty viruses waiting to jump from animals into humans is long and scary:

https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/en/

Well, unless you’re oblivious to the data, clearly the ‘lockdown’ (which isn’t a lockdown but restrictions on movement and personal contact) is working.

Sorry to hear that Brian  Not sure what more to say, how old were they? Must be very difficult for all concerned.

Have got several friends who are having tests due to reporting symptoms, one of whom is a nurse who was not supposed to work with covid patients due to personal health issues but has had to because so many other nurses have tested positive for it. On a brighter note from a dark situation, the 31year old nurse that a friend knows has come round after spending 3 weeks on a ventilator.

A girl who was a close friend of mine at school and I still see from time to time nowadays very sadly lost her mum to pneumonia back in the middle of January, around the same time that the outbreak of Covid-19 in China and elsewhere in Asia was first being reported here. Her mum was diagnosed with vascular dementia in the late noughties and had been looked after in a local care home for the last 7-8 years I think. As I mentioned above, her mum died from pneumonia officially but after reading the above, it could well be that the virus had reached these parts some time before anyone knew about it.

As far as I recall, the first confirmed case of Covid-19 wasn't found in Scotland until early March but as I say, it could have been doing the rounds up here sometime before this.

Just over a week after Germany's lockdown was loosened and the R number is estimated at 0.76. Given the time lag i would have thought that if the lockdown loosening was to go wrong then you might start seeing a rise in the R number soon. (Of course, people may be more cautious when the lockdown is first loosened resulting R staying low, and be more complacent in later weeks/months meaning the R value rises then, the R value will not be fixed at any one level). 

https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus/Situationsberichte/2020-05-04-en.pdf?__blob=publicationFile

Packed planes with no social distancing continue to arrive in London as seen here from Belfast

So @Nigel_Farage is questioned by the police for claims he broke lockdown laws travelling to Dover

Yet PACKED planes can travel from Belfast to London with no social distancing

Can all these be necessary journeys 6 weeks into a lockdown?

Have @BTP spoken to @AerLingus? pic.twitter.com/8BltT5O3tI

— Darren McCaffrey (@DarrenEuronews) May 5, 2020

If the man in France who had CV-19 back in late December had not been to China or anywhere else known to be affected by the virus at the time, I can only think that he must have been in fairly close contact with someone who, unknown to him, had been to one of the countries concerned.

Paris is one of the world's biggest tourist hotpots and I reckon it is entirely possible that before Christmas, there were many people travelling from China to Paris and elsewhere who unknown to them were carrying the virus.

ONS report out

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsregisteredweeklyinenglandandwalesprovisional/weekending24april2020

2.Main points

• The provisional number of deaths registered in England and Wales in the week ending 24 April 2020 (Week 17) was 21,997, a decrease of 354 deaths registered compared with the previous week (Week 16); this is the first decrease in the number of deaths since the week ending 20 March 2020 (Week 12) but is 11,539 more than the five-year average for Week 17.


• Of the deaths registered in Week 17, 8,237 mentioned “novel coronavirus (COVID-19)”, which is 37.4% of all deaths; this is a decrease of 521 deaths compared with Week 16 (39.2% of all deaths).


• The number of deaths in care homes (from all causes) for Week 17 was 7,911, which is 595 higher than Week 16. The number of deaths in hospitals for Week 17 was 8,243, which is 1,191 lower than Week 16.


• In London, over half (50.5%) of deaths registered in Week 17 involved COVID-19; the North West and North East also had a high proportion of COVID-19 deaths, accounting for 38.8% and 38.0%, respectively, of deaths registered in these regions.


• In Wales, there were 413 deaths registered in Week 17 involving COVID-19, accounting for 36.7% of all deaths registered in Wales.


• Of deaths involving COVID-19 registered up to Week 17, 71.8% (19,643 deaths) occurred in hospital with the remainder mainly occurring in care homes (5,890 deaths), private homes (1,306 deaths) and hospices (301 deaths).
   

Couple of points from SAGE

Full SAGE report here https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/882725/28-easing-restrictions-on-activity-and-social-distancing-comments-suggestions-spi-b-01042020.pdf

 From The New York Times:

As President Trump presses for states to reopen their economies, his administration is privately projecting a steady rise in the number of coronavirus cases and deaths over the next several weeks. The daily death toll will reach about 3,000 on June 1, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times, a 70 percent increase from the current number of about 1,750.

The projections, based on government modeling pulled together by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of the month, up from about 25,000 cases a day currently.

The numbers underscore a sobering reality: The United States has been hunkered down for the past seven weeks to try slowing the spread of the virus, but reopening the economy will make matters worse.

“There remains a large number of counties whose burden continues to grow,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned.

As the administration privately predicted a sharp increase in deaths, a public model that has been frequently cited by the White House revised its own estimates, doubling its projected death toll.

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington is now estimating that there will be nearly 135,000 deaths in the United States through the beginning of August — more than double what it forecast on April 17, when it estimated 60,308 deaths by Aug. 4. (The country has already had more than 68,000 deaths.)

The institute wrote that the revisions reflected “rising mobility in most U.S. states as well as the easing of social distancing measures expected in 31 states by May 11, indicating that growing contacts among people will promote transmission of the coronavirus.”

The projections confirm the primary fear of public health experts: that a reopening of the economy will put the nation back where it was in mid-March, when cases were rising so rapidly in some parts of the country that patients were dying on gurneys in hospital hallways.

On Sunday, Mr. Trump said deaths in the United States could reach 100,000, twice as many as he had forecast two weeks ago. But that new number still underestimates what his own administration is now predicting to be the total death toll by the end of May — much less in the months to come. It follows a pattern for Mr. Trump, who has frequently understated the impact of the disease.

“We’re going to lose anywhere from 75, 80 to 100,000 people,” he said in a virtual town hall on Fox News on Sunday. “That’s a horrible thing. We shouldn’t lose one person over this.”

The White House responded that the new federal government projections had not been vetted.

“This data is not reflective of any of the modeling done by the task force or data that the task force has analyzed,” said Judd Deere, a White House spokesman

Perhaps its domestic cats?

I enjoy reading the old thread and my complacency was similar to Boris! 

Didn't we have an earlier thread in the Science forum back in December, when the Chinese first reported it?

Why has HMG built its own centralised contact tracing app instead of using the Apple/Google decentralised one? Do I want HMG and selected third parties to know where I’ve been, who I’ve seen and what I’ve been doing?

The @ONS showed death registrations were 11,539 more death registrations than normal in week ending April 24 (relating to deaths up to around April 20)

To that date across the UK, there have now been 42,140 excess deaths

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— Chris Giles (@ChrisGiles_) May 5, 2020