March 20th: Daily Coronavirus Links

[habryka]

As part of the LessWrong Coronavirus Link Database, Ben, Elizabeth and I are publishing daily update posts with all the new links we are adding each day that we ranked a 3 or above in our importance rankings. Here are all the top links that we added yesterday (March 20th), by topic.

Dashboards

Worldwide current and historical stats

History of number and percent infections, recoveries, deaths, worldwide. Uses John Hopkins data

Guides/​FAQs/​Intros

Kurzgesagt: Accessible video to basic science of C19

High quality (in both production values and content) intro to the physical form of C19 and how it interacts with the body

(EV): They state that C19 can invade immune cells, but the only identified C19 receptor isn’t on immune cells, and the paper they cite is for SARS proper, not C19

Medical System

WHO coordinates C19 drug trials

WHO to coordinate multinational testing of remdesivir (lopinavir + ritonavir) and chloroquine (malaria)

Do more with fewer tests by batching

Batching multiple people’s samples could give us much more information with the same number of tests, at the cost of slower results

Guide to C19 pharma in development

A guide to the vaccine and treatment regiments currently in testing

List of hospitals requesting donations of equipment

Aggregation of hospital requests for donors to tackle

Progression & Outcome

Optimistic scenario exploration

Long now explores a set of assumptions, unproven but consistent with current knowledge, under which things might be pretty okay

Video explanation of basic C19 science

Great explanation of C19′s form and lifecycle, including explanations of how certain potential treatments could work

Spread & Prevention

Video: estimating prevalence from deaths

Estimating actual COVID 19 cases (novel corona virus infections) in an area based on deaths. Based on work by Tomas Pueyo.

(EV): They’re still only using cases that came to the attention of medical authorities, potentially missing people w/​o severe symptoms

Work & Donate

SoGive’s C19 donation guide

A short list of recommendations for organizations that would benefit from more money and are (perhaps indirectly) fighting COVID-19

Link to Full Database

[Wei Dai]

From the Long Now article:

The fast-and-stealthy scenario is consistent with the evidence reported to date from China, Italy, and isolated cruise ships. Consider the Diamond Princess as an extreme example of what can happen with an older population and delayed social distancing: 3,711 people on board, about 700 had the virus when tested, 400 of these were asymptomatic, 300 became sick, 7 died. But, how many of the 3,711 had recovered before they were tested? One of the problems is that the current tests for COVID-19 only tell us if someone is currently hosting the virus. The vast majority of people tested so far have been negative; is that because they never had the infection or is it because they had already successfully recovered? If 3,000 on the Diamond Princess recovered before testing, the mortality rate was 0.2%. That is high, but it is much better than the mortality rate of those we know caught the virus.

This seems very unlikely to me. For this to be true, the majority of humans would have to be able to develop antibodies and then clear the virus much faster than a substantial minority, and the virus would have to spread much faster than we currently think (i.e., have a much bigger R0 or shorter incubation time which would it place it outside the range of other respiratory viruses). Is there any inside view or outside view reasons to think this? E.g., has there ever been another virus like what the Long Now article suggests?

To distinguish between the most optimistic and pessimistic possibilities, we would need to measure how many people have developed an immunity to the virus. Fortunately, there are at least two different well-understood methods for developing such “serologic” tests, and the first such test has recently been developed for COVID-19. The first studies to use these tests are already underway in China and Singapore. We should know the results within a few months, if not weeks.

It seems not very decision-relevant for the vast majority of LWers to bring up this “optimistic possibility” at this point, given how unlikely it is, and how long we’d have to wait to distinguish it from the the “pessimistic possibility”. (Also I don’t like the subtext here subtly suggesting that until we know for sure, the two possibilities should be equally salient.) Am I missing anything, or is decision-relevance not the main reason for linking this?

[libero]

Remdesevir (lopinavir + ritonavir) (HIV)

A little mistake with the parenthesis, they’re different things