The Olimpics are postponed

In the present circumstances and based on the information provided by the WHO today, the IOC President and the Prime Minister of Japan have concluded that the Games of the XXXII Olympiad in Tokyo must be rescheduled to a date beyond 2020 but not later than summer 2021, to safeguard the health of the athletes, everybody involved in the Olympic Games and the international community.

 Read the full estatement here

9 more cases and indiscipline

BREAKING: CS Mutahi Kagwe announces 9 more cases of coronavirus in Kenya

CS Kagwe: Kenyans are becoming indiscipline, and it will cost us

Different country responses, different numbers - Aragón (Spain)

Aragón is the beloved land where all my genes come from and, to make it more heartfelt, were the next generation of my family is growing up. I have been following up the cases there with great concern because I know how aged the population is and how many cardiac surgeries my own relatives have gone through in the last few years; two factors, age and pre-existing cardiac conditions, that make COVID-19 lethal. They have released the cases segregated by severity and the picture looks totally wrong to me.

Data up of 24th March by the Dirección General de Salud Pública in Aragón, Spain (graph made with Flourish) Only 337 out of 758 cases did not require hospitalization

This is not the graph that a region should show if the country had been preparing for over a month for this virus to arrive. A disease that in 90% of the cases develops with mild or even no symptoms, cannot look like a condition that sends to hospital or kills more than half of the affected individuals. This suggests that the testing is not being done as a preventive measure, the way Korea did to isolate each and every positive case and flatten the curve in two weeks. This suggests that testing has been only reactive to cases appearing and patients asking for help.

It is true that we haven't seen anything like this in our lifetime, and that is not an easy problem to tackle, but we have watched it progress from the far East to our sitting room without doing anything to prepare for it. A new batch of test kits has arrived this weekend and we all hope that it will not be too late to contain the spread. The damage to our elders is done. For the last month, they have seen the virus come closer without anyone doing anything to stop it from killing them.

Age distribution of COVID-19 cases requiring ICU or ending in death; Male (Hombres) and Female (Mujeres) - source National Surveillance -

Everyone talks about the general lethality rate of the virus being somewhere between 2 and 4%, but the percentage of death among 80+ is 15%. Do you know what happened in Spain 80years ago? WAR. Civil war. And afterwards? Poverty, famine, medieval misery. The people we are loosing to this virus were the miracle children of the war. Some were born during the war. Some a few years before or after. They survived violence and oppression, malnutrition and diseases. They built with their own hands the country that today is letting them die of a coronavirus. I am too mad to write today. It's just not fair that we let them go without putting up a proper fight.

Rwanda, 17 new cases

It looks like rushing back home before the airport close up, some people carried the virus with them

Wangige Market closing

 Starting Friday 27th March to April 30th 2020

COVID-19 does affect younger people

It is true that the worst outcomes are observed in the elderly, and they have the highest probability of getting sick and of a fatal outcome from it. BUT, it is not true that the virus doesn't affect younger people. Let the data speak.


In the USA, the CDC has published the data on severe outcomes from cases between February  12 and March 16.

The CDC reports that 38% of those hospitalized are below 55years of age and, no, most of them are not in the older bracket of that range.



The first ones to arrive to this mess and also to start producing research out of it, the Chinese, have published the findings on 2143 pediatrics cases, most of them from the Hubei province where the outbreak initiated. 13 cases got to be critical; 112 severe.

 I interpret the absence of a "Deaths" category as a sign that there was no death among the cases (Source)

The Washington Post reports that

Earlier this week, French health ministry official Jérome Salomon said half of the 300 to 400 coronavirus patients treated in intensive care units in Paris were younger than 65, and, according to numbers presented at a seminar of intensive care specialists, half the ICU patients in the Netherlands were younger than 50.

We don't have the age distribution of the patients in Italy, but some of the highlighted cases in worldometers include the death of some fourty-something year old patients.

cases highlighted on worldometers.info on March 20, 2020

The numbers coming out of Spain also call for a warning to younger people. Data from the Ministry of Health on 18959 cases shows a reduced number of cases compared to the total but, nonetheless, 232 patients below 30 years old that required hospitalization, with 5 of them resulting in death.

Cases confirmed (confirmados), total of hospitalized cases (Hospitalizados totales), requiring ICU (UCI) and resulting in death (Fallecidos) out of 18959 cases (source MoH memo).

It is true that MOST cases among young people resolve with mild symptoms and in a few days, but we are yet to see what will happen when the virus hits an expansive population pyramid with persistent malnutrition. We also don't know what will happen if COVID-19 hits a crowded informal settlement, or how weak health care systems can manage to respond to a wide spread of the virus.

 

 (Source UN)

The strategy of early lockdown that many African countries are adopting seems a necessity, as the scientific community runs against the clock to find an effective treatment and, in the farther future, a vaccine that protects most of the population. We need to find a way to convince people to stop attending gatherings, even religious ones. We need to inform of the gravity of the situation without generating panic. Things could get really bad, but we are doing the right things. If we keep doing them, we will be protective ourselves and our communities. Simply STAY HOME.