Talk:COVID-19

See also

• Symptoms
• Treatments given
• Patients' characteristics (Jan. 24th)
• Cities and areas under quarantines

Yug (talk) 07:22, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

• The "treatments given" template was removed by another editor citing WP:MEDRS. This is the first time the symptoms template has gone up here, but it is based upon the same data, so it would be worth checking whether the same issue applies. Dekimasuよ! 08:12, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

@Dekimasu: your deletionism approach goes too far and prevent us from reasonable building up. For both template, we can take precautions in citing the source via some "according to this study" or alike. The source is of quality, state of the art actually (as we already discussed). The data is emerging and must be declared as such, simply. *Removing* such well sourced info is not the solution. While "/Treatments given" is ambiguous medically (it's the treatment chosen in these 99 cases by the local medical staff, mainly to prevent or cure complications), it's not the cases for /Symptoms, which are rigorously observed, documented, and published is this reliable academic source. Yug (talk) 14:12, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

I did not remove either one of the templates. In fact, I believe I improved the "treatments given" one a bit. Dekimasuよ! 15:31, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

(@Dekimasu: i believe i misread your message and shot an undeserved arrow at you, my apologize. I will enquire on this mishap when back on desktop PC) Yug (talk) 19:43, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

New case fatality and infection fatality estimates

MRC outbreak research centre has come out with new estimates for both case fatality rate and infection fatality ratio: https://twitter.com/MRC_Outbreak/status/1226765905306234881, https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-infectious-disease-analysis/news--wuhan-coronavirus/ (COI declaration: spouse is co-author of https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-2019-nCoV-severity-10-02-2020.pdf)

• Estimated infection fatality ratio: 1%

• Estimated case fatality ratio for travellers outside mainland China (mix severe & milder cases): 1%-5%

• Estimated case fatality ratio for detected cases in Hubei (severe cases): 18%

The difference in these numbers is infection fatality ratio refers to overall mortality rate for *all* cases, including people who have very mild cases and do not go to hospital. This is by definition estimated .

Case fatality rate refers to people who have a confirmed case of the disease. This is necessarily higher because their condition is more severe; and it varies quite a lot, hence the difference between confirmed cases outside mainland China, which have been caught by screening people for mild illness, and in Hubei province where the outbreak is the most severe. Mvolz (talk) 08:13, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

We have to be cautious here. The Imperial College paper is not WP:MEDRS compliant. Furthermore, is it usual practice to quote separate fatality rates for asymptomatic and symptomatic infections? I think quoting a rate of 18% is misleading. The Guardian quotes a more cautious 2%.[1] This is probably more accurate. Graham Beards (talk) 12:34, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

Agreed we should use caution, especially about including that 18% figure.

It is *not* usual to talk about asymptomatic versus asymptomatic rates, so that part of the article should be fixed/made more clear, if you are misinterpreting it like that! The article it isn't strictly wrong - it says "including asymptomatic" not "only asymptomatic" but I agree it's easy to misinterpret that, we should just all "all infected, including undiagnosed" or something similar.

It *is* usual to talk about the infection fatality rate (IFR) versus the confirmed case fatality rate (cCFR). IFR is an estimated rate for *everyone* infected, which includes asymptomatic and also subclinical cases, which may or may not be diagnosed, as well as those cases which are confirmed and diagnosed.

From an epidemiological standpoint, infection fatality rate (IFR) is much more useful than confirmed case fatality rates (cCFR), because of course those vary a lot depending on whether or not people are being screened, how the health system is faring, etc. So I think the IFR is much more useful/important to include than the cCFR, which can cause unnecessary panic. The 18% is of course terrible on a human scale, but people will see those numbers and confuse it with the IFR, i.e. they'll think that if they contract the virus they'll individually have an 18% chance of death which just isn't true. There's also a good thread explaining the difference here if that explanation didn't help: https://twitter.com/SRileyIDD/status/1220464674476625921 Mvolz (talk)

I think the Imperial study is close to MEDRS compliant in the circumstances of everything moving very quickly. It's better than a bunch of sources currently used. When quoting its conclusions, I think we should take their topline estimate, as per my initial edit, rather than the current text that tries to go into more detail. Bondegezou (talk) 17:28, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

Precautions explainers

• Devlin, Hannah; Wishart, Ellen (2020-02-03), How to protect yourself from coronavirus
• Coronavirus: Everything you need to know in a visual explainer, 2020-02-07
• Coronavirus: Symptoms, Treatments and Science

Yug (talk) 14:18, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

Treatment research section title - now Management

Somewhere in this series of edits, the section Treatment research was shifted in position and renamed to Treatment. The reason for the word research in the section title is in the spirit of WP:MEDRS, to clarify that presently there are no "treatments", there is only research into treatments, which after appropriate peer review and later meta-review of multiple peer-reviewed literature, will achieve the status of "knowledge" about treatments. I'm not an expert in the medical meaning of "treatment", so either way would be OK by me.

In the present version, the title was changed again, to Management. If people disagree about the best section title, please sort this out on this talk page and come to a consensus - I tend to think that it's good to show that research is being done on the treatments, but "Management" is also reasonable. In any case, if there are any new changes to the section title, please update the link in Template:2019-nCoV. Lots of readers will be seeking information on "how can this be cured? how can it be prevented?" Providing clear answers ("not yet; here's the research being done") is the best way to minimise the growth of conspiracy theories. Boud (talk) 18:04, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

I think that "Treatment research" does a better job at making the scope of the section clear, which will help with the "management" of the article. It's also the most robust section we have at the moment. Overall, while I understand that most of the sections we have now are suggested by WP:MEDMOS, the reason why most of them are extremely short is not that no one has bothered to add more information, but rather that more information does not yet exist. For that reason I would further suggest that we reduce the number of sections in the article for the time being. For example, I don't think we really need "Cause: The cause is the virus provisionally named 2019 novel coronavirus." Sure, that hasn't been mentioned after the lede so technically it can (or should) go somewhere in the body of the article. But it's literally six lines down from the last time that was said, and we don't expand upon what was in the lede, so what's the purpose of including it? It's just pushing more essential information down the page right now. Dekimasuよ! 03:08, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Psychological

Could someone double-check the psychological section please. Whispyhistory (talk) 18:47, 10 February 2020 (UTC)