Coronavirus (COVID-19)

I just don’t get it. The lockdown of Wuhan has received massive criticism from public health officials, it hasn’t done jack shit to stop it from spreading worldwide. Y’all seem to think they did a great job. Italy was also aggressive in trying to stop travel from China, they are also on lockdown, y’all seem to think they are fucked.

This is a respiratory disease with a two week head start and some of the carriers aren’t even going to be symptomatic. Just lol at the idea that there’s some containment strategy that’s ever going to work.

Again, the most comprehensive statistics we have are coming from South Korea and they’re reporting an order of magnitude less lethality than some of the numbers being bandied about here.

In China a boxy little drone yells at you.

The math is pretty damn consistent eh? This is exactly how we design seed growth trains and model contamination in industrial fermentation.

Just do an exponential curve fit and e^exponent where the exponent= growth rate = u (miu) units are reciprocal time

.693/exponent = generation or doubling time. In this case we would use days.

(Ln2= .693)

Prison time. Cops drive around and yell at people.

Do you acknowledge that South Korea’s more comprehensive statistics come from testing orders of magnitude more people per capita than some (most?) other countries?

Do you see how this coincides with a containment strategy of tracking down potentially infected people more efficiently, testing them earlier and self-quarantining them sooner?

If so, do you not see the major major difference in South Korea versus Italy, the US, etc, that might be the key factor in a lower mortality rate?

Lethality seems very closely linked to capacity to treat.

You identify every patient, and quickly put everyone who needs it in life support. You are going to get one death rate.

You run out of ventilators and are literally choosing who not to treat, you will get another.

SK seems the former, Italy the latter.

I’m sure USA#1 will do fine tho… well functioning healthcare system that you have.

More broadly, I’m not very clear on what argument (if any) you are trying to make. You are jumping around a lot. Maybe take another run at laying out your thoughts here?

The testing and tracking does nothing to slow down the disease, my man. It’s great data collection, but in terms of keeping people from getting infected, it does jack shit. You get tested because you have a cough and then when the lab results are back you self-isolate? That’s shutting the barn doors after the horses have fled.

https://mobile.twitter.com/WeatherProf/status/1236885534796124160

Remember when we were just worried about the super slow motion trainwreck that was probably going to stay on the tracks at least until we all died, instead of the slow-motion trainwreck we’re in now? Good times.

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That’s not how it’s working in South Korea, have you read up on it at all? They get a positive test, they push out a text to people alerting them of the location of the person who tested positive. They have publicly available info on where that person went in the last 7-14 days, not sure exactly how far back, then they offer free drive through testing to literally anyone who wants it. I’m sure they’re also aggressively tracing potential contacts and reaching out to them and having them tested.

As a result, they are very likely catching a significant number of people early in the incubation period and having them self-quarantine and thus significantly reducing the rate of spread.

That’s how testing and tracking slows down the disease. They’re not testing only people who are symptomatic, they’re testing anyone who wants it and giving people a lot of info about whether they might have been exposed.

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I was thinking about this today… Like on the one hand coronavirus could have the silver lining of slowing down climate change by piercing the right wing media bubble, altering the demographics of the population a bit, and teaching people to listen to scientists. On the other, climate change could make it warm up quicker and to hotter temperatures and slow down the spread of coronavirus.

Then it dawned on me, we’re probably in the simulation where we thread the needle and neither is quite bad enough to impact the other, so instead we just maximize overall human suffering through their combined impacts.

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I have some Meltykiss coming in the mail that I could share with you.

Like I just can’t even right now. I don’t mean this as some sort of personal attack cause a ton of people are reacting this way in one form or another, but Trolly is a smart person who is almost always a quality poster who’s in here now like guys relax you’re overreacting, South Korea proves that it’s not so bad, but doesn’t even know that South Korea is testing people BEFORE they are symptomatic in BIG numbers, which we are not doing.

So from that perspective South Korea looks like a great set of data given that containment isn’t effective once you’re symptomatic, but, like, they’re testing 10s of thousands of people before they’re symptomatic, so yeah it does make a huge difference.

We have this level of ignorance from intelligent, generally well-informed people, we have Italy screaming to the world take this seriously we messed up you don’t have to, we had China literally killing it’s economy to try to contain this, and yet it’s still ho hum we’ve got this, USA #1 if South Korea can stop it we can stop it, who needs silly containment?

We are so so so fucked. The level of disconnect between what people think is going on and what is actually going on would be hilarious if not for the fact that it’s literally going to cost thousands of human lives.

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I heard it can exist on counter tops and tables, etc. If you then touch these, then touch your face, mouth, or nose, you can breathe it in. Not sure if that’s correct tho. I don’t wanna say anything definite. I’m not a doctor nor have I done a ton of research on it. Just tidbits of stuff I’ve read here and there

It should be taken seriously. Wash your hands properly and frequently. Avoid touching door knobs, elevator buttons, etc., if you can help it.

Is Holly okay?

Lethality depends on how many people you test. You need to get people who aren’t checking into hospitals and who aren’t symptomatic. Again, the best data we have puts the mortality rate at less than a percent. You guys keep talking about how great South Korea is handling this, let’s look at their data.

And all it takes is one carrier who doesn’t feel like getting tested to smash through all of that.

Despite running a fever, the woman twice refused to be tested for the coronavirus, as she had not recently traveled abroad, according to The Guardian. So far, she and 37 other members of the church have tested positive for the novel coronavirus, called SARS-CoV-2, and 52 additional churchgoers have shown symptoms of infection but have not yet been tested. (SARS-CoV-2 is the name of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.)

Authorities described the outbreak as a “super-spreading event,” as the lone woman transmitted the infection to an unusually high number of people, according to Reuters. Current estimates suggest that a single person with the novel coronavirus spreads the infection to about 2.2 additional people, on average. The surge of infection at the church brings the total number of confirmed cases in South Korea to 104; one death associated with the virus has occurred in the country so far.

It’s somewhat clear. We know you can spread it by touching your eyes/nose/mouth and then touching other people or surfaces that they then touch. We learned quite a bit today about how long it lives on various surfaces. We also learned today that it can be contagious through the air with regular breathing, not just coughing, and QUITE contagious this way in confined spaces - one guy on a bus for four hours got like 7 people sick without touching any of them, and then another person on the NEXT group of people on the bus after he was off - and they believe that was aerosol transmission.

So while we don’t know specifics, we know enough to say it’s pretty damn contagious from people who aren’t coughing or sneezing.

Yeah you’re going to have some of those, but every person you catch on Day 1 or 2 or even 4 could save 1-12 days of asymptomatic transmission and a couple days of symptomatic transmission versus people who don’t get tested til like their second or third day of symptoms. You’re talking about reducing the period of time in which people can spread it by literally as much as like 80-90%.

Then each time someone doesn’t get tested and spreads it, and tests positive once symptoms start, you’re racing against the clock to run those people down too. If you do enough of this and societally people take it seriously (seems like people in SK are in general), you are going to significantly reduce the spread.

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This is because it’s just so goddamn easy to pretend things aren’t that serious until they directly impact you. I admit I’m the same way. I still remember when SARS was a big thing. I was a kid and didn’t think twice about it. I also had no respect for the swine flu even though someone in my school had it (I realize this is much more serious than the swine flu)

But the fact of the matter is, this will mostly impact the elderly and those already sick. I don’t think people my age with healthy immune systems are likely to be more than inconvenienced by possibly getting really sick for a week or two and then fully recovering (am I wrong about that?). So it makes sense that younger people aren’t taking it too seriously

It’s specifically not contagious by regular breath - like the measles. I’ve read that multiple times. The contagion comes from droplets expelled from the lungs which quickly settle onto surfaces. Maybe those can come out with regular breathing but it doesn’t take a scientist to reason that infinitely more is going to come out with a cough or sneeze. It also doesn’t live for very long on your hands at all.

No. Apparent lethality depends on that. Actual lethality depends on the capacity of the hospitals to treat the serious cases. And that depends on how fast it actually spreads, because no health care system on earth has the capacity to deal with it if it spreads fast enough. So everybody needs to practice some social distancing to slow it down, because we are past containing it.

In a year or 2 it’ll be endemic and there will be a vaccine and it’ll be nbd. But right now shit could get real.

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You don’t know how many people would have died in S.Korea if they had acted differently. They are the country with the 4th most COVID deaths of any country. You don’t know if they’d be 1st or 2nd or 3rd or 10th if they’d acted differently. Perhaps the testing and quarantine and early treatment have saved people, perhaps more people have been exposed and infected because of the testing. I mean, you’re probably right, but it’s not knowable from the information we have so far.

What it seems like Trolly is right about vis a vis S.Korea is that they are the only country that has any data that’s at all useful in determining lethality.

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