31–40 of 46 posts
There are those that dreamed of this happening. Those that wanted the massive decoupling between the United States and China. Those that wanted to see China suffer, fail, collapse, and devolve into another destructive civil war; while the United States remains ascendant. Well, their dreams might be about to come true. This coronavirus was the perfect economic weapon that was dropped in the heart of China. And not eve…
[flagged]
Sorry for not being upbeat! I am wondering why the world still does not seem to care about it. Why do we have to wait until every city gets infected? Why we can't stop travelling? Eventually, when it spreads to a city, the quarantine must be the only way... but why we aren't preventing that ourselves? The politicians does not really seem to care (in the bunkers)? Individual, consumer society with no interest and with…
One point missing that I think could be important even in the more worrying scenarios is the average health condition or age of the people who develop severe stage infection. If the CFR is high but people dying are mostly old and not of working age, the pandemic will create a drag on global economy but not as bad as the CFR might lead to suppose. Don’t mean to sound cynical, just putting another element into the equa…
2) Simply having workers get incapacitated is one of the smallest impacts the virus will have. Take a look at the present price of crude oil - the effects of the epidemic in China are already sending that crashing.
Quarantines, the need for medical supplies, lost work hours, elimination of disposable income, an economic downturn worldwide as products become harder to get and more expensive to transport... there are lots and lots of impacts this will have, including vastly increased unemployment.
Even if no one at all dies, a pandemic with the world getting sick all at the same time will have an impact bigger than any other event going back to World War II.
> In the optimistic scenario, a month from now we can calculate, from data outside mainland china, that the CFR is perhaps .3% or below What so absurd is it will take the world a month to know how serious this virus is. By that point it's likely too late to do anything to stop it. It's beyond disgusting that China is putting the entire world's population at risk due to pride and ego. Essentially "we'd rather screw ov…
My guess is this thing is bad - keeps spreading, high mortality and the best we can do is slow it until we have a vaccine. I'm kind of optimistic people may be able to speed the vaccine stuff when they see how bad the situation is. Animal trials have started already >Shanghai-based Tongji University School of Medicine and Stermirna Therapeutics Co., Ltd. The vaccine samples were injected into more than 100 mice Sunda…
There's also the ongoing Phase 3 Remdesivir trial. [1] Which was used in the treatment of Washington's 2019-nCoV case. The patient appears to have begun recovering soon after the remdesivir was administered and was released shortly after. [2][3] > Treatment with intravenous remdesivir (a novel nucleotide analogue prodrug in development) was initiated on the evening of day 7, and no adverse events were observed in ass…
Without a vaccine, the only way to keep people from getting infected is to isolate them.
There are those that dreamed of this happening. Those that wanted the massive decoupling between the United States and China. Those that wanted to see China suffer, fail, collapse, and devolve into another destructive civil war; while the United States remains ascendant. Well, their dreams might be about to come true. This coronavirus was the perfect economic weapon that was dropped in the heart of China. And not eve…
If Trump screws up the response to this virus (like by cutting the CDC's budget in the middle of a crisis) then the people most vulnerable are the same demographic as Trump's supporters.
Sorry for not being upbeat! I am wondering why the world still does not seem to care about it. Why do we have to wait until every city gets infected? Why we can't stop travelling? Eventually, when it spreads to a city, the quarantine must be the only way... but why we aren't preventing that ourselves? The politicians does not really seem to care (in the bunkers)? Individual, consumer society with no interest and with…
How often do you want to do that worldwide travel shutdown? We got through SARS and Ebola without one. At the height of each, without the benefit of hindsight, did you consider them less serious then this one?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even with the existing restrictions the virus spreads. Spread leads to quarantine as we've seen in many chinese cases. I don't see why should we hope for the better with less restrictions. Not being a huge problem outside of China is a fact for NOW. Does not mean it won't happen in weeks. The question is: do we want to solve the problem now, or we want to postpone the solution for later. There won't be "deus ex machi…
> Even with the existing restrictions the virus spreads. Spread leads to quarantine as we've seen in many chinese cases. I don't see why should we hope for the better with less restrictions. If we can identify which restrictions are helping, and which are not, then we can remove the ones that are not. The point of my comment above is that the restrictions come with their own costs, in some cases severe. > Not being a…
I think this is unfair on two fronts.
First, labeling it as “panic” is just dismissive. What constitutes panic vs. what is responding rapidly and vigorously to a critical emergency is in the eye of the beholder.
Secondly, it’s possible to trust the experts and also think that the proper measures are not being taken. The experts are the epidemiologists, virologists, doctors, public health officials, etc. who are working on this outbreak, and they seem pretty damn concerned. I’ve read very few statements that suggest this is likely to blow over, and many more that show a widespread opinion among the experts that containment is unlikely and that this is very serious. But the experts don’t run the world, politicians and bureaucrats and business leaders do. And they have different interests and incentives. There are also likely discussions behind the scenes that we don’t know about. The WHO could be urging countries to shut down all air travel but leaders are reluctant to do so for fear of the political backlash.
All you have to do is look at how China treated the doctors who reported on this back in December to see how “trust the people in charge” is not the same as “trust the experts”. If China had clamped down on this six weeks earlier than they did, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How often do you want to do that worldwide travel shutdown? We got through SARS and Ebola without one. At the height of each, without the benefit of hindsight, did you consider them less serious then this one?
I have advocated a worldwide travel shutdown exactly twice in my life: SARS, and now. SARS was a damn close call; it was stopped by proactive measures of contact tracing and quarantine (i.e. you quarantine, forcibly if need be, not only each sick person, but everyone they came into contact with); had it not been stopped, the death toll would've hit nine digits. This one looks about equally serious, and has clearly no…
Sorry for not being upbeat! I am wondering why the world still does not seem to care about it. Why do we have to wait until every city gets infected? Why we can't stop travelling? Eventually, when it spreads to a city, the quarantine must be the only way... but why we aren't preventing that ourselves? The politicians does not really seem to care (in the bunkers)? Individual, consumer society with no interest and with…
> Why we can't stop travelling? Way too many things/people depend on traveling. You can't stop the world for such a small thing. We should take precautions, probably more than what we do now, but stopping the world isn't going to work. Don't fall for the fear mongering too, it kills less than the flu: https://blogs.sas.com/content/graphicallyspeaking/files/2019... and has a death rate of 2%. It's serious but not end…
We’d survive but it wouldn’t be pretty. I really doubt that’ll happen here, but this is a serious risk.